The ZIKA virus is named after the ZIKA forest in Uganda, where it was first discovered, and is a type of flavivirus, closely related to those which cause more serious diseases like dengue and yellow fever. ZIKA normally produces symptoms such as fever or conjunctivitis and sometimes joint pain, but typically so mild that the symptoms last for only a few days and most people don’t even know they have it. The ZIKA is not contagious but is transmitted by mosquitoes, which means you must be bitten by an infected mosquito to contract it. Africans have developed antibodies to the virus and are mostly immune, but Westerners have no such immunity and for them there is no vaccine or cure for the ZIKA virus, though none is generally necessary.
The virus was first isolated from a rhesus monkey in Uganda in 1947, was discovered in a few humans in Uganda and Tanzania some years later, and in humans in Nigeria in 1968. (1) (2) There was never any indication that the virus “traveled well”, and it remained an obscure and unremarkable illness with only a handful of reported cases for 40 years until it suddenly appeared on a South Pacific island in Micronesia in 2007, which was the first time it had been seen outside its original home, but where it apparently did nothing of consequence. (3) Some six or seven years later, there was a outbreak in French Polynesia, also in the South Pacific, that affected about 10% of the population, but this time with the added feature of apparently causing Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare autoimmune disorder in which the body’s immune system attacks itself, or at least the body’s nerves, and can be paralysing or even fatal. Then after a hiatus of seven or so years ZIKA appeared abruptly in Brazil, with a virtually simultaneous spread to more than 20 other countries. On this occasion, ZIKA was now linked to a severe birth defect called microcephaly and possibly other birth defects and neurological disorders. Those are the basic facts.
There was substantial controversy about the links between ZIKA and microcephaly, the official narrative being that ZIKA was suspected – and indeed was strongly promoted – as the cause, but always with caveats suggesting the links might have been coincidental or opportunistic rather than causal. (4) (5) One group of medical practitioners in Brazil wrote a paper suggesting microcephaly was either caused by, or linked to, the dispersal of the chemical pyroxiprophen, an insecticide recommended by the WHO, which was heavily sprayed in drinking water reservoirs in the areas exhibiting the highest incidences of the condition, a theory that appeared to have at least a solid circumstantial basis. The physicians stated that pyriproxifen was a hormone disruptor and growth inhibitor that altered the development process of mosquitoes, generating malformations and causing their death or incapacity to reproduce. They wrote, “Malformations detected in thousands of children from pregnant women living in areas where the Brazilian state added pyriproxifen to drinking water is not a coincidence, even though the Ministry of Health [rules out] the hypothesis of direct and cumulative chemical damage.” (6) A German epidemiologist, Dr. Christoph Zink, had been studying and charting the timing and geographic distribution of both ZIKA and microcephaly, and wrote “I soon got the idea that blaming the ZIKA virus for this epidemic does not really get to the point”, stating a suspicion there had been under-reporting of cases for years. (7) But, according to a CBC report, he also suspected a chemical explanation for the heavy concentration in Northeastern Brazil, stating, “I would ask my toxicological colleagues in Brazil to please look very closely into the practical application of agrochemicals”. Others discounted this hypothesis on the basis of an inconsistent time-line and some conflicting data. Be this as it may, the links between ZIKA and the birth defects appeared at the time of writing (and later) to be only coincidental at best, with no evidence of direct causality.
It was interesting that this debate conducted itself with more heat than light, exhibiting the kind of characteristics we associate with the pros and cons of 5G communication, that is to say more ideological and emotional than scientific. It was also interesting that the American CDC and the UN’s WHO acted fervently to lay the blame for birth defects directly on ZIKA while simultaneously building an exit for possible later use with what I thought were rather cleverly-worded suggestions that the link was “not entirely proven”. This clearly coordinated campaign, with its vast international media support, carried with it a powerful scent of an intent to deflect the main issue into a desired channel and thereby discourage active investigation or discussion of topics outside the official approved list. Evidence of this seemed apparent in the unwarranted eagerness with which officials and the many elements of the media literally trashed anyone suggesting a story line that differed from the official version. As I wrote in the Introduction, a clear warning sign that a desired official story is being crafted is when those presenting contrary facts and theories are not only immediately and widely denounced as biased ideologues but derided as conspiracy theorists. ZIKA fit this template very well.
Whatever the totality of truths may be about this viral outbreak, the media coverage – the official narrative – about ZIKA quickly focused entirely on the statistically insignificant numbers of birth defects in relation to the total infected populations, and the simultaneous initiation of a concentrated debate about the cause of such defects, while dismissing in a single careless phrase the origin of the ZIKA outbreak itself. While it is the origin and cause of the outbreak that should have been the main story, the official narrative pushed this aspect into the background where the media buried it. And it is primarily this that contained the scent of an attempt to deflect the main issue not only into a desired channel but away from other, perhaps politically dangerous, aspects of the event. So let’s take a few minutes to examine the curious origin of this outbreak.
As already noted, ZIKA was never predisposed to travel, considering that it sat in Uganda since 1947 and went nowhere. Surely it had multiple opportunities to attach itself to a person or mosquito and land on another continent. But no. It stayed at home, and for almost 60 years was not a public menace, had never been associated with birth or other physical defects, and attracted no attention. So, if this ZIKA virus could stay at home and remain more or less localised for 60 years, why would it suddenly begin travelling the world? And, if the virus had never spread explosively at home in Africa in that 60 years, how could it suddenly become so active and virulent as to have infected almost the entirety of South and Central America in only a few months?
Let’s review the path. One day in 2007, ZIKA traveled by means unknown, 15,000 kilometers from Africa to land on a tiny Micronesian island named Yap, where it rested for six or seven years doing nothing remarkable, then continued its voyage of several thousand kilometers to French Polynesia where it landed to infect a large percentage of the population and do rather more harm. After another lengthy pause of six or seven years it began another voyage, this time traveling 12,000 kilometers or so, crossing much of the Pacific Ocean, the US and Mexico, all of Central America and the Caribbean, and finally traversing all of South America to land on the Atlantic side in Rio and São Paulo. From there, it almost instantaneously radiated outward 4,000 or 5,000 kilometers in all directions to cover most of Brazil (the fifth-largest country in the world). ZIKA then spread to all of South and Central America and the Caribbean, flooding more than 20 countries within a few months, then embarked on journeys of 8,000 kilometers or more, voyaging as far as Mexico and Puerto Rico. It then quickly headed Northeast on another journey of 8,000 kilometers to land in Spain where it was predicted to become a calamity.
Now let’s think about the journey. Viruses can’t fly, and they don’t travel on airplanes. They travel by mosquito, and mosquitoes don’t travel either. They live their entire short lives within maybe one kilometer of wherever they were hatched. It’s true they are sometimes blown around by prevailing winds and could potentially end up almost anywhere, but these wind-blown insects tend to number in the tens or hundreds rather than the hundreds of millions necessary to infect millions of people in a vast country like Brazil. Some news media published deliberately misleading and unforgivably uninformed reports referring to the “migration patterns” of mosquitoes, but mosquitoes do not migrate, not in any sense of the meaning of that word. Birds migrate, caribou migrate, locusts and lemmings migrate. Monarch butterflies migrate. Ducks, geese and hummingbirds migrate. Mosquitoes do not migrate. They cannot.
As one entomologist wrote, “mosquitoes live within a mile or two of their breeding grounds their entire life, with little evidence they make purposeful long distance flights that can be classified zoologically as migration. It is better to regard all mosquito flights as dispersal.” In other words, we cannot have tens of millions of mosquitoes, infected or otherwise, filling their tiny luggage with mini-viruses and flying 15,000 kilometers to take up residence in another country. We are told that mosquitoes will sometimes breed in pools of water, in old auto tires and other odd places, and can by this method be transported around the world, but again the numbers of insects traveling this way would be exceedingly low for our purposes since no country – and certainly not Brazil – is importing sufficient numbers of old tires to bring us the hundreds of millions of insects we need to create an epidemic. And yes, mosquitoes breed, but to burgeon in only weeks from a few infected mating pairs in one location to a few hundred million scattered over millions of square kilometers is beyond the ability even of mosquitoes.
The Infected World Cup Visitor
And it was here that the WHO and the Western media began crafting their tale. The official narrative was that the mosquitoes never did travel. Instead, the virus found itself a means of long-distance transport and was “believed to have been brought to Brazil by an infected visitor to the World Cup”. Thus, according to the WHO and the compliant media, a lone traveler infected millions of people in Rio and within a few months the disease had spread to Colombia, Paraguay, Venezuela, Panama, the Honduras, Guyana, Martinique, Puerto Rico and Mexico, and altogether more than 20 countries. We need only think for a moment to realise this proposition is a ridiculous impossibility. I wrote above that the origin of the ZIKA outbreak was dismissed in a single careless phrase, that phrase being “believed to have been brought to Brazil by an infected visitor to the World Cup”, a statement tossed out with no evidential support, one that appears superficially credible but which constitutes logical rubbish. And, as we will see, ZIKA was in Brazil long before the World Cup. Remember, ZIKA is not a contagious disease spread by coughing or sneezing or even extended social contact. It is a virus infection carried by mosquitoes, and one must be bitten to contract it. The traveling of infected people from Polynesia to Brazil is of no consequence in itself since the only way to transmit their disease is by being bitten by mosquitoes, which might in turn become infected then spread the infection by biting others. (8)
Let’s take a moment to think about the supposedly-infected (and surely imaginary) World Cup visitor, and consider the astonishingly-rapid spread of the infection. The official narrative was that the virus came to Brazil from French Polynesia, but how many people, infected or otherwise, would be likely to travel from the tiny population of French Polynesia to Brazil just to watch a football game? Two? Ten? So how could clean, uninfected Brazilian mosquitoes find those few infected Polynesian people, bite them and become infected in turn, then spread the infection to at least tens of millions of insects in a few months so as to bite and infect many millions of people throughout the entirety of Latin America? The sheer volume of the outbreak coupled with its virtually instantaneous spread, dismisses any possibility of this infection originating with a foreign traveler. One mosquito biting one person does not constitute an epidemic. If we want to have an “explosive spread” of a mosquito-borne virus like the ZIKA, which infected millions of people in only a very short time, we need at least tens of millions of mosquitoes but more reasonably we need hundreds of millions of them. This is especially true when the mosquitoes seem determined to infect the enormous land areas of South and Central America, passing over vast unpopulated areas in the process. Not every mosquito is infected, not every infected mosquito will find someone to bite, not everyone will be bitten, and not everyone bitten will be infected. And a mosquito’s life is very short indeed, about ten days.
