German Courts Are Going FULL Dystopia
OffGuardian | August 23, 2023
It’s been an astonishing couple of days for German judges. Well, “astonishing” if you’ve been living in a cave for the last four years.
Many of you likely already know that satirist and playwright (and frequent OffG contributor) CJ Hopkins is being prosecuted in Germany for “disseminating propaganda, the contents of which are intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist organization,”
All because the cover of his book has a swastika on it.
Needless to say, the charges are absurd. Insultingly so. You can read CJ’s first-hand account of this nonsense here and here.
Anyone who isn’t a) stupid or b) delusional can plainly see these charges have nothing to do with a stock-image swastika, and everything to do with the content of the book. In short, they are politically motivated charges brought against an author for criticizing the state. The very essence of dystopian tyranny.
… and yesterday he was convicted.
He now faces 60 days in prison or a 3600 Euro fine.
That’s case one, and as we say one you are likely familiar with if you’re regular readers.
Something you probably haven’t heard is that, just this morning, a different German court sentenced a former judge to two years in prison.
His crime? Ruling that mask mandates in schools were not constitutional.
The case dates back to April 8th 2021, when Weimar District Family Court judge Christiaan Dettmar ruled that two schools in the district a) could not enforce mask mandates, b) must continue in-person classes and c) could not force pupils to test for “Covid”.
From Human Rights Blog :
The court case was a child protection case under to § 1666 paragraph 1 and 4 of the German Civil Code (BGB), which a mother had initiated for her two sons, aged 14 and 8 respectively, at the local Family Court. She had argued that her children were being physically, psychologically and pedagogically damaged without any benefit for the children or third parties. At the same time, she claimed this constituted a violation of a range of rights of the children and their parents under the law, the German constitution (Grundgesetz or Basic Law) and international conventions.
After listening to testimony from expert witnesses, the judge ruled in favour of the mother, writing in his verdict:
These are the risks [to mask mandates]. The children are not only endangered in their mental, physical and psychological well-being by the obligation to wear face masks during school hours and to keep their distance from each other and from other persons, but they are also already being harmed. At the same time, this violates numerous rights of the children and their parents under the law, the constitution and international conventions.
Two weeks after handing down this ruling, his home and office were raided by the police and his mobile phone was seized.
And now, two years later, he was found guilty of “judicial misconduct” and initially given two years in prison (the court has since suspended the sentence). “Judicial Misconduct”, for simply disagreeing with the government.
Free speech is the first and most vital liberty, without it no one is truly free. An independent judiciary is a must to preserve any kind of justice, judges who simply nod along with government edicts are the building blocks of authoritarian states.
The voice of the people and the power of the courts – ideally – work together to hold the government to account.
And yet, whether in the judiciary or the arts, the German legal system is now a machine for criminalizing and punishing dissent of any kind.
… I’d make a comparison to another German government that used to function in a similar way, but I really can’t afford a 4000 euro fine.
Feds want to make it easier to identify independent doctors
They want to obtain the National Practitioner Data Bank
BY MERYL NASS | AUGUST 22, 2023
Do the feds want to be ready to censor or even round up doctors who may oppose their next round of heavy-handed “public health” measures?
Need and Proposed Use of the Information: The NPDB acts primarily
as a flagging system; its principal purpose is to facilitate
comprehensive review of practitioners' professional credentials and
background. Information is collected from, and disseminated to,
eligible entities (entities that are entitled to query and/or report to
the NPDB as authorized in Title 45 CFR part 60 of the Code of Federal
Regulations) on the following: (1) medical malpractice payments, (2)
licensure actions taken by Boards of Medical Examiners, (3) state
licensure and certification actions, (4) federal licensure and
certification actions, (5) negative actions or findings taken by peer
review organizations or private accreditation entities, (6) adverse
actions taken against clinical privileges, (7) federal or state
criminal convictions related to the delivery of a health care item or
service, (8) civil judgments related to the delivery of a health care
item or service, (9) exclusions from participation in federal or state
health care programs, and (10) other adjudicated actions or decisions.
It is intended for NPDB information to be considered with other
relevant information in evaluating credentials of health care
practitioners, providers, and suppliers.
Likely Respondents: Eligible entities or individuals that are
entitled to query and/or report to the NPDB as authorized in
regulations found at 45 CFR part 60.I have a black mark in the NPDB despite lack of a completed hearing — the demand for a psych evaluation and temp suspension gave me the black mark.
Meta Pays Supposedly Independent Australian “Fact-Checkers” 800 Dollars Per Fact-Check
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | August 21, 2023
Those who doubt that “fact-checking” is an industry created around the push for internet censorship that’s been going on these last years might be persuaded otherwise by information that emerged from a lawsuit.
The lawsuit was filed by Australia-based reporter and commentator Avi Yemini, and it reveals the amount of money changing hands between Facebook (Meta) and its notorious “fact-checkers” whose purpose is supposed to be weeding out “misinformation.” And who are supposed to be “independent.”
However, these efforts disturbingly often end up in plain censorship of “disfavored” opinion on political and social issues.
And even though Yemini eventually had to withdraw his lawsuit in order to avoid costs he was unwilling or unable to pay, the legal process while it was ongoing produced some interesting findings, including the true nature of some of the “fact-checkers’” purported financial independence from Big Tech.
According to a deal cited in the court documents, the figure went up to half a million dollars annually – and that’s involving just one “fact checking” operation, RMIT University’s FactLab, also based in Australia.
The agreement was kept confidential, but surfaced in Yemini’s defamation suit naming RMIT FactLab as the plaintiff. Yemini claimed that this group subjected one of his reports to a false “fact-check.”
But, whether that’s true or false, RMIT lab was given 800 Australian dollars per “check,” up to 40,000 per month – with the contract stipulating that RMIT would run up to 50 articles through its “fact-checking machine” each month.
The issue that this discovery sheds light on is the nature of these arrangements – namely, “independent fact-checkers” seem to be very much involved in commercial dealings with social media giants, which has the inherent potential to sway the results of their work in a desired direction.
At the same time, given the reach and influence of the huge platforms where content is “arranged” in a certain way thanks, among other things, to the work of these organizations, this means that public opinion could be unfairly influenced through biased information.
RMIT University, which is behind RMIT FactLab, maintains that the group is in fact independent and that the money comes from “philanthropic donations and independent research grants.”
The UN is Building a “Digital Army” To Fight What it Calls “Deadly Disinformation”
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | August 21, 2023
The UN is tripling down on its role as an important global player in the “fight against online misinformation” and amplification of the narrative of a supposedly serious threat this allegedly new phenomenon brings to humankind.
Thus UN peacekeepers are adding another task to the duties the member-states fund when they approve their missions meant to help people and countries devastated by war and other disasters: they are now also “building a digital army.”
And according to a writeup on the UN website, “misinformation” is viewed by the world organization in exceedingly alarmist terms as, “deadly,” and posing “existential” risk to such core building blocks of modern societies as democratic institutions and fundamental human rights.
They really do make that connection, verbatim. And they now use the term “war” and “battlefield” to describe (mis)information and other goings on in the media, too.
We’ve heard this before, of course, from the Biden administration regarding the Covid vaccines/pandemic – but the identical wording may or may not be a coincidence.
In order to justify as much as it can this considerable shift in policy and focus from UN’s traditional operations and purpose, the UN article doesn’t talk only about things like undermining epidemic(s)-containing efforts, protecting scientific truths and facts (and, as recent experience has shown, “facts” as well ), and the like.
To prop up the argument, it is claimed that the peacekeeping work itself, and the safety and lives of peacekeepers are also falling victim to “large scale misinformation.”
The UN’s solutions: effectively testing “proactive” approaches to the problem they defined, and doing this in a number of war-torn African countries.
Leading the charge seems to be the UN mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, known as MONUSCO (a French-language acronym).
Then there’s something called the UN Verified initiative, which offers a course free of charge that is supposed to “educate” people in these physically dangerous places on how to keep themselves safe from – online “misinformation.”
This effort expands on several basic topics, including how to recognize “disinformation,” and the UN will also tell you why it is being spread.
Another one is to be able to discern emotional, dramatic, and provocative content (some might say the article from the UN site referenced here might easily qualify.)
London City Hall Tries to Put Pressure on Scientists Who Doubted Climate Policy – Report
Sputnik – 20.08.2023
London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s office tried to “silence” scientists who called into question the effectiveness of the ultra-low emissions zone (Ulez) policy promoted by the head of the city, The Telegraph reported on Saturday.
