Michigan AG Pins Blame for Failed Prosecutions of Student Protesters on Rep. Debbie Dingell
The Michigan attorney general provided no evidence for her claim, which Dingell rejected
By Ryan Grim and Tom Perkins | Drop Site | May 11, 2025
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel continues to do damage control in the wake of her failed prosecution of student protesters at the University of Michigan. Nessel was forced to drop charges against students who had been arrested at a pro-Palestinian encampment last year after the judge overseeing the case indicated he was sympathetic to the defense’s argument that Nessel had been improperly biased against the defendants.
This week, in public remarks on the prosecution, she claimed without evidence that Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell of Michigan had been the one who urged her to charge students involved in protests over Gaza. Pinning the pressure for the prosecutions on Dingell was Nessel’s way of arguing that the bias claims made against her were inaccurate—that she was not in fact pushed to take the cases by donors to her campaign who serve as senior officials at the university, but rather by the local congresswoman, Dingell.
“I heard it was from the Jewish Regents,”—that is, the Jewish members of the University of Michigan Board of Regents—“they forced me to take these cases,” Nessel said at an event this week called a “Town Hall on Hate Crimes & Extremism” in West Bloomfield Township. “I heard it was from the [Michigan Legislative] Jewish Caucus because of the money I get from them. I heard it was from Jewish donors. You know how those cases came to my office? Debbie Dingell. Debbie Dingell, I don’t know if you know this: Not Jewish. But it had to be some sort of Jewish influence.”
In a statement to Drop Site, Dingell spokesperson Michaela Johnson suggested the congresswoman was not behind the investigations, pointing to a May 2024 letter from Nessel’s office to the university in which Nessel offered to take over any investigations. The letter, which has not previously been reported, makes no reference to Dingell, but instead suggests that protests outside the homes of Board of Regents members triggered Nessel to launch an effort targeting student protesters.
“Nessel did not write the letter at our request, and Rep. Dingell had not seen that letter until today,” Johnson said. Dingell represents Ann Arbor, but previously represented Dearborn until redistricting in 2014, and she still has strong ties to the Arab-American community there. But she has remained largely silent with regard to the protests.
Amir Makled, an attorney for some of the students, said he called Dingell’s office on Friday to ask about Nessel’s allegations. He said a Dingell staffer denied the congresswoman had pushed for the investigation.
Makled said he didn’t think it was done at Dingell’s behest, but he said Dingell has been involved with the discussions because the incident occurred in her district, and she “has been giving lip service to all sides.”
But, he added, “Nessel is trying to do anything to deflect blame for her office’s misdeeds – that much seems clear to me.”
Nessel’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment over the weekend.
The university, its regents and Nessel have denied that the school recruited the attorney general.
This was not the first time Nessel had pointed the finger at Dingell. She told a local reporter several weeks ago that “the congresswoman from the 6th Congressional District” – Dingell – had put her up to it. “I stand behind the evidence and I stand behind the charges, and I appreciate the fact that this matter was referred by the congresswoman from the 6th Congressional District, who asked the state to intervene because they were concerned about what was happening on campus,” she said. “I believe what we did was the right thing, and that will be borne out in court.”
Following that report, supporters of the students who’d been charged approached Dingell at an event on March 3 to ask if Nessel’s allegation was true. According to an audio recording provided to Drop Site, it was not. “She’s told a lot of people a lot of stuff,” Dingell told the students. She was then asked directly by Jared Eno, a grad student at Michigan, if that was true: “No!” Dingell said. “She called the university and offered.” The letter supports that claim.
Nessel, in her remarks at the town hall, again claimed Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan had accused her of bias linked to her Jewish background, but Tlaib’s public statements have never referenced this. “I think people at the University of Michigan put pressure on her to do this, and she fell for it,” Tlaib had said. “I think President Ono and Board of Regent members were very much heavy-handed in this.” UMich President Santa Ono, the only person Tlaib named as having applied pressure to Nessel, is not Jewish.
The AG letter was sent to Timothy G. Lynch, vice president and general counsel at the University of Michigan, and signed by Danielle Hagaman-Clark, a prosecutor in Nessel’s office. “I write today to offer the DAG’s assistance with investigating and prosecuting any cases that arise from the recent demonstrations on UM’s campus,” she wrote. “It has been widely reported that the demonstrators have not limited their protests to the campus but have also appeared at the homes of the Board of Regents. My understanding is that the Regents are not required to live in Washtenaw County, the location of UM, but that they reside in several different counties. Because the DAG has state-wide criminal authority to bring charges, we are ideally situated to review any potential cases.”
The reference to the protests outside the homes of Regents matches reporting that suggested those demonstrations, even more than the encampments, enraged the board members, who urged Nessel to prosecute.
Nessel’s prosecutor added her office was well suited to determine whether any of the speech from the protesters was illegal. “I would also note that our Department has specialized expertise in the intersection of First Amendment free speech rights in the context of a criminal prosecution. We are fluent in the law around what speech is protected and what speech is not protected,” said Hagaman-Clark, making the pitch to Michigan. The letter was sent shortly after local prosecutor Eli Savit (who is also Jewish) declined to prosecute 36 of 40 protesters arrested in connection with the occupation of an administration building, and recommended four others for diversion. “General Nessel has discussed the potential jurisdictional issues that might arise with Washtenaw County Prosecutor Eli Savit. Prosecutor Savit recognizes that his authority is confined to Washtenaw County. He is comfortable with the DAG overseeing these cases based on his jurisdiction being limited to only Washtenaw County.”
In her effort at damage control this week, Nessel claimed Dingell’s supposed request was common. “Now it’s not unusual for a congressional representative to call up the department of the attorney general and to call the attorney general herself and say ‘I’m really worried about what I see to be criminal activity occurring and either the local prosecutor is not doing anything about it,’ or ‘they’re not equipped to do anything about it. But I am scared about what I am seeing. And I think the AG’s office has to take action.’”
Nessel also told the town hall audience that she dropped the charges because the judge had ordered an evidentiary hearing into the defense’s charge that Nessel was biased against the defendants. Defense attorneys, in their recent motion to disqualify Nessel’s office over bias, pointed to a previous analysis that found she had prosecuted protesters at a much higher rate than other prosecutors in the state.
They also pointed to Nessel recusing herself from an investigation into alleged election fraud by Muslim-American city council members in nearby Hamtramck. Nessel said she wanted to avoid the appearance of bias because she was Jewish and the suspects were of Arab descent. She also noted that she had previously been critical of the Hamtramck City Council. In their motion to disqualify Nessel’s office, defense attorneys questioned how she could consider herself biased in Hamtramck but unbiased in Ann Arbor under similar circumstances.
A letter sent by the Jewish Federation of Ann Arbor to the judge urging him to allow her to remain on the case, she said, put improper pressure on the judge and should not have been sent. And the cases against the students were becoming a distraction to staff, she added, who couldn’t even attend a job fair without being “shut down by protesters.”
