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Bill Gates’s money and his influence on British universities

This the fourth and final part of a series

By Karen Harradine | The Conservative Woman | May 20, 2021

My series on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (GF) has revealed the unparalleled influence one man, Bill Gates, has over:

·      the WHO and global health policy; 

·      British public health and Covid-19 policy, through the Gates Foundation’s funding of a number of powerful and interconnected scientific institutions, charities and companies and their personnel crossover with the government’s science advisers;  

·     The Government’s appointed science advisory bodies Sage and Nervtag through the many members and subcommittee members who are employed by academic institutions funded by GF over many years. 

This is only a partial picture of the long reach of Bill Gates into our scientific institutions. On Monday I focused on three GF-funded universities which have informed Sage on doomsday Covid-19 modelling: Imperial College London (ICL), Warwick University and the London School of Tropical Hygiene and Medicine (LSHTM). There are many more academic universities and centres which have taken the GF dollar, including those involved in the research and manufacture of vaccines, who between them set parameters of approved research and gave their research leads significant clout.

They are thus able ‘to ignore or cherry pick science and indulge in anti-competitive practices that favour their own products and those of friends and associates’, as  the executive editor of the BMJ Kamran Abbasi explained it recently. This toxic combination of scientific bias by commission and omission, exacerbated by GF funding, has led to the shutting down of science debate, to active censorship and even to dissemination of scientific untruths, as has been reported elsewhere in TCW pages.

Many scientists and academics have been worryingly silent about the government’s anti-science response to Covid-19. The few who have spoken out have been scorned and smeared by Sage and their nodding dogs, the MSM. Can this culture of silence can be traced back to the extensive GF funding of British universities?

Let’s take Britain’s pre-eminent universities, Oxford and Cambridge, first.

The GF’s funding of Oxford University goes back 21 years, to a first $4.7million grant for malaria and global health research in 2000.  Its giving has risen exponentially since then. In 2019, the GF gave Oxford $40million, including $9.6million for vaccine development. In 2020 it gave $10.8million, including $310,970 to improve understanding of Covid-19. To date this year, Oxford has received $152,553 from the GF.

Oxford University is the site of the Covid-19 Recovery trial (Randomised Evaluation of COVid-19 thERapY), promoted as the world’s largest randomised clinical trial. The trial’s chief investigator, Professor Peter Horby, is a key member of Sage and Nervtag.

The Recovery trial is funded by the Wellcome Trust, the GF, the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and the ‘Covid-19 Therapeutics Accelerator’, the latter being a collaboration between the GF, Wellcome Trust and MasterCard. In March 2020, Oxford University was one of three institutions to share $20million from the GF via its Covid-19 Therapeutics Accelerator.

Professor Horby’s co-investigator at the Recovery Trial, Wei Shen Lim, is also a Nervtag member and chairman of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation. 

The deputy investigator of the Recovery trial, Professor Martin Landray, has further links to the GF.  He is a Lead at the UK Biobank, which is partnered with the Wellcome Trust and also a Lead of the NIHR (National Institute for Health Research) Oxford Biomedical Research Centre at Oxford University.

In April 2017, the GF gave the NIHR Centre funding to study antibiotic resistance in tuberculosis, and a further grant in September 2017 to study typhoid vaccines.

Further funding was provided in September 2020 to research treatments for Covid-19 in care homes. 

The NIHR Centre is funded as well by the Covid-19 Therapeutics Accelerator, as noted above itself a collaboration between the GF, Wellcome Trust and MasterCard.

In March 2020, the Wellcome Trust gave £7.5million via the Covid-19 Therapeutics Accelerator to see if hydroxychloroquineand chloroquine ‘can prevent the spread of Covid-19’ (not treat it, strangely). During the same year the Covid-19 Therapeutics Accelerator also gave $9.5million to the University of Washington to study the effects of hydroxychloroquine on Covid-19.

Professor Horby has sold the Recovery Trial as a success story, but other scientists have disputed this. Last June, hard on the heels of the retraction by the Lancet of its now-notorious paper purporting to show that hydroxychloroquine not only did not help Covid-19 patients, but actually made them worse, came news of the termination of the hydroxychloroquine ‘arm’ of the UK’s Recovery clinical trials.

As reported by Edmund Fordham in TCW, this ‘huge embarrassment was conveniently overlain by news from Oxford University that sorry, hydroxychloroquine really isn’t any good’. So even if the Lancet paper was fake, ‘a political hit job’ as one American doctor had it, Oxford’s clinical trial showed the same result.

But the trial design had already been savaged within days of launch; it was never likely to help very sick late-stage Covid-19 patients and what Professor Landray found himself struggling to explain in an interview were ‘the very heavy doses of the drug that were given – 2400 mg in the first 24 hours, a ‘dose fit for a gorilla’ as one critic had it.

