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The Media Slowly Backpedals

By Mark Oshinskie | Dispatches from a Scamdemic | May 9, 2024

Early in my legal career, I handled many one-day trials. Late one afternoon, I returned to my office. Still wearing my suit and carrying my briefcase, I passed the open office door of a senior colleague named Ben. He called out to me, “How’d you do today?”

I stood in his doorway and replied, “Not good. I couldn’t get their witness to admit what I wanted him to.”

Ben smiled and said, “You’ve watched too much TV. You expect the witness to break down on the stand and admit everything, as grim music plays in the background. That won’t happen. You have to treat every adverse witness as someone who starts with a handful of credibility chips. You let him say whatever he wants and make himself look dishonest saying it. Ideally, he trades those chips in, one-by-one, and leaves the stand without any chips in his hand.”

This made sense. Thereafter, I adjusted my expectations and structured my questions accordingly.

—

Media outlets and writers who fomented Coronamania have, over the past two years or so, been retreating slowly from the fear and loathing they began brewing up in March, 2020. They’ve calculated that a Covid-weary, distractable public won’t remember most of what they said earlier in the Scamdemic.

Last Friday, in two, paired articles, New York Times writers Apoorva Mandavilli and David Leonhardt continue this strategically slow retreat from the Covid lies they’ve sponsored. For the first time, they acknowledge that maybe the shots they’ve praised have caused a few of what jab-o-philic readers will dismiss as minor injuries.

As he begins his summary of Mandavilli’s theme, Leonhardt admits that the notion that vaxx injuries occurred makes him “uncomfortable.” He’s not expressing discomfort about the injuries themselves. He’s concerned that the vaxx critics might be proven correct.

Why would a self-described “independent journalist” be made uncomfortable by facts? What’s so repugnant about simply calling balls and strikes? Why does Leonhardt have a rooting interest? What’s so hard about admitting he’s been wrong, not just about the shots, but about all of the Covid anxiety he and his employer have incited throughout the past three-plus years?

Bear this in mind: In early 2021, Leonhardt went on a 1,600-mile road trip to get injected as early as he could. David, kinda neurotic and def not climate friendly.

Admitting error—or outright complicity with the Scam—during the Covid overreaction would entail losses of face and credibility. After all the harm the media has done, those consequences would be just and proper.

To avoid this result, the media and bureaucrats are backpedaling slowly to try to change their views without too many people noticing. In so doing, they’re very belatedly adopting the views of those, like me, who from Day 1, called out the hysteria driving, and the downsides to, the Covid overreaction.

But while they’ve incrementally changed parts of their message, they hold tightly to the central, false narrative that Covid was a terrible disease that indiscriminately killed millions. The Covophobes continue to falsely credit the Covid injections for “saving millions of lives” and “preventing untold misery.”

Times readers are a skewed, pro-jab sample. Thus, about half of the 1000+ commenters adopt Mandavilli’s and Leonhardt’s mythology that, even if the shots injured people, they were a net positive in a world facing a universally vicious killer. Relying on that false premise, these columnists and the commenters assert that no medical intervention is risk-free and that a few metaphorical eggs were inevitably broken while making the mass vaccination omelet. In their view, such injuries are a cost of doing business.

To begin with, where was such risk/reward analysis when the lockdowns and school closures were being put in place?

Moreover, The Times writers and most pro-jab commenters pretentiously and inappropriately claim the mantle of “Science.” To many, modern medicine is a religion and “vaccines” are a sacrament. Their pro-vaxx faith is unshakable. But these ostensible Science devotees unreasonably overlooked Covid’s clearest empirical trend: SARS-CoV-2 did not threaten healthy, non-old people. Therefore, neither non-pharmaceutical interventions (“NPIs”) nor shots should have been imposed upon those not at risk. The NPI and shot backers weren’t Scientists. They were Pseudo-Scientists.

The Times’s stubborn, apocalyptic Covid narrative and pro-vaxx message has never squared with what I’ve seen with my own eyes. After four years in Covid Ground Zero, high-density New Jersey, and despite having a large social sphere, I still directly know no one who has died from this virus. I indirectly know of only five—relatives of acquaintances—said to have been killed by it. Each ostensible viral victim fits the profile that’s been clear since February, 2020: very old and unhealthy, dying with, not from, symptoms common to all respiratory virus infections, following a very unreliable diagnostic test.

Countering the intransigent shot backers, hundreds of commenters to the Mandavilli piece describe non-lethal injuries they sustained shortly after injecting. But both articles, and many commenters to the Mandavilli article, emphasize that “correlation isn’t causation.”

The persuasiveness of correlation is typically questioned only when one would viscerally prefer not to apply Occam’s Razor and adopt the most straightforward explanation for symptoms that began shortly after injection. I suspect that, in their personal dealings, those who say “correlation isn’t causation” seldom believe in coincidences.

I directly know six people who’ve had significant health setbacks shortly after taking the shots, including one death. These seem like too many coincidences. Further, what would provide convincing proof of vaxx injury causation? Autopsies are, perhaps strategically, rare. Having done litigation, I know experts will always disagree about causation if they’re paid well enough. And ultimately, doesn’t the cited “millions saved” study assume that correlation is causation?

While the peremptory assertions that the shots saved millions of lives are very questionable and poorly supported, many who read these statements will cite these as gospel because “millions” is a memorable, albeit speculative and squishy figure, and because, well, The New York Times said so!

While the columnists use this phony stat to justify mass vaccination, only one in five-thousand of those infected—nearly all of them very old and/or very sick or killed iatrogenically—had died “of Covid” before VaxxFest began. The vast majority of these deceased were likely to die soon, virus or no.

Thus, how can one say that the shots saved millions of lives? For how long were they saved? And did those who conducted the cited “millions of deaths” study believe they’d get future—professional lifeblood—grants if they didn’t find that the shots saved millions of lives?

Further, Mandavilli and Leonhardt never acknowledge—and may not even know of— the statistical sleight of hand that’s been used throughout by the jab pushers. I’ve described these tricks in prior posts. For example, there was “healthy vaccinee bias:” those who administered the shots strategically declined to inject those who were so frail that the shots’ systemic shock might kill them. And those who injected weren’t counted as “vaxxed” until 42 days after their first shot. As the shots initially suppress immunity and disrupt bodies, one should expect the shots to increase deaths in the weeks after the shot regimen begins. Injectees who died within this initial 42 days were falsely categorized as “unvaxxed.”