With only a handful of infected people, such a widespread epidemic is impossible by this method of transmission. The number of travelers is statistically insignificant, so even if they were all bitten many times by different insects, the totality of those insects could not have in turn bitten and infected millions of people in 20 countries within a few months, especially countries many thousands of kilometers away, considering that mosquitoes do not travel. It’s true the infected mosquitoes would breed and perhaps contaminate their young, but this would by definition be a localised outbreak with no natural possibility of traveling even tens, much less thousands of kilometers to cover a continent. One infected mosquito cannot breed millions of offspring and cover millions of square kilometers in a few months. And, if one person traveled to Rio or São Paulo for a football game, how does that explain the disease exploding in a dozen other cities in Brazil, all at approximately the same time? How does that explain the disease spreading to Colombia and a dozen other nearby countries, and 8,000 Kms away in Mexico and Puerto Rico, very shortly thereafter? Even if infected travelers from Brazil went to Mexico, how many would be bitten by clean mosquitoes there, and be able to pass on the virus? Statistically zero, or thereabouts.
Millions of mosquitoes cannot bite the same ten travelers, become infected, then bite millions of other people and cause an epidemic. You don’t have to be a statistician to know that’s not possible. If millions of people are infected, there had to have been at least many millions of infected mosquitoes in the area. So, the most important question in this entire saga is: how did at least tens, and more likely, hundreds, of millions of insects become infected? The virus did not exist in Brazil. Native mosquitoes were not infected with ZIKA, and could have become infected only by either biting countless thousands of infected people, or else being the offspring from millions of matings with infected insects, but where would those come from? A few infected travelers cannot account for such a massive geographical outbreak within weeks, which means vast numbers of infected mosquitoes must have been introduced in those locations. There is no other possible explanation.
The WHO’s official statement said ZIKA appeared to be spreading so rapidly for two reasons: One, because it was a new disease to the region and so the population had no immunity, and two, because ZIKA is primarily transmitted by a mosquito species known as A. aegypti, which lives in every country in North and South America except Canada and Chile. These statements are deliberate misinformation and unforgivably dishonest for what they neglect to say. The portion about the lack of immunity is true, but that lack of immunity exists only because, as the WHO itself pointed out, ZIKA is a new disease to the region, meaning it didn’t exist in Brazil or South-Central America prior to this time. The second portion of the statement is even more dishonest. The WHO tells us the disease spread so rapidly because it is transmitted by a species of mosquito which exists locally, but the reason the disease was new to the region in the first instance is that domestic mosquitoes had never been infected and therefore could not possibly have been responsible for the dispersion of the virus.
It is worth noting the cleverness of the WHO’s statement. It does not say the disease was spread by local mosquitoes (and could not have been, since they weren’t infected), but spread by the same species that lives in South America. That’s not exactly the same thing. The fact that this strain of mosquito lives in South and Central America is entirely irrelevant to the ZIKA outbreak because these local mosquitoes were not infected. The statement appears to blame local insects – by family association, and we would normally draw this inference from a casual reading, but if we examine the words, the statement tells us absolutely nothing and is fraudulent because it leads us to a false conclusion. The WHO glossed over the most important question in this entire issue, which is how tens or hundreds of millions of a local variety of clean mosquitoes suddenly became infected by a foreign virus and in a few months caused an epidemic covering nearly 20 million square kilometers.
It is of course theoretically possible for a single infected person to initiate an eventual epidemic, but consider the circumstances necessary. One infected person traveling to a new location is bitten by one or more mosquitoes who become infected and who bite a few other persons who become infected in turn. The infected mosquitoes breed and die, leaving potentially infected offspring who can gradually spread the disease. At the beginning, this would be tightly localised, not only in one city but likely in one area of one city since we have very few infected mosquitoes that do not travel. Then gradually, infected persons would move to other areas of the city and to other cities, and slowly spread the infection to other areas. But it should be obvious that this method would require years to create an epidemic, and would still not account for an explosive spread in the new locations. By definition, a natural introduction and spread of a mosquito-borne virus would require years to develop. The only physical way to have an explosive spread of an insect-borne disease is to have hundreds of millions of infected insects. And, since Latin America did indeed experience precisely such an explosive spread, the fundamental question is the source of those infected insects.
Oxitec’s GM “Terminator” Mosquitoes
There is one additional fact in this story, a fact that was heavily suppressed by the media. It involves a company named Oxitec, which bills itself as “a British biotech company pioneering an environmentally friendly [i.e. genetically-modified] way to control insect pests that spread disease and damage crops”. Oxitec was conducting genetically-modified “transgenic mosquito trials” in Braziland many other locations, trials that, according to Science Magazine, “have not been without controversy in the past”. (9) It will not be a surprise that one of Oxitec’s “collaborators” is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as other non-surprises that include the WHO, the CIA, the Pentagon, the Rockefeller Foundation, Fort Detrick, and other luminaries of the world of genetically-modified pathogens. In particular, one article that appeared to be credible, claimed that the equity owners of Oxitec had strong links to the CIA. Other Oxitec funders are the WHO, who provide research grants, and apparently a Hong Kong investment fund called Asia Pacific Capital, which is controlled by GE Capital of the US.
Oxitec was conducting “experiments in the suppression of mosquitoes”, experiments which involved the release of countless millions of genetically-modified Aedes aegypti mosquitoes(the same species that spread the ZIKA virus) that had been bio-engineered for male insterility. Oliver Tickell wrote an interesting article published in The Ecologist on February 1, 2016, titled, “Pandora’s Box: how GM mosquitoes could have caused Brazil’s microcephaly disaster”. (10) In it, he wrote, “The idea of the Oxitec mosquitoes is simple enough: the males produce non-viable offspring which all die. So the GM mosquitoes are ‘self-extinguishing’ and the altered genes cannot survive in the wild population.” The theory is that these GM-modified ‘terminator’ mosquitoes will breed with native females to produce non-viable larvae, thereby eradicating the entire mosquito population. Unfortunately, the truth, even according to Oxitec’s own information, is that a large percentage of their mosquitoes are not sterile after all, that many do survive and thrive, and that apparently a large percentage of native female insects refuse to breed with these introduced GM terminators, rendering some part of the experiment useless.
According to Tickell’s research, the insect dispersions occurred between May of 2011 and early 2012 and, in some locations alone, involved millions per month. I do not know the total number of locations in which mosquitoes were dispersed nor the total number of insects dispersed, but for the disease to spread the way it did, the dispersion was certainly carried out in many locations and likely involved tens of millions of insects in each case and, with several years to breed, gives us the hundreds of millions we needed. Certainly the dispersals in some instances contained massive volumes. In the Cayman Islands, Oxitec “liberated” 3.3 million of their “transgenic mosquitoes” in 80 separate releases that covered only about 16 hectares of land, and the same a bit later in Malaysia. (11) With 100 hectares in a square kilometer, how many mosquitoes would have been released in 20 million square kilometers? At this point, we can perhaps assume it was a micro-biologist from Oxitec who traveled to Brazil, but not for the World Cup. This assumption explains many things, but apparently not to the converted. Soon after, the world media were actively promoting the theory that Oxitec’s “mutant” GM mosquitoes were instead being used to battle ZIKA. (12) (13)
Tickell discussed the potential survival of the GM insects and how they could spread the ZIKA infection, but ignored the much more important question of how they became infected in the first place. Let’s try a direct analogy: You do not get rabies from a dog bite; you get rabies when bitten by a rabid dog. If the dog doesn’t have rabies, all you get is a dog bite. And dispersing thousands of non-rabid dogs into a clean environment will give you only thousands of non-rabid dogs in a still-clean environment. You may get bitten much more often, but you still won’t get rabies. By this analogy, the vast dispersal of genetically modified Aedes aegypti mosquitoes is of no consequence unless the mosquitoes are already infected with the ZIKA virus. If they do not carry the virus, their bites will do nothing to their victims, leaving us with no way to spread a foreign virus.
The important point, so studiously avoided by the CDC, the WHO and the media, is that since ZIKA was not endemic to Brazil or indeed to South-Central America, it had to be introduced from somewhere, and on a massive scale. One infected visitor to the World Cup cannot do that, but importing and dispersing hundreds of millions of infected mosquitoes can do that. It is not possible to disperse millions of uninfected mosquitoes into a clean environment then have them magically become self-infected by a virus whose nearest proximity is 18,000 kilometers distant, which means the insects dispersed by Oxitec had to have been infected before their dispersal because there is no other credible explanation for the comparatively instantaneous explosion of ZIKA in so many millions of square kilometers, events that appeared to coincide with the dispersion of Oxitec’s insects. The question then is how a company like Oxitec could disperse millions of insects without knowing they were infected. After all, they engineered the mosquitoes, they surely were aware of the dangers, and certainly had the ability to do testing. The only possible conclusion I see, is that they did know. If there is an alternative explanation, I cannot imagine what it would be.