“We elected that rather than me being put on trial for being a Jewish prosecutor, and rather than having the federation be put on trial for an email they should not have sent—but the kind that gets sent all the time—that we would dismiss the charges against those particular defendants,” she said. An evidentiary hearing would have opened her office to discovery and made public communications about how the cases came together. Defense attorneys say she wanted to avoid that.
Liz Jacob, an attorney from the Sugar Law Center, said the claim from Nessel was another effort to deflect responsibility. “It’s alarming to see the ways that Nessel is trying to avoid accountability for her repression of free speech and brutal targeting of protesters at all costs,” Jacob said. “Both in that video and over the last several months AG Nessel has tried to blame anyone—from Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib to Debbie Dingell to the Jewish Federation of Greater Ann Arbor—to deflect criticism regarding her own deplorable treatment of pro-Palestine protesters.”
Nessel’s decision was a serious one, and Nessel should treat it seriously, Jacob said. “As the Attorney General who is directing the FBI to raid protesters homes and bringing baseless and retaliatory criminal charges against protesters, it is Nessel who must bear responsibility for targeting young people who bravely speak out against war and genocide. Nessel’s actions speak for themselves — she has aligned herself with the Trump administration’s criminalization and repression of pro-Palestine speech,” she said.
Cover-ups, lies, smears and fake news from Ursula could be EU’s own suicide pill
By Martin Jay | Strategic Culture Foundation | May 12, 2025
Previous disparaging comments about the past of European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen and her grandparents’ role in the second world war might have seemed truculent by Russian commentators. And yet, as each month passes, we seem to be witnessing VDL’s political identity – and her vision of the role of the EU – more and more in line with Nazi Germany. The total annihilation of the free press in Brussels was not her doing, as she inherited the draconian system when she took office. But her efforts to broaden the silencing of journalists right across Europe is telling as it becomes even more an act of desperation to stamp out any free and feral reporting while her own team are pumping out these entirely fake narratives every day. The Russians are planning on invading Baltic states. Russia is the new threat to a democratic Europe. And the latest blag, EU is a bastion of peace and democracy “which doesn’t invade other countries”.
The lies and hypocrisy are at an all-time high and so it seems fitting that the draconian measures of arresting or detaining journalists, like Chay Bowes attempting to cover the Romanian elections, is understandable.
And yet there is no evidence at all to back up the preposterous claim that Moscow has eyes set on invading Baltic countries; there is also no evidence to back up the claim that Russia is the real threat to European democracy, which, in fact is being destroyed each day by the EU and its elites themselves. And as for the EU being this example of a peaceful trading bloc which doesn’t have any intention of attacking its own members… that might have been true. Until now.
These days the EU elite in Brussels are panicking about losing their relevance. It is looking at though the anti-EU candidate in Romania might well win the presidential elections there. If that happens, this means an alliance of three rebels in the pack – Hungary, Romania and Slovakia – are going to give the EU, let alone NATO a real headache. It might be overzealous to say it could be the end of the EU, but it may well certainly be the end of the EU as we know it. The extraordinary elitist dictatorship which has no accountability to its own mercurial ambitions and acts, might have to learnt a thing or two about democracy and start respecting a few of its principles. NATO, arguably, might be hit even harder as three members holding back the EU’s dream of organizing an EU army in Ukraine will have longer-term ramifications to the prestige and relevance of both those Brussels based institutions.
Have the cracks already started? Are these elitists like VDL losing their grip with reality? The threat by Estonia to “shoot down” any planes flying from Slovakia to Moscow is a good sign of the lunatics running the asylum as this WTF moment naturally is not reported by mainstream media and so the Slovakian PM himself had to stream a piece to camera for X just to confirm the madness.
Yet Ursula is really losing her mind. She’s out of control and this obsession with fighting Russia at any cost may well provide the defining moment where she and the EU project falls on its own sword. The election meddling, arrests of journalists and sheer scale of the fake news coming from the EU is starting to get noticed and seen for what it is – not only in these three recalcitrant EU member states but right across Europe. This is evident in the rise of far-right movements in France, Britain and Germany. It’s plain to see. More and more people are simply no longer buying the BS that comes to their TV screens by these leaders in Brussels on immigration, COVID, LGBT and of course boosting EU defence budgets to new giddy heights. In the UK for example, the government is looking at how to cut disability benefits to its own citizens as the national coffers are empty due to 7.5 illegal migrants receiving state benefits, free housing and health care.
The hypocrisy is staggering. Just recently we read that the EU accuses Hungarian populist leader of pouring cash into a number of media outlets to boost his popularity. And yet HUNDREDS of journalists in Brussels each day working for all of Europe’s main broadcasters, even the BBC when the UK was a member, receive free productions services saving them possibly hundreds of millions of euros each year. We don’t know the figure because it’s all shrouded in secrecy, naturally, but the laughable accusation made by the EU must be noted for the pot calling the kettle black.
Hungary, Slovakia and soon Romania will all be targets for smear campaigns by Brussels-based so-called journalists as part of the new objective of VDL and her cronies. This is coming on a grand scale and the more this is intensified, you can literally watch the popularity of the far-right parties in ‘Old Europe’ rise each day. The model has an autodestruct facility built into it which fools like VDL can’t even see as they are too fixated with power grabbing and the dirty tricks which are needed therein. But the whole machinery is fed on lies which still too many gullible Europeans believe whether it be about Russia’s “threat” or electric cars, alternative energy and of course vaccines. All these areas represent hundreds of billions of euros being transferred from the public coffers to the private ones and there are still, sadly, a good number of ignorant Europeans who can’t join up the dots.
Trump Cuts Ties with Netanyahu over “Manipulation Concerns”: Report
Al-Manar | May 9, 2025
US President Donald Trump has reportedly decided to cut off direct contact with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a report said Thursday.
Yanir Cozin, a correspondent for Israeli Army Radio, said in a post on his X account that Trump made the decision after close associates told Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer that “the president believes that Netanyahu is manipulating him.”
An Israeli official added that Dermer’s tone during recent discussions with senior Republican figures about what Trump should do “was seen as arrogant and unhelpful.”
The official said that people around Trump told him that “Netanyahu was manipulating him.”
“There is nothing Trump hates more than being portrayed as a fool or someone being played. That’s why he decided to cut contact with Netanyahu,” the official added.
Cozin pointed to the Israeli government’s “failure to present a concrete plan and timeline” regarding Iran and Yemen as a source of the worsening US-Israel relationship.
The Army Radio correspondent also highlighted that the Netanyahu government has failed to offer a concrete proposal on Gaza.
Meanwhile, Axios reported that Trump met Dermer on Thursday and discussed the nuclear talks with Iran and the war in Gaza, according to two sources briefed on the meeting.
The meeting at the White House, which was not made public by the US or the Zionist entity, took place ahead of the fourth round of nuclear talks between the US and Iran on Sunday in Muscat and Trump’s trip to the Middle East starting on Monday.
Trump will visit Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE on this trip but will skip the Zionist entity.
Iran categorically rejects involvement in alleged plot to attack Israeli embassy in UK
Press TV – May 8, 2025
Tehran has categorically rejected Western media reports about Iranian nationals being involved in an alleged plot to target the Israeli embassy in London.