FWIW, my wife and I and all other non-vaxxers I know have predictably been fine. The shots didn’t save any of our lives or keep us out of the hospital. Our immune systems did. “The Virus’s” lethality was badly overhyped.

More medical intervention doesn’t necessarily improve health. To the contrary, and especially regarding the shots, less is often more.

While Mandavilli and others blame “vitriolic” anti-vaxxers for discouraging vaxx and booster uptake, vaxx failure itself more strongly discouraged injections than did anything any anti-vaxxer said. The government and media repeatedly touted the shots as “safe and effective” and guaranteed that they would “stop infection and spread.” Montages of these clips are likely still on the Net. Yet, countless injectees—including all injectees whom I know—have gotten sick, several times each.

Consequently, jabbers felt lied to. Based on such directly observable data of vaxx failure and experiencing or seeing vaxx injuries, and without reading studies or conducting courtroom trials, the public made its own observations and rendered its negative verdict about vaxx efficacy and safety by declining vaxx “boosters.” Besides, if anti-vaxxers held such sway over public opinion that they could stop people from taking boosters, their initial warnings would have stopped people from taking the initial shots.

Importantly, and by extension, as we skeptics were right about the shots, we were also right when we criticized the lockdowns, school closures, masks and tests that have been articles of Coronamanic faith. A recent CDC study so has so concluded.

Many of NPI and shot backers have taken refuge in “We-Couldn’t-Have-Known-ism.” But millions, including me, did know, based on widely available information, that the NPIs and shots were always bad ideas. And as we knew that only the old and ill were at risk and that the NPIs would cause great harm, those who are very belatedly admitting that “mistakes were made” not only also could have known; they should have known. Their failure to know reveals either a willful, opportunistic, tribalistic disregard of plainly observable information or a lack of intelligence.

Throughout the Scamdemic, Mandavilli and Leonhardt have belatedly, incrementally changed their disproven views. Their untenable alternative was to persist with a plainly failed narrative and trade in their credibility chips, issue-by-issue. But they’re doing so slowly to evade responsibility for being wrong when it mattered.

For example, for two years, Mandavilli strongly supported keeping schoolkids home. Similarly, 41 months after the Scamdemic began, Leonhardt quoted, with apparent surprise, an “expert” who says that Covid deaths correlate closely with old age. By the time they made these concessions, most of the public already knew that the columnists’ notions were wrong to begin with.

It also took Leonhardt 41 months to admit that Covid deaths were significantly overcounted. But, as when drivers who exhale a .25% blood alcohol level say they “only had a couple of beers,” neither Leonhardt nor the rest of the Covid-crazed will admit how much these numbers were strategically inflated.

Leonhardt had also backed Paxlovid, which has long since been widely devalued.

And Leonhardt very belatedly admitted that infection confers immunity: first to individuals, then to the group. By so conceding, he was merely validating a basic epidemiological principle—herd immunity—that was widely accepted before March, 2020 but, from 2020-22, was used to vilify those who stated it.

Further, while Leonhardt and Mandavilli continue to sell the phony “Pandemic of the Unvaccinated” narrative, far more vaxxed, than unvaxxed people have died with Covid.

Conspicuously, Mandavilli and Leonhardt also fail to mention that hundreds of thousands have suffered apparent vaxx injuries or deaths from heart attacks, strokes or cancers and that overall deaths have increased in highly vaxxed nations. Thus, when one considers all causes of death, the shots seem to have caused a net loss, not gain, in life span.

The Times writers ignore the tens of thousands of American post-vaxx deaths listed in the user-unfriendly, and therefore underused, VAERS database and the excess death increases in the most highly vaxxed nations in 2021-22. Unlike the vaxx injured, who are still alive, dead vaccinees tell no tales. Nor do most of their survivors because, as with families who’ve lost a young man in a war, those left to mourn don’t want to believe that their beloved has died avoidably or in vain. The reluctance to attribute deaths to the shots is particularly acute if the bereaved encouraged the decedent to inject.

While Mandavilli and Leonhardt now begrudgingly report that the shots may not, despite all of the ads and bureaucratic assurances, have been so safe after all, conceding that the shots have killed people is a bridge too far. At least for now.

But the Overton Window has been opened. Thus, the media backpedaling will continue, albeit slowly. Vaxx injuries and NPI-induced damage are not emerging trends. They’re established trends that deserve much more coverage than they’ve received. The lockdown/mask/test/vaxx supporters have been thoroughly wrong throughout. They have no credibility chips left.

I derive little satisfaction from watching their pro-vaxx/NPI case crumble. Firstly, unlike in a courtroom, where judges and juries are, at least in theory, focused on what witnesses say, most peoples’ attention is too scattered to notice the Covid fearmongers’ reversals. The media’s retreat has occurred very slowly. As the backtracking fearmongers have cynically calculated, the public’s Covid fatigue will blunt anti-media anger.

Secondly, these media’s concessions come far too late to have much practical benefit. Team Mania’s social, economic and political objectives were accomplished in 2020-22. Sadly, this damage is permanent.

Nonetheless, in order to discourage additional public health, political and economic chicanery and oppression, we must continue to say what’s true: the Scamdemic was a massive, opportunistic overreaction that most people were too naive to apprehend.

Truth is intrinsically valuable. Regardless of outcome, telling the truth is our obligation to posterity.

May 21, 2024 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

Gideon Falter, Campaign Against Antisemitism instruments of the Zionist entity

By David Miller | Al Mayadeen | May 12, 2024

Gideon Falter had his face plastered all over the British mainstream media after he tried to provoke a confrontation with thousands of anti-genocide protestors in central London on April 13.

A specially edited video produced by his organisation the Campaign for Antisemitism, was released to the media 5 days after the march.