Needless to say Professors Horby and Landray glossed over the inadequacies of this particular trial and quickly dismissed the use of hydroxychloroquine, vowing to concentrate on ‘more promising drugs’. And the possibility of a cheap and easy early treatment for Covid-19, from re-purposed generic drugs, especially hydroxychloroquine to prevent hospitalisation, was trashed.

Probing alleged conflicts of interest, France Soir noted the co-authorship of Professor Horby on papers reporting trials of Gilead’s remdesivir (there was no benefit in mortality), an agreement between his department and AstraZeneca for development of Oxford’s vaccine candidate, and generous funding from the GF. Curiously, there is a connection too between Professor Landray’s interests in Big Data and Gilead, a pharmaceutical company which was in merger talks with AstraZeneca last year. Vaccines are profitable, hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine are not. No wonder the GF invests so heavily in the organisations which research, fund and manufacture vaccines, rather than pursuing investment in better constructed early treatment trials.

A further cluster of Sage members, Professors Dame Angela McLean, Michael Parker, Gideon Henderson, Charlotte Deane and Dr Laura Merson, all work at Oxford University.

SPI-M-O members Drs Thomas Crellen, Joshua Firth and Professor Deirdre Hollingsworth are likewise all employed at Oxford University too.

Cambridge University’s GF’s funding started with an initial grant of $8.1million for agricultural development in 2012. The GF awarded a grant of $998,891 in 2019 to fund research into pneumonia, and $420,000 in 2020 for global education.

More significantly, Cambridge is the site of the Cambridge Science Park, another GF-funded venture. In May 2020, GF and Google Ventures gave $45million to Cerevance, a pharmaceutical company based at Cambridge Science Park.

AstraZeneca is opening its new R&D centre at the Cambridge Biomedical Campus this month. The vaccine giant is supported by the GF, although no details are available on funding. Cambridge University and Imperial College London, both GF-funded institutions, collaborate extensively with AstraZeneca. Sage member Professor Kamlesh Khunti has received grants from AstraZeneca and has also worked as a consultant and speaker for the company.

The Wellcome Trust is also involved in scientific research at Cambridge. Together with the Medical Research Council Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, it awarded the Cambridge-based Institute of Metabolic Science £24million in 2013. Professor Julia Gog of Sage is employed at Cambridge University, as are Nervtag member Professor Ravindra Gupta and Independent Sage member Dr Tolullah Oni.

Professor Daniela DeAngelis and Dr Joshua Blake, members of SP-I-M, also work at Cambridge University.

The GF has also funded University College London (UCL), giving its first $25.2million in 2006 for HIV research. UCL was granted a total of $10.8million in 2019 and $484,000 in 2020, including $144,000 to research vaccines last March. The GF has committed funding from 2020-2023 to study postpartum haemorrhage. UCL also collaborates with the GF and the Wellcome Trust on a research project called Global Health. 

Sage members Professors Dame Anne Johnson, Andrew Hayward and Alan Penn work at UCL.

Professor Susan Michie is the Director of the Centre for Behaviour Change at UCL and sits on both Sage and Independent Sage. Her fellow Independent Sage members Professors Anthony Costello, Christina Pagel, Deenan Pillay, Ann Phoenix and Robert West all work at UCL in some capacity.

Other less prominent academic institutions, such as the University of Southampton, are also beneficiaries of the GF’s vast financing. In 2009, Southampton received $100,000 for scientific research from the GF, and was also given specific grants of $335,800 in 2014, $3.6million in 2015 and $476,214 in 2020 for vaccine research. Sage member, Professor Guy Poppy, is employed at this university, as is Professor Lucy Yardley, a member of both Sage and SP-I-MO.

The UWE Bristol also has connections with the GF, the latter funding its climate change project called Robial. Peter Case, a UWE Bristol Law Professor, wrote a report on malaria for the GF.  Sage member, Professor Jonathan Benger, is employed at the UWE Bristol.

The GF has donated to a multitude of universities unconnected to Sage too, like Liverpool University, giving them a total of over $4million between 2010-2020, with the largest grant being $1.5million in 2010 for pneumonia research.

The GF also funds British charities. The Dementia Discovery Fund, part of Alzheimer’s Research UK, received $50million from the GF in 2017. A small science company in Wales, the Sure Chill Company, was given £1.4million in 2014.

The GF has also invested in the private security firm Serco, buying 3.74 million shares worth $6.6million. This collaboration is not as bizarre as it first seems. Serco is one of the companies hired by the British government to run its Test and Trace system and is likely to make up to £410million from a contract it has with the Department of Health and Social Care.