In a post on his X account on Thursday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Tehran has not been informed of any allegations via “proper diplomatic channels”.
“Iran stands ready to engage to shed light on what has truly transpired, and we reiterate that UK authorities should afford our citizens due process,” he wrote.
The United Kingdom has arrested eight men, including seven Iranian nationals, as part of two investigations regarding alleged threats to national security.
London’s Metropolitan Police confirmed the arrests on Sunday, saying five men, including four of the Iranian nationals, were detained on suspicion of “preparation of a terrorist act” while the other three were being held under national security legislation introduced in 2023 to counter the actions of hostile states.
They were arrested as part of a “pre-planned” investigation into an alleged plot to “target specific premises,” the Metropolitan Police said, adding that the “affected site” was made aware and is being supported by police.
As part of a separate investigation led by the Met, three other Iranian men were arrested in London on Saturday.
The Met said three men — aged 39, 44 and 55 — were arrested under section 27 the National Security Act at separate addresses in north-west and west London, and had been taken into custody while searches continued.
In his post, Araghchi pointed to the stories in the media about the alleged involvement of Iranian nationals in a supposed plot to target the Israeli embassy in London and urged the UK to engage so that Tehran may assist any probe into credible allegations.
The top Iranian diplomat warned that third parties are resorting to desperate measures, including false flag operations, to derail diplomacy and provoke escalation.
“Timing and lack of engagement suggest that something is amiss,” he said.
In a post on his X social media account on Tuesday, the Iranian foreign minister called on the UK to respect the rights of Iranians arrested in Britain, underscoring Tehran’s readiness to assist investigations in the incident.
“Disturbed to learn that Iranian citizens have reportedly been arrested by UK security services,” Araghchi wrote.
Who’s the ‘Real’ Peter Marks?
New Website Exposes Failure of Former FDA Vaccine Czar to Protect Americans From COVID Vaccine Dangers
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | May 6, 2025
A former top U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) vaccine official ignored evidence that COVID-19 vaccines caused serious injuries, and dismissed the pleas of people injured by the vaccines, all while reassuring the public the shots were safe, documents published today on TheRealPeterMarks.com website reveal.
The website hosts public statements by Peter Marks, M.D., Ph.D., recordings of his calls with vaccine-injured individuals, transcripts and previously unreleased FDA records.
Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), React19 and Follow the Silenced — organizations that advocate for the vaccine-injured — obtained the documents through Freedom of Information Act requests and other legal work.
Dr. Danice Hertz, a retired gastroenterologist injured by the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, said she hopes the website reveals the side of Marks that the media ignores. Hertz said:
“We want to set the record straight about Marks. The media is misinformed about him and has falsely represented him as a hero. In my opinion, he is far from a hero. He is a dishonest, corrupt man whose allegiance has been to the vaccine manufacturers and not to the safety of the people.”
Website contradicts claims Marks makes in latest media blitz
On March 28, Marks resigned as director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) under pressure from his new boss, U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
He has since made several appearances on mainstream media, defending his record and attacking Kennedy.
React19 co-chair Dr. Joel Wallskog, a Wisconsin orthopedic surgeon injured by the COVID-19 vaccines, accused Marks of lying during media interviews.
“He is a liar and fearful of the truth getting out,” Wallskog said. “The best defense is a good offense.”
Wallskog and Brianne Dressen, a vaccine-injury victim and co-chair of React19, said the media failed to ask the former FDA executive key questions.
Wallskog said he wants to know why Marks “refused” to give Kennedy the vaccine injury data he requested. Dressen said she wants to ask Marks “about the countless lives negatively impacted by the COVID vaccines.”
“We brought the truth front and center to Marks, and he refused to see it,” Dressen said. “His decisions not to disclose highly reported injuries had devastating impacts on the medical community’s ability to recognize and treat injuries.” As a result, she said, “countless lives” were lost and people were “permanently harmed.”
Dressen said Marks’ “real tagline is ‘profits over people.’”
In an April 13 interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Marks told host Margaret Brennan, “You’re talking to the person who came up with Operation Warp Speed.”
Operation Warp Speed was the government’s public-private partnership responsible for facilitating and accelerating the development, manufacture and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines.
As the person responsible for that operation, Marks would have been privy to warning signs on the possible dangers of the new COVID-19 vaccine.
Documents on TheRealPeterMarks.com site reveal that Marks knew about adverse events following vaccinations as early as October 2020 — less than two months before the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines received emergency use authorization (EUA).
Dressen said she was “astonished” that Marks ignored those warning signs and instead promoted the government’s “safe and effective” narrative.
“He knew very well that there were serious problems with the COVID vaccines,” Dressen said. “What astonished me was how he can say it with such resolve.”
Marks approved COVID vaccines, boosters for kids despite knowledge of risks
The documents posted on TheRealPeterMarks.com show that Marks ignored reports and studies on COVID-19 vaccine injuries sustained by children, and that he claimed such reports were “sensationalized.”
For example:
- During a call in May 2022 with vaccine-injury victims, Marks suggested that child deaths following COVID-19 vaccination must be reported because the vaccines are under EUA. Yet during a 2021 call with FDA stakeholders, Marks said child deaths post-vaccination are “very sensationalized” and were unrelated to the vaccines.
- A Jan. 3, 2022, letter from the Siri & Glimstad law firm warned Marks about adverse events in vaccinated children. Yet that day, the FDA extended the EUA for Pfizer’s COVID-19 booster to children ages 12 to 15.
- ICAN filed a citizen petition in May 2022 urging Marks to revoke the EUA for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines for children. But a month later, the FDA extended the EUA to children as young as 6 months — even though Marks responded to the petition that day, acknowledging adverse events in children.
- The FDA authorized a fourth dose of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines for some groups of people, including immunocompromised children ages 12 and up, four days after the Journal of Pediatrics published a study of children who developed myopericarditis following COVID-19 vaccination.
Dressen called out Marks for his handling of a prominent case of childhood vaccine injury involving Maddie de Garay, a 16-year-old who was seriously injured by the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in January 2021.
In June 2021, Marks accepted Pfizer’s finding that de Garay’s injuries were unrelated to the vaccine.
Marks received further updates about de Garay’s condition over the next few months, including statements by de Garay’s mother at an October 2021 meeting of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.
But in March 2022, Marks said de Garay’s injuries were not vaccine-related and he denied her parents’ request for a meeting. “They took Pfizer’s word for it, then internally gaslit her,” Dressen said.
‘Marks was continually moving the goalpost’ on vaccine risks
Transcripts of Marks’ meetings with vaccine-injury victims showed that he repeatedly rejected safety concerns, or safety signals, related to the COVID-19 shots.
“Marks was continually moving the goalpost — it didn’t matter how we communicated the data, didn’t matter how many hoops we jumped through,” Dressen said.
For example, Marks was repeatedly informed about the prevalence of neurological injuries post-vaccination, including in emails and reports he received in February, March, April and August of 2021.