Shirley Rodrigues, the London Mayor’s deputy for environment and energy, told in emails to Imperial College London professor Frank Kelly that she was “really disappointed” by scientists publishing results that cast doubt on the effectiveness of Ulez, the newspaper reported, adding that the corresponding complaint was sent in November 2021.
In particular, Rodrigues said that she was “deeply concerned” about the damage done to the credibility of the Mayor’s office and Ulez. In response, Kelly promised to write a Ulez-friendly report, the report added.
The report stated that since 2021, Kelly’s research group has received over 800,000 pounds ($1.018 million) from the mayor’s office. However, the publication by scientists led to a cooling in their relations with the London city hall. This, in turn, caused the reluctance of representatives of the scientific community to write any new materials about Ulez, the newspaper noted.
The Ulez initiative was first announced by then-Mayor of London Boris Johnson in 2015. Later, Khan launched an initiative that included, among other things, the installation of special traffic signs and cameras. Since 2020, the London authorities have had to spend over 850,000 pounds to rebuild infrastructure for the initiative, which has been repeatedly damaged by vandals.
Critics Slam JAMA Study Claiming 52 U.S. Doctors Spread COVID ‘Misinformation’
By Monica Dutcher | The Defender | August 18, 2023
Critics of a study published this week in JAMA concluding 52 doctors from across the U.S., propagated “COVID-19 misinformation about vaccines, treatments, and masks on large social media and other online platforms” called the study nothing more than “propaganda.”
“Ultimately, misinformation is just a weaponized term meaning nothing,” said Vinay Prasad, M.D., MPH. “People who use it are often completely ignorant of science and truth.
Prasad and others pointed to several flaws in the study, including the researchers’ definition of “misinformation,” the reported percentage of those with post-COVID-19 condition, or “long COVID” and the false claim that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine alone led to deaths — as deaths also have been linked to the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines.
The CDC as the arbiter of COVID truths
The University of Massachusetts researchers who produced the study defined misinformation as “assertions unsupported by or contradicting U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] guidance on COVID-19 prevention and treatment during the period assessed or contradicting the existing state of scientific evidence for any topics not covered by the CDC.”
But in an Aug. 16 Substack article, Prasad — a hematologist-oncologist and professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco — challenged the notion of using the CDC as the litmus test for pandemic-related information.
CDC “made many errors,” Prasad wrote, citing a paper he published in March, documenting 25 statistical or numerical errors made by the CDC that he said raised questions about the agency’s “real or perceived systematic bias.”
It’s also well documented that the agency constantly changed its mask guidance and published conflicting information about vaccine effectiveness.
Dominique Brossard, professor and chair of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who studies medical misinformation, told USA Today, “The guidance kept on changing … Communication around the vaccine was horrible.”
Dr. Jeff Barke, an Orange County, California, primary care physician and founding member of America’s Frontline Doctors, called the CDC “a captured agency,” saying “it makes no sense whatsoever to recommend this toxic product [COVID-19 vaccines] to children.”
The CDC never came out with early treatment guidelines, Barke said. It was always about vaccines and masks. Barke recalled prescribing ivermectin to his patients and the pharmacists not filling it, asking him for the “diagnostic code” in order to proceed.
Barke told The Defender :
“The pharmacy never asks for a diagnostic code if you prescribe OxyContin for a patient. So it’s OK for a doctor to prescribe a Schedule II narcotic — no questions asked — but I can’t prescribe a product that has a proven safety record of 50 or 60 years.”
Barke is a co-plaintiff in a lawsuit to stop a California law that subjects the state’s doctors to discipline, including the suspension of their medical licenses, for sharing “misinformation” or “disinformation” about COVID-19 with their patients.
What exactly is ‘misinformation’?
The study’s authors identified four categories of “misinformation”:
- Claiming vaccines were unsafe and/or ineffective.
- Promoting unapproved medications for prevention or treatment.
- Disputing mask-wearing effectiveness.
- “Other misinformation,” to include conspiracy theories and the virus’s origins.
The authors reviewed COVID-19-related posts from doctors on the social media platforms Twitter (now X), Facebook, Instagram, Parler and YouTube between January 2021 and December 2022.
The researchers initially focused their Twitter review on America’s Frontline Doctors’ profile because of the organization’s “volume of COVID-19 misinformation in its tweets” and “large following.”
Physicians who followed America’s Frontline Doctors’ Twitter page were targeted on Twitter and other platforms.
Using the search terms “COVID,” “vaccine,” “doctor,” “physician,” “ineffective,” “pharmaceutical,” “ivermectin,” “hydroxychloroquine” and others, the authors of the study identified 52 doctors — 50 licensed and two unlicensed — who used social media to spread COVID-19 “misinformation.”
Results showed most of the 52 physicians (76.9%) who posted “misinformation” did so in more than one of the four categories identified. The majority posted vaccine “misinformation.”
Dr. Meryl Nass — who on Thursday sued the Maine Board of Licensure in Medicine and its individual members, alleging the board violated her First Amendment rights and her rights under the Maine Constitution — called the JAMA study “a piece of propaganda.”
Nass said:
“There is no science. They [the authors] are trying to make it look like they’re doing something quantitative when they’re not. There was a lot known about the ineffectiveness of the vaccines at the time they were working on this paper.”
Unpacking the misinformation in the misinformation study
The University of Massachusetts researchers said doctors’ claims that myocarditis was common in children who received the vaccine and that the risks of myocarditis outweighed the risk of vaccination were “unfounded.”
But myocarditis “does outweigh the benefits of vaccinations for some ages — in men — and some doses,” said Prasad, citing an article published in the Journal of Medical Ethics.
The paper, which focused on booster mandates at American universities, concluded the mandates were unethical because they could result in greater health risks, like booster-associated myocarditis, than benefits to healthy young adults.
Several other studies have shown either myocarditis deaths across all age groups, or elevated myocardial injury after vaccination.
The researchers also flagged any posts discussing pre-pandemic studies that definitively concluded masks do not prevent the spread of respiratory viral infections. And they deemed as misinformation any post that undermined the role of masks in slowing the spread of the infection and that pointed to rising cases in areas with mask mandates.
But a plethora of studies on mask ineffectiveness emerged during the time the Massachusetts team was conducting its research on physicians and “misinformation.”
There were also reports on “The Foegen effect” — the idea that deep re-inhalation of droplets and virions caught on facemasks might make COVID-19 infection more likely or more severe. German physician Dr. Zacharias Fögen introduced the concept in a study that concluded: “mask use might pose a yet unknown threat to the user instead of protecting them, making mask mandates a debatable epidemiologic intervention.”
“The totality of the evidence to date shows no benefit from community mask wearing,” said Prasad, who pointed to Cochrane’s multiple analyses.
According to the JAMA study, doctors who said the COVID-19 vaccines were ineffective at preventing COVID-19 spread or that the virus originated in a lab in China were propagators of misinformation.
Yet plenty of data show the vaccines did not prevent transmission, and scientists even testified to evidence that COVID-19 could have resulted from controversial gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
In the wake of the pandemic, multiple organizations have published guidelines on “medical misinformation” — including YouTube and the American Medical Association (AMA).
Last June, the AMA adopted a new policy to limit medical disinformation, including ensuring that medical licensing boards can take disciplinary action against health professionals who spread health-related disinformation.
In California, however, a judge ruled in January that the state does not have the power to penalize doctors who spread “misinformation” or “disinformation.”
“COVID-19 is a quickly evolving area of science that in many aspects eludes consensus,” the judge decided.
Monica Dutcher is a Maryland-based senior reporter for The Defender.
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.
Medical Board Chief who wanted Doctors delicensed for ‘misinformation’ in bed with PR firm tied to CDC, Pfizer, Moderna
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | August 18, 2023
The head of a national medical organization who publicly called for doctors to lose their licenses unless they supported government narratives on COVID-19 treatments and vaccines concealed his relationship with a public relations firm whose client list also included Pfizer, Moderna and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Dr. Richard Baron, president and CEO of the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) is a client of Weber Shandwick, investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker reported on Wednesday.
In late 2021, Baron publicly pushed for doctors who spread “misinformation” about COVID-19 and the vaccines to lose their license and certification. Baron said then that “putting out flagrant misinformation is unethical and dangerous during a pandemic.”