It seems that no corner of British industry lies untouched by the long reach of the GF. As my research shows, it certainly seems to be the largest funder of British science, giving Gates influence and control exceeding all others, with an ownership of scientists and scientific research as a critical dimension of his global control agenda.

The level of dominance which Gates holds over British science companies, institutions and universities is more than concerning.

Could the combined anti-science and harmful responses to Covid-19 by members of Sage, Independent Sage and Nervtag have anything to do with their multitude of connections to the GF? This is certainly jackpot time for these GF-funded scientists and academics, some of whom are having their moment in the sun pontificating on television to the supine masses. Fame is an addictive drug.

It’s not just the Tories have turned into Gates’s lapdogs. A controlling group of scientists and academics, with unaccountable power over our lives, have too.

Science and scientists that question the new groupthink or fall outside the parameters of the GF approved research have little chance. Neither do we while Bill Gates remains omnipotent.

May 20, 2021 Posted by | Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

Total Tyranny: We’ll All Be Targeted Under the Government’s New Precrime Program

By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead | The Rutherford Institute | May 19, 2021

“There is now the capacity to make tyranny total in America.”― James Bamford

It never fails.

Just as we get a glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe, there might be a chance of crawling out of this totalitarian cesspool in which we’ve been mired, we get kicked down again.

In the same week that the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously declared that police cannot carry out warrantless home invasions in order to seize guns under the pretext of their “community caretaking” duties, the Biden Administration announced its plans for a “precrime” crime prevention agency.

Talk about taking one step forward and two steps back.

Precrime, straight out of the realm of dystopian science fiction movies such as Minority Report, aims to prevent crimes before they happen by combining widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, precognitive technology, and neighborhood and family snitch programs to enable police to capture would-be criminals before they can do any damage.

This particular precrime division will fall under the Department of Homeland Security, the agency notorious for militarizing the police and SWAT teams; spying on activists, dissidents and veterans; stockpiling ammunition; distributing license plate readers; contracting to build detention camps; tracking cell-phones with Stingray devices; carrying out military drills and lockdowns in American cities; using the TSA as an advance guard; conducting virtual strip searches with full-body scanners; carrying out soft target checkpoints; directing government workers to spy on Americans; conducting widespread spying networks using fusion centers; carrying out Constitution-free border control searches; funding city-wide surveillance cameras; and utilizing drones and other spybots.

The intent, of course, is for the government to be all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful in its preemptive efforts to combat domestic extremism.

Where we run into trouble is when the government gets overzealous and over-ambitious and overreaches.

This is how you turn a nation of citizens into snitches and suspects.

In the blink of an eye, ordinary Americans will find themselves labeled domestic extremists for engaging in lawful behavior that triggers the government’s precrime sensors.

Of course, it’s an elaborate setup: we’ll all be targets.

In such a suspect society, the burden of proof is reversed so that guilt is assumed and innocence must be proven.

It’s the American police state’s take on the dystopian terrors foreshadowed by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Phillip K. Dick all rolled up into one oppressive pre-crime and pre-thought crime package.

What’s more, the technocrats who run the surveillance state don’t even have to break a sweat while monitoring what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, how much you spend, whom you support, and with whom you communicate.

Computers now do the tedious work of trolling social media, the internet, text messages and phone calls for potentially anti-government remarks, all of which is carefully recorded, documented, and stored to be used against you someday at a time and place of the government’s choosing.

In this way, with the help of automated eyes and ears, a growing arsenal of high-tech software, hardware and techniques, government propaganda urging Americans to turn into spies and snitches, as well as social media and behavior sensing software, government agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports aimed at snaring potential enemies of the state.

It works the same in any regime.

As Professor Robert Gellately notes in his book Backing Hitler about the police state tactics used in Nazi Germany: “There were relatively few secret police, and most were just processing the information coming in. I had found a shocking fact. It wasn’t the secret police who were doing this wide-scale surveillance and hiding on every street corner. It was the ordinary German people who were informing on their neighbors.”

Here’s the thing as the Germans themselves quickly discovered: you won’t have to do anything illegal or challenge the government’s authority in order to be flagged as a suspicious character, labeled an enemy of the state and locked up like a dangerous criminal.

In fact, all you will need to do is use certain trigger words, surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, drive a car, stay at a hotel, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious to a neighbor, question government authority, or generally live in the United States.

The following activities are guaranteed to get you censored, surveilled, eventually placed on a government watch list, possibly detained and potentially killed.