Marks claimed in a September 2021 email to Dressen that there were no safety signals for neurological injuries. He did not take action in response to several reports in late 2021 and early 2022 on the prevalence of such injuries.
“We spoon-fed their own data to them, showing exactly where the problem is, and still, Marks insisted they couldn’t see it,” Dressen said.
“We know through our work at React19 that neurological adverse events are the most common,” Wallskog said.
Other examples highlighted in the documents include:
- During a call in late 2022, Dr. Narayan Nair, then-director of CBER’s Division of Pharmacovigilance, acknowledged a safety signal for neuropathy in young women. But in the same call, Marks said this signal has “not been possible to tease out.”
- In April 2021, a peer-reviewed paper described the case of a vaccinated person who experienced small fiber neuropathy following COVID-19 vaccination. It identified a successful treatment.
- An August 2021 analysis of VAERS data showed that compared to the annual average of other vaccinations, there were 17 times more reports of serious injuries and 42 times more deaths reported after COVID-19 vaccines.
Marks also repeatedly denied the existence of safety signals for multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS). In an email from September 2022, Dressen told Marks that MIS occurs at a higher rate than thrombotic thrombocytopenia syndrome, which was associated with the Johnson & Johnson (Janssen) COVID-19 vaccine and led to a pause in its administration.
However, in a call three days later, Marks said there was not enough data to “make a clear association” between MIS and the COVID-19 vaccines.
‘Stone-cold’ demeanor: Marks appeared indifferent to people injured by vaccines
In several instances, Marks expressed confusion as to why the vaccine-injured were having difficulty receiving medical care for their conditions. Yet he also reportedly appeared indifferent to the victims’ plights.
Dressen and Wallskog pointed to several instances when Marks appeared to act disrespectfully toward vaccine injury victims, notably blowing off an August 2021 meeting with vaccine-injured people and doctors.
Dressen said the meeting, scheduled three weeks in advance, was held the same day the Pfizer Comirnaty COVID-19 vaccine received full FDA approval. “He was busy approving Comirnaty,” Dressen said.
Marks said in an email at the time he missed the meeting due to “urgent matters related to the ongoing pandemic.”
Marks later skipped a Nov. 2, 2021, COVID-19 vaccine injury roundtable hosted by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), even though Johnson invited the FDA to attend. Marks did not respond to other emails from vaccine injury victims and attorneys in 2021.
According to Dressen and Wallskog, during other meetings and calls, Marks appeared unmoved by the stories recounted by the vaccine-injured. Wallskog said he acted “cold and calculated.” Dressen claimed Marks had a “stone-cold” demeanor and he was visibly performing other work while the injured shared their stories.
Related articles in The Defender
- HHS Ousts Peter Marks, Sending Vaccine Stocks Tumbling and Biopharma Lamenting Loss of ‘Ally’ at FDA
- ‘Historic’: Federal Court Says AstraZeneca Not Immune From Liability in Case Involving Woman Injured by COVID Vaccine During Clinical Trial
- Their Vaccine Injury Reports Disappeared From VAERS — So They Developed a Tool Anyone Can Use to Track Their Own Reports
- ‘Do Your Job. We Beg of You’: FDA Officials Knew of COVID Vaccine Injuries in Early 2021 But Took No Action
- White House Lacked Plan to Compensate People Injured by COVID Shots, as FDA Sped Up Approval
- ‘I Just Want My Life Back’ Says 16-Year-Old Who Developed Neurological Symptoms After Pfizer Vaccine
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
UK keeps sending arms to Israel despite ban: Report
Press TV – May 7, 2025
A new report says Britain keeps exporting arms and equipment, including F-35 fighter jet parts, to Israel despite a government suspension in September 2024.
The report released by three campaign groups says parts for the jet, which has been critical for Israel’s brutal military campaign in Gaza, appear to have arrived in Israel as recently as March.
Investigation using Israeli customs data says 8,630 munitions items were sent from the UK to Israel since the suspensions.
The munitions fall under a category of import labelled “bombs, grenades, torpedoes, mines, missiles, and similar munitions of war and parts thereof.”
Most of the shipments cited in the report happened after the government’s arms suspension.
Britain had said it suspended its direct exports over concerns they might be used in serious violations of international humanitarian law.
Soon after the suspensions, Foreign Secretary David Lammy told parliament that “much of what we send is defensive in nature. It is not what we describe routinely as arms.”
“On the basis of the evidence in this report, it appears that Lammy has misled parliament and the public about arms shipments to Israel,” according to the report.
Nearly two dozen MPs have written to Lammy, calling on him to come before parliament to respond to the allegations.
They said that the public “deserves to know the full scale of the UK’s complicity in crimes against humanity.”
“We urge the government to disclose the details of all arms exports to Israel since October 2023 and to immediately halt all arms exports to Israel,” they wrote.
“This could not be more urgent given the risk that British-made weapons could be used to enact Netanyahu’s plan to annex Gaza and ethnically cleanse the Palestinian people.”
Former Labor shadow chancellor and MP John McDonnell and MP Zarah said the findings showed the government “has been lying to us about the arms it is supplying to Israel while it wages genocide in Gaza.”
“Far from ‘helmets and goggles’, the government has been sending thousands of arms and ammunition goods and [is] even still supplying components of the world’s most lethal fighter jets,” she said.
Emily Apple, media coordinator for the UK-based Campaign Against Arms Trade, said the report had shattered the claim that the UK arms export regime is transparent.
“Our arms export regime is not fit for purpose and this government is complicit in Israel’s horrific war crimes. Time and again, it has either refused to act or manufactured loopholes to prioritize arms trade profits over Palestinian lives. This has to stop,” Apple said.
‘A lot of people know’ who blew up Nord Stream – Trump
RT | May 6, 2025
US President Donald Trump has dismissed claims that Russia was behind the 2022 sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines and suggested that the true culprit is widely known – without naming names.
Speaking at a White House press event, Trump said there was no need for a formal investigation to uncover who carried out the attack, which crippled a key energy route between Russia and Western Europe.
Three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, built to deliver Russian gas to Germany and the rest of Western Europe, were damaged by blasts at the bottom of the Baltic Sea in September 2022.
On Tuesday, a correspondent for libertarian financial blog ZeroHedge, which has been admitted to White House press events under the new administration, noted that Trump had previously rejected the Western narrative that Russia blew up its own pipelines, and asked the president if he was planning to initiate a probe to find out who was actually behind the attack.
“If you can believe it, they said Russia blew it up,” Trump responded. “Well, probably if I asked certain people, they would be able to tell you without having to waste a lot of money on an investigation. But I think a lot of people know who blew it up,” he added, without elaborating.
ZeroHedge suggested that Trump’s comment meant that “based on classified intelligence he knows exactly who was behind” the destruction of Nord Stream. It also “should put the ‘Russia destroyed its own vital and economically lucrative pipeline’ storyline to rest,” the outlet insisted.