I am reminded of Dr. David Heymann of the WHO who, when speaking of the identical issue of the origin and spread of HIV, claimed, “The origin of the AIDS virus is of no importance … speculation on how it arose is of no importance.” I disagreed then, and I disagree now. The WHO took enormous pains to obscure investigation into the origin and spread of that virus, and appeared to be doing the same with ZIKA. In the Scientific Method, we try to form a theory to explain the phenomena we witness. Then, if we can, we test our assumptions and hypotheses to see if they correlate with the known facts. In this case, we have unknowns and unanswered questions in a situation where the official explanation doesn’t appear plausible, and where confusion exists in some facts. But if we theorise that Oxitec carried out its field trials in these locations with infected mosquitoes our theory explains almost everything we know about ZIKA. But this isn’t quite the end of the story.
Back to the Future
Many virologists and media sources inform us that the ZIKA virus was first isolated from a monkey in the ZIKA Forest in Africa (Uganda) in 1947 while scientists were researching Yellow Fever, but the more interesting parts of ZIKA’s story occurred in labs rather than forests. The virus was isolated in a laboratory by a microbiologist named Jordi Casals (14) (15), whose entire career (but for two years after graduation) was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, mostly working in labs at Yale University. Casals was a specialist in ticks and virus-borne diseases (of the kind produced by the US Military at Fort Detrick and Plum Island), as well as the viruses that cause encephalitis and the kind of hemorrhagic fever the US dispersed in North Korea during the war and later in Cuba. He was for years a consultant to the WHO and to the US Army Research Institute in Bethseda, Maryland, where he was performing concurrent work in what appeared to be related to bioweapons research.
The media and the medical history books tell us that after its discovery, ZIKA remained an “obscure and unremarkable illness” that caused no trouble and was of no apparent interest to anybody, but that’s not entirely correct. After Casals isolated ZIKA from Rockefeller Foundation monkey number 766, a quiet interest apparently emerged in this ‘obscure’ virus, with both the WHO and America’s CDC establishing “virus research laboratories” very near the same forest where ZIKA was discovered, and in 2008 the Wellcome Trust – who are coincidentally one of Oxitec’s sources of funds – also became involved in microbiology programs at the same location. (16) (17) The Rockefeller Foundation established its East African Virus Research Institute in Entebbe, Uganda, in 1936, the UVRI forming at the same time (with whom the CDC began working in 1991, the WHO joining the affiliation in 1996). (18)
More recently, when the ZIKA outbreak occurred in 2007 on the Micronesian island of Yap, the US military was reported to have sent what was described as “a large research presence” to that island, consisting of individuals from both the CDC labs at the University of Colorado and from the military, all experts in insect-vector bio-pathogens. (19) (20) (21) Perhaps coincidentally and perhaps not, Yap Island is only about 800 Kms. from Guam, the original site of the US military’s NAMRU-2 biowarfare lab which depended primarily on researchers from the Rockefeller Institute. And to bring us up to date with Brazil, one media report informed us that two American researchers from the University of Wisconsin, one a professor of pathobiological sciences named Jorge Osorio (22) (23), the other his assistant named Matthew Aliota, were the first to identify ZIKA virus in South America. Osorio’s assistant, Aliota, had a long history with the US Army’s bio-warfare lab, USAMRIID, located at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and was also a professor at Colorado State University, the source of the CDC’s virological staff originally sent to Yap to examine the first ZIKA outbreak. (24) (25)
The Microcephaly Problem
There had for many months been a flurry of media activity with reports containing an utter confusion of claims about the incidence of this condition, a multitude of false alarms causing misunderstandings and creating excessive caution. One report in the New York Times claimed that fears of the virus resulted in “massive over-reporting”. In early February of 2016, Brazil’s Health Ministry accounted for about 5,000 reported cases, but in fact only a few hundred had actually been confirmed, an insignificant number that would normally be buried within the statistical averages. Interestingly, the WHO was guilty of laying most of the fuel onto this fire, announcing an “international health emergency”, appearing primarily motivated to strongly focus public attention onto the birth defects and away from other considerations. Indeed, virtually all of the media attention appeared to focus on a few hundreds of potentially damaged fetuses and a few thousands of symptomatic mothers rather than on the millions of civilians inexplicably infected by a foreign virus of (so far) unknown provenance. In any case, the clear intent was to establish a link in the public mind between ZIKA and birth defects, going so far as to advise all mothers in South and Central America to delay planned pregnancies for several years. Much of this was alarmist and unjustified. The New England Journal of Medicine claimed that “29 percent of women who had ultrasound examinations after testing positive for infection with the ZIKA virus had fetuses that suffered [undocumented] “grave outcomes”.” (26) (27) But they neglected to mention that the total number of women in this sample was only about 40, if memory serves me correctly.
The media reports on this problem, virtually without exception and certainly including all those from the WHO, consisted mostly of dramatic attention-getting headlines. An article would quote an apparently prominent virologist claiming his research “strongly indicated” that “the ZIKA virus, and nothing else” was responsible for the rash of birth defects. Other scientists were quoted as saying ZIKA targeted the brain cortex, leaving readers to worry that every pregnant mother in all of Latin America would give birth to a brain-damaged baby. A website calling itself the Virology Blog, run by a virologist and professor at Columbia University in the US, stated that published reports made “a compelling case that ZIKA virus is causing microcephaly in Brazil”, quoting from studies with such small samples they were statistically invalid, and even admitting no confirmations were available of ZIKA infections in the microcephaly cases studied. He even went so far as to write, “Here is the clincher – the entire ZIKA virus genome was identified in brain tissue” of an infant born with this condition. (28) Another virologist promptly informed this writer that he had all his facts wrong, and that only small sections of the virus had in fact been identified. Virology Blog – ZIKA virus is causing microcephaly in Brazil.
Other scientists expressed their amazement that a flavivirus like ZIKA could cause birth defects when no strain or variety of flavivirus had ever done so before. They noted too that the Brazilian strain of the virus was a 99.75% match, indicating it was the same virus from other areas of the world, and that birth defects existed in none of those places. Many virologists stated that historically no flavivirus had ever been implicated in birth defects, claiming the conditions pointed to a “localised environmental factor” or some other cause. Dr. Ahmed Kalebi, Director of the Lancet Pathology Research Group, echoed a similar sentiment, stating the possibility that “ZIKA is just a red herring and there is something else . . . that makes those babies get microcephaly”. And a published study posted on the WHO website stated, “ZIKV has been identified in Africa over 50 years ago, and neither there nor in the outbreaks outside Africa, has such an association with microcephaly [ever] been reported.” Another virologist wrote that there was no proof of a cause-effect relationship, that the ZIKA virus might just have been “infecting opportunistically, and that these are cases that would have developed birth defects even without it”. Others noted that the apparent surge in these cases occurred only in Northeastern Brazil, primarily in Pernambuco in and near Recife (where the WHO-recommended insecticide pyroxiprophen was being sprayed), and many noted that there was no actual proof of correlation between ZIKA and microcephaly, other than the fact that the virus had been found in some infants with the condition. Unfortunately, none of these other voices were ever able to reach the microphone.
And there is more. I downloaded a study from the WHO’s own website, titled “Microcephaly in northeastern Brazil: a review of 16,208 births between 2012 and 2015” (29) that states in part, “However, if the ZIKV were indeed introduced in Brazil at the World Cup in mid 2014, the outbreak of microcephaly would have preceded it.” In case this isn’t clear, the authors of this paper documented that microcephaly began appearing in Brazil in 2011 and 2012, well prior to the appearance of the claimed “visitor from Polynesia”, which by itself would seem irrefutable proof that the ZIKA virus cannot be responsible for the birth defects in Latin America. Not only that, according to this same paper, the initial appearances of microcephaly would have coincided perfectly with the spraying of pyroxiprophen and the timing of Oxitec’s GM mosquito dispersal program. Certainly the WHO was fully aware of this information, and the media pundits either were aware or should have been aware, but these crucial facts were entirely censored by all the media. In March of 2016, Canada’s CBC reported on another study in Paraíba State in Brazil, which lies next to Perambuco, and which also discovered cases of microcephaly prior to 2012, a full two years before the appearance of the supposed Polynesian visitor, and which confirmed as well that these cases have been concentrated in Brazil’s Northeast where the bulk of the chemical spraying was done. (30) (31) (32) (33) Nevertheless, the New York Times was telling us “There is no longer any doubt that Zika causes microcephaly”, quoting a study of ZIKA at estimated a “1 in 100” risk of microcephaly. (34) (35)
The Media Focus
In the extensive media coverage of the ZIKA epidemic, several elements were not only unusual but were so uniformly focused they had a distinct appearance of having been coordinated as part of plan. The first of these I have already discussed: the apparent absence of any interest whatever in the source of the ZIKA infection. Aside from the almost-flippant attribution of a sudden and massive international outbreak of ZIKA to a single traveler from Polynesia, I was unable to find any reference, question or investigation by any part of the Western mainstream media as to alternative explanations. It seems that no scientist or reporter in the Western world had any apparent interest in this critical matter, a circumstance I find almost bizarre. Every newspaper, TV station, publication, that I could monitor, studiously avoided any mention of alternative explanations of the source of millions of infected mosquitoes. With every other disease outbreak in the recent past, we have had various theories and consequent debates as to source and origin, but not this time. This is exceedingly curious, since the officially-attributed source is clearly impossible.
The second element was a persistent coordinated focus on the relatively few instances of microcephaly to the neglect of almost every other aspect, leading one to conclude the outbreak might consist of millions of microcephaly cases instead of instances of a minor virus infection. This was true not only with the Western mass media but also with internet searches. In repeated searches for the incidence of total ZIKA infections in Brazil and other South American nations, Google repeatedly produced only information on births with apparent ZIKA-related defects. I will note here that Google’s searches are often highly selective in a manner not entirely explained by an autonomous algorithm. When repeated and diligent searches on one topic produce only results on another topic, it is safe for us to conclude that someone is pulling the strings. In broad searches for rates of ZIKA infection, Google’s entire emphasis was on supposedly ZIKA-related microcephaly cases, and searches for percentages produced more of the same “reported but unconfirmed” statistics misleadingly quoted to infer that a very high percentage of births were defective – which was absolutely not the case. Let’s look at some statistics.