Use harmless trigger words like cloud, pork and pirates. Use a cell phone. Drive a car. Attend a political rally. Express yourself on social media. Serve in the military. Disagree with a law enforcement official. Call in sick to work. Limp or stutter. Appear confused or nervous, fidget, whistle or smell bad. Allow yourself to be seen in public waving a toy gun or anything remotely resembling a gun, such as a water nozzle or a remote control or a walking cane, for instance. Stare at a police officer. Appear to be pro-gun, pro-freedom or anti-government. Attend a public school. Speak truth to power.

Long before Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden were being castigated for blowing the whistle on the government’s war crimes and the National Security Agency’s abuse of its surveillance powers, it was activists such as Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lennon who were being singled out for daring to speak truth to power. These men and others like them had their phone calls monitored and data files collected on their activities and associations. For a little while, at least, they became enemy number one in the eyes of the U.S. government.

Yet as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, you don’t even have to be a dissident to get flagged by the government for surveillance, censorship and detention.

All you really need to be is a citizen of the American police state.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president The Rutherford Institute. His books Battlefield America: The War on the American People and A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State are available at www.amazon.com. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

May 19, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Pentagon to surveil social media of US Service Members

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim the Net | May 19, 2021

The new US administration is reportedly planning to reverse course on a previous policy not to spy on members of its own military by monitoring political opinions they express on social media.

In the past, this type of surveillance was not used out of fear that it might infringe on service members’ First Amendment rights, but now that the Biden administration is making combating “domestic extremism” one of its main narratives, that is changing.

According to The Intercept, which said it had access to relevant internal Defense Department documents and spoke to a source with direct knowledge, a pilot program is in the works to continuously screen behavior on social media of the members of the military, looking for any concerning signs, in the context of opinions espousing domestic extremism.

According to the same source, the Pentagon plans to outsource this job to a private surveillance company – most likely Babel Street – and thus bypass the First (and Fourth) Amendment.

Babel Street is already selling controversial products to US law enforcement, who use its services as a method of circumventing government requirements, like warrants. Babel Street buys and sells massive amounts of phone location data, and some of the previous clients have been the Secret Service and US Special Operations Command.

The latest pilot program seems to be developed far from the eyes and the ears of Congress. Don Bacon, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said that so far they had heard nothing from the Department of Defense (DoD) “that would confirm this story.”

However, an email from the House Armed Services Committee sent later said it was their understanding that the DoD intends to use social media screening as an additional vetting tool, rather than one for ongoing surveillance.

“That said, Secretary Austin has been clear about his intentions to understand to what extent extremism exists in the force and its effect on good order and discipline. We look forward to hearing the results of the stand down and the Department’s plan to move forward,” the email said.

Meanwhile, neither Babel Street, nor Bishop Garrison, who is behind the project, have commented about it. Garrison is a senior adviser to the defense secretary and head of an extremism steering committee, who has drawn attention for what has been described as a purge of Trump supporters from the military. In 2008, he is said to have authored an opinion piece that referred to free speech as “digital black plague.”

May 19, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | | Leave a comment

Facebook hints its “Oversight Board” could expand to other social platforms

Facebook has its sights set on more censorship domination

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim the Net | May 19, 2021

Facebook is seen as trying to promote the self-regulating model known as its Oversight Board as a success story that could become a standard for other similar platforms.

There were indications of an ambition to turn the Oversight Board into a bigger, more widely-encompassing regulatory body in a letter CEO Mark Zuckerberg penned in 2019, announcing the Board and saying that while it would initially deal with a small number of contentious cases, Facebook hoped it would in time expand to include “more companies across the industry as well.”

More recently, discussing Facebook’s decision to ban President Trump, VP of Global Affairs Nick Clegg did not disagree with his boss’s initial sentiments around the Oversight Board.

“Who knows, maybe in the future it could either be the germ of an idea that is then taken up in statutory regulation or it could be something that could operate for more companies than just for Facebook,” Clegg said.

One of the members of the board, Rachel Wolbers, said the body hopes to do such good work that “other companies might want our help.”

Officially, the Board has commented to say that while the model of “online governance” they are testing here might prove useful to others, their focus is currently on Facebook and Instagram.

And while the signs are there that Facebook would like to at least set the tone and become a leader in the censorship and moderation “standard” for social media – or just toot its own horn as doing this highly controversial work well – those other companies, its competitors, have so far remained silent, and that includes YouTube, Twitter, and Reddit.

One reason some observers give for this is that they “like their autonomy and have different rules” – but there is also the issue of how such an idea might be brought to life technically, given the different platforms and appeals systems currently in place.

There are examples of entire industries self-regulating to introduce agreed upon rules, like the gaming industry. But those who see the idea of the Oversight Board as a far fetched role model for others say that its own existence is “still controversial.”