In early February 2023, veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published a report claiming that then US President Joe Biden had given the order to destroy Nord Stream. According to an informed source who talked to the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, the explosives that were detonated on September 26, 2022 had been planted at the pipelines by US Navy divers a few months earlier under the cover of a NATO exercise called ‘Baltops 22’. The White House denied the report, calling it “utterly false and complete fiction.”
Senior Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin, have previously pointed the finger at the US as the possible culprit behind the Nord Stream explosions. They have argued that Washington had the technical means to carry out the operation and stood to gain the most, considering that the attack disrupted Russian energy supplies to the EU and forced a shift to more expensive US-supplied liquefied natural gas.
The Great Spillover Hoax
By Jeffrey A Tucker | Brownstone Institute | April 27, 2025
Why precisely were Anthony Fauci and his cohorts so anxious to blame SARS-CoV-2 on bats and later pangolins in wet markets? It was not just to deflect attention from the possibility that the novel virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan doing gain-of-function research. There was a larger point: to reinforce a very important narrative concerning zoonotic spillovers.
It’s a fancy phrase that speaks to a kind of granular focus that discourages nonspecialists from having an opinion. Leave it to the experts! They know!
Let’s take a closer look.
For many years, there has been an emerging orthodoxy in epidemiological circles that viruses are jumping from animals to humans at a growing rate. That’s the key assertion, the core claim, the one that is rarely challenged. It is made repeatedly and often in the literature on this subject, much like climate claims in that different literature.
The model goes as follows.
Step one: assert that spillover is increasing, due to urbanization, deforestation, globalization, industrialization, carbon-producing internal combustion, pet ownership, colonialism, icky diets, shorter skirt lengths, whatever other thing you are against, or some amorphous combination of all the above. Regardless, it is new and it is happening at a growing rate.
Step two: observe that only scientists fully understand what a grave threat this is to human life, so they have a social obligation to get out in front of this trend. That requires gain-of-function research to mix and merge pathogens in a lab to see which ones pose the most immediate threats to our existence.
Step three: in order to protect ourselves fully, we need to deploy all the newest technologies including and especially those which allow for fast production of vaccines that can be distributed in the event of the pandemics that are inevitably coming, probably just around the corner. Above all, that requires testing and perfecting mRNA shots that deliver spike protein through lipid nanoparticles so they can be printed and distributed to the population widely and quickly.
Step four: as society breathlessly awaits the great antidote to the deadly virus that comes to us via these vicious spillovers, there is no choice but to enact common-sense public-health measures like extreme restrictions on your liberty to travel, operate a business, and gather with others. The top goal is disease monitoring and containment. The top target: those who behave in ways that presume the existence of anachronisms like freedom and human rights.
Step five: these protocols must be accepted by all governments because of course we live in a globalist setting in which otherwise no pathogen can possibly be contained. No one nation can be permitted to go its own way because doing so endangers the whole. We are all in this together.
If that way of thinking strikes you as surprising, ridiculous, and scary, you have clearly not attended an academic conference on epidemiology, a trade show for pharmaceutical companies, or a planning group feeding information to the United Nations and the World Health Organization.
This is conventional wisdom in all these circles, not even slightly unusual or strange. It is the new orthodoxy, widely accepted by all experts in this realm.
The first I had heard of this entire theory was the August 2020 article in Cell written by David Morens and Anthony Fauci. Written during lockdowns that the authors helped shepherd, the article reflected the apocalyptic tone of the times. They said humanity took a bad turn 12,000 years ago, causing idyllic lives to face myriad infections. We cannot go back to a Rouseauian paradise but we can work to “rebuild the infrastructures of human existence.”
I was obviously stunned, reread the piece carefully, and wondered where the evidence for the great spillover – the crucial empirical assertion of the piece – could be found. They cite many papers in the literature but looking at them further, we find only models, assertions, claims rooted in testing bias, and many other sketchy claims.
What I found was a fog machine.
You see, everything turns on this question. If spillovers are not increasing, or if spillovers are just a normal part of the complicated relationship between humans and the microbial kingdom they inhabit alongside all living things, the entire agenda falls apart.
If spillovers are not a pressing problem, the rationale for gain-of-function evaporates, as does the need for funding, the push for the shots, and the wild schemes to lock down until the antidote arrives. It’s the crucial step, one that has mostly evaded serious public attention but which is nearly universally accepted within the domain of what is called Public Health today.
Who is challenging this? A tremendously important article just appeared in the Journal of Epidemiology and Global Health. It is: “Natural Spillover Risk and Disease Outbreaks: Is Over-Simplification Putting Public Health at Risk?” by the Brownstone-backed team at REPPARE. It’s something of a miracle that this piece got through peer review but here it is.
They present the core assumption: “Arguments supporting pandemic policy are heavily based on the premise that pandemic risk is rapidly increasing, driven in particular by passage of pathogens from animal reservoirs to establish transmission in the human population; ‘zoonotic spillover.’ Proposed drivers for increasing spillover are mostly based on environmental change attributed to anthropogenic origin, including deforestation, agricultural expansion and intensification, and changes in climate.”
And the observation: “If a genuine misattribution bias regarding spillover risk and consequent pandemic risk is arising, this can distort public health policy with potentially far-reaching consequences on health outcomes.”
Then they take it on with a careful examination of the literature generally footnoted as proof. What they find is a typical game of citation roulette: this guy cites this guy who cites this guy who cites that guy, and so on in spinning circles of authoritative-seeming apparatus but fully lacking in any real substance. They write: “We see a pattern of assertive statements of rapidly rising disease risk with anthropogenic impacts on ecology driving it. These are cited heavily, resting largely on opinion, which is a poor substitute for evidence. More concerningly, there is a consistent trend of misrepresenting cited papers.”
We’ve seen this movie many times before. What’s more, there does exist a largely ignored literature that closely examines many of the supposed causal factors that drive spillovers that reveals grave doubts about any causal connection at all. The authors then place the skeptical papers against the opinion papers usually cited and conclude that what has emerged is an evidence-free orthodoxy designed to back an industrial project.
“There are several potential reasons for this tendency to reference opinion as if it is fact. The field has been relatively small, with authorship shared across many papers. This risks the development of a mechanism for circular referencing, reviewing and reinforcement of opinion, shielding claims from sceptical inquiry or external review. The increased interest of private-sector funders in public health institutions including WHO, and its emphasis on commodities in health responses, may deepen this echo chamber, inadvertently downgrading or ignoring contrary findings while emphasizing those studies that support further funding.”
See the pattern here? Anyone who has followed sociology of “the science” over these last five years can. It’s groupthink, the acceptance of doctrine believed because all their peers believe it. In any case, the gig pays well.
Now we can better explain why it is that Fauci and the rest were so emphatic that the coronavirus of 2019 did not originate in a lab for which they had arranged the funding but instead leapt from a bat or something else from a wet market.
The wet market narrative was not only designed to cover up their scheme and avoid blame for a global pandemic of any level of severity. It was also to deploy the potentially catastrophic consequences and resulting public panic as a rationale for continuing their own biological experimentation and funding grift.
“Sadly, it appears we have a leak from a lab.”