The total population of South and Central America is almost 450 million, with reported ZIKA infections projected to total perhaps 4 million overall. This means that less than 1% of the total populations of these countries will be infected with the ZIKA virus, of which a very small portion (perhaps only 1% or 2% at any given time) will be pregnant mothers. Remember too, that there were only a few hundred confirmed microcephaly cases and only about 1% of those contained any link with ZIKA. This means that of all the pregnancies in Brazil, perhaps one ten-thousandth will result in microcephaly and, as noted above, only about 1% of these would exhibit a ZIKA infection. I by no means wish to trivialise individual tragedies but, with confirmed cases measured as a percentage of the population or by the incidence of all other primary causes of diseases and deaths, the incidence of microcephaly in Brazil was statistically zero, whether ZIKA-induced or not.
The next concern was what appeared to be a widespread and deliberate program of fear-mongering, with a coordinated focus that I anticipated but found disturbing nonetheless. Even the adjuncts were designed to be unsettling and frightening. For one article on ZIKA, the Washington Post employed a photographic setting of a statue guarding a tomb in a cemetery, with the caption, “Flower urns at many graves are breeding grounds for the disease-carrying mosquitoes.” Why a cemetery setting? Why the photo of graves? How many people had died from contracting ZIKA? Approximately none. The Washington Post screamed that “The more we learn, the worse things seem to get”. It told us of the virus “sweeping through the hemisphere” and wrote of the “growing links to birth defects and neurological disorders” which were even “worse than originally suspected”, and warning of the “increasing the risk for devastating harm” during pregnancy. The Washington Post told us, “Brazilians panic as mosquito linked to brain damage in thousands of babies” (36) (37), and Canada’s Globe and Mail told us that “As the virus ravages Brazil”, several hundred babies were left “with devastated brains” (38), while failing to mention that Canada’s House of Parliament has suffered the same condition for decades.
Thomas Frieden, Director of the US-based CDC, said he expected cases to increase “dramatically” (39), and that “The cost of caring for one child with birth defects can be $10 million or more”. He tearfully told us, according to the Washington Post, of one woman “who was fearful of what would happen to her baby. To quote, “She said, ‘I will be worried for my whole life, and even after I die, who is going to take care of the baby’.” We were further informed that “studies showed” ZIKA was “likely behind more birth defects and problems than researchers realised”, and was linked to “a broad array of birth defects and neurological disorders”. As an aside, WHO Director-General Dr Margaret Chan said ZIKA had gone “from a mild threat to one of alarming proportions”, and that she had set up a ZIKA “emergency team” after the “explosive” spread of the virus. (40) But as you will read elsewhere, Margaret Chan apparently wasn’t concerned about Ebola that was killing by the tens of thousands, to the extent that the WHO stopped answering their phones so people wouldn’t continue to bother them with updates. It took years for Ebola – and other serious outbreaks, including the H5N1 flu and SARS in Hong Kong – to become “alarming” and explosive” and require Margaret Chan to establish an “emergency team”, so why all the fuss about ZIKA that killed nobody? To continue, the Washington Post further informed us:
A growing concern among pediatricians is that ZIKA could inflict harm to developing brain tissue in other, less obvious ways than microcephaly. That condition could be the “tip of the iceberg” of a series of neurological problems, some of which might not show up in the brain scans used to spot microcephaly, and it might not even show up for years to come. These could include epilepsy, behavioral problems and mental retardation, “It could be that these children are born with a normal head size but manifest other problems later in life.”
From this, we must gather that now even those babies appearing normal at birth are by no means safe or healthy, that they might appear normal today but may very well become delinquent, epileptic and mentally retarded at undetermined points in the future. So we have not only a strong focus on the relatively few cases of confirmed birth defects, but solemn and somber warnings that all births in the entirety of Latin America are suspect far into the indefinite future.
In such a case, what does one do? Fortunately, the WHO, Western medical “experts”, and the Washington Post, all reading from the same page, had the ready answer: legalised abortions. And this was the final, and extraordinarily vocal, thrust of the media coverage. And I have to say, I found this to be suspicious as hell. Reading from beginning to end, it was difficult to avoid concluding that the purpose of the exaggerated focus on the birth defects to the exclusion of all else, coupled with the intense fear-mongering that followed, were simply the prelude to the main act which was to force a change in South America’s abortion laws. The fear-mongering paid off to some extent: The governments of many countries in South and Central America, aided immeasurably by some elements of the media and countless NGOs, advised all women to delay any planned pregnancies until 2018.
The New York Times, Bloomberg, Canada’s Public Health Service and others were instructing Latin American women to avoid pregnancy (41) (42) (43) (44), while the Washington Post ran an article on January 22, 2016 in which it informed that Latin American countries were advising women to not only postpone pregnancies but to avoid sex altogether. (45) But then it launched into what I thought was an extraordinary propaganda piece on abortion in Latin America. It told us that the topic is “Taboo in election campaigns”, then “estimated” the total number of induced abortions at well over 850,000 per year, stating that perhaps ten million women had obtained illegal abortions in Brazil alone during the prior ten years. In other words, roughly a third of all pregnancies in Brazil had been aborted. And a group known as the Pan American Health Organization, a sister to Margaret Chan’s WHO, produced a study claiming the numbers were well over one million per year. (46) And not only that, but more than 20% of all women in Brazil have had “at least one abortion” – this in a country where abortions are illegal. But, according to these “experts”, it is clear that such a prohibition “does not prevent women resorting to abortion.” I guess not. These “experts” even admitted their figures were “ridiculously high”, but used this as proof that abortions would not increase if they were legalised – which was the thrust of the entire argument and the purpose of the almost certainly fabricated facts. The fear-mongering further reared its ugly head with an (undocumented and certainly false) tale of one woman who “disappeared after entering an illegal abortion clinic,” the article confiding to us that “She would have died during the procedure and police suspect that her body was burned and dismembered.” With risks like this, we should conclude that Brazilian women are nothing if not courageous, though I would have thought the more common procedure would be to dismember first and burn later. But then maybe things are different in Brazil.
The Washington Post ran another article on February 8, 2016, titled, “ZIKA prompts urgent debate about abortion in Latin America” (47), in which they stated (much too gleefully, I thought) that calls to loosen restrictive abortion laws were “gaining momentum”, and that “activists” were “pressing lawmakers” to act swiftly in removing these laws. According to the Post, the pro-abortion lobby was “taking advantage of this to liberalize the legislation”, and one spokesman for a pro-abortion NGO named ‘Bureau for the Life and Health of Women’ hoped that “ZIKA would change the debate”. (48) (49) We were also informed of another Canadian NGO named ‘Women on Web’, who specialise in shipping abortion-inducing drugs through the mail (for a “donation” of $100) into countries where abortions are prohibited by law. The article informed us that, sadly, “Often, government customs inspectors seize the pills.” No idea why. And a columnist named Hélio Schwartsman wrote that he has interviewed a woman that said if she were pregnant and discovered she’d been infected by ZIKA, “I would not hesitate an instant to abort”, dismemberment and subsequent incineration apparently being an insufficient disincentive. (50) (51) I should note here that the Washington Post and all other Western media, while positively glowing about the prospects of abortion being legalised in South and Central America, neglected to mention that all the “activists,” the NGOs, and the “pro-abortion lobbies” were all US-based or US-funded, as well as often being US-managed, many or most closely connected to USAID and US-based Planned Parenthood, who are in turn the Great-Grandfather and Great-Grandmother of eugenics, abortion, forced sterilisation, and population reduction.
Then the New York Times, not one to be left out of the excitement, ran an article by a Simon Romero, informing that “ZIKA Virus Has Brazilians Re-examining Strict Abortion Laws,” and that “the surging reports” of babies with microcephaly “are igniting a fierce debate” over the country’s abortion laws. Romero also noted that (American) “abortion rights activists are seizing on the crisis” to change the country’s laws. (52)”Pregnant women across Brazil are now in a panic”, he tells us, which is no great surprise given “the surging reports” and the extraordinary amount of fear-mongering the media contributed to aid their momentum. After reading all the Western media stories, I’d be in a panic too. He noted that “some activists”, American as usual, compare this to the US debate on abortion following measles infections in that country, a situation that “paved the way” for abortion in California and then most states in the US. “The fears over the ZIKA virus are giving us a rare opening to challenge the religious fundamentalists who put the lives of thousands of women at risk in Brazil each year to maintain laws belonging in the dark ages.”
It needs to be noted somewhere that casual abortions as a means of birth control may not necessarily qualify as a “universal value.” People and societies in different countries are entitled to form their own values, especially those values involving human life, without the belligerent assistance of either Planned Parenthood or the Washington Post, and if the countries in Latin America want to restrict abortions or if China wants to restrict pornography, it is nobody else’s business and is a gross violation of sovereignty to attempt to force our Western or other values onto them. We formed our values, such as they are, without interference from others, and they have the right to do the same.
It is a truth in all matters involving foreign affairs, most especially those carrying significant social, political or economic implications, that there are no fortuitous events, no “coincidences”, that all things happen because they are planned, with the final result inevitably being according to expectation and plan. How then do we think about ZIKA? It seems implausible that the intense onslaught by the WHO and the media, wildly exaggerating what appeared to be non-existent dangers, was simply unintelligent and purposeless fear-mongering. This, and the sudden overwhelming push for legalised abortions were too unanimous, too widespread, and too well-orchestrated to have been merely opportunistic. How then do we think about Oxitec’s release of hundreds of millions of mosquitoes that were almost certainly infected with ZIKA? How do we think about the unanimous official narrative of ZIKA packing its bags and traveling halfway around the world to Brazil at the time of the World Cup? A coincidence? How do we think about ZIKA choosing as its new home the one place in the world with concentrated abortion restrictions? How do we think about the media ignoring the logic in these questions and trashing anyone who raised them?