It caused a deluge of headlines on the “shocking moment” police threatened to arrest Falter “simply” for being “quite openly Jewish”. This narrative dominated all major news outlets for some five days, until Sky News published a much longer video, lasting 13 minutes, which showed the encounter in context. This started to change the story.  The BBC Breakfast programme interviewed a former Metropolitan Police Chief, Superintendent Dal Babu, who stated, “I have watched the thirteen-minute clip that’s on @SkyNews and it’s a totally different encounter to the one Gideon Falter has reported… The narrative that has been pushed is not accurate”. He also said, “Personally, if I was policing that march, I would have been inclined to have arrested [Falter] for assault on a police officer and breach of the peace.”

In the Sky News footage, the activist insisted he was only trying to cross the road down which the demonstration was passing, but this is disputed by a police officer in the new footage, who said Mr. Falter had deliberately walked head-on into the crowd and accused him of being “disingenuous” and seeking to “antagonise” the marchers.

Then it emerged that one of the people accompanying Falter, who looked like his security detail, had been co-ordinating security for the visit of the Israeli President Isaac Herzog to December last year. It turned out that he worked for SQR Group. His name was Vicentiu Chiculita. Other security personnel, presumably from the firm, around five of them, can be seen in various video clips from that day. They make clear that Falter was simply lying in his interactions with the police.

The firm also happens to be run by two ex-Mossad officers, Avi Navama and Shai Slagter. They even advertise themselves (in the Zionist JC) as former Mossad. Navama may well have been the Mossad station chief in the London Embassy, given the description given of him in the JC as a “security attache” who “specialised in counter-terrorism operations.”

The picture of an ordinary Jewish man wandering the streets of London after attending Synagogue, only to run into an anti-genocide march, had by this stage, been totally discredited. Instead what was seen was a Zionist provocateur with a Mossad-connected security team deliberately trying to provoke trouble so that the victimology of false antisemitism allegations could be employed.

What is the Campaign Against Antisemitism?

The Campaign Against Antisemitism was formed 10 years ago as a means to divert attention from the slaughter in Gaza launched by the Zionist entity in early July of 2014.

Its first action was to propose a boycott of the Tricycle Theatre for refusing to accept sponsorship from the embassy of “Israel”. This manifestly had nothing to do with so-called “antisemitism”.

The modus operandi for the CAA can been seen from these early actions. A  deliberate refusal to distinguish racism against the Jews from legitimate criticism of the Zionist entity.

The CEO, Gideon Falter, already had form before joining the CAA. Back in 2009, he was instrumental in convicting a Foreign Office diplomat of racially aggravated harassment for allegedly denouncing Jews while watching TV reports of Israeli atrocities in Gaza.

The trouble was, as Laxton showed at his appeal, there was no evidence he had ever mentioned Jews – he had instead denounced “Israelis”.  Falter had given a false account of the incident.

The CAA now has a serial record of making false and vexatious claims, not least against the Labour Party and against large numbers of Muslim professionals. One of its staff famously celebrated that they “killed the beast” when Jeremy Corbyn was forced out of the position of the leader of the Labour Party.

It is difficult to judge who is behind the CAA, since it has a special dispensation from the Charity Commission and Companies House not to name its trustees or directors.

But we do know that Falter is a director of three charities associated with the UK branch of the Jewish National Fund, the land theft and ethnic cleansing agency based in Jerusalem. It is one of the four Israeli “national institutions” that comprise the leadership of the global Zionist movement.

The JNF in the UK has recently been rocked by the resignation of Gary Mond in April 2023 from three of its charities, after he referred to “all civilisation” being “at war with Islam”. This happened just after Samuel Hayek, chair of the UK Jewish National Fund, promoted the far-right great replacement theory. Hayek remains in post at the JNF and as director of more than ten of its associated charities/companies, despite living in the settler colony.

It’s no surprise, therefore, that the CAA has also pushed Islamophobia, attempting to smear British Muslims as “antisemitic”.

Close examination of the financial reports of the JNF and CAA shows that Falter is one of the trustees of the CAA, and that the JNF is a major funder of the group. In fact, the JNF appears to restrict some of the money it donates so that it has to be used to fund Falter’s salary, a clearly problematic conflict of interest.

Other sources of funding are hard to find, but we can say that a little-known charity called the Anglo-Jewish Association (AJA) made a £5,000 donation to the CAA when the Equality and Human Rights Commission was investigating alleged anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. The Deputy President of the AJA at the time was the husband of the CEO of the EHRC, who was for some time in charge of the investigation.

Another ‘Jewish’ foundation called Natan also funded CAA. Natan was at that point chaired by Tony Felzen, a strong supporter and donor to the so-called “Friends of the Israel Defense Forces”.

A more recent and major funder of the CAA is an obscure British charity, called the David and Ruth Lewis Family Charitable Trust, gave more than £400,000 between 2019 and 2023. The trust is associated with the Zionist Lewish family, which owns the River Island clothing chain, and which gives to a range of other extreme Zionist groups, including the UK Friends of the Association for the Wellbeing of Israel’s Soldiers, which funds the Israeli military and several groups involved in settlements illegal under international law such as Jewish National Fund (£135,000), Jerusalem Foundation (£632,131) and Aish Ha Torah UK Limited (£102,000).  It has funded a wide range of Zionist lobby groups (details here) as well as the Islamophobic think tank Policy Exchange.

The CAA is a covert instrument of the foreign policy objectives of the illegitimate and genocidal Zionist regime. It should be shut down.

May 12, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , | Leave a comment

CUOMO, MAINSTREAM REVERSE COURSE ON VACCINE INJURY

The Highwire with Del Bigtree | May 9, 2024

In a shocking turn, mainstream voices who censored and suppressed conversation around vaccine injury have reversed course, even calling for a “9/11-style tribunal.” Yet they’re “limited hangout” falls short of full accountability or vindication for the injured. Del has a message for Chris Cuomo.

May 11, 2024 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

IS A CLIMATE LOCKDOWN ON THE HORIZON?

The Highwire with Del Bigtree | May 2, 2024

A recent article by the LA Times editorial board claims that California is experiencing record high temperatures. Jefferey Jaxen does a fact check on their claims. As President Joe Biden mulls the idea of declaring a climate emergency, we look into the potential powers that could be gained from this move. Will we have a climate lockdown on our horizon?

May 6, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Western Media Spread Fake Report About Use of N. Korean Missile in Kharkov

Sputnik – 30.04.2024

Western media outlets are disseminating a fake report claiming that Russia used a North Korean -made missile to strike a target in Kharkov, a source at the United Nations told Sputnik on Monday.