Weber, the world’s second-largest PR firm, has branded its team as “misinformation and disinformation” experts and says it provides clients with services to help manage any perceived threats posed by spreaders of such information.
The firm has organized conference panels on “medical misinformation” in which Baron participated.
Last year, Baron partnered with Weber Shandwick to propose a South by Southwest (SXSW) panel titled “When Doctors Prescribe Misinformation.” The proposal was subsequently accepted and the panel took place at SXSW in Austin, Texas, on March 13.
According to Thacker, “Weber Shandwick’s panel featuring Dr. Baron has been widely promoted by the PR firm’s employees,” including Sarah Mahoney, executive vice president, Healthcare Communications, Strategy & Planning for Weber Shandwick, who in a LinkedIn post, wrote she “can’t think of a more important topic right now.”
The CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD) in September 2020 awarded Weber a $50 million contract “to promote the vaccination of children, pregnant women and those at risk for flu and increase the general acceptance and use of vaccines,” according to the PR firm’s website.
Under the contract, Weber employees were embedded in the NCIRD to “communicate the risks and recommended actions for outbreaks and convey vaccine recommendations to healthcare providers,” according to Thacker.
Medicine has always been ‘in bed with Big Pharma’
Several doctors have faced disciplinary action by state medical boards for allegedly spreading “misinformation.” One of them is internist and biological warfare epidemiologist Dr. Meryl Nass, a member of Children Health Defense’s scientific advisory committee.
Nass on Thursday sued the Maine Board of Licensure, which suspended her license in January 2022.
The board’s suspension arose from its adoption of a position statement promulgated by the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) threatening physicians “who generate and spread COVID-19 vaccine misinformation” with suspension or revocation of their medical license.
In 2021, ABIM and FSMB collaborated to create the statement used to discipline Nass.
Nass told The Defender that in order to get certified by organizations like ABIM, there are several requirements, primarily related to demonstrating competence in one’s field of specialization, including completing a residency, being certified by the residency director, and paying for and passing the board examinations.
Nass told The Defender that in order to get certified by organizations like ABIM, there are several requirements. She explained:
“You complete a medical residency in your field of specialization. Your residency director certifies your competence and moral character, and you must pay for and pass your board examination to demonstrate your command of your specialty.
“When you’ve paid them for board certification and successfully completed all the requirements, how can they change the rules 20 or 50 years later and say, ‘we’re going to decertify you now because we don’t like your viewpoint?’
“There was nothing in any documentation from the Board of Internal Medicine about misinformation, or any other standards that the board can impose apart from competency to practice when it issued certifications.”
Dr. Richard Eggleston, a retired ophthalmologist in Clarkston, Washington, also faces disciplinary action — by the Washington Medical Commission — arising from articles he published in a local newspaper in 2021, questioning the official narrative and medical advice related to COVID-19.
Doctors aren’t being targeted exclusively for spreading “misinformation” — some, like Dr. Mary Kelly Sutton, an integrative physician, were targeted for their less-than-100% support for COVID-19 vaccines.
Last month, the Massachusetts medical board revoked Sutton’s medical license, claiming she improperly exempted eight children from required school vaccinations. This came a year after California also revoked Sutton’s medical license.
Sutton told The Defender, “The voice of medicine today is determined by the marketing wisdom of Madison Avenue, not by what is sound information from scientific research.”
Sutton said the whole practice of medicine rests on sharing and providing information necessary for informed decisions and consent. When specialty boards issue vague accusations, they engage in “harassment,” and an “egregious overreach of power” and are obstructing the practice of medicine.
A California law aimed at punishing doctors for providing “misinformation” to their patients is now in “legal limbo” following conflicting rulings in state courts earlier this year, which could affect Sutton’s and other California doctors’ cases going through the courts.
This trail of evidence demonstrates medical boards are not simply acting on their own authority but in collusion with state governments, federal agencies and private companies.
“There’s no one who is a ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’ expert whose opinion does not align with the government and with the corporations,” Thacker told The Defender. “That’s what makes them an ‘expert.’”
“What’s always been true is that medicine has been in bed with Big Pharma,” he added. “It’s now becoming a lot more transparent. These relationships are much more transparent.”
‘A very political attempt to shut down people from having alternative viewpoints’
According to Thacker, Baron began his “crusade for the biopharmaceutical industry” in September 2021. In a post for ABIM’s blog, Baron said, “I want to state unequivocally that ABIM can and does take action, independent of state licensing boards, to remove certification from physicians for unprofessional and unethical behavior.”
For Thacker, Baron’s concern about “misinformation” was first triggered when physicians spoke out against COVID-19 vaccine safety, efficacy and side effects. “These are the same concerns held by Weber Shandwick, who Pfizer and Moderna are paying big buck[s] to promote their vaccines,” he said.
“Baron’s relationship with Weber Shandwick was not disclosed” by JAMA, Thacker said, “nor in an accompanying viewpoint Baron wrote for JAMA.”
After an inquiry by Thacker, JAMA’s editor-in-chief, Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, said, “We initiated our internal investigation earlier this week, in accordance with our standard processes for allegations of non-disclosure of conflicts.”
“It is notable that Baron has done his best to mislead the public and other physicians about what he is doing,” Nass said. “He claims the ABIM is trying to ‘protect the legitimacy of medical expertise’ rather than censoring viewpoints it does not like.”
Nass said Baron “conjures up examples of what the board might censure.” She pointed to a Feb. 23, 2023, New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) article Baron co-authored with attorney Carl J. Coleman, which stated:
“When a licensed physician insists that viruses don’t cause disease or that COVID-19 vaccines magnetize people or connect them to cell towers, professional bodies must be able to take action in support of fact and evidence based practice.”
“Yet this is a fabrication,” Nass said, adding:
“Instead, Dr. Baron, who earns about $1.2 million yearly from the ABIM and the ABIM Foundation, has decertified Drs. Peter McCullough, Paul Marik and Pierre Kory — all highly celebrated, published and esteemed doctors in their fields.
“None of them have uttered any mumbo-jumbo about cell towers, magnetism or a non-viral etiology for COVID-19. All have had their board certifications revoked for the viewpoints they expressed — viewpoints that are supported by a preponderance of the medical literature.”
In a January 2022 article for Health Affairs, Coleman wrote, “Licensing boards are state agencies subject to the First Amendment, and as such they are limited in their ability to penalize physicians based on the content of their speech.”
Yet, a 2022 NEJM article co-authored by Baron argued that while “Differences of opinion in medicine are necessary for progress … there are some opinions that have been so thoroughly repudiated by existing evidence as to be considered definitively wrong.”
‘All this money is sloshing around now for misinformation research’
According to Thacker, “PR firms are now moving into the ‘disinformation’ space after decades of deceit on behalf of multiple industries,” with Weber Shandwick having “expanded into the disinformation space in late 2021,” promoting tactics that help “brands combat misinformation and disinformation that may implicate them.”
Speaking to Thacker, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, director of bioethics at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, said, “The ABIM is clearly part of this ‘medical misinformation’ push, which is orchestrated by pharmaceutical companies and their PR allies” and which serves “the interests of Big Pharma.”
Remarking on the presence of a “medical misinformation” panel at SXSW, long known as a music, film and technology festival, Thacker told The Defender, “Anyone and everyone is getting involved in ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation.’”
“Baron has given a TED Talk, for instance. Why is TED Talks involved in this?” he asked.
In 2019 Baron delivered a talk at TEDx Chicago titled, “Please Don’t Confuse Your Google Search with My Medical Degree.”
For Thacker, the answer relates to financial interests. “All this money is sloshing around now for ‘misinformation’ research. Anyone can hop up and down saying ‘I’m an expert on misinformation and disinformation, get me a grant, get me on a panel,’” he said.
Weber embedded staffers within the CDC while representing Pfizer, Moderna
Thacker wrote that prior to discovering Baron’s ties to Weber Shandwick, he had confirmed the PR firm’s ties to COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers Pfizer and Moderna.
These ties did not prevent the CDC from awarding the $50 million contract to Weber Shandwick in September 2020 to push vaccines. The Daily Mail subsequently reported Thacker’s findings.
Medical Marketing and Media reported “Weber’s duties include providing 10 on-site health communications staffers, seven health comms specialists, two health research specialists and one social media specialist” to NCIRD, as well as “generating story ideas, distributing articles and conducting outreach to news, media and entertainment organizations.”