What were the results of the ZIKA outbreak? The most noticeable was an unparalleled opportunity to raise a critical mass clamoring for legalised abortions, but there were others. Media reports estimated South America would lose at least $53 billion in tourism revenue from the widely-advised travel restrictions. (53) (54) Metropole would have to search hard indeed to find a more convenient economic sanction for a recalcitrant socialist periphery. And of course, economic hardship coupled with public fear and panic easily decay into social unrest, and are the precursor of choice as a seedbed for regime change. We have seen all of these, and more.
Larry Romanoffis a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Twitter has removed thousands of accounts it claims were tied to Chinese and Russian information campaigns involved in “manipulation” efforts – but its decision to team up with the Stanford Internet Observatory raises a red flag.
In a blog post on Friday, Twitter said it was disclosing 32,242 accounts to its archive of “state-linked information operations,” including three distinct operations from China, Russia and Turkey.
“Every account and piece of content associated with these operations has been permanently removed from the service,” it said, claiming that its goal was to get rid of “bad faith actors.”
The social media giant said it discovered a “core network” of 23,750 accounts relating to China, with 150,000 “amplifier” accounts boosting their content. All were engaging in “manipulative and coordinated activities,” it said.
It also shut down 1,152 accounts associated with Current Policy, which it described as a website “engaging in state-backed political propaganda within Russia.” Twitter said the network of accounts was posting in a “coordinated manner for political ends.”
One of Twitter’s leading “research partners” in this effort is named as the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), which describes itself as studying “the abuse of the internet” with a particular focus on social media.
Indeed, one of SIO’s researchers, Renee DiResta, should be well aware of how to spot online manipulation campaigns, given that she previously worked for cybersecurity firm New Knowledge – an outfit that was busted by the New York Times for reportedly running a disinformation campaign targeting American voters in 2017.
The article then stated that the firm “orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation” with an army of fake Russian bots, which was designed to make voters believe that Republican candidate Roy Moore was backed by Moscow when he was running for the US senate. This could easily be described as the kind of “abuse of the internet” SIO claims it is against.
The stunt even got the firm’s CEO Jonathan Morgan kicked off Facebook for “coordinated inauthentic behavior” – an event described by the Times as a “stinging embarrassment” for the researcher given his reputation as a “leading voice” against disinformation campaigns online.
Adding further irony to Twitter’s choice of research partner is the fact that SIO Director Alex Stamos “serves on the advisory board to NATO’s Collective Cybersecurity Center of Excellence.”
NATO is no stranger to social media manipulation either, with its Public Diplomacy Division having reportedly been a funder of a British ‘Integrity Initiative’ psy-op exposed in the past, which had been posing as a disinformation-busting charity.
Twitter said this week it was trialling a “read before you retweet” pop-up message in order to promote “informed discussion,” but it looks as though the platform itself is missing (or ignoring) some crucial information about its own research partners.
This week, the Grayzone’s Gareth Porter exposed an important strategy led by the FBI to purge the internet of alternative media outlets who question the mainstream narratives being used to shepherd society into an Orwellian post-COVID world order.
Although FBI propagandists strewn throughout mainstream media have attempted to project the idea that the corrupt days of America’s internal Gestapo operation led by J. Edgar Hoover are a thing of the past, the reality is that its days of COINTEL PRO, MK Ultra, assassinations and media manipulation of the 1960s and 1970s not only didn’t go away but only amplified their influence during the modern age of cyberwarfare.
Knowing that alternative media was a decisive factor in the downfall of Hillary (and her neocon backers), a vast operation was put into motion designed to convince Americans that the elections were never really legitimate in the first place because… Russia.
Four years of Russiagate contaminated the American political landscape ultimately producing both a multi-million dollar nothing burger and also one of the most dangerous reforms in counter-intelligence operations that currently threatens to render what little remains of the first amendment forever obsolete.
Countering Malign Foreign Influences in the Media
In his article, Porter begins by describing the creation of the October 2017 creation of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Counter-Intelligence Task Force which generated a new procedure for extending internet censorship to any media outlet that could be labelled a “malign foreign influence” if connected in any way to America’s major adversaries of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.
Porter describes how Facebook, Google, Twitter and Instagram promptly interfaced with the Task Force and began deleting accounts and pages of alternative media outlets who were labelled puppets of foreign actors. The biggest purge occurred in 2018 as Facebook deleted 559 pages and 251 accounts including Anti-media, the Free Thought Project and Naked Empire due to their supposed “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” tied to shadowy “malign foreign influences”.
While the American Herald Tribune was not officially listed as one of the targets during this operation, it’s de-platforming over Facebook, Instagram and Google was later admitted to have been part of the purge (more to be said on that below).
Shadowy Enemies and New Protocols
In an April 26, 2019 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, FBI director Christopher Wray described “malign foreign influence” to be “the fairly aggressive campaign we saw in 2016 and that has continued pretty much unabated, is the use of social media, fake news, propaganda, false personas etc… to spin us up, pit us against each other, sow divisiveness and discord, and undermine America’s faith in democracy”.
According to Wray (and echoed in recent days by former Obama advisor Susan Rice), such divisiveness and discord as we see across America’s protests now have less to do with the systemic corruption, economic injustice (or even George Soros’ moneybags fueling the fires of chaos)… but rather Russia, China and Iranian fake news campaigns.
Gareth Porter cites the important February 2020 remarks by the FBI’s Assistant Section for the Foreign Influence Task Force David Porter, who described the foreign operations which “seek to weaken an adversary from within” using “information confrontation to target the perceptions of their adversaries’ population”. These methods then “erode confidence in democratic values and institutions, encourage negative sentiment, apathy and mistrust of government.” One of the most dangerous by-products for agent David Porter is that the public loses confidence in the “credibility of an established, free and independent news media” pushing “consumers towards alternative news sources of news media where of course it is much easier to introduce false narratives.”
David Porter focuses his discourse on Russia and China explaining that the two nations differ in their methods of information warfare in the following manner: Where China “confines its manipulation to its geostrategic economic goals” and “wants to manage our gradual economic decline over the course of generations”, Russia is more vicious and just “wants to see us tear ourselves apart”.
How does the FBI decide who is guilty of “malign foreign influence”? Not by wasting their time “chasing content” or looking at what websites actually say, but rather by “attribution”. In laymen’s terms, “attribution” merely implies using behavioral pattern recognition logarithms to de-platform and censor alt media accounts. Evidence of actual funding by a foreign government or even systemic lying need not be considered under this sort of attribution. Merely having shared a server with a company that “at some point may have” hosted a website affiliated with a foreign government, or publishing narratives that are critical of the western establishment are sufficient proof to remove and blacklist you under this new digital McCarthyism.
The Targeting of the American Herald Tribune
Gareth Porter takes the time to showcase the important case study of American Herald Tribune as an example of the FBI’s brazen abuse of this loosely defined standard of “attribution”. Just days after the August 2018 takedown of the Tribune’s pages on Facebook (and Google’s cancellation of the site’s ad service which act as a vital revenue stream for any alternative media agency), Christopher Wray admitted to have provided social media companies with the “specific threat indicators” used to justify censorship… although they did not openly admit to targeting the American Herald Tribune at this time.
It was only on January 24, 2020 that Facebook finally confirmed publicly in the form of a CNN report) that American Herald Tribune was taken down due to Wray’s counter-intelligence program. The January 24 CNN article cited by Porter asserted that a Facebook spokesperson asserted that the Cybersecurity company FireEye (which is highly enmeshed in all branches of American intelligence agencies) found the AHT’s links to the Iran government’s larger influence operation “with moderate confidence”.
For anyone familiar with the modern newspeak of the FBI’s lexicon, “moderate confidence” means little more than “we feel that there may be some connection but have no actual evidence.”
Illustrating the Tribune’s great sin, the CNN article in question stated that “The articles posted to American Herald Tribune are largely in line with the views of Iran’s ruling establishment. It publishes stories criticizing American foreign policy and attacking President Donald Trump and Israel. Often the criticism is not unlike viewpoints expressed on authentic US-based independent websites, especially ones with an anti-establishment perspective.”
Here we have the essence of what the FBI considers the Tribune’s great crime: Permitting anti-establishment views to be published critical of American foreign policy. It’s really that simple.
The Strategic Reality of the Fight: A Word from Anthony Hall
Grayzone’s expose should be studied in tandem with a powerful report written by American Herald Tribune Editor in Chief Anthony Hall published on June 8 entitled COVID-19, Antifa, and Black Lives Matter: The Battle for Control of the Internet. In this important article, Hall explains that the current convergent of major global developments has come to a historic head.
As we move into and through this turbulent phase of history, the speed of world events has accelerated to unprecedented levels exemplified from the quick change of focus from one controlled fallacious narrative featuring Gates as the star performer Global Pandemic show to a new Soros-managed narrative of controlled chaos across America under the Black Lives Matter/Antifa show.
In his article, Hall points out: “In recent days the focus suddenly shifted from COVID-19 and compulsory vaccines to insurrection and anarchy from within. Suddenly the vaccine czar, Bill Gates, has been swept from the center stage of current events. Suddenly multi-billionaire Gates has been upstaged by multi-billionaire George Soros.”
In both cases of COVID-19 and Soros-financed mass anarchy, the target is the same thing: The free access to information on the internet which has become a focal point for the battle ground for the future of the human race. As Hall points out, “the drama of these cataclysmic times is serving to highlight the importance of the Internet not only as a medium for reporting events but as a vehicle that is instrumental in the shaping of events; in determining what actually happens or not.”