Earlier in the day, Reuters reported that some three experts allegedly provided a report to the UN Security Council Sanctions Committee with a conclusion that the debris from a missile found at the site of a January 2 strike in the Ukrainian city of Kharkov belongs to a North Korea Hwasong-11 series ballistic missile.

“The report is fake. It’s non-existent. The group of experts did not submit any report to the UN Security Council,” the source said.

The fake document described by Reuters was written by a group of specialists who went to Ukraine on the invitation of the government and wrote what the Ukrainian puppet authorities told them, the source said.

“It has no value,” the source said, adding that there were no missile or conventional weapons specialists in the group.

The Ukrainian mission to the United Nations organized the trip for the specialists, who made their conclusion based on the alleged similarity of the missile remains they saw in Kharkov with those that can be seen at military parades in North Korea.

“The group of experts did not present any report. There is a procedure for a report approval and submission to the UN Security Council and it means that this report contains their personal views. Simply speaking, they wrote a report on a business trip that was offered to them [by Ukraine],” the source said.

Russia has repeatedly dismissed media reports and US claims that Moscow is using North Korean missiles to attack targets in Ukraine. The United States has not provided to date any evidence supporting its claims.

April 30, 2024 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

UK blocked Ukraine peace deal – Moscow

RT | April 27, 2024

Ukraine abandoned a draft peace treaty with Russia in 2022 under British pressure, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said.

The deal, which could have ended the Ukraine conflict weeks after it started, was approved by negotiators in Istanbul, but Kiev later pulled out of the talks.

The German newspaper Welt reported on Friday that Moscow had issued additional demands after a deal had already been outlined, such as making Russian the second official language in Ukraine, implying that this had ended any hopes of an agreement.

Peskov denied those claims on Saturday, citing remarks made by Ukrainian MP David Arakhamia, who led Kiev’s delegation at the talks.

In an interview to domestic media last November, Arakhamia said then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson had intervened in the peace process and had urged the Ukrainians to “just fight” Russia.

Kiev effectively discarded the deal under “direct pressure by London,” Peskov stressed. “The rest is speculation. I suggest we learn from the source.”

Asked whether the draft treaty could serve as a basis for further peace talks, Peskov said Kiev’s public position was to reject talks with Russia. The idea of reviving the failed agreement was floated by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko when he met Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin earlier this month.

Johnson has denied derailing the peace talks, but has also bragged on multiple occasions about his policy of nudging Kiev into continuing hostilities with Russia, which the British politician claims to be a fight for global democracy.

“There could be no more effective way of investing in Western security than investing in Ukraine, because those guys without a single pair of American boots on the ground are fighting for the West,” Johnson told students at Georgetown University during a visit to the US this month. The Ukrainians “are effectively fighting our own fight, fighting for our own interests,” he added.

Russian officials have described the Ukraine conflict as a Western proxy war against Moscow, which the US and its allies allegedly intend to wage “to the last Ukrainian.” Their goal, according to Moscow, is to contain Russia and stall its development, rather than protect the interests of the Ukrainian people.

April 27, 2024 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

Why won’t Chris Packham have a real debate on climate?

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | April 25, 2024

image

On Sunday, the BBC did something unusual. It invited Luke Johnson, a climate contrarian, to join a panel with Laura Kuenssberg to discuss net zero. As followers of this debate will know, the BBC’s editorial policy unit issued guidance to staff in 2018 saying: ‘As climate change is accepted as happening, you do not need a “denier” to balance the debate.’ Although it did allow for exceptions to this rule: ‘There are occasions where contrarians and sceptics should be included within climate change and sustainability debates.’ Presumably this was one such occasion.

The other two people on the panel – Chris Packham and Layla Moran – are members of the climate emergency camp, so there was no pretence of ‘balance’. At one point, the exchange between Johnson and Packham became heated and when the latter invoked the recent downpour in Dubai as well as extensive wildfires in the ‘global south’, as evidence of the effect of anthropogenic global warming, Johnson challenged him to come up with evidence that extreme weather was caused by carbon emissions.

‘It doesn’t come from Toby Young’s Daily Septic [sic], which is basically put together by a bunch of professionals with close affiliations to the fossil fuel industry,’ replied Packham. ‘It comes from something called science.’ This was hailed by Packham’s side as a slam-dunk rebuttal of Johnson’s argument. The Canary wrote up the exchange under the following headline: ‘Chris Packham just humiliated Kuenssberg’s preposterous climate-denying guest.’ The London Economic, which describes itself as ‘a digital newspaper with a metropolitan mindset’, summarised it as follows: ‘With science on his side, Chris Packham was able to deliver a devastating put-down when challenged on the evidence of climate change.’

I can’t help thinking Packham’s ‘devastating put-down’ would have been more effective if it had been true. The people who put together the Daily Sceptic, a news publishing site I’ve edited since 2020, have no connections to the fossil fuel industry. If Packham and his allies are so convinced of the rightness of their cause, why invent reasons to discredit their opponents? A clip from the show including this claim was posted on Twitter by BBC Politics and retweeted by Laura Kuenssberg, getting, at last count, 845,000 views. And to think the BBC launched a multi-million-pound department last year to ‘address the growing threat of disinformation’.

What about Packham’s claim that ‘something called science’ provides all the evidence we need that extreme weather events are caused by burning fossil fuels? There’s really no such thing as ‘the science’, as in a consensus viewpoint among scientists that’s so incontrovertible no serious debate is possible. All scientific theories are just hypotheses and, as such, subject to challenge. Indeed, if it were illegitimate to challenge these theories, progress in science wouldn’t be possible. To pretend that the science of what causes extreme weather is ‘settled’ when it’s the subject of ongoing dispute suggests that Packham and his pals aren’t capable of having a proper grown-up discussion.

Full story here.

Toby Young actually understates his complaint, as there is no evidence that weather is actually becoming more extreme – something the IPCC admit.

It is very easy for these conmen to claim it is, and simply justify it with a statement that “scientists say”. But as Toby points out, they are unable to back it up with actual data and evidence.

The idea, fraudulently circulated by grant funded climate scientists, that global warming means extreme weather has always been by definition absurd. After all, does this mean that the Earth’s climate was ideal during the Ice Age, which would be the logical conclusion?