In October 2020, a blog post by Stacy Montejo, senior vice president at Weber Shandwick, disclosed that Pfizer is one of the firm’s clients. A month later, with Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine awaiting Emergency Use Authorization, the company hired Weber Shandwick to handle the vaccine’s publicity, according to PR Week.
Such relationships have continued to the present. In June, Moderna announced a new communications strategy “to further educate the world about Moderna’s mRNA technology and its promise to transform the future of human health.”
The effort is led by Laura Schoen, “who is sometimes titled president of global healthcare at Weber Shandwick, and other times chief healthcare officer at IPG DXTRA, Weber Shandwick’s parent company,” Thacker wrote.
Lucy Rieck, a Weber Shandwick employee, previously publicly tweeted support for a panel Moderna proposed for this year’s SXSW, titled “COVID, Monkeypox, Disease X, What’s Next?” That proposal does not appear to have been accepted for presentation.
Conflicts of interest between Weber Shandwick, the CDC and NCIRD, and Pfizer and Moderna do not appear to have been disclosed.
In October 2022, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) sent a letter to the CDC inquiring about its relationship with Weber Shandwick and requesting “information regarding the nature of Weber’s work for the NCIRD.” It’s unclear whether the CDC complied with the request.
Todd S. Richardson, one of the attorneys representing Eggleston, told The Defender “While it is certainly understandable that governmental agencies will hire PR firms to help them get their message out … it becomes of real concern to me when those agencies, or people working within the agencies, try to silence those who disagree.”
According to Thacker, the web of relationships between Weber Shandwick doesn’t just extend to Big Pharma companies, the CDC and its agencies, or to doctors such as Baron. Academics such as Brown University’s Claire Wardle, Ph.D., a key figure in the “misinformation research” space, have participated in some of the firm’s events.
Wardle, a professor of the practice of Health Services, Policy and Practice at Brown University who has no scientific or medical credentials, participated in an online meeting organized by Weber Shandwick in October 2020 to discuss “election misinformation.”
Subsequently, Wardle played a key advisory role in the Biden administration, federal agencies, social media platforms and Ivy League institutions as they sought to censor content that ran counter to the government’s COVID-19 narrative.
According to Thacker, she “helped organize many of today’s campus disinformation groups … with funding from Google” and later sent Twitter a report aimed at countering the “growing threat of disinformation to trust in COVID-19 vaccines.”
Thacker said the biopharmaceutical industry is “the smartest at putting out disinformation. What other industry has bought off the medical community and the science community?” he asked. “They bought off the researchers, the government, the academic journals.”
Thacker said he believes much of what is labeled “misinformation” in medicine and academic research “is really just corporate PR,” and that “Congress needs to take a harder look at funding for ‘misinformation research.’“
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
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.
Pakistan arrests opposition leader in crackdown on Imran Khan’s party
Press TV – August 19, 2023
Pakistani authorities have arrested opposition leader Shah Mehmood Qureshi in a widening crackdown on former prime minister Imran Khan’s party by the military-backed interim government.
Qureshi, who twice served as Pakistan’s foreign minister, was arrested by the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) on Saturday in the capital Islamabad shortly after he denounced the newly installed caretaker government for its attempts to delay the elections which are scheduled to be held later this year.
“He was arrested from his residence by Islamabad police. We don’t have any further details yet,” a Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told AFP.
In recent months, Pakistani authorities have made widespread arrests targeting Khan’s PTI party in an attempt to crush his grassroots support, causing nationwide anger against the country’s powerful military, which most people believe is behind the crackdown.
According to several independent surveys, the PTI will win a landslide victory in the next elections if the party is allowed to run a political campaign without restrictions.
PTI spokesman Zulfi Bukhari condemned Qureshi’s arrest on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, saying the vice chairman of the party was “arrested for doing a press conference and re-affirming PTI stance against all tyranny and pre-poll rigging that is going on currently in Pakistan.”
“PTI Vice Chairman Shah Mahmood Qureshi has been illegally arrested once again,” the PTI said in social media post on X.
Qureshi was also arrested on May 11 and released on June 6.
In the meantime, Khan, 70, is currently serving a three-year jail term.
Khan was arrested earlier this month and taken to jail after a court found him guilty in one of the more than dozens of cases he has faced.
The former prime minister has maintained that some 200 cases against him are politically motivated to keep him out of power. He says the country’s powerful military is behind these cases.
The three-year jail sentence issued by a lower court disqualifies him from taking part in elections.
Dr. Meryl Nass sues Maine Medical Board over suspension, alleges Board violated her first amendment rights
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | August 17, 2023
Dr. Meryl Nass today filed suit against the Maine Board of Licensure in Medicine and its individual members, alleging the board violated her First Amendment rights and her rights under the Maine Constitution.
The complaint alleges the board engaged in retaliatory conduct against Nass, a practicing internal medicine physician and member of the Children’s Health Defense (CHD) scientific advisory board, when the board suspended her medical license for publicly expressing her dissenting views on official COVID-19 policies, the COVID-19 vaccine and alternative treatments.
“Because she was outspoken, the board targeted Dr. Nass as someone to silence,” her attorney, Gene Libby told The Defender.
In fall 2021, the board issued a position statement, quoted in the complaint, stating that licensees could face disciplinary action if they “generate and spread COVID-19 vaccine misinformation or disinformation.”
In October 2021, soon after the statement was issued, the board received a complaint alleging Nass was spreading misinformation online and soon after launched an investigation.
The board suspended Nass’ medical license on Jan. 12, 2022, without a hearing, accusing her of engaging in “unprofessional conduct” by spreading “misinformation about COVID-19.”
It also accused her of improperly prescribing hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin for three patients for off-label uses of those drugs.
The board suspended Nass’ license and ordered a neuropsychological evaluation, implying she was mentally impaired or a substance abuser and incompetent to practice medicine.
“There were no grounds to order a mental health examination,” Libby said. “That was simply a means to communicate to the public that there was something wrong with Dr. Nass, to discredit her and tarnish her reputation.”
After Nass moved to have the board dismiss its complaint against her, alleging First Amendment violations, the board on Sept. 26, 2022, withdrew its accusations of “misinformation”, just prior to her first hearing date, Oct. 11, 2022.
The board’s case now rests on Nass’ alleged non-adherence to the medical “standard of care” as it pertained to ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for treating COVID-19 and on the alleged “record-keeping” issues.
Nass told The Defender :
“The two primary complaints against me were that my statements were misleading and that I was prescribing drugs off-label. My speech — which I should note, was not simply opinion, it was an educated opinion developed after consulting the medical literature — is protected by the First Amendment.
“And prescribing drugs off-label is a perfectly legal thing to do, as explicitly stated on the FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] website. Somewhere between 20-50% of drugs are prescribed off-label. The lawyers on the board staff know all of this. It’s their job to know the law with respect to medicine.
“They didn’t do this because they thought I had committed some kind of violation. They did it because they thought I’m older and I wouldn’t have the money to challenge them and so they could get away with it — they thought they could turn me into a poster child to scare all the doctors in the country.
“It is part of this broader attempt by the U.S. government and governments across the world to criminalize dissent by criminalizing so-called ‘misinformation.’”
Libby said the remaining allegations against Dr. Nass “are simply a pretext to discipline her. Because now, from an institutional standpoint, the board has to do something. She’s been under suspension for 19 months, which is the longest suspension that I’m aware of for any physician in the state.”
The board refused to schedule hearings on Nass’ suspension on consecutive days. Instead, it has held one day of hearings every other month. There have been six days of hearings so far over 10 months — and Nass’ license has been suspended the entire time.
“This is fundamentally unfair to Dr. Nass, but she’s within the grip of an institution that doesn’t want her speaking out,” Libby said.
In her lawsuit, Nass alleges the board and its members used their power to “crush dissenting views and chill disfavored speech.”
Nass is asking the court for declaratory relief, for an injunction to stop the board from continuing to retaliate against her and for monetary damages and legal fees.
CHD is providing financial and legal resources to Nass’ Maine-based legal team.
CHD President Mary Holland told The Defender :
“CHD is proud to support Dr. Nass’ lawsuit against the Maine medical board and its individual members.
“The board and its members have deprived Dr. Nass of her license and livelihood for over a year with no basis whatsoever. This kind of censorship, intimidation and punishment of doctors of conscience must stop.
“People need independent, thoughtful, caring physicians like Dr. Nass to be honored, not hounded as the board has done.
“I am pleased to see this case move forward in the courts in the interests of justice, for Dr. Nass, her patients and the broader society.”