May 19, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Steven Crowder gives YouTube legal notice, intends to seek injunction against deplatforming

By Tom Parker | Reclaim the Net | May 17, 2021

Comedian Steven Crowder has announced that last Thursday (May 14, 2021), his company, Louder with Crowder LLC, gave a legal notice to YouTube announcing its intent to file a lawsuit and seek an injunction to stop YouTube deplatforming his channel.

Crowder has one of the most popular conservative channels on YouTube with more than five million subscribers. However, over the last few months, YouTube has removed his videos, demonetized his channel, and most recently, suspended him from uploading or live streaming for two weeks.

“Once we hit the new year and a new president ascended, the landscape of social media shifted in favor of the left,” Louder with Crowder’s editor at large, Courtney Kirchoff, noted in a blog post announcing the legal action against YouTube. “Democrats took control of the presidency and now have control of both houses of Congress. As such, YouTube and other Big Tech platforms feel emboldened, with very few lawmakers standing in their way.”

In a video about the legal action they plan to take against YouTube, Crowder and his lawyer Bill Richmond discussed how the channel is now just one strike away from being deleted after receiving a warning strike and two hard strikes this year.

The warning strike was issued on a coronavirus lockdown anniversary video where someone in the studio said “young children are more likely to die of the flu than COVID.”

The statement reflects Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) statistics but YouTube deemed the video to be in violation of its “medical misinformation” policy.

“It is tantamount to saying that no conservatives or people who cite the CDC and believe that relevant information like young children have a different immune response to COVID than the standard flu, and it is significantly less lethal to young people but more lethal to old people, which we’ve always talked about, YouTube is saying anyone with that point of view is not welcome on this channel, on this platform, I guess,” Crowder said when discussing this warning strike.

The first hard strike was issued on a March 29 video where Crowder provided examples of a vote being cast from a fake address in Nevada in 2020. YouTube deemed this to be “content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential election.”

Crowder said he didn’t make any such claims and described this first strike as “investigative journalism being a violation of the policy if someone doesn’t like it.”

The second hard strike was issued on a May 10 video where Crowder described the Columbus police shooting of Ma’Khia Bryant as “an example of a justified police shooting” that was “necessary to save the life of someone who is in the process of being stabbed.”

According to YouTube, this video violated its rules around “content reveling in or mocking the death or serious injury of an identifiable individual.”

Crowder noted that Big Tech platforms allowed posts that were favorable to Bryant and critical of the police officer to remain up. But when he challenged the criticism of the police officer and argued that the shooting was justified because she had a knife in her hand and was about to swing at another girl, his video was removed and he was suspended.

“That means that the lie is allowed and the truth is not because the truth is simply from a point of view which is impermissible,” Crowder said.

“It’s an incredible indictment of how YouTube enforces its policies and, and really the reason why we’ve had to give the notice, serve the notice of moving for an injunction, to prevent the deplatforming,” Richmond added.

Richmond continued by discussing how he and Crowder’s team are concerned about YouTube actively looking for violations that aren’t actually violations and explained that this is why they’ve moved forward with this injunctive notice which will request immediate relief to protect the existence of Crowder’s YouTube channel.

“This is something that concerns every person who values any type of democracy,” Richmond added. “What they’re saying is ‘these ideas are so dangerous that we can’t address them and rebut them, we can’t criticize them, we just have to extinguish the opinions entirely, we have to eradicate these opinions from the planet because we can’t deal with them.’ But the reality when everyone looks at this is, this is a comedy show that takes on important issues. Commentary, politics, issues that are facing everyone in every part of the nation in the world. And we have to be able to talk about them.”

May 18, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

YouTube restrictions on medical information are a public health concern

By PeterYim | TrialSiteNews | May 16, 2021

Recently, the American Journal of Therapeutics reported that there was strong evidence that a treatment for COVID-19 had been found:

“Meta-analyses based on 18 randomized controlled treatment trials of ivermectin in COVID-19 have found large, statistically significant reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance.”

The American Journal of Epidemiology also reported on strong evidence of a different treatment for COVID-19:

“Five studies, including 2 controlled clinical trials (of hydroxychloroquine), have demonstrated significant major outpatient treatment efficacy.”

What these reports have in common is that YouTube explicitly forbids these therapies to be discussed on its platform. It’s policy states:

“Don’t post content on YouTube if it includes ….. Claims that Ivermectin or Hydroxychloroquine are effective treatments for COVID-19”

Furthermore, YouTube characterizes any information that dissents from the view of the “local health authorities” or the World Health Organization as “misinformation”:

“YouTube doesn’t allow content that spreads medical misinformation that contradicts local health authorities’ or the World Health Organization’s (WHO) medical information about COVID-19.”