In the case of the current controlled chaos agenda, this battle is playing out over President Trump’s recent Executive Order invoking Section 230 of the Communications and Decency Act of 1996 in defense of a free and uncensored internet. On this point, Hall writes: “Love him or hate him, Donald Trump has recently moved forward with the most significant anti-censorship initiative in the history of the Internet. Trump is seeking to stop the takeover of humanity’s most vital infrastructure of communications by a cabal of extremists.”
Trump’s Executive Order stands in direct opposition to those forces of the Anglo-American Five Eyes empire which seeks nothing less than to turn humanity into a society of sheepish zombies as pliable as the mobs of Ancient Rome who would as soon cheer for Pompei one day as they would Julius Caesar, Brutus or Marc Antony the next… as long as blood and wine continued to flow in the gladiator arenas.
It is important to emphasize here that no one is safe from this new age of post-2016 cyberwarfare.
Whether you place yourself on the “left” or on the “right” of America’s political spectrum, the chances are that if your conscience is intact, then you don’t want your nation to become a dictatorship, you prefer the constitution not be shredded and you certainly don’t want the American Military Industrial Complex to blow up the world. If this is the case, then you would do well to pay attention to any FBI-run protocols which demand that the population be kept fearful and confused enough to willingly renounce their liberties, free speech and very constitution upon which so many people gave their lives, in exchange for a Deep State bureaucrat’s definition of “security”.
Matthew J.L. Ehret is a journalist, lecturer and founder of the Canadian Patriot Review.
Denmark has called in the Saudi ambassador to Copenhagen to protest the kingdom’s support for a notorious terrorist group behind a 2018 deadly attack in Iran’s southwestern city of Ahvaz, among its other terrorist crimes against Iranians.
Riyadh’s envoy was summoned to the Danish Foreign Ministry on Wednesday after terrorism charges were leveled against three leaders of the anti-Iran al-Ahvaziya terror group based in Denmark.
Danish police said they were prosecuting “three people for financing and promoting terrorism in Iran, including in collaboration with a Saudi intelligence service.”
The suspects are believed to have received funds from Riyadh, which has been pursuing a highly hostile Iran policy under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Meanwhile, Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET) stressed that the trio worked for the Saudi regime between 2012 and 2018.
PET chief Finn Borch Andersen said it is “completely unacceptable” that Denmark is used “as a starting point to finance and support terrorism.”
“We will not accept such activities under any circumstances and our ambassador in Riyadh has repeated the same message directly to the Saudi authorities,” Danish Foreign Minister Jeppe Kofod said in a statement.
In February, Denmark said its intelligence service had arrested and charged three members of the Saudi-backed terror group for spying on behalf of the kingdom in the Scandinavian country.
Al-Ahvaziya has committed numerous crimes against Iranian targets over the past decades, among them bomb attacks in public places, abductions, assassinations, kidnapping for ransom, shooting at tourists and blowing up oil pipelines.
Formed a few years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, the terror group was inspired back then by the Baath regime of Iraq’s ex-dictator Saddam Hussein.
Al-Ahvaziya has been after separating the southwestern province of Khuzestan — home to the country’s Arab population — from the rest of Iran through engaging in armed conflict against the Iranian government.
In September 2018, the Saudi-backed terror outfit claimed responsibility for a deadly attack on military parade in Ahvaz, Khuzestan’s provincial capital. The assault killed 25 people, including members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and civilian bystanders, and injured 70 others.
Shortly after the attack, the London-based “Iran International” television channel funded by Saudi Arabia allowed the al-Ahvaziya spokesman to go live on air to defend the bloodshed.
In parallel, the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group also claimed responsibility for the Ahvaz attack.
In response, Iran launched missiles on gatherings of the ringleaders of the terror attack Ahvaz based in an area east of the Euphrates in Syria, killing and injuring a number of them and inflicting heavy losses on their stronghold.
Riyadh is widely viewed as a key sponsor of Takfiri terrorists, who are inspired by Wahhabism, an extremist ideology preached by Saudi clerics.
A Florida Senator spectacularly claimed he’s got intelligence proving China is obstructing the West’s search for a Covid-19 cure – He shouldn’t be shy to let the world see the “evidence,” Beijing’s diplomats swiftly quipped.
Rick Scott, who sits on the Senate’s Armed Services and Homeland Security Committees, pulled no punches when talking China on the BBC on Sunday. Apart from being hostile to the US and democracy, Beijing communists are hindering the development of a coronavirus vaccine, and are trying “to sabotage us or slow it down,” Scott alleged.
He said there’s “evidence” substantiating the bombshell claim but repeatedly refused to disclose it, citing vague considerations regarding secrecy – much to the disappointment of anchor Andrew Marr.
The Senator’s media blitz predictably caught Beijing’s eye the following day. Since the BBC host failed to extract the proof, Hua Chunying, a spokeswoman for the Chinese foreign ministry, challenged Scott into lifting the shroud of mystery.
“Since this lawmaker said he has evidence that China is trying to sabotage Western countries in their vaccine development, then please let him present the evidence. There’s no need to be shy.”
In response to Scott’s assertion that Beijing doesn’t want the West to develop the vaccine first, Hua stated during a regular press briefing that the search for a Covid cure isn’t a competition at all.
Previously, China’s Science and Technology Minister Wang Zhigang gave reassurances that his country would make such a vaccine a “global public good” when it finally arrives.
The claim that China is hindering the anti-Covid research effort may well be riding a wave of another theory, one that alleges that coronavirus is man-made and was released from a virology lab in Wuhan, the Chinese city that was the epicenter of the epidemic.
Aggressively pushed by top US officials, the theory was consistently denounced by Beijing which called it an attempt to switch attention from Washington’s handling of its epidemic at home. Certain American allies also doubted the Covid-19 was a human creation, although some pundits suggested a ‘leak’ from the lab could have been accidental.
Flying completely under the radar of the various crises that have come to define 2020, an interesting story is playing out in India. This story shines a light on the increasingly globalized nature of medical research and on the dark practice of using poor people in third world nations as guinea pigs in that research.
In early May, the US Centers for Disease Creation and Propaganda (CDC) announced a $3.6 million grant to “further strengthen and support the Indian government’s efforts to increase laboratory capacity for SARS-COV-2 testing.” But just days later, it was reported that the grant may be delayed because the CDC was placed on a “watch list” by the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs last December.
Wait, what? The Indian government placed the CDC on a “watch list” last year? Why?
Well, according to The Hindustan Times, the Indian government specifically asked the CDC to “stop funding research in India without government approval” after they discovered that the US health agency had helped an under-qualified Indian research facility to study a potential bioweapon. The facility in question—the Manipal Centre for Virus Research—was researching the Nipah virus, a so-called “Risk Group 4” (RG4) pathogen that is “likely to cause serious or lethal human disease for which preventive or therapeutic interventions are not usually available.”
Given their extremely dangerous nature, RG4 pathogens can only be handled in special “biological safety level 4” (BSL4) laboratories. BSL4 labs are completely sealed off from the outside, with dedicated supply and exhaust air systems and rigorous procedures for decontaminating all personnel and materials leaving the building. As a result, BSL4 laboratories are very rare, with only a handful of facilities in the world able to meet the stringent security protocols. Like the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
. . . Oh, wait.
Well, anyway, the key point is that the Manipal Centre for Virus Research (MCVR) is a BSL2 facility, not a BSL4 laboratory, and thus was not cleared to be working with Nipah virus at all. So how did the researchers at the MCVR get their hands on the viral samples? And how did they get the funding for their research?
The illegal research was uncovered after the coronavirus panic prompted the Indian government to order a review of biological weapons grade pathogens in the country. That review discovered that the CDC was funding a training program at the MCVR to detect and diagnose Nipah virus, and that the US agency was secretly funding the program in violation of India’s Foreign Contribution Regulation Act 2010. The bold, illegal scheme was laid out in an internal government report titled “Unapproved, US-funded Indian Laboratory stored samples of Nipah Virus – a bioterrorism agent.”
The Hindustan Timesreport includes a startling accusation from one unnamed Indian government official:
“Our apprehension is that the lab was being used to map the Nipah virus, which can be used to develop a vaccine, the intellectual property right of which [sic] will not be with India. Importantly, understanding how the human body reacted to the virus will also produce a more virulent form of virus for biological warfare.”
That’s right, folks. For some reason, the US CDC was secretly funding a research program into a highly dangerous weapons-grade biological pathogen at an under-qualified research facility in India.
Even more incredibly, this isn’t the first time that the CDC has been accused of nefarious biowarfare activity in the country. In 1994, an outbreak of bubonic and pneumonic plague hit south-central and western India, causing 693 cases of the disease and 56 deaths. The loss of life may have been relatively small, but the panic surrounding the event was unprecedented. 300,000 people fled the plague-stricken city of Surat in two days, the largest post-independence migration of Indians in history, and the Indian economy suffered a $600 million hit.
Upon further inspection, however, questions began to emerge about whether the outbreak had really been the plague at all. Writing about the questions surrounding the recent coronavirus panic, a jounalist in the Indian publication THE WEEKwrote:
“During the 1994 plague outbreak in Surat and Beed, it was found that the germs had an extra protein ring which could only have been inserted artificially. Indian scientists had raised concerns about a US biowar experiment having gone awry. THE WEEK had carried reports giving details of germ war research being carried on in labs under the Centre for Disease Control in Atlanta and about a newly developed germ detector being tested. The US embassy had denied the allegations.”
Yes, perhaps the only surprising thing about this latest Nipah virus scandal is that the Indian government had the gumption to call the CDC out on their illegal activity and even to delay cashing a big juicy bribe check from the agency just to smooth things over.
You see, ever since it was effectively conquered by the British East India Company in the 18th century, India has been used as a giant open-air laboratory for the would-be social engineers of the ruling oligarchy.