Board provided resources to ‘combat spread of vaccine misinformation’
The Maine board’s Fall 2021 position statement expressed its support for a statement by the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) — a private organization with no regulatory authority — which threatened physicians “who generate and spread COVID-19 vaccine misinformation” with suspension or revocation of their medical license.
According to the statement, physicians have a high degree of public trust and therefore a responsibility to “share information that is factual, scientifically grounded and consensus-driven for the betterment of public health.”
The Maine board’s statement endorsed the FSMB statement, encouraged physicians to address misinformation when encountered, directed physicians to use circulated materials from the American Medical Association (AMA) and said that questioning the COVID-19 vaccine qualifies as “misinformation,” according to the complaint.
The AMA materials provide scripts, talking points and strategies for “combating the spread of vaccine misinformation.”
The Maine board’s chair, Dr. Maroulla Gleaton, is also an FSMB director.
Nass is a widely recognized expert on the anthrax vaccine and biological warfare. She testified before Congress six times and was quoted in major media outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune.
She has also been a prominent critic of governmental handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, the suppression of effective treatments such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and the safety and risks of the vaccine — all topics she has discussed in her Substack, on the radio, in interviews and elsewhere.
But, the complaint notes, her positions have been in conflict with those asserted in the position statement and the resources it highlights as “supporting the fight against COVID-19 misinformation.”
This was merely an attempt by the board to justify its decision to immediately suspend Nass and to intimidate her, the complaint alleges.
Board’s only concern was ‘silencing’ Nass and ‘branding her as crazy’
When Nass questioned the board’s authority to investigate a complaint unrelated to the practice of medicine and instead “focused entirely on a statement made in her private life,” the board responded, on Oct. 14, 2021, that she was engaged in “alleged unprofessional conduct” by provisioning “misleading and/or inaccurate” information.
In the January board meeting where the board decided to suspend her license, the conversation focused on Nass’ “unprofessional conduct due to the spreading of misinformation about COVID-19.”
The board also cited three matters related to treating patients, alleging Nass improperly diagnosed a patient “over the phone,” that she had provided misinformation to a pharmacist about why she was prescribing ivermectin for a patient, and that she had improperly issued another prescription.
On Sept. 7, 2022, Nass moved to dismiss the complaint, alleging the board was violating her First Amendment rights.
The board responded by withdrawing all charges based on her speech, retaining only the charges related to the treatment of three patients.
Libby told The Defender that through the entire investigation and hearings, the board never even spoke to the three patients. It did not inform them their medical records had been subpoenaed, or ask them about their treatment by Dr. Nass.
“Yet the remaining disciplinary charges are all predicated on Dr. Nass’ consultation with and advice to these patients.”
Libby called the patients to testify in Nass’ hearings. They all made “glowing comments” about her availability, her medical advice and her handling of their cases and expressed anger that Nass was being targeted by the board for their cases.
Libby said he interpreted this to indicate the board’s singular focus was not to ensure patient well-being, but rather “silencing Dr. Nass and attempting to brand her as crazy.”
According to the complaint, the board’s animus against Nass is also demonstrated by the fact that it is flouting its own rules for selecting and paying expert witnesses.
Board guidelines stipulate that witnesses can be paid a maximum of $125/hour for preparation and $175/hour for testimony and that the witnesses should have the same specialty as the practitioner in question and be licensed to practice in Maine.
But the board is paying Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency room physician from Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston, $500/hour to testify.
And board member Gleaton, who has conflicts of interest because of her position as FSMB director and has acted in openly mocking ways, has refused to recuse herself.
The next medical board hearing is set for mid-September.
But in the meantime, Libby said “The actions of the board are so outrageous, they need to be acted on legally.”
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
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.
The WHO’s Proposed Amendments Will Increase Man-Made Pandemics
By Meryl Nass | Brownstone Institute | August 17, 2023
This report is designed to help readers think about some big topics: how to really prevent pandemics and biological warfare, how to assess proposals by the WHO and its members for preventing and responding to pandemics, and whether we can rely on our health officials to navigate these areas in ways that make sense and will help their populations. We start with a history of biological arms control and rapidly move to the COVID pandemic, eventually arriving at plans to protect the future.
Weapons of Mass Destruction: Chem/Bio
Traditionally, the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) have been labelled Chemical, Biological, Radiologic, and Nuclear (CBRN).
The people of the world don’t want them used on us—for they are cheap ways to kill and maim large numbers of people quickly. And so international treaties were created to try to prevent their development (only in the later treaties) and use (in all the biological arms control treaties). First was the Geneva Protocol of 1925, following the use of poison gases and limited biological weapons in World War I, banning the use of biological and chemical weapons in war. The US and many nations signed it, but it took 50 years for the US to ratify it, and during those 50 years the US asserted it was not bound by the treaty.
The US used both biological and chemical weapons during those 50 years. The US almost certainly used biological weapons in the Korean War (see this, this, this and this) and perhaps used both in Vietnam, which experienced an odd outbreak of plague during the war. The use of napalm, white phosphorus, agent orange (with its dioxin excipient causing massive numbers of birth defects and other tragedies) and probably other chemical weapons like BZ (a hallucinogen/incapacitant) led to much pushback, especially since we had signed the Geneva Protocol and we were supposed to be a civilized nation.
In 1968 and 1969, two important books were published that had a great influence on the American psyche regarding our massive stockpiling and use of these agents. The first book, written by a young Seymour Hersh about the US chemical and biological warfare program, was titled Chemical and Biological Warfare; America’s Hidden Arsenal. In 1969 Congressman Richard D. McCarthy, a former newspaperman from Buffalo, NY wrote the book The Ultimate Folly: War by Pestilence, Asphyxiation and Defoliation about the US production and use of chemical and biological weapons. Prof. Matthew Meselson’s review of the book noted,
Our operation, “Flying Ranch Hand,” has sprayed anti-plant chemicals over an area almost the size of the state of Massachusetts, over 10 per cent of its cropland. “Ranch Hand” no longer has much to do with the official justification of preventing ambush. Rather, it has become a kind of environmental warfare, devastating vast tracts of forest in order to facilitate our aerial reconnaissance. Our use of “super tear gas” (it is also a powerful lung irritant) has escalated from the originally announced purpose of saving lives in “riot control-like situations” to the full-scale combat use of gas artillery shells, gas rockets and gas bombs to enhance the killing power of conventional high explosive and flame weapons. Fourteen million pounds have been used thus far, enough to cover all of Vietnam with a field effective concentration. Many nations, including some of our own allies have expressed the opinion that this kind of gas warfare violates the Geneva Protocol, a view shared by McCarthy.
A Biological Weapons Convention
Amid great pushback over US conduct in Vietnam, and seeking to burnish his presidency, President Nixon announced to the world in November 1969 that the US was going to end its biowarfare program (but not the chemical program). Following pointed reminders that Nixon had not eschewed the use of toxins, in February 1970 Nixon announced we would also get rid of our toxin weapons, which included snake, snail, frog, fish, bacterial, and fungal toxins that could be used for assassinations and other purposes.
It has been claimed that these declarations resulted from careful calculations that the US was far ahead technically of most other nations in its chemical and nuclear weapons. But biological weapons were considered the “poor man’s atomic bomb” and required much less sophistication to produce. Therefore, the US was not far ahead in the biological weapons arena. By banning this class of weapon, the US would gain strategically.
Nixon told the world that the US would initiate an international treaty to prevent the use of these weapons ever again. And we did so: the 1972 Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction, or Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) for short, which entered into force in 1975.
But in 1973 genetic engineering (recombinant DNA) was discovered by Americans Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen, which changed the biological warfare calculus. Now the US had regained a technological advantage for this type of endeavor.
The Biological Weapons Convention established conferences to be held every 5 years to strengthen the treaty. The expectation was that these would add a method to call for ‘challenge inspections’ to prevent nations from cheating and would add sanctions (punishments) if nations failed to comply with the treaty. However, since 1991 the US has consistently blocked the addition of protocols that would have an impact on cheating. By now, everyone accepts that cheating occurs and is likely widespread.
A leak in an anthrax production facility in Sverdlovsk, USSR in 1979 caused the deaths of about 60 people. While the USSR tried a sloppy cover-up, blaming contaminated black market meat, this was a clear BWC violation to all those knowledgeable about anthrax.
US experiments with anthrax production during the Clinton administration, detailed by Judith Miller et al. in the 2001 book Germs, were also thought by experts to have transgressed the BWC.