“No worries. We’ll find some scientists and steer some grant money to prove the pathogen in question originated from zoonotic spillover, thus proving the point that we need more funding.”
“Brilliant Dr. Fauci! Do we have contacts in the media?”
“We do. We’ll get on that.”
Fauci’s Replacement at NIAID a Cheerleader for Gain-of-Function Research
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | April 29, 2025
A virologist who supports gain-of-function research and believes COVID-19 evolved naturally is the new acting director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the agency Dr. Anthony Fauci led for 38 years.
Jeffery Taubenberger, M.D., Ph.D., a 19-year veteran of NIAID and chief of the institute’s Viral Pathogenesis and Evolution Section, replaced Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, who was placed on leave last month by the Trump administration.
Citing an email from Dr. Matthew Memoli, deputy director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Science reported that Taubenberger’s first day as acting director was April 25. Taubenberger will head an institute with a $6.56 billion budget, making it the second-largest NIH branch, overseen by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Several researchers told Science that Taubenberger has a commendable track record, highlighting his work sequencing the Spanish flu virus of 1918.
Adolfo Garcia-Sastre, Ph.D., a virologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, said Taubenberger “has made many critical contributions to the field of influenza, both in pathogenesis, animal models, human data, and vaccines.”
But critics point to Taubenberger’s public support of gain-of-function research and the zoonotic theory of COVID-19’s origins, which holds that the virus crossed over naturally from animals to humans.
They also criticized his past ties to Fauci and other controversial virologists, and his prior work on COVID-19 vaccines.
Gain-of-function research, which increases the transmissibility or virulence of viruses, is often used in vaccine development. Such research was conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, prompting fears that the virus was developed at the lab and subsequently leaked.
Concerns over the safety of gain-of-function research previously led the U.S. government to implement a moratorium on such projects between 2014 and 2017.
“Gain-of-function research, if made safe, is a tremendous tool for forecasting the evolution of pathogens,” said Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., senior research scientist for Children’s Health Defense. “The problem is that there is no such thing as a leak-proof laboratory, just as there is no such thing as an unsinkable ship. A lab leak is not inevitable, but it is a risk — one that we witness surprisingly often.”
Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright, Ph.D., a critic of gain-of-function research, said, “Taubenberger is part of the problem at NIAID, not part of the solution.”
Ebright said Taubenberger’s track record is at odds with HHS’ “Make America Healthy Again” agenda:
“Taubenberger’s views on the need for transparency and accountability at NIAID management, on the need for re-prioritization of NIAID funding to match disease burden, on the cause and cover-up of COVID, on reckless gain-of-function research and pathogen-resurrection research, and on biosafety, biosecurity, and biorisk management all appear to be diametrically opposed to those of HHS Secretary Kennedy.
“As such, Taubenberger’s appointment as acting director of NIAID is baffling.”
In a 2014 interview with the journal EMBO Reports, Taubenberger downplayed the risks of gain-of-function research, claiming it’s what “virologists have done for a hundred years.”
In a 2013 letter to the journal mBio, Taubenberger suggested that gain-of-function research replicates natural processes. He argued that Influenza A viruses “continually undergo ‘dual use experiments’ as a matter of evolution and selection.”
According to the American Society for Microbiology, dual-use research is a type of gain-of-function research that raises “important biosafety and/or biosecurity concerns.” It requires “a higher level of review” and is “subject to strict protocols.”
Jablonowski said Taubenberger’s dismissal of concerns over the safety of gain-of-function research overlooks its inherent risks.
“The problem with the argument is actually a problem with the policy it argues — it assumes an ill-willed actor intent on ‘deliberate misuse’ as the risk. Recent history has taught us that lab leaks pose a real and serious risk, no ill-willed actor needed. … Advocates of gain-of-function research do not include a realistic assessment of pathogen escape as part of a risk-benefit balance,” Jablonowski said.
While Taubenberger has been lauded for his role in sequencing the 1918 Spanish flu virus, some scientists were critical of this work, with Ebright calling the reconstruction of the 1918 virus “reckless.”
“Taubenberger … exhumed victims of the 1918 Spanish flu from the Alaskan permafrost to sequence and reconstruct the virus,” Jablonowski said. “It is a virus that killed 50 million people in two short years, and with its resurrection, could have reinitiated a pandemic.”
Taubenberger downplayed connections between COVID, lab leak
Taubenberger has sought to downplay any connection between gain-of-function research and the origins of COVID-19, instead claiming the virus emerged naturally.
In July 2020, Taubenberger and Fauci associate Dr. David Morens co-authored an op-ed in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, suggesting that COVID-19 is “a virus that emerged naturally.”
In a later email to a Science reporter, on which Taubenberger was copied, Morens described the article as a publication that “defends Peter and his Chinese colleagues” — referring to zoologist Peter Daszak, Ph.D., former president of the EcoHealth Alliance, which collaborated with Wuhan scientists on gain-of-function research.
Jablonowski said the authors of the 2020 op-ed “are unfit for office at a scientific institution — not because they got the origins of COVID-19 wrong, but because they played the game of deceiving the world. One of the villains of COVID-19 was EcoHealth Alliance, and Taubenberger’s narrative casts it as the hero.”
In their op-ed, Fauci and Morens called for the development of “broadly protective vaccines” and suggested that the role of organizations like the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) “should be extended and strengthened.”
In 2021, CEPI launched its “100 Days Mission” to develop infrastructure capable of delivering a vaccine for a future pandemic within 100 days. CEPI’s supporters include the Gates Foundation, World Economic Forum and Wellcome Trust.
According to his NIAID biography, Taubenberger has overseen research aimed at developing “broadly-protective coronavirus vaccines in pre-clinical animal studies.”
“Taubenberger is wrong about the dangers of gain-of-function research and also about the ‘zoonotic theory,’” said immunologist and biochemist Jessica Rose, Ph.D. “He needs to read EcoHealth Alliance’s DEFUSE proposal.”
Project DEFUSE, a 2018 grant developed by Daszak and co-authored by U.S. and Wuhan scientists, proposed engineering high-risk coronaviruses of the same species as SARS-CoV-2.
Although the U.S. government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency rejected the proposal, some scientists have likened DEFUSE to a blueprint for generating SARS-CoV-2 in the lab, noting the similarities between the proposed work and key characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 that are not found elsewhere in nature.
Last year, HHS suspended all funding for EcoHealth Alliance after finding the organization failed to properly monitor risky coronavirus experiments.
The suspension came two weeks after a U.S. House of Representatives committee investigating the COVID-19 pandemic called for a criminal investigation of Daszak and a month after the U.S. Senate launched an investigation into 15 federal agencies that were briefed about Project DEFUSE in 2018 but said nothing.
Taubenberger collaborated closely with Fauci
According to U.S. Right to Know, “Most of the NIAID employees who helped Daszak maintain funding amid the pandemic still retain positions of influence at NIAID” — including Taubenberger and Morens, formerly a key aide to Fauci who is under investigation for allegedly using his personal email address to evade Freedom of Information Act requests for communications related to the origins of COVID-19.