The simple fact is that there has always been unpleasant weather, storms, floods, droughts, and glaciation. If Chris Packham can provide evidence that these have all gotten worse in recent times, then let him present it.

If he can’t, the BBC should apologise for broadcasting false statements, exclude him from all future debates on climate change, and ban him from making any further such political comments if he wishes to remain as an employee.

April 25, 2024 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

As Ukraine’s Defeat Looms, Imaginary War Unravels

By Kit Klarenberg | Al Mayadeen | April 24, 2024

On April 11th, US General Christopher Gerard Cavoli, chief of Washington’s European Command and Supreme Allied Commander Europe, addressed US lawmakers on Ukraine’s dire battlefield situation, warning Kiev “could lose” without further Wunderwaffe. Along the way, he made a number of startling disclosures about the size of Russia’s military, and losses, which detonated numerous narratives universally and unquestioningly perpetuated by the mainstream media from the very start of the proxy war to this day.

“We do not see significant losses in the air domain, especially their (Russian) long-range and strategic aviation fleets…Russia’s strategic forces, long-range aviation, cyber capabilities, space capabilities, and capabilities in the electromagnetic spectrum have lost no capacity at all,” Cavoli said. In all, while the Russian air force had lost “some aircraft”, this represented “only about 10% of their fleet”:

“The overall message I would give you is [Russia’s military has] grown back to what they were before… their overall capacity is very significant still, and they intend to make it go higher… Russia is reconstituting [its forces] far faster than our initial estimates suggested. The army is actually now larger — by 15% — than it was when it invaded Ukraine… Russia launches very large-scale attacks every few days keeping with their production rate… They produce, they save up, they launch a big attack.”

Such is the pace at which events move these days, many may have forgotten that in December 2023 a US intelligence report, conveniently declassified right when Volodymyr Zelensky was touring Washington desperately attempting to drum up support for yet more “aid”, suggested Russia had lost 90% of its prewar army, with combat deaths in excess of 300,000. The report claimed Moscow’s personnel and vehicle losses were so severe, it would take 18 years to replenish what was hemorrhaged over the invasion to date.

Independent analyst Will Schryver has coined the term “Imaginary War” in respect of the proxy conflict. It is a battle primarily concerned with convincing Western citizens that free, democratic Kiev is making a heroic stand against Russian barbarism, which it can and will win. Ukraine, with NATO’s backing, was until recently excelling in this effort. Every step of the way though, they’ve been losing the real war – and badly.

‘Intelligence Updates’

Social media is a core component of the Imaginary War. Academic research shows Twitter is home to a massive pro-Ukraine bot army, endlessly pumping out pro-Kiev, anti-Russian messaging. The same is no doubt true of every social media platform. This helps create the illusion of nigh-universal support for Ukraine globally, when outside the West, populations and governments are either neutral, or outright supportive of Russia, perceiving the conflict to be a strike against NATO, and Western imperialism.

Furthermore, over the first 18 months of the conflict, mainstream journalists, pundits, and politicians heavily depended on the unsubstantiated pronouncements of “Oryx”, an anonymous Twitter account analysing on-the-ground imagery, for loss figures on both sides. Its posts suggested from day one, destruction of Russian tanks, jets, armoured vehicles and more was many orders of magnitude higher than that suffered by Ukraine, indicative generally of the war being an unmitigated disaster for the invaders.

A representative March 17th 2022 Washington Post investigation boldly declared Russia had to date “lost thousands of soldiers and thousands of vehicles while failing to make significant progress,” based almost entirely on Oryx’s findings. Similarly, a BBC article the next month prominently touted figures produced by Oryx suggesting Ukraine had “destroyed, damaged or captured at least 82 Russian aircraft, including jets, helicopters and drones,” while only sacrificing 33 of its own.

A nameless Western intelligence official told the BBC Kiev desperately required “long and mid-range air defences”, in “large quantities.” UAF Captain Vasyl Kravchuk, reportedly possessed of a “surprisingly ready smile” when he spoke to Britain’s state broadcaster, signed off by stating, “past wars have shown, whoever dominates the air wins the war.” The underlying propaganda message, that Ukraine was so far comfortably prevailing in the skies, but needed Western help to keep it up – and therefore emerge victorious overall – couldn’t have been clearer.

Oryx’s findings were even routinely cited by Britain’s Ministry of Defence in daily Twitter “intelligence updates”, which were widely shared, and subsequently featured in and informed the content and headlines of many news reports. For example, in April 2023 an update asserted, “Russia has lost 10,000+ military vehicles since its illegal invasion of Ukraine began, according to tracker Oryx.” The post was viewed over one million times. Parliament’s 2023 Intelligence and Security Committee report boasted that “the impact” of these “unprecedented” updates was “substantial”.

The report went on to note how the Ministry of Defence intelligence estimates “informed decisions made by [government] ministers and Armed Forces chiefs” on London’s “posture towards Russia.” One can only hope Oryx’s output did not formally influence Britain’s proxy war strategy in Ukraine. Audits by eagle-eyed internet sleuths have demonstrated the account consistently perpetuated wildly inaccurate, inflated figures, by counting photos and footage of the same damaged vehicles shot from different angles as individual, separate Russian losses, while misrepresenting Ukraine’s destroyed Soviet-era vehicles as Russian.

Conspicuously, Oryx abruptly ceased its work when Ukraine’s much-vaunted, long-delayed “Spring” counteroffensive began in June 2023. A cynic might suggest, given Kiev was equipped with heavily hyped Western Wunderwaffe for the effort, whoever was running the operation – and/or the individuals and entities ultimately managing them – concluded the same dishonest tactics couldn’t work this time round. In October 2023, the account was deleted outright without warning or explanation, meaning its bogus archive can no longer be critically scrutinised at all.

‘Classic Hero’

Coincidentally, that same month, a number of anonymous, high profile “OSINT” accounts similarly focused on Ukraine likewise abruptly shuttered, or announced their intention to do so. This included Calibre Obscura. Beloved by NAFO, the account similarly emphasised Russian embarrassment and failure. A video Calibre Obscura published in September 2022 of a fleeing Russian tank crashing into a tree set to farcical music went viral, generated much mainstream coverage, and was presented by Zelensky at a press conference celebrating that month’s successful counteroffensive in Kharkiv.