Under YouTube policy, the peer-review medical literature has lost its place as the source of medical information to governmental and para-governmental organizations. In the US, the relevant organizations are the FDA and the NIH. The FDA currently recommends against the use of Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine in COVID-19 except in clinical trials.

The FDA does not, however, offer any evidence to support this recommendation. In fact, the FDA clarifies:

“The FDA has not reviewed data to support use of ivermectin in COVID-19 patients to treat or to prevent COVID-19 …”

Nor does the FDA claim that any formal procedure was followed. It doesn’t even identify the individual or individuals who developed that recommendation.

The case of the NIH recommendation on Ivermectin is even more troubling. The NIH formally does not recommend for or against the use of Ivermectin but does make it clear that there are “insufficient data” to make that recommendation. The NIH names the medical experts who form the Panel and explains the procedures for developing the COVID-19 recommendations. Then, apparently, the NIH deceptively bypassed both in arriving at its recommendation.

Our reporting on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines has found that the NIH cannot state whether a vote was held to endorse the latest recommendation on Ivermectin. The NIH even decided to fight a complaint in federal court simply to avoid answering that question. This reporting shows that the NIH cannot be trusted.

Aside from the NIH’s deceptive ivermectin recommendation, the American public is generally skeptical of public health authorities. As reported earlier, a survey was recently conducted by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health on the public’s views of the US public health authorities. The top line finding was:

“The public lacks the high level of trust in key public health institutions necessary to address today’s and future challenges.”

Why then is YouTube adhering so uncritically to the views of “local health authorities”? In so doing, it is obstructing patients and health care providers from accessing the best medical information.

May 16, 2021 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

Israel’s War on Truth-Telling Media and Journalists

By Stephen Lendman | May 16, 2021

Time and again, truth-telling journalism as it should be is a casualty of all things war and related violence.

Big Lies, mass deception, and censorship are weapons of war by other means — in support of the official falsified narrative.

In their book titled “Guardians of Power,” David Edwards and David Cromwell explained why today’s media are in crisis — free and open societies at risk.

It’s because press prostitution substitutes fiction for fact — notably in the US, other Western countries and Israel.

Their state-approved sanitized reports stick exclusively to the official falsified narrative in support of wealth, power and privilege over full and accurate reporting.

In the US especially, news consumers are fed a daily diet of managed news misinformation, disinformation, junk food news and infotainment — at all times.

Notably in times of war, their reports regurgitate state-supplied talking points.

Whatever diverges from the official falsified narrative is filtered out and suppressed.

Adopted unanimously by Security Council members in December 2006, SC Res. 1738 affirms protection for civilians and journalists in war theaters — calling their safety and security “urgent and important.”

Condemning intentional attacks on fourth estate members, the resolution demands accountability for responsible parties.

At all times, especially at times of war and under occupation, civilians are protected persons. So are journalists — under international law.

Throughout at least most of its history, Israel waged war on truth-telling Palestinian journalists.

They’re at risk of arrest, prosecution, imprisonment, and/or assassination.

According to the Committee to Support Palestinian Journalists, “(t)he Israeli occupation tries to muzzle the Palestinian journalists’ mouths and prevent them from unmasking its barbaric practices in the occupied Palestinian territories to the international media.”

Palestinian journalists covering Israeli violence against legitimate protesters risk serious injury or death.

Anyone wearing a flak jacket labeled press is vulnerable, their unprotected areas vulnerable to Israeli sniper attacks by live fire — including use of exploding dum dum bullets able to leave fist-sized existing wounds in individuals struck.

They’re designed to inflict disabling damage to internal organs or death — even though banned by the 1899 Hague Convention.

Since IDF terror-bombing and shelling of Gaza began on May 10, silencing truth-telling media has been a prioritized Netanyahu regime aim.

The same objective is sought in all Israeli preemptive wars, as well as at all other times on whatever conflicts with official falsified Israeli talking points.

On May 15 in Gaza, Israeli terror-bombing turned the 11-story Al-Jalaa building to smoldering rubble — its occupants given one hour to vacate the premises.

It’s unknown so far if some remained inside and perished.

Along with residences of Gazan families, the building housed international media offices.

According to DW News, AP News, AFP, Al Jazeera, other international media operations, and local Palestinian news agencies had offices in the building.

The IDF defied reality by falsely claiming that the building included Hamas “military assets (sic),” adding:

“(O)ffices of civilian media outlets (were) use(d) (by Hamas) as human shields (sic).”

According to AP News, the Netanyahu regime and IDF “did not provide evidence for the claim” — because there is none.