The Company began its conquests in the mid-18th century and gradually expanded military, political and economic control over India. At the height of the East India Company’s power, the nation of India had effectively become the plaything of a private corporation. As historian William Dalrymple writes:
“We still talk about the British conquering India, but that phrase disguises a more sinister reality. It was not the British government that seized India at the end of the 18th century, but a dangerously unregulated private company headquartered in one small office, five windows wide, in London, and managed in India by an unstable sociopath – [Robert] Clive.”
Fast forward a century or two and India is still the plaything of multinational corporations. The much-touted “Green Revolution” of the 1950s and 1960s, for example—a set of technology transfer initiatives designed to “modernize” agricultural practices in developing countries by selling them American-made machinery running on petrochemicals—not only exacerbated the problems faced by landless peasants in India, but actually slowed the growth of agricultural production in the country. The seed cartels and agricultural giants like Monsanto that colonized the country in the wake of this “Green Revolution” have left their own scar on India in the form of an epidemic of suicides committed by farmers saddled with unpayable debts.
In the current era, however, the privatization of India is done not by the corporations directly, but under the guise of “philanthropy” by nongovernmental organizations and private foundations.
Viewers of Who Is Bill Gates? will already know some of the lowlights of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s involvement in India. From the national vaccination schedule to the national biometric identification scheme (Aadhaar) to the country’s headlong rush towards a mobile digital payment system, there is no aspect of the modern Indian state that does not bear the fingerprints of Gates or one of his minions. In fact, such was the concern over the way that the Gates Foundation was influencing India’s vaccination strategy on behalf of Gates’ Big Pharma buddies that the Indian government was forced to cut all financial ties between the foundation and the National Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation—the primary body advising New Delhi on all vaccination-related matters.
But, contrary to the headlines that have been generated in the alt media that the Gates Foundation has been “kicked out” of the country, the relationship between the Indian government and Gates is as close as ever. In fact, so close is the relationship that the Gates Foundation actually operates an “India Office,” which “operates as a branch office with permission of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) under Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA) and is appropriately registered under Indian law.”
The reason that India continues to be a rich target for the likes of the Gates Foundation is that it provides an easily accessible testing ground for medical research and its large population provides ready markets for Big Pharma vaccines and other products. As Samiran Nundy, editor emeritus of the National Medical Journal ofIndia, observed regarding a scandal surrounding an HPV vaccine study in the country that committed “gross violations” of consent, “This is an obvious case where Indians were being used as guinea pigs.”
The Indian people, and poor people across Asia and Africa, have been used as human guinea pigs by medical researchers, social engineers and agents of empire for centuries. It should come as no surprise that the US CDC has been caught with their hand in the India cookie jar, funding secret bioweapon development research in the country without the government’s knowledge or consent. The only question now is whether the Indian government is willing to cash their $3.6 million “coronavirus research” bribe and look the other way, or stick to their guns and kick the CDC out of the country for good.
The National Endowment for Democracy, a soft-power group mostly known for splashing government dollars on pro-US influence campaigns overseas to enforce regime change, has endorsed protests against police brutality at home.
In a statement on Friday, the NED came out in support of the protests against the police killing of unarmed black man George Floyd, which, while originally peaceful, spiralled into violence, wrecking havoc across dozens of US cities. The group, which styles itself as a “private and nonprofit foundation dedicated to the growth and strengthening of democratic institutions around the world” but is notorious for being used as a vehicle of US foreign policy abroad, said that it hopes that the movement for racial justice in the US will inspire other “brave people” to challenge the status quo all around the globe.
“Such a movement is needed not just for the sake of our own country, but for the benefit of brave people on the frontlines of democratic struggles around the world.”
In its emphatic endorsement of the ongoing protests, marred by looting, arson and numerous instances of violence, the group equated its doing of Washington’s bidding abroad with the civil rights movement that brought the system of legal segregation in the US to its formal end, arguing that the NED’s mission is “based on the same values of freedom and human equality.”
In a not so thinly-veiled innuendo, the group, which is sponsored by the US Congress and is backed by both Republican and Democratic parties, expressed hope that the events in the US could ignite similar movements elsewhere.
“May the present crisis lead to the realization of the ideals that animate our democracy, and may this give hope to those in other countries who share our commitment to freedom and human dignity.”
The NED, founded in 1983, has courted controversy for using its US government allocated resources for encouraging regime change in countries that refuse to toe Washington’s line, like Russia and China. The group, along with other US-based “NGOs” supported the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine and later funneled millions of freedom dollars to the country ahead of the 2014 anti-Russian coup that brought down Ukraine’s former President Viktor Yanukovych.
In 2015, Moscow designated the NED’s activities as “undesirable” after it was found to have sponsored political campaigns aimed at influencing the Russian government’s decisions, including discrediting the nation’s military forces and the results of elections.
The outlet has also been caught red-handed stirring anti-Beijing sentiment in Hong Kong, drawing fire from the Chinese government. In December 2019, Beijing sanctioned the NED along with several other US-affiliated organizations, accusing them of “horrible activities in the months-long turmoil in the city.”
“[There is] a great amount of evidence proving that these NGOs have supported anti-China forces to create chaos in Hong Kong, and made utmost efforts to encourage these forces to engage in extreme violent criminal acts,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry said at the time.
Facebook fact checkers have labeled a video published by RT’s German-language branch RT Deutsch ‘fake news,’ after the outlet reported a viewership spike. They later blamed a ‘technical glitch’ but the damage was already done.
An innocent post about a hospital being built in Russian city of Ufa to treat people suffering from Covid-19 had somehow incurred the displeasure of Facebook’s ever-watchful fact checkers. It is trivial to discover lots of stories about the project in Russia’s regional and national media, as well as a plenty of videos of the hospital under construction on platforms such as YouTube.
Yet Facebook’s guardians of truth still declared that video of the hospital was false and labelled it as such in mid-May, just a day after it was published. When RT sought to find out the reasons for such a move, it emerged that the fact-checker involved was Fatabyyano, a platform normally verifying Arabic-language stories about the Middle East and North Africa.
In what came as an even bigger surprise, the link attached to the RT Deutsch video as proof of its alleged falsehood led to a post analyzing an entirely different story about some quotes on Covid-19 falsely attributed to the former French minister and ex-UN Under-Secretary-General, Philippe Douste-Blazy.
When RT attempted to contact the fact checkers and point out the discrepancy, it received no reply. Only a message to Facebook administration set things into motion. Fatabyyano CEO Moath Altheher apologized to RT and said that his agency never rated any German-language content, let alone the specific RT post. He blamed the whole incident on an alleged “technical problem with the system” or an email glitch.
The “false” tag has since been removed from the video in question, but the damage has already been done, since RT Deutsch reported a steep downfall in the number of ‘likes’ and shares of its content following the incident. The tag also caused RT Deutsch to temporarily lose access to Facebook’s Instant Articles service, as well as to content monetization options. Facebook algorithms limit the spread of content from sources it deems ‘fake news factories’, meaning that fewer people could actually see RT Deutsch posts.
The “glitch” took place right after RT Deutsch reported that it became the fifth most popular German-language outlet on Facebook, citing video viewership data from March 2020.
Berlin is insistent on maintaining problematic relations with Moscow by making claims against Russia. Long-time German Chancellor Angela Merkel accused Russia in the Bundestag that she was the target of Russian hackers, adding that she had concrete proof of the “outrageous” spying attempts, without actually providing any evidence. She even went on to suggest that sanctions could be placed against Russia.
The German Foreign Ministry said in a statement on May 28 that “The Russian ambassador was informed that on the basis of an arrest warrant issued by the federal prosecutor’s office on May 5 against Russian national Dmitry Badin, that the German government will seek in Brussels to use the EU cyber sanctions regime against those responsible for the attack on the German Bundestag, including Mr Badin.”
The alleged cyberattack occurred in 2015 and brings to question why Berlin is now resurrecting a 5-year-old issue that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov highlighted there was no evidence for Russian involvement. EU High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy, Josep Borrell, shared Lavrov’s sentiment and said he also did not have data on a cyberattack on the Bundestag and could not comment on this issue despite Berlin’s threat that it will use the EU to place sanctions on Russia.
“As for Russian hacker attacks, I don’t have any information that I can provide you at this stage,” said Borrel, answering a question from journalists about the possible imposition of sanctions on this case against Russians.
Perhaps as the U.S. continues to threaten companies involved in NordStream 2, Berlin is giving the appearance that it is still anti-Russia, despite being almost entirely reliant on Russia for its energy needs. Also, as Berlin has not provided evidence that Russia was behind the cyberattacks, why has it also not considered the U.S. could have orchestrated the attack?
In October 2013, Steffen Seibert, an official spokesman for the German government, reported that former CIA officer Edward Snowden had warned Germany that U.S. intelligence agencies could track Merkel’s mobile phone. Despite numerous demands from the public to conduct a full investigation and prosecute those responsible for this incident, in June 2015 the German Federal Prosecutor’s Office announced that the case was closed due to the inability to prove it in court.
Although the case allegedly could not be prosecuted, it does call to question why Merkel through a spokesperson told U.S. officials that they “view such practices [like spying] … as completely unacceptable.” White House spokesman Jay Carney said in response that “the United States is not monitoring and will not monitor the communications of the chancellor.”
In a statement, the German government said that “Among close friends and partners, as the Federal Republic of Germany and the U.S. have been for decades, there should be no such monitoring of the communications of a head of government.” The statement also said that Merkel had told Obama that “such practices must be prevented immediately.”
However, this is an incident that took place seven years ago and under a different U.S. administration and political party. None-the-less, in February 2019, a scandal erupted around Swiss company Crypto AG which was developing equipment used to encrypt sensitive information, and was working closely with the CIA and the BND (German intelligence). It was revealed that for more than half a century this practise was going on, demonstrating that U.S. spying on its own allies is not a new phenomenon.