Ebright said that Taubenberger has maintained longstanding collaborations with such figures, noting that he co-authored 14 papers with Fauci and 66 papers with Morens.
According to U.S. Right to Know, Taubenberger also collaborated with researchers who played a key role in promoting the zoonotic theory of COVID-19’s origins — including Daszak and several co-authors of “The proximal origin of SARS-Cov-2,” a March 2020 editorial published in Nature Medicine promoting the natural origin of COVID-19 that was later used to discredit proponents of the lab-leak theory.
Earlier this month, the Trump administration launched a revamped version of the government’s official COVID-19 website, presenting evidence that COVID-19 emerged following a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The CIA, FBI, U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Congress and other intelligence agencies have endorsed this theory.
In a 1998 interview on PBS’ “American Experience,” Taubenberger suggested that a flu pandemic was inevitable. “The odds are very great, practically a hundred percent, that another pandemic will occur,” he said.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Agent Waltz?
By Daniel McAdams | Ron Paul Institute | May 3, 2025
The Washington Post is reporting today that recently-ousted National Security Advisor Mike Waltz may have been involved in activities even more nefarious than inviting journalists onto highly sensitive Signal group chats. It appears that what really angered President Trump is less Waltz’s incompetence (or worse) in keeping sensitive military communications secure, but rather his taking an active role in doing the bidding of a foreign government.
As the Post reported, in advance of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s February visit to the United States the US National Security Advisor to President Trump…
… appeared to have engaged in intense coordination with Netanyahu about military options against Iran ahead of an Oval Office meeting between the Israeli leader and Trump, the two people said.
That means that Mike Waltz was working with a foreign government to maneuver President Trump into a situation where war seemed the only option left to deal with Iran. That kind of manipulation is a classic neocon move and one that Waltz’s ideological allies managed with great success against President George W. Bush regarding Iraq.
According to one insider quoted in the article, Waltz, “wanted to take U.S. policy in a direction Trump wasn’t comfortable with because the US hadn’t attempted a diplomatic solution.”
That means the former NSA was working with a foreign leader to limit the diplomatic and military options his boss could choose from, i.e. he was working to hobble the United States so as to achieve an objective of a foreign regime.
The WaPo piece continues…
‘If Jim Baker was doing a side deal with the Saudis to subvert George H.W. Bush, you’d be fired,’ a Trump adviser said, referring to Bush’s secretary of state. ‘You can’t do that. You work for the president of your country, not a president of another country.’
To his credit, President Trump recognized that Waltz was blowing Bibi’s smoke at him and rather than bite at the trap sprung for him the President saw through the game and became annoyed possibly at both of them. The fiasco one month later, where Waltz claimed that neocon scribbler Jeffrey Goldberg’s contact information had somehow been “sucked up” into his phone and then presumably spit out again when it came time to invite top Administration officials onto a call to discuss military strikes on Yemen, may have been the straw that broke Trump’s waning patience in the man.
Last month, the Grayzone published leaked audio of Israel lobby AIPAC’s CEO, Elliott Brandt, “describing how his organization has cultivated influence with three top national security officials in the Trump administration – Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Security Director Mike Waltz, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe – and how it believes it can gain ‘access’ to their internal discussions.”
Was the Waltz/Netanyahu trap for Trump the result of this “cultivated influence” that Brandt is bragging about? And if so, how much deeper does it go?
Whatever the case, it’s lucky for Waltz that he was “only” acting as an agent for our Greatest Ally ™ and Only Democracy in the Middle East ™. Otherwise he’d be soon enjoying the hospitality of Bukele’s All Male B&B rather than the rather more luxurious digs at 50 United Nations Plaza.
The False Claims of WHO’s Pandemic Agreement
By David Bell | Brownstone Institute | April 28, 2025
One way to determine whether a suggestion is worth following is to look at the evidence presented to support it. If the evidence makes sense and smells real, then perhaps the program you are asked to sign up for is worthy of consideration.
However, if the whole scheme is sold on fallacies that a child could poke a stick through, and its chief proponents cannot possibly believe their own rhetoric, then only a fool would go much further. This is obvious – you don’t buy a used car on a salesman’s insistence that there is no other way to get from your kitchen to your bathroom.
Delegates at the coming World Health Assembly in Geneva are faced with such a choice. In this case, the car salesman is the World Health Organization (WHO), an organization still commanding considerable global respect based on a legacy of sane and solid work some decades ago.
It also benefits from a persistent misunderstanding that large international organizations would not intentionally lie (they increasingly do, as noted below). The delegates will be voting on the recently completed text of the Pandemic Agreement, part of a broad effort to extract large profits and salaries from an intrinsic human fear of rare causes of death. Fear and confusion distract human minds from rational behavior.
WHO Likes a Good Story?
The Pandemic Agreement, and the international pandemic agenda it is intended to support, are based on a series of demonstrably false claims:
- There is evidence of a rising risk of severe naturally occurring pandemics due to a rapid (exponential) increase in infectious disease outbreaks
- A massive return on financial investment is expected from diverting large resources to prepare for, prevent, or combat these
- The Covid-19 outbreak was probably of natural origin, and serves as an example of unavoidable health and financial costs we will incur again if we don’t act now.
If any of these were false, then the basis on which the WHO and its backers have argued for the Pandemic Agreement is fundamentally flawed. And all of them can be shown to be false. However, influential people and organizations want pandemics to be the main focus of public health. The WHO supports this because it is paid to.
The private sector invested heavily in vaccines, and a few countries with large vaccine and biotech industries now direct most of the WHO’s work through specified funding. The WHO is obligated to deliver what these interests direct it to.
The WHO was once independent and able to concentrate on health priorities – back when they prioritized the main drivers of sickness and premature mortality and gained the reputation they now trade from. In today’s corporatized public health, population-based approaches have lost value, and the aspirations of the World Economic Forum hold more sway than those dying before sixty.
Success in the health commodities business is about enlarging markets, not reducing the need for intervention. The WHO and its reputation are useful tools to sanitize this. Colonialism, as ever, needs to appear altruistic.
Truth Is Less Compelling Than Fiction
So, to address these fallacies. Infectious disease mortality has steadily declined over the past century despite a minor Covid blip that took us back just a decade. This blip includes the virus, but also the avoidable imposition of poverty, unemployment, reduced healthcare access, and other factors that the WHO had previously warned against, but recently actively promoted.
To get around this reality of decreasing mortality, the WHO uses a hypothetical disease (Disease X), a placeholder for something that has not happened since the Spanish flu in the pre-antibiotic era. The huge Medieval pandemics such as the Black Death were mostly bacterial in origin, as were probably most Spanish flu deaths. With antibiotics, sewers, and better food, we now live longer and don’t expect such mortality events, but the WHO uses this threat regardless.
Thus, the WHO has been reduced to misrepresenting fragile evidence (e.g. ignoring technology developments that can explain rising reports of outbreaks) and opinion pieces by sponsored panels in order to support the narrative of rapidly rising pandemic risk. Even Covid-19 is getting harder to use. If, as appears most likely, it was an inevitable result of laboratory manipulation, then it no longer even serves as an outlier. The WHO’s pandemic agenda is squarely targeted at natural outbreaks; hence the need for “Disease X”.