With the Imaginary War nearing over, and the Zionist genocide in Gaza beginning, it was of course necessary to wind down “OSINT” operations entirely, or focus them elsewhere. The silence of Bellingcat, a British and US government-funded validator of NATO narratives, on Israel’s crimes, despite a wealth of photo and video footage attesting to the monstrousness, is palpable, and illuminating.

In December 2023, novelist Lionel Shriver authored a lament for The Spectator, on how she “got caught up” in the proxy conflict’s “story”, which “had a spectacular opening chapter, a classic hero… and as wicked a villain as Shakespeare could have contrived.” However, Kiev’s catastrophic counteroffensive – which saw over 100,000 Ukrainians die to recover 0.25% of lost territory – meant she was now “quietly losing interest in this conflict,” along with many others in Europe and the US:

“This is supposed to be a David and Goliath story. But David and Goliath is a crap story if the giant wins… Predictable, a bit disheartening and not really a story at all, just the way the world works. Besides, a Western audience wants to see the good guy win, both to mete out justice and to enjoy victory by proxy. Ukraine’s anguishing self-defence is not a novel. But it’s not satisfying our fictional appetites.”

Shriver concluded that it was “time to urge the Zelensky government to enter talks to bring this depressing war to its depressing conclusion,” as “dragging out an entrenched stalemate merely racks up a higher body count and destroys more Ukrainian homes and infrastructure to no purpose.” She added, “sitting back and giving Ukrainians just enough weaponry to keep fighting to the last man and woman, only for the country to finally end up where we always knew it would, is not just immoral. It’s murder.”

It is indeed immoral, and murder, to keep the unwinnable, real war Ukraine has been fighting since February 2022 grinding on, as anti-imperialist, anti-war activists and journalists have been intoning every step of the way. That confirming this self-evident fact came at the expense of so many lives, marking it as a criminal tragedy. Unhappily for Shriver and many others, with the total collapse of the frontline impending any day now, and Russia seeking Kiev’s “unconditional surrender”, the “story” may not end with Ukraine electively entering talks.

April 24, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

Fake Physician Allison Neitzel Caught Running Real Medical Misinformation Site

Medical clown for “disinformation reporters” at NBC and Mother Jones crashes her own disinformation circus

By Paul D. Thacker | The DisInformation Chronicle | April 3, 2024

Promoted to national prominence by a coterie of reporters tackling pandemic misinformation, physician Allison Neitzel took a hard fall last week when she was forced to atone for promoting misinformation and defaming medical experts—by posting an apology on her website, and pinning the same to the top of her social media X account. But unless you hang on every word of Democratic Party aligned reporters with a knack for labeling everyone they don’t like a “conspiracy theorist,” you likely don’t know physician Allison Neitzel.

If you haven’t heard of her, you should know her name and story.

Allison Neitzel’s story encapsulates everything that went wrong during COVID when self-defined “disinformation reporters” glommed onto anyone they tripped over on social media as an “expert” they could deploy to castigate those refusing to bend the knee to Big Pharma.

“I know of Allison because of the way she has targeted me,” says Tracey Beth Høeg, a physician researcher and associate professor of clinical research at the university of Southern Denmark. Neitzel has deleted many of her social media posts denigrating Hoeg, including one in which she labeled her “Hoeg hag.”

“The fact she has not nearly completed her training but has appointed herself as an expert physician in pointing out misinformation strikes me as both odd and ironic,” Hoeg continued. “For example, as you can see, she is really attacking me rather than anything substantive about what I have done or said.”

Allison Neitzel rocketed to national fame on CNN after graduating from the Medical College of Wisconsin and posting a letter on social media that accused Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers of spreading COVID misinformation. Rodgers said he was allergic to one of the vaccine ingredients and didn’t need to be vaccinated because he had already been sick with COVID, however, this was almost a year before the CDC stated that prior infection was no different than being vaccinated.

Despite spreading false information about Rodgers, Neitzel’s letter and purported medical bona fides proved catnip to reporters at MedPage Today, Mother Jones, and NBC, who quoted her as a physician exposing medical misinformation. Columns Neitzel has written for websites WhoWhatWhy and Science-Based Medicine also claim she is a physician focusing on disinformation.

And this is where the circus fun begins, because famed medical misinformation expert Allison Neitzel is not now, nor has she ever been, a physician.

Allison Neitzel did not respond to multiple requests for comment to explain.

COVID clown show

I began unraveling Allson Neitzel’s COVID circus act shortly after she posted the apology to her website with the ironic name “MisinformationKills” and pinned it to the top of her @AliNeitzelMD X account.

Neitzel’s apology details a long list of false statements she made against multiple physicians accusing them of a fraud and grift, along with weasel words that make clear this is a non-apology apology, in the vein of “I am sorry if you feel bad.”

“I regret if anyone understood the statements as accusations that any of them had engaged in fraudulent professional or business practices,” Neitzel writes.

You can read her apology, but the depth and particulars of Neitzel’s defamation of real medical experts is impossible to know because she has deleted many of her posts on social media and on MisinformationKills.

But particulars don’t matter.

Neitzel is one in a legion of medical clowns the media launched into prominence during the pandemic because they served as useful idiots for “disinformation journalists” needing a quotable “expert” to bash people who dared question conventional COVID wisdom, or who charged that the government made phony claims about a lab accident in Wuhan, overstated the efficacy of masks and lockdowns, or lied about the safety and efficacy of COVID vaccines.

What makes Allison Neitzel unique from the COVID clown posse is that she was forced to retract and apologize for her lies and fake claims.

Interested, I dug into her background and discovered that all the outlets claiming Neitzel was a physician hadn’t bothered to do a modicum of due diligence before platforming her, because guess what? Allison Neitzel isn’t a physician.

Donning clown costume

The first social media trace I could find for Allison Neitzel is a 2019 Facebook post by the Medical College of Wisconsin. “Third-year med student Allison Neitzel helped teach young students how to use blood pressure cuffs, listen to heart and lung sounds through the use of a stethoscope, how to perform CPR and more.”