Investigators from the German television station ZDF and The Washington Post found that the illegal actions by U.S. and German intelligence services affected more than 120 countries. The Swiss company supplied products as far back as the Second World War with encryption weaknesses so U.S. and German intelligence agencies could spy on many countries, including their own allies. Though the BND stopped participating in this Rubicon operation, as it came to be known, in 1993, the U.S. continued to spy until 2018.
After such cooperation with the U.S., information about the wiretap of the German Chancellor, which remained without a harsh reaction, is presented in a completely different light. Berlin probably had to quietly take the insult in order to avoid major and public problems because the NATO allies have likely gathered a lot of damaging information about each other over the years in their joint work in the Rubicon operation. It is worth to mention that Germany is not an ordinary European state, but the power engine of the European Union and an important member of NATO.
Now Germany decisively accuses Russia of cyberattacks and threatens sanctions, despite not providing any evidence for their claims. Although Russia, unlike the U.S., did not wiretap the German government, it is much safer to blame Russian citizens for cyberattacks. It does bring into question however why Germany is even possibly discussing sanctions while it fully supports the NordStream 2 pipeline project to secure its energy interests with Russia.
Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.
Researchers about the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor know that President Franklin Roosevelt had provoked a Japanese attack to justify America’s entry into World War II. Most Americans were against joining the war, but the attack on Pearl Harbor provided the excuse needed to declare war. The best book on this topic is “Day of Deceit” by former World War II Navy officer Robert Stinnett. The topics he covers are controversial because most people refuse to accept that Roosevelt and top military leaders in Washington DC failed to inform the commanders in Hawaii that a Japanese fleet was coming to attack.
__________________________________________
“Do Freedom of Information Act Files Prove FDR Had Foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor?”; Robert Stinnett; Independent.org; March 11, 2002; https://www.independent.org/issues/ar…
“From Shanghai to Corregidor: Marines in the Defense of the Philippines”; J. Michael Miller, National Park Service; https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/onlin…
“HIGHLIGHTS OF MOBILIZATION, WORLD WAR II, 1938-1942”; Office of the Chief of Military History; Department of the Army; Dr. Stetson Conn; 10 March 1959; https://history.army.mil/documents/WW…
Since the promotion of hydroxychloroquine by US President Donald Trump as a possible treatment for those afflicted with the coronavirus, the drug has been the subject of controversy, as top medical journals rebuked the claim and major drug trials were halted.
Three authors of an article that claimed to have discovered that taking hydroxychloroquine led to an increased fatality risk among COVID-19 patients retracted the study on Thursday over concerns that the primary source data used to support the work was unverifiable.
According to the authors, Surgisphere, a data analytics company said to be responsible for providing the raw data, refused to supply the full dataset to an independent review. The authors then acknowledged that they “can no longer vouch for the veracity of the primary data sources”.
“We always aspire to perform our research in accordance with the highest ethical and professional guidelines. We can never forget the responsibility we have as researchers to scrupulously ensure that we rely on data sources that adhere to our high standards. Based on this development, we can no longer vouch for the veracity of the primary data sources” the authors said in a co-signed retraction letter.
The authors requested that the paper be retracted and apologised “for any embarrassment or inconvenience” they may have caused.
The research was published in the British medical journal The Lancet last month and garnered widespread response after appearing to imply that antimalarial drugs endorsed by US President Donald Trump as a COVID-19 treatment, were not just ineffective but potentially deadly to users.
Conclusions of the study suggested that coronavirus patients taking chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine showed irregular heartbeats and therefore faced a higher chance of dying while undergoing treatment.
Following the publishing of the study, the World Health Organisation (WHO) – which has been defunded by the White House amid the coronavirus pandemic – initially halted their trials of the malaria drug as a coronavirus treatment, but in the wake of the new findings have resumed trials on Wednesday.
The United Kingdom and France also shut down their clinical drug trials in the wake of the report.
Accusations of politically motivated condemnation have been leveled against those responsible for the data used in the study as an attempt to discredit the treatment touted by Trump. Demand for the drug has since skyrocketed.
Despite the retraction of the the study, however, a concurrent study published by the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday found there is no evidence that hydroxychloroquine helps prevent those taking the drug from becoming infected with the COVID-19 coronvirus.
As the WHO and prestigious medical journal the Lancet back away from questionable data provided by healthcare analytics firm Surgisphere, ulterior motives for the rush to demonize hydroxychloroquine become clear.
The World Health Organization (WHO) sheepishly resumed testing the off-patent malaria drug hydroxychloroquine on coronavirus patients on Wednesday after pausing that arm of its ‘Solidarity’ clinical trial based on data that appeared to show the drug contributed to higher death rates among test subjects. That data, it turned out, came from a tiny US healthcare analytics firm called Surgisphere, and calling it faulty would be excessively charitable.
Not only is Surgisphere a company lacking in medical expertise – its employees included an “adult” entertainer and a science-fiction writer – but its CEO Sapan Desai co-authored two of the damning studies that used the firm’s data to smear hydroxychloroquine, already thoroughly demonized in the media thanks to its promotion by US President Donald Trump, as a killer. All data is sourced to a proprietary database supposedly containing a veritable ocean of real-time, detailed patient information yet curiously absent from existing medical literature.
The Surgisphere-tainted study appeared to show increased risk of in-hospital deaths and heart problems with no disease-fighting benefits, confirming the suspicions of medical-industry naysayers already inclined to hate the off-patent drug due to the lack of profit potential and Trump’s incessant boosterism. Italy, France, and Germany rushed to ban hydroxychloroquine, citing “an increased risk for adverse reactions with little or no benefit.”
But such a shameless character assassination performed against a potentially-lifesaving drug – especially one with a decades-long track record of safety in malaria, lupus, and arthritis patients that came highly recommended by some of the world’s most eminent disease experts, including France’s Didier Raoult – could only be accomplished with help from industry prejudice. It required ignoring numerous existing studies showing hydroxychloroquine was beneficial in treating early-stage Covid-19 patients, as well as anecdotal reports from thousands of doctors who’d successfully used it.
It also required trusting a fly-by-night company with next to no internet or media presence to make decisions that could affect the lives of millions of people. It’s not like there weren’t warning signs Surgisphere was something other than the top-notch medical analytics firm it presented itself as. The company began life as a textbook publisher in 2008 and hired most of its 11 employees two month ago, according to an investigation by the Guardian, yet it claimed ownership of a massive international database of 96,000 patients in 1,200 hospitals worldwide. One expert interviewed by the outlet said it would be difficult for even a national statistics agency to do in years what Surgisphere had supposedly done in weeks, calling the database “almost certainly a scam.” Yet no one at the Lancet or WHO thought to look a gift horse in the mouth – not when that gift drove a stake through the heart of hydroxychloroquine as Covid-19 treatment.
And while Australian researchers found flaws in the Surgisphere data just days after the May 22 publication of the Lancet study, noting that the number of Covid-19 deaths cited by the study as coming from five hospitals exceeded the entirety of Covid-19 deaths recorded in Australia at that time, the Lancet – instead of investigating just who this Surgisphere company really was, and why it had made such a glaring mistake – merely published a minor retraction related to the Australian data and put the controversy to bed.
The full-frontal assault on hydroxychloroquine was instead allowed to continue unchecked in the media, as mainstream outlets focused their energies on fluffing up remdesivir – a costly, untested drug manufactured by drug maker Gilead that has so far produced lackluster results in clinical trials – and stumping for an eventual vaccine. Hydroxychloroquine’s off-patent status meant it was a dead end as far as profits were concerned, while remdesivir and whatever vaccine is ultimately green-lighted will make a lot of people very rich. Perhaps hoping to throw their audiences off the real reason for their hydroxychloroquine hatred, several outlets hinted that Trump stood to make money off the drug (which costs about 60 cents per pill) – but even Snopes, no fan of the ‘Bad Orange Man’, had to pour cold water on that speculation.
The Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine have – belatedly – published “expressions of concern” about the Surgisphere hydroxychloroquine study, and an independent audit is being conducted. But the problem of biased health authorities selectively embracing some trial results while rejecting others is unlikely to stop there.
The Lancet study is hardly the only one to show hydroxychloroquine lacks efficacy in treating Covid-19. Multiple studies conducted by the US National Institutes of Health on hospitalized (i.e. severely-ill) coronavirus patients have yielded poor results, but even the drug’s most ardent evangelists acknowledge it doesn’t help end-stage or very sick patients. Raoult has even claimed France banned the drug’s use in all but the most severely ill patients in order to discredit it as a treatment. The US National Institutes of Health was publishing studies in its journal Virology touting chloroquine as “a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection” as far back as 2005, yet ‘coronavirus czar’ Anthony Fauci throws shade at the drug whenever he gets a chance.
As long as deadly diseases like Covid-19 are seen as profit sources first and human rights issues second (or third, or tenth…), treatments that aren’t profitable will always be marginalized in favor of costly and frequently less-effective pharmaceuticals. Drug industry profiteering has already killed hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of people in the US alone. Taking the profit motive out of healthcare can help ensure its body count stays as low as possible.
Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23
Stark Realities with Brian McGlinchey | April 4, 2024
A principal goal of Stark Realities is to “expose fundamental myths across the political spectrum” — and few myths are as universally embraced as the notion that US participation in World War II (1941-1945) lifted the American economy out of the Great Depression.
This myth is dangerous not only because it leads citizens and politicians to see a bright side of war that doesn’t really exist, but also because it helps foster a belief that government spending is essential to countering economic downturns. That belief, in turn, has helped propel us to a point where the national debt now exceeds $34.6 trillion, with interest payments alone on pace to reach $1 trillion a year in 2026, inviting financial catastrophe. … continue
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