The WHO (and the World Bank) follow a similar approach in inflating financial Return on Investment (ROI). If you received an email promoting over 300 to 700 times return on a proposed investment, some may be impressed but sensible people would suspect something amiss. But this is what the Group of Twenty (G20) secretariat told its members in 2022 for return on investment on the WHO’s pandemic preparedness proposals.
The WHO and the World Bank provided the graphic below to the same G20 meeting to support such astronomical predictions. It is essentially subterfuge; a fantasy to mislead readers such as politicians who are too busy, and trusting, to dig deeper. As these agencies are intended to serve countries rather than fool them, this sort of behavior, which is recurrent, should call into question their very existence.
Figure 1 from Analysis of Pandemic Preparedness and Response (PPR) architecture, financing needs, gaps and mechanisms, prepared by WHO and the World Bank for the G20, March 2022. Lower chart modified by REPPARE, University of Leeds.
A virus like SARS-CoV-2 (causing Covid-19) that mostly targets the sick elderly with an overall infectious mortality rate of about 0.15% will not cost $9 trillion unless panicked or greedy people choose to close down the world’s supply lines, implement mass unemployment, and then print money for multi-trillion-dollar stimulus packages. In contrast, diseases that regularly kill more and much younger people, like tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV/AIDS, cost far more than $22 billion a year in contrast.
A 2021 Lancet article put tuberculosis losses alone at $580 billion/year in 2018. Malaria kills over 600,000 children annually, and HIV/AIDS results in similar numbers of deaths. These deaths of current and future productive workers, leaving orphaned children, cost countries. Once, they were the WHO’s main priority.
Trading on a Fading Reputation
In selling the package, the WHO seems to have abandoned any attempt at meaningful dialogue. They still justify the surveillance-lockdown-mass vaccinate model by the logic-free claim that over 14 million lives were saved by Covid vaccines in 2021 (so we all have to do that again). The WHO recorded a little over 3 million Covid-related deaths in the first (vaccine-free) year of the pandemic. For the 14 million ‘saved’ to be correct, another 17 million would somehow have been due to die in year two, despite most people having gained immunity and many of the most susceptible having already succumbed.
Such childish claims are meant to shock and confuse rather than educate. People are paid to model such numbers to create narratives, and others are paid to spin them on the WHO websites and elsewhere. An industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars depends on such messaging. Scientific integrity cannot survive in an organization paid to be a mouthpiece.
As an alternative, the WHO could advocate for investment in areas that promoted longevity in wealthy countries – sanitation, better diet and living conditions, and access to basic, good medical care.
This was once the WHO’s priority because it not only greatly reduces mortality from rare pandemic events (most Covid deaths were in people already very unwell), but it also reduces mortality from the big endemic killers such as malaria, tuberculosis, common childhood infections, and many chronic non-communicable diseases. It is, unequivocally, the main reason why mortality from major childhood infectious diseases like measles and Whooping cough plummeted long before mass vaccinations were introduced.
If we concentrated on strategies that improve general health and resilience, rather than the financial health of the pandemic industrial complex, we could then confidently decide not to wreck the lives of our children and elderly if a pandemic did arise.
Very few people would be at high risk. We could all expect to live longer and healthier lives. The WHO has elected to leave this path, instill mass and unfounded fear, and support a very different paradigm. While the Pandemic Agreement is not essential to it, it is an important part of diverting further funds to this agenda and cementing this corporatist approach into place.
The United States has done well by stepping out of this mess, but continues to push many of the same fallacies and was instrumental in sowing the mess we now reap. While a few other governments are questioning, it is hard for any politicians to stand with truth when a sponsored media stands squarely elsewhere.
Society is once more enslaving itself, at the behest of an entitled few, facilitated by international agencies that were set up specifically to guard against this. At the coming World Health Assembly, the pandemic fairytale will almost certainly prevail.
The hope is that a well-deserved erosion of trust will eventually catch up with the global health industry and too few countries will ratify this treaty for it ever to come into force. To fix the underlying problem though and derail the pandemic industry train, we will need to rethink the whole approach to cooperation in international health.
David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health. David is a former medical officer and scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO), Programme Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, Switzerland, and Director of Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in Bellevue, WA, USA.
White House calls out ‘media cover-up’ on Biden’s health
RT | April 30, 2025
The “cover up” of former US President Joe Biden’s poor mental and physical health has led to a decline of public trust in “legacy media”, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has claimed.
Throughout Biden’s time in office, Donald Trump and his allies repeatedly argued that he was unfit for the job – claims the Biden administration and US media vociferously denied. Biden only withdrew from the presidential race when he faced pressure from within the Democratic Party and major campaign donors after a disastrous debate performance against Trump last June, in which he appeared confused and struggled to finish his sentences.
“Millions of Americans watched our mentally incompetent president [Biden] struggle with his day-to-day duties of this office. We watched our country be run into the ground as a result. And nobody in the media wanted to write about that,” Leavitt said during a White House briefing on Monday.
The spokeswoman recalled how during Trump’s campaign her warnings about Biden’s “clear mental incompetence” led to her being “accused by people in this room [journalists] of manufacturing deepfake videos trying to persuade the public into not believing what they saw with their own eyes for many years.”
“I think it is about time the legacy media finally admits that was one of the greatest cover-ups and scandals that ever took place in American history,” she insisted.
Leavitt said that the reluctance to report on Biden’s actual physical and mental condition “certainly did contribute to the decline in the trust that Americans have for the legacy media.”
A poll by Gallup earlier this year suggested that confidence in fair reporting of the news by US media has dropped to its lowest point in five decades. Only 31% of those surveyed said they trust the mainstream media “a great deal” or “a fair amount,” while 36% said they do not trust it “at all.”
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From the Archives
The Dirty Little Secret behind the “Global Terrorism Index”
The Omission of Israeli Terrorism in the Occupied Palestinian Territories
By Karin Brothers | Global Research | December 6, 2014
… The Israeli settlements — all of which are illegal – have been identified as a major impediment to peace. The refusal of a major “global” terrorism report to name the Israeli settlers as one of the groups most responsible for terrorism not only misrepresents a major source of regional violence but exposes the Global Terrorism Index as a propaganda tool that supports a U.S. agenda.
In recent years, governments have been attempting to thwart terrorism by blocking supportive fund-raising. When it comes to Israeli settlements, however, the US and Canada actually encourage fund-raising by giving organizations (such as Christian Friends of Israeli Communities (CFOIC) and the Jewish National Fund) financial support in the form of donor tax-deductions.
Charities which provide funds for the Israeli settlements should be regarded as terror-financing organizations. They should not only lose their tax-deductible status, but they should be banned because they support the violation of international humanitarian law. The terror-financing laws that are being strictly enforced for Muslim charities should be applied to Christian and Jewish charities as well. … Read full article
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