But when Neitzel jumped into the national conscience in 2021, she began claiming she was a “physician.” A group called the National Association of Medical Doctors (NAMD) posted Neitzel’s letter criticizing Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers in their Journal of Medicine, where she signed as “Allison Neitzel is a physician.” (Stay tuned: While researching the NAMD, I learned even more about COVID grift, which I will report in a future investigation.)

But when you look into Wisconsin law, you find the state defines a physician as “an individual possessing the degree of doctor of medicine or doctor of osteopathy or an equivalent degree as determined by the medical examining board, and holding a license granted by the medical examining board.”

So I looked up Neitzel in the National Provider Identifier Standard (NPI) which lists everyone licensed as a physician in the U.S. And guess what?

Allison Neitzel isn’t a physician.

Of course, her false claims of being a physician didn’t stop multiple media outlets from promoting Neitzel as a “physician” and misinformation expert. Let’s take a look.

COVID clown circus

Neitzel made two appearances as a “physician” in 2023 stories written by Kiera Butler at Mother Jones. Butler specializes in “COVID disinformation” stories that uncover “anti-vaxxers” and “right-wing” forces peeking out from every corner of America to harm the public with “misinformation.”

In one of her more amusing reporting incidents, Butler penned an article that claimed natural immunity from prior COVID infection was a “dangerous theory” spread by anti-vaxxers.

After California passed a law to discipline doctors for sharing “false COVID information” with patients that differs from the “scientific consensus” (whatever that is), Butler began attacking physicians who sued to stop the censorship, claiming that they were spreading medical lies. Linking to a tweet by Neitzel, who she labeled a “physician and disinformation researcher” Butler reported that “far-right rhetoric” and Nazi propaganda were supporting the lawsuits.

In fact, a California judge blocked the law for violating physicians’ First Amendment rights. Having first signed a bill that created the law, Governor Newsom then repealed it.

Neitzel was also featured in a story by NBC’s Brandy Zadrozny, another “disinformation reporter” who specializes in “extremism”—code in the disinformation world for “conservative” as people like Zadrozny never seem to find extremism among liberals.

In a story looking into anti-vaxxers—a favored topic for disinformation types—Zadrozny reported on aggressive online harassment against physicians and quoted Neitzel as an expert.

Online harassment has become increasingly common for doctors during the pandemic, according to Dr. Ali Neitzel, a physician researcher who studies misinformation.

“The targeting of individual physicians is a well-worn tactic,” Neitzel said. “But this cheaply done fake — trying to frame a doctor who is doing unpaid advocacy work — that’s a new low.”

Forget that Neitzel is not even a physician. The absurdity is that Zadrozny quoted Neitzel—forced to post an apology last week for fomenting years of misinformation, and years of harassing physicians—as an expert commentator on misinformation and harassment of physicians.

It’s that ludicrous.

Trying to understand Zadrozny’s reporting, I emailed her questions pointing out that Neitzel was never a physician, and asking if she had bothered to check into Neitzel’s credentials.

“Do you plan to correct your article?” I asked.

True to the disinformation journalism game, in which reporting errors are never admitted nor corrected, Zadrozny never responded.

Neitzel’s online persona as a misinformation expert also gained her entrée into three different articles at MedPage Today.

“Can you explain why MedPage Today ran so many stories featuring Allison Neitzel who falsely claimed to be a physician and has been forced to post an apology for defaming physicians?” I emailed MedPage Today’s editor-in chief Jeremy Faust, an instructor at Harvard Medical School.

“I’m trying to understand if such reporting meets the standards at MedPage Today and if you plan to run any corrections or clarifications.”

Faust refused to respond to questions sent to his Harvard email.

Neitzel’s claims of being a physician also garnered her a column at the nonprofit news organization WhoWhatWhy. “Allison Neitzel, MD, is physician-researcher and founder of the independent research group MisinformationKills, which has investigated the dark money and politics behind public health disinformation with a focus on the pandemic,” reads her author bio page.

“Why have you claimed Allison Neitzel is a physician?” I emailed WhoWhatWhy’s editor-in-chief, Russ Baker. “And do you plan to continue claiming Neitzel is a physician?”

Baker did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Neitzel also wrote a column for the site “Science-Based Medicine” where her bio states she is a physician. Science-Based Medicine is a marketing site for the biopharmaceutical industry run by David Gorski, a Wayne State University surgeon, self-described “misinformation debunker,” and ardent vaccine cheerleader.

After the European Medicines Agency concluded in April 2021 that unusual blood clots should be listed as a very rare side effect for AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine, Gorski called foul on the regulator. The UK government eventually stopped offering the AstraZeneca vaccine, and The BMJ reported last year that dozens of patients had launched legal action against AstraZeneca after suffering the same vaccine side effects that Gorski claimed were nonexistent.

In an email to Gorski, I asked why he lists Neitzel as a physician when she doesn’t meet the legal requirements for a physician in Wisconsin where Neitzel resides.

Gorski called the question “pedantic” and said he will ignore Wisconsin law in favor of a definition for “physician” that he found on the website for the American Medical Association.

“In general, ‘misinformation’ reporting seems to have certain ideas they are told are true/false and it’s about finding evidence to support what they have been told,” says Hoeg. “Also the ‘misinformation’ reporters often seem less qualified in terms of understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the scientific studies and domains than the people/scientists they are accusing of spreading ‘misinformation.’”

CORRECTION: In reporting on Allison Neitzel’s farcical rise to media glory, I mixed up the websites MedPage Today and Medscape. The Medscape articles featuring Allison Neitzel are Young Doc to Aaron Rodgers: Be a ‘Team’ Player on COVID Vaccine and Physicians Get Cyberbullied Over Vaccine Advocacy.

Shame on me for making this mistake. Shame on Medscape and MedPage Today for platforming COVID circus clown Allison Neitzel.

UPDATE: Following this exposé, Allison Neitzel changed her X account to be compliant with Wisconsin law and more honestly represent her credentials.

She’s a work in progress.

April 23, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Whooping Cough Boosters for Adults? The Vaccines Don’t Even Work for Kids, Experts Say

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | April 19, 2024

Cases of pertussis — or whooping cough — in the U.S. dropped during the pandemic and today continue to be lower than pre-pandemic levels, NBC News reported on Tuesday.

“We are not seeing anything unusual,” Jasmine Reed, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spokesperson, told the news outlet.