On its Saturday newscast, senior Al Jazeera (AJ) political analyst Marwan Bishara minced no words in debunking the thinly veiled IDF Big Lie.

Gaza-based AJ journalist Al Kahlout said the following in response to Israel’s destruction of the Al-Jalaa building with three missiles:

“(N)o one can understand the feeling of the people whose homes have been destroyed by such kind of air attacks,” adding:

“It’s really difficult to wake up one day and then you realize that your office is not there with all the career experiences, memories that you’ve had.”

Separately on Saturday, IDF terror-bombing destroyed a Gaza City area refugee camp three-story residence, massacring eight children and two women.

The above buildings had no military significance. Israel defied reality by claiming otherwise.

In response to its destruction of Gaza’s Al Jalaa building, AP News president and CEO Gary Pruitt said the following:

“The world will know less about what is happening in Gaza because of what happened today.”

“We are shocked and horrified that the Israeli military would target and destroy the building housing AP’s bureau and other news organizations in Gaza.”

“This is an incredibly disturbing development. We narrowly avoided a terrible loss of life.”

Separately, AP reported:

“For 15 years, the AP’s top-floor office and roof terrace were a prime location for covering Israel’s conflicts with Gaza.”

Now it’s gone, along with scores of massacred Gazans, including women and children.

NY-based Committee to Protect Journalists’ executive director Joel Simon said the following:

“This latest attack on a building long known by Israel to house international media raises the specter that the IDF is deliberately targeting media facilities in order to disrupt coverage of the human suffering in Gaza.”

Indeed so!!

Silencing coverage of its high crimes of war, against humanity, and other human rights abuses is longstanding Israeli policy — in flagrant breach of international law.

On May 10, the Palestinian Center for Development and Media Freedoms (MADA) reported the following:

It “condemn(ed) escalating attacks of the occupation forces against journalists and media workers in Palestine…”

MADA noted what’s going on in “occupied…Jerusalem…aim(s) (to) block the transmission of the violations to the world.”

“This was accompanied by widespread violations of freedom of expression committed by social media companies to serve the goal of the occupation state by obscuring the attacks implemented by its soldiers and settlers.”

In early May alone, “Israeli attacks against journalists during their field coverage of events, as the occupation army targeted a number of journalists while they were” reporting on what’s going on.

At least “10 (Palestinian) journalists” were targeted and “injured.”

“(I)mpunity of the Israeli occupation forces over the years for their almost daily crimes and violations of media freedoms in Palestine, including the killing of more than 40 journalists during the past two decades, is what encourage them to continue committing more crimes and violations, which requires serious action to prosecute the perpetrators of these crimes, as the only way to reduce it.”

Facebook, Twitter, and other “social media companies… deliberately blocked and suspended the accounts of many Palestinian citizens, including many journalists…”

MADA called their action “a severe violation against freedom of expression (in cahoots with) the occupation state (by) blocking facts and suppressing media freedoms and freedom of expression.”

At the same time, they freely allow hostile-to-truth-telling Western and Israeli propaganda on their “platforms.”

May 16, 2021 Posted by | Book Review, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Facebook deletes “I trust my immune system” profile photo frames under “misinformation” policy

By Christina Maas | Reclaim the Net | May 16, 2021

Facebook has a lengthy policy on what people are allowed to talk about in relation to COVID vaccines. However, as of the end of last week, the platform continued to host “pro-immune system” profile picture frames until it was contacted by CNBC News.

An analysis by CNBC News found out that there are dozens of profile picture frames promoting pro-immune system opinions. Some are using statements such as “I TRUST MY IMMUNE SYSTEM! #NOTASHOT.” Others didn’t mention the word vaccine, such as “I HAVE AN IMMUNE SYSTEM! #MedicalFreedom.”

Facebook has now deleted all of these frames.

A spokesperson for Facebook told CNBC that such frames did actually violate its policies, adding that the platform would remove frames with vaccine skeptic messages. In its policy on anti-vaccine misinformation, the platform prohibits, “promoting alternative treatments or natural immunity, celebrating those who refuse vaccination, and encouraging vaccine refusals without citing medical rationales or guidance,” and “claims that something other than COVID-19 vaccine can vaccinate you against “COVID-19.”

The spokesperson also noted that pro-vaccine frames are allowed and are trending on the platform.

“In countries where vaccines are available to most of the population, like the US and the UK, we ramped up our efforts to show people when their friends and neighbors share their support for vaccines through profile frames and stickers,” Facebook wrote in a blog post earlier this week.

May 16, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Biden revokes Trump’s executive order against Big Tech censorship

By Didi Rancovic | Reclaim the Net | May 15, 2021

Four of President Donald Trump’s executive orders have been quietly reversed by the new Biden administration on Friday.