It has taken over 40 years, but in 2022 all declared stocks of chemical weapons had been destroyed by the USA, by Russia, and the other 193 member nation signatories. The chemical weapons convention does include provisions for surprise inspections and sanctions.
Pandemics and Biological Warfare Receive Funding from Same Stream
It is now 2023, and during the 48 years the Biological Weapons Convention has been in force the wall it was supposed to build against the development, production, and use of biological weapons has been steadily eroded. Meanwhile, especially since the 2001 anthrax letters, nations (with the US at the forefront) have been building up their “biodefense” and “pandemic preparedness” capacities.
Under the guise of preparing their defenses against biowarfare and pandemics, nations have conducted “dual-use” (both offensive and defensive) research and development, which has led to the creation of more deadly and more transmissible microorganisms. And employing new verbiage to shield this effort from scrutiny, biological warfare research was renamed as “gain-of-function” research.
Gain-of-function is a euphemism for biological warfare research aka germ warfare research. It is so risky that funding it was banned by the US government (but only for SARS coronaviruses and avian flu viruses) in 2014 after a public outcry from hundreds of scientists. Then in 2017 Drs. Tony Fauci and Francis Collins lifted the moratorium, with no real safeguards in place. Fauci and Collins even had the temerity to publish their opinion that the risk from this gain-of-function research was ‘worth it.’
What does gain-of-function actually mean? It means that scientists are able to use a variety of techniques to turn ordinary or pathogenic viruses and bacteria into biological weapons. The research is justified by the claim that scientists can get out ahead of nature and predict what might be a future pandemic threat, or what another nation might use as a bioweapon. The functions gained by the viruses or other microorganisms to turn them into biological warfare agents consist of two categories: enhanced transmission or enhanced pathogenicity (illness severity).
1) improved transmissibility may result from:
a) needing fewer viral or bacterial copies to cause infection,
b) causing the generation of higher viral or bacterial titers,
c) a new mode of spread, such as adding airborne transmission to a virus that previously only spread through bodily fluids,
d) expanded range of susceptible organs (aka tissue tropism); for example, not only respiratory secretions but also urine or stool might transmit the virus, which was found in SARS-CoV-2,
e) expanded host range; for example, instead of infecting bats, the virus is passaged through humanized mice and thus acclimated to the human ACE-2 receptor, which was found in SARS-CoV-2,
f) improved cellular entry; for example, by adding a furin cleavage site, which was found in SARS-CoV-2,
2) increased pathogenicity, so instead of causing a milder illness, the pathogen would be made to cause severe illness or death, using various methods. SARS-CoV-2 had unusual homologies (identical short segments) to human tissues and the HIV virus, which may have caused or contributed to the late autoimmune stage of illness, impaired immune response and ‘long COVID.’
Funding for (Natural) Pandemics, Including Yearly Influenza, was Lumped Together with Biological Defense Funding
Perhaps the comingling of funding was designed to make it harder for Congress and the public to understand what was being funded, and how much taxpayer funding was going to gain-of-function work, which might lead them to question why it was being done at all, given its prohibition in the Biological Weapons Convention, and additional questions about its value. Former CDC Director Robert Redfield, a physician and virologist, told Congress in March of 2023 that gain-of-function research had not resulted in a single beneficial drug, vaccine, or therapeutic to his knowledge.
Nonprofits and universities like EcoHealth Alliance and its affiliated University of California, Davis veterinary school were used as intermediaries to obscure the fact that US taxpayers were supporting scientists in dozens of foreign countries, including China, for research that included gain-of-function work on coronaviruses.
Perhaps to keep the lucrative funding going, fears about pandemics have been deliberately amplified over the past several decades. The federal government has been spending huge sums on pandemic preparedness over the past 20 years, routing it through many federal and state agencies. President Biden’s proposed 2024 budget requested “$20 billion in mandatory funding across DHHS for pandemic preparedness” while the DHS, DOD, and the State Department have additional budgets for pandemic preparedness for both domestic and international spending.
Although the 20th century experienced only 3 significant pandemics (the Spanish flu of 1918-19 and 2 influenza pandemics in 1957 and 1968) the mass media have presented us with almost non-stop pandemics during the 21st century: SARS-1 (2002-3), avian flu (2004-on), swine flu (2009-10), Ebola (2014, 2018-19), Zika (2016), COVID (2020-2023), and monkeypox (2022-23). And we are incessantly told that more are coming, and that they are likely to be worse.
We have been assaulted with warnings and threats for over 2 decades to induce a deep fear of infectious diseases. It seems to have worked.
The genomes of both SARS-CoV-2 and the 2022 monkeypox (MPOX) virus lead to suspicion that both were bioengineered pathogens originating in laboratories. The group of virologists assembled by Drs. Fauci and Farrar identified 6 unusual (probably lab-derived) parts of the SARS-CoV-2 genome as early as February 1, 2020 and more have been suggested subsequently.
I do not know if these viruses leaked accidentally or were deliberately released, but I am leaning toward the conclusion that both were deliberately released, based on the locations where they first appeared, the well-orchestrated but faked videos rolled out by the mass media for COVID, and the illogical and harmful official responses to each. In neither case was the public given accurate information about the infections’ severity or treatments, and the responses by Western governments never made scientific sense. Why wouldn’t you treat cases early, the way doctors treat everything else? It seemed that our governments were trading on the fact that few people knew enough about viruses and therapeutics to make independent assessments about the information they were being fed.
Yet by August 2021, there was no corresponding course correction. Instead, the federal government doubled down, imposing vaccine mandates on 100 million Americans in September 2021 in spite of ‘the science.’ There has been no accurate statement yet from any federal agency about the lack of utility of masking for an airborne virus (which is probably why the US government and WHO delayed acknowledging airborne spread by COVID for 18 months), the lack of efficacy of social distancing for an airborne virus, and the risks and poor efficacy of 2 dangerous oral drugs (paxlovid and molnupiravir) purchased by the US government for COVID treatment, even without a doctor’s prescription.
Never have any federal agencies acknowledged the truth about the COVID vaccines’ safety and efficacy. Instead, the CDC turns definitional and statistical cartwheels so it can continue to claim they are “safe and effective.” Even worse, with all that we know, a third generation COVID vaccine is to be rolled out for this fall and the FDA has announced that yearly boosters are planned.
All this goes on, even a year after we learned (with continuing corroborations) that children and working age adults are dying at rates 25 percent or more above the expected averages, and the vascular side effects of vaccination are the only reasonable explanation.
Maiming with Myocarditis
Both of the two US monkeypox/smallpox vaccines (Jynneos and ACAM2000) are known to cause myocarditis, as do all 3 COVID vaccines currently available in the US: the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 mRNA vaccines and the Novavax vaccine. The Novavax vaccine was first associated with myocarditis during its clinical trial, but this was downplayed and it was authorized and rolled out anyway, intended for those who refused the mRNA vaccines due to the use of fetal tissue in their manufacture.
Here is what the FDA’s reviewers wrote about the cardiac side effects noted in the Jynneos clinical trials:
Up to 18.4% of subjects in 2 studies developed post-vaccination elevation of troponin [a cardiac muscle enzyme signifying cardiac damage]. However, all of these troponin elevations were asymptomatic and without a clinically associated event or other sign of myopericarditis. p. 198
The applicant has committed to conduct an observational, post-marketing study as part of their routine PVP. The sponsor will collect data on cardiac events that occur and are assessed as a routine part of medical care. p. 200
In other words, while the only way to cause an elevated troponin level is to break down cardiac muscle cells, the FDA did not require a specific study to evaluate the extent of cardiac damage that might be caused by Jynneos when it issued its 2019 license. How frequently does myocarditis occur after these vaccines? If you use elevated cardiac enzymes as your marker, ACAM2000 caused this in one in thirty people receiving it for the first time. If you use other measures like abnormal cardiac MRI or echo, according to the CDC it occurs in one in 175 vaccinees. I have not seen a study with rates of myocarditis for Jynneos, but there was an unspecified elevation of cardiac enzymes in 10 percent and 18 percent of Jynneos recipients in two unpublished prelicensure studies available on the FDA website. My guess for the mRNA COVID vaccines is that they cause myocarditis in this general range, the vast majority of which remain undiagnosed and probably asymptomatic.
Why would our governments push 5 separate vaccines all known to cause myocarditis on young males who have been at extremely low risk from COVID, and who simply get a few pimples for 1-4 weeks from monkeypox unless they are immunocompromised? It’s an important question. It does not make medical sense. Especially when the vaccine probably does not work—Jynneos didn’t prevent infection in the monkeys in whom it was tested nor did it do well in people. And the CDC has failed to publish its trial of Jynneos vaccine in the ~1,600 Congolese healthcare workers on whom the CDC tested it for efficacy and safety in 2017. The CDC made the mistake of announcing the trial, and posting it to clinicaltrials.gov as required, but has not informed its advisory committee that reviewed the vaccine, nor the public, of the trial’s results.
There can be no question about it: our health agencies are guilty of malfeasance, misrepresentation, and deliberate infliction of harm on their own populations. The health agencies first incited terror with apocalyptic predictions, then demanded patients be medically neglected, and finally enforced vaccinations and treatments that were tantamount to malpractice.
COVID Vaccines: The Chicken or the Egg?
The health authorities could have just been ignorant — that could possibly explain the first few months of the COVID vaccines’ rollout. But once they figured out, and even announced in August 2021 that the vaccines did not prevent catching COVID or transmitting it, why did our health authorities still push COVID vaccines on low-risk populations who were clearly at greater risk from a vaccine side effect than from COVID? Particularly as time went on and newer variants were less and less virulent?
Once you acknowledge these basic facts, you realize that maybe the vaccines were not made for the pandemic, and instead the pandemic was made to roll out the vaccines. While we cannot be certain, we should at least be suspicious. And the fact that the US contracted for 10 doses per person (review purchases here, here, here, here and here) and so did the European Union (here and here) and Canada should make us even more suspicious – there is no justification for agreeing to purchase so many doses for vaccines at a time when the vaccines’ ability to prevent infection and transmission was questionable, and its safety suspect or worrying.
Why would governments want ten doses per person? Three maybe. But ten? Even if yearly boosters were expected, there was no reason to sign contracts for enough vaccine for the next nine years for a rapidly mutating virus. Australia bought 8 doses per person. By December 20, 2020 New Zealand had secured triple the vaccines it needed, and offered to share some with nearby nations. No one has come forward to explain the reason for these excessive purchases.
Furthermore, you don’t need a vaccine passport (aka digital ID, aka a phone app that in Europe included a mechanism for an electronic payments system) unless you are giving out regular boosters. Were the vaccines conceived of as the means for putting our vaccinations, health records, official documents–and most importantly, shifting our financial transactions online, all managed on a phone app? This would be an attack on privacy as well as the enabling step to a social credit system in the West. Interestingly, vaccine passports were already being planned for the European Union by 2018.
A Pandemic Treaty and Amendments: Brought to You by the Same People who Mismanaged the Past 3 Years, to Save us from Themselves?
The same US and other governments and the WHO that imposed draconian measures on citizens to force us to be vaccinated and take dangerous, expensive, experimental drugs, withheld effective treatments, and refused to tell us that most people who required ICU care for COVID were vitamin D-deficient and that taking vitamin D would lessen COVID’s severity–decided in 2021 we suddenly needed an international pandemic treaty. Why? To prevent and ameliorate future pandemics or biological warfare events… so we would not suffer again as we did with the COVID pandemic, they insisted. The WHO would manage it.
To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, the words, “I’m from the WHO, and I’m here to help” should be the most terrifying words in the English language after the COVID fiasco.
What the WHO and our governments conveniently failed to mention is that we suffered so badly because of their medical mismanagement and our governments’ merciless economic shutdowns and mismanagement. According to the World Bank, an additional 70 million people were forced into extreme poverty in 2020 alone. This was due to policies issued by our nations’ rulers, their elite advisers and the World Health Organization, which came out with guidance to shut down economic activity that most nations adopted without question. The WHO is acutely aware of the consequences of economic lockdowns, having published the following:
Malnutrition persisted in all its forms, with children paying a high price: in 2020, over 149 million under-fives are estimated to have been stunted, or too short for their age; more than 45 million – wasted, or too thin for their height…
Starvation may have killed more people than COVID, and they were disproportionately the youngest, rather than the oldest. Yet the WHO prattles on about equity, diversity, and solidarity—having itself caused the worst food crisis in our lifetime, which was not due to nature but was man-made.
How can anyone take seriously claims by the same officials who mishandled COVID that they want to spare us from another medical and economic disaster–by using the same strategies they applied to COVID, after they masterminded the last disaster? And the fact that no governments or health officials have admitted their errors should convince us never to let them manage anything ever again. Why would we let them draw up an international treaty and new amendments to the existing International Health Regulations (IHR) that will bind our governments to obey the WHO’s dictates forever?
Those dictates, by the way, include vaccine development at breakneck speed, the power to enforce which drugs we will be directed to use, and which drugs will be prohibited, and the requirement to monitor media for “misinformation” and impose censorship so that only the WHO’s public health narrative will be conveyed to the public.
The WHO’s Pandemic Treaty Draft Requires the Sharing of Potential Pandemic Pathogens. This is a Euphemism for Bioweapons Proliferation.
Obviously, the best way to spare us from another pandemic is to immediately stop funding gain-of-function (GOF) research and get rid of all existing GOF organisms. Let all nations build huge bonfires and burn up their evil creations at the same time, while allowing other nations to inspect their biological facilities and records.
But the WHO in its June 2023 Bureau Text of the Draft Pandemic Treaty has a plan that is the exact opposite of this. In the WHO’s draft treaty, which most nations’ rulers appear to have bought into, all governments will share all viruses and bacteria they come up with that are determined to have “pandemic potential” — share them with the WHO and other governments, putting their genomic sequences online. No, I am not making this up. (See screenshots from the draft treaty below.) Then the WHO and all the Fauci’s of the world would gain access to all the newly identified dangerous viruses. Would hackers also gain access to the sequences? This pandemic plan should make you feel anything but secure.
Fauci, Tedros, and their ilk at the WHO, and those managing biodefense and biomedical research for nation states are on one side, the side that gains access to ever more potential biological weapons, and the rest of us are on the other, at their mercy.
This poorly conceptualized plan used to be called proliferation of weapons of mass destruction—and it is almost certainly illegal. (For example, see Security Council resolution 1540 adopted in 2004.) But this is the plan of the WHO and of many of our leaders. Governments will all share the weapons.
The Genomic Sequencing Conundrum
And governments are to commit to building biolabs that must include genomic sequencing. No explanation has been forthcoming about why each nation needs to install its own genome sequencing laboratories. Of course, they would sequence the many viruses that will be detected as a result of the pathogen surveillance activities nations must perform, according to the WHO treaty draft. But the same techniques can be used to sequence human genomes. The fact that the EU, UK, and US are currently engaged in projects to sequence about 2 million of their citizens’ genomes provides a hint they may want to collect additional genomes of Africans, Asians, and others.
This might fly as simply sharing state-of-the-art science with our less-developed neighbors. But it is curious that there is so much emphasis on genomics, compared to an absence of discussion about developing repurposed drugs for pandemics in the draft treaty or IHR amendments.
But we can’t forget that virtually all developed nations, in lockstep, restricted the use of safe generic hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and related drugs during the pandemic. In retrospect, the only logical explanation for this unprecedented action was to preserve the market for expensive patentable drugs and vaccines, and possibly to prolong the pandemic.
Genomes offer great potential profits, as well as providing the substrate for transhumanist experiments that could include designer babies.
The latest version (aka the WHO Bureau draft) of the pandemic treaty can be accessed here. I provide screenshots to illustrate additional points.
Draft pages 10 and 11:
The WHO Treaty Draft Incentivizes Gain-of-Function Research
What else is in the Treaty? Gain-of-Function research (designed to make microorganisms more transmissible or more pathogenic) is explicitly incentivized by the treaty. The treaty demands that administrative hurdles to such research must be minimized, while unintended consequences (aka pandemics) should be prevented. But of course, when you perform this type of research, leaks and losses of agents can’t always be prevented. The joint CDC-USDA Federal Select Agent Program (FSAP) which keeps track of research on potential pandemic pathogens collects reports of about 200 accidents or escapes yearly from labs situated in the US. The FSAP annual report for 2021 notes:
“In 2021, FSAP received 8 reports of losses, 177 reports of releases, and no reports of thefts.”
Research on deadly pathogens cannot be performed without risks both to the researchers and the outside world.
Draft page 14:
Vaccines Will be Rolled Out Speedily Under Abbreviated Future Testing Protocols
Vaccines normally take 10-15 years to be developed. In case you thought the COVID vaccines took too long to be rolled out (326 days from availability of the viral sequence to authorization of the first US COVID vaccine) the WHO treaty draft has plans to shorten testing. There will be new clinical trial platforms. Nations must increase clinical trial capacity. (Might that mean mandating people to be human subjects in out-of-the-way places like Africa, for example?) And there will be new “mechanisms to facilitate the rapid interpretation of data from clinical trials” as well as “strategies for managing liability risks.”
Draft page 14:
Manufacturer and Government Liability for Vaccine Injuries Must be “Managed”
Nations are supposed to use “existing relevant models” as a reference for compensation of injuries due to pandemic vaccines. Of course, most countries do not have vaccine injury compensation schemes, and when they do the benefits are usually minimal.
Is the US government’s program to be a model of what gets implemented internationally?
The US government scheme for injuries due to COVID pandemic products (the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program or CICP) has compensated exactly 4 (yes, four) of the 12,000 claimants for COVID product-related injuries as of August 1, 2023. All pandemic EUA drugs and vaccines convey a liability shield to the government and manufacturers (this includes monoclonal antibodies, pre-licensure remdesivir, paxlovid, molnupiravir, some ventilators and all COVID vaccines) and the only avenue for injury compensation is through this program.
Slightly over 1,000 of the 12,000 claims have been adjudicated while 10,887 are pending review. Twenty claims were deemed eligible and await a benefits review. Benefits are only paid for uncovered medical expenses or lost income. A total of 983 people, or 98 percent of those whose claims have been adjudicated had their claims denied, many because they missed the brief one-year statute of limitations. Below are the latest data from this program:
The treaty draft also demands weakening the strict regulation of medical drugs and vaccines during emergencies, under the rubric of “Regulatory Strengthening.” As announced in the UK last week, where ‘trusted partner’ approvals will be used to speed licensure, this is moving toward a single regulatory agency approval or authorization, to be immediately adopted by other nations (p 25).
Next Up: Vaccines Developed in 100 Days
A plan to develop vaccines in 100 days and have them manufactured in 30 additional days has been widely publicized by the vaccine nonprofit CEPI, founded in 2017 by Sir Dr. Jeremy Farrar, who is now the WHO’s Chief Scientist. The plan has been echoed by the US and UK governments and received some buy-in from the G7 in 2021. This timeframe would only allow for very brief testing in humans, or would, more likely, limit testing to animals. Why would any country sign up for this? Is this what we the people want?
The plan furthermore depends on the vaccines only being tested for their ability to induce antibodies, which is termed immunogenicity, rather than being shown to actually prevent disease, at least for the initial rollout. My understanding of FDA regulation was that antibody levels were not an acceptable surrogate for immunity unless they had been demonstrated to actually correlate with protection. However, the FDA’s recent vaccine decisions have scrapped all that and vaccines are now being approved based on antibody titers alone. The FDA’s vaccine advisory committee has asked it for better indicators of efficacy than this, but the advisers have also voted to approve or authorize vaccines in the absence of any real measures showing that they work. I learned this because I watch the FDA vaccine advisory meetings and provide a live blog of them.
We all know how long it took for the public to become aware that the COVID vaccines failed to prevent transmission and only prevented cases for a period of weeks to months. The US government has still not officially admitted this, even though CDC Director Rochelle Walensky told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer the truth about transmission on August 6, 2021.
It is critical for the public to understand that safety testing can only be accomplished in human beings, as animals react differently to drugs and vaccines than humans do. Therefore, limited testing in animals would mean there was no actual safety testing. But testing vaccines in humans for only short periods is also unacceptable.
Testing vaccines during brief trials in humans (the Pfizer trials only followed a “safety subset” of trial subjects for a median of two months for safety) allowed COVID vaccines to be rolled out without the public being aware they could cause myocarditis and sudden deaths, most commonly in athletic young males in their teens and twenties, or a myriad of other conditions.
Finally, following this rapid manufacturing plan, thorough testing for potential failures in the manufacturing process could not be performed. With the current plan for far-flung, decentralized manufacturing facilities that are said to be necessary to achieve vaccine equity for all, there are nowhere near enough regulators who could inspect and approve them.
Will the WHO Respect Human Rights?
The need to respect “human rights, dignity, and freedom of persons” is embedded in the current International Health Regulations (IHR), as well as other UN treaties. However, the language guaranteeing human rights, dignity, and freedom of persons was peremptorily removed from the proposed IHR Amendments, without explanation. The removal of human rights protections did not go unnoticed, and the WHO has been widely criticized for it.
The WHO apparently is responding to these criticisms, and so the language guaranteeing human rights that was removed from the drafts of the International Health Regulations has been inserted into the newest version of the pandemic treaty.
Conclusions
As long predicted by science fiction, our bio- and cyber-scientific achievements have finally gotten away from us. We can produce vaccines in 100 days and manufacture them in 130 days–but there will be no guarantees that the products will be safe, effective, or adequately manufactured. And we can expect large profits but no consequences for the manufacturers.
Our genes can be decoded, and the fruits of personalized medicine made available to us. Or perhaps our genes will be patented and sold to the highest bidder. We might be able to select for special characteristics in our children, but at the same time, a human underclass could be created.
Our electronic communications can be completely monitored and censored, and uniform messaging can be imposed on everyone. But for whom would this be good?
New biological weapons can be engineered. They can be shared. Maybe that will speed up the development of vaccines and therapeutics. But who really benefits from this scheme? Who pays the price of accidents or deliberate use? Wouldn’t it be better to end so-called gain-of-function research entirely through restrictions on funding and other regulations, rather than encouraging its proliferation?
These are important issues for humanity, and I encourage everyone to become part of the conversation.
Dr. Meryl Nass, MD is an internal medicine specialist in Ellsworth, ME, and has over 42 years of experience in the medical field. She graduated from University of Mississippi School of Medicine in 1980.
YouTube Greatly Expands Its Medical “Misinformation” Policies
New rules, largely determined by the WHO
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | August 16, 2023
YouTube, the titan of online video content, has expanded its Covid misinformation policy to cover what it calls all forms of medical misinformation.
YouTube has also declared its plan to delist videos promoting “cancer treatments proven to be harmful or ineffective,” effectively disallowing content creators from encouraging natural cures.
The platform pledges to implement its medical misinformation policies when a topic exhibits high public health risks, is supposedly prone to misinformation, and when official guidance from health authorities is accessible to the public.
The changes also see YouTube recommitting to groups such as the WHO and other health bodies on what information is deemed to be acceptable for people to talk about on the platform – despite these institutions having recently received major blows to their credibility.
According to the policy update, YouTube will no longer host content that:
- Misinforms about prevention techniques or contradicts current health authority guidelines, including inaccuracies regarding the safety or efficacy of approved vaccines.
- Promotes treatments that local health bodies or the WHO have neither approved nor recognized as safe and effective. Moreover, it bans content that advocates for harmful substances or practices that have been scientifically proven to be detrimental.
- Denies the existence of specific health conditions.
As stated in its blog post, YouTube intends to punish content promoting not only what it believes to be overtly harmful treatments but also unproven ones that are audaciously offered as replacements for recognized alternatives.
For instance, influencers suggesting vitamin C supplements or garlic for cancer may have their content removed, the post states.
This marks a substantial escalation in the Google-owned platform’s ongoing crusade against what it believes to be the dissemination of medical misinformation, heavily catalyzed by the controversial experience of battling narratives about themes such as COVID-19 and vaccines, something YouTube was heavily criticized for as truthful content ended up being censored on the platform.
YouTube had targeted vaccine “misinformation,” such as demonetizing and deleting vaccine skepticism, thereby refining their approach in response to the global pandemic situation.
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Major rabbi says non-Jews are donkeys, created to serve Jews
By Khalid Amayreh, in occupied East Jerusalem | The People’s Voice | October 18, 2010
A major Jewish religious figure in Israel has likened non-Jews to donkeys and beasts of burden, saying the main reason for their very existence is to serve Jews.
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual mentor of the religious fundamentalist party, Shas, which represents Middle Eastern Jews, reportedly said during a Sabbath homily earlier this week that “the sole purpose of non-Jews is to serve Jews.”
Yosef is considered a major religious leader in Israel who enjoys the allegiance of hundreds of thousands of followers. … continue
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