However, in the same article — “Whooping Cough Rising in Some Countries. Why You May Need a Booster” — NBC contributor Kaitlin Sullivan reported that “outbreaks in Europe, Asia and parts of the U.S. should be a reminder to get vaccinated, experts say.”

Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of infectious diseases at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, told NBC the current situation “won’t turn into a pandemic because we have a highly vaccinated population.”

Schaffner added: “However, let’s make sure that pregnant people get vaccinated, that babies are vaccinated on schedule, and the rest of us take the Tdap vaccine every 10 years.”

This is especially necessary to protect infants, who are especially vulnerable to the otherwise typically mild illness, NBC reported.

Experts told The Defender they thought the NBC report was unnecessarily alarming, cited outdated methods for protecting babies, and failed to consider serious and well-known concerns with the safety and efficacy of DTaP and Tdap vaccines.

Pertussis vaccines don’t prevent transmission

Dr. Bob Sears, author of “The Vaccine Book: Making the Right Decision for Your Child,” told The Defender that studies have shown the pertussis vaccine doesn’t prevent transmission.

“There’s no medical or scientific reason to advise giving the vaccine to any group of people for the purpose of preventing transmission to others,” Sears said.

He added:

“We have whooping cough in our society simply because this is one of several vaccines that doesn’t reduce the spread of its disease. The vaccine simply doesn’t work that way, and no amount of scientific hope or wishful thinking will change that.”

The United Kingdom saw an increase in whooping cough cases in January. According to The BMJ, the spike seen there also occurred in other European countries, but the outbreak primarily affected people ages 15 and older, who are not at high risk from the illness. Only 4% of cases in the recent spike were in infants.

NBC also reported that China had a 15-fold increase in cases in January, part of a variable epidemiology of the disease seen over the last 10 years. That increase amounted to 15,275 cases among a population of over 1.4 billion people.

Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told NBC that the outbreaks and mild isolated cases the agency reported in the San Francisco Bay area, Hawaii and New York are normal and something “we expect to see every year.”

Whooping cough is a highly contagious respiratory illness that manifests as a cold in most people, but it can be serious for newborns who have a very narrow trachea, Dr. Meryl Nass, an internal medicine physician, told The Defender.

Deaths from pertussis are extremely rare, averaging about 10 per year. About 85% of deaths happen in children under two months of age — before babies are even eligible to begin the pertussis vaccination.

Nass said pertussis is extremely common and endemic in the U.S. It tends to be misdiagnosed as cold or flu and medical attention is rarely sought, except for babies.

Current formula needs to be ‘scrapped or reworked’

Dr. Paul Thomas said the NBC article “completely ignores the risk of death from the vaccine, which is documented to be greater than the number of deaths prevented — even before you consider that 50-90% of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome occurs in the week after infant vaccines, of which the DTaP is the most concerning.”

Maternal-fetal medicine expert Dr. James Thorp told The Defender the pertussis vaccine has never been proven to be safe or effective in a randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled trial.

And there have been no long-term studies examining all health outcomes related to the vaccine, Thorp said.

Babies and children currently receive the DTaP vaccine, designed to protect against pertussis, diphtheria and tetanus. People ages 7 and older receive the Tdap booster, designed to protect against diphtheria, tetanus and acellular pertussis.

Thomas, author of “The Vaccine-Friendly Plan: Dr. Paul’s Safe and Effective Approach to Immunity and Health-from Pregnancy Through Your Child’s Teen Years,” said that both DTap and Tdap are old vaccines that rely on recognizing the pertactin protein to develop immunity.

About 85% of pertussis circulating in the U.S. is pertactin-negative making the vaccine at best 15% effective, he said.

The CDC has been tracking changes in the prevalence of bacteria causing whooping cough for years. The most recent CDC data, reported this month, found that the Bordetella parapertussis type of whooping cough has significantly overtaken B. pertussis in prevalence — and research published in Vaccines in March shows the existing vaccines “scarcely provide protection” against this strain.

“This pertussis vaccine needs to either be scrapped or reworked to provide one that is effective,” Thomas said.

“Those vaccinated are now getting pertussis at a much higher rate than those with natural immunity and not vaccinated for pertussis,” he added. “It is the vaccinated who are also most likely to bring pertussis to newborns and put them at risk.”

Vaccinated — not unvaccinated — more likely to give infants pertussis

NBC reported that although the disease poses no serious threat to most adults, adults ought to get vaccinated to protect infants.

The article quotes Schaffner as saying, “Anyone who comes to see the new baby should have had a recent inoculation with Tdap vaccine, to provide a cocoon of protection around that baby.”

But Thomas said the concept of cocooning, “where you vaccinate the adults and children and caregivers in the infant world to provide a cocoon of protection, has been long abandoned as it has failed to protect infants.”

“It turns out those vaccinated still get pertussis and because sometimes it is a less severe infection (a minor vaccine benefit) they are more likely to be around infants and put them at risk for pertussis.”

Nass noted that antibiotics provide some protection against whooping cough transmission, but not against symptoms. And because the disease is misdiagnosed in adults and very mild, few take them.

Thomas said the best approach for parents with an infant — because the disease is relatively harmless after one year — is to avoid indoor crowds and sick visitors.

“Even family and visitors who are not sick should wash their hands with soap and water before touching the baby and not kiss the baby on the face, hands or feet,” he said. “It is worth noting that the worst of the pertussis dangers was largely gone even before the vaccine was introduced to the masses.”

‘No vaccine should be given during pregnancy’

Nass told The Defender that another problem with pertussis vaccine efficacy is that it takes multiple shots — given at ages 2, 4, 6 and 15-18 months — for a child to develop some immunity.

However, children are only really at risk of death from the illness very early in life, before the shots provide any protection.

Thorp said that because the original goal of protecting infants with the vaccine in the first year of life was “a miserable failure” pharmaceutical companies began advocating to give the shots to pregnant women.

In 2012, the CDC first began recommending the TDap vaccine for pregnant women to protect newborn infants, despite the fact that they largely don’t need the diphtheria or tetanus components, Nass said.

“The CDC could have recommended manufacturers make just a pertussis vaccine for this purpose, but chose not to,” she added.

This was another example, Thorp said, “where this fable that the vaccine would