The news was announced by the White House on late Friday and those media outlets who attempted to get any further comment and clarification were out of luck at the time, as the White House remained silent.

One of the four executive orders the former president had signed was called, Preventing Online Censorship.

The executive order came along – and perhaps “prophetically” – before the unprecedented wave of online censorship in the wake of the November 2020 US elections – and the political and physical turmoil during the long weeks the US was trying to count that vote, that culminated in the Capitol Hill protests in early January – but perhaps far more reaching decision by Twitter to ban the account of a sitting president.

The order the Biden administration has now annulled originates in May 2020, when several of Trump’s tweets got labeled as “misleading.”

The executive order at the time accused Twitter of “now” selectively slapping warning labels (meant to undermine authenticity, and ease of access to these tweets) as a reflection of the social media company’s own political bias.

The executive order also mentioned Twitter at the same time turning a blind eye to perpetrators of what many at this time already saw as a Russian collusion hoax, like Adam Schiff. His tweets never got flagged for political bias, the order read.

The order meant that the commerce secretary was to submit a petition to the Federal Communications Commission over social media companies’ practices, while the U.S. attorney general was asked to consider enforcing anti-censorship states laws.

According to the EFF, Biden’s move to revoke the order of his predecessor on this issue came after a letter from Rock The Vote, Voto Latino, Common Cause, Free Press, Decoding Democracy, and the Center for Democracy & Technology, who said the order was “a drastic assault on free speech designed to punish online platforms that fact-checked President Trump.”

These organizations also filed lawsuits against the Trump executive order – a case that now seems to be resolved with the Biden administration’s move.

May 15, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | | Leave a comment

Israel ‘deliberately targeting’ Palestinian journalists, media body says

MEMO | May 14, 2021

Israeli occupation forces “deliberately targeted Palestinian journalists who cover attacks and violations against Jerusalem and worshipers in the courtyards of Al-Aqsa Mosque”, the Coalition For Women In Journalism (CFWIJ) has warned.

At least 10 journalists, two of whom were women, were injured during the incidents.

In a statement the CFWIJ said this it “is utterly dismayed by the deliberate and vicious attacks against journalists.”

During the past few days, many violations were committed against the press, with them being prevented from covering events in the occupied city of Jerusalem and the Sheikh Jarrah area.

Palestine reporter Liwa Abu Armila suffered from tear gas inhalation while following the raids while journalist Fatima Al-Bakri was also physically assaulted by the Israeli occupation forces.

On 8 May occupation forces attacked journalists by spraying skunk water at them to damage their equipment, reporter Maysa Abu Ghazaleh was among them.

The CFWIJ continued: “We applaud the brave journalists who are covering the incidents in the field despite the large scale of the Israeli attacks. However, we demand the Israel state to end these devastating attacks against Palestinians. Journalists must report in a free and safe environment and the security forces must respond to provide it to them.”

May 14, 2021 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Facebook deletes Ohio group that supports legal exemptions to COVID vaccine mandates

By Tom Parker | Reclaim the Net | May 13, 2021

The Facebook group for Ohio Advocates for Medical Freedom (OAMF), a non-profit that supports legislation that would give people exemptions to vaccine mandates, has been banned from Facebook.

The group had 40,000 members and its President, Stephanie Stock said that Facebook banned the group for sharing mainstream news articles.

OAMF describes itself as an advocate for “your right to choose or refuse any medical treatment or procedure.”

Recently, OAMF has been supporting House Bill 248, the Vaccine Choice & Anti-Discrimination Act. The bill’s sponsor, State Rep. Jennifer Gross, describes it as “legislation that protects individuals who choose not to be vaccinated from discrimination due to vaccine status.”

The removal of this group follows Facebook deleting a 120,000-member group where people shared stories of alleged adverse vaccine reactions last month.

Facebook’s current rules prohibit a wide range of vaccine-related posts including posts claiming vaccines are ineffective, posts claiming vaccines cause blood clots, and posts claiming vaccines change people’s DNA (something Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told his staff during an internal July 2020 meeting).

Facebook also labels any posts discussing the vaccine with “credible information about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines from the World Health Organization.”

The tech giant’s increased censorship and editorialization of posts about vaccines follows pressure from Democratic Party Senators and State Attorneys General who have pushed the company to “address” prominent vaccine skeptics and kill vaccine skepticism.

Before this Facebook censorship, OAMF had its video of legislative testimony before the Ohio senate removed by YouTube in February. The video featured testimony in support of a bill that would allow state lawmakers to vote against the governor’s coronavirus lockdowns but was removed by YouTube for violating its “coronavirus misinformation” policies.

May 13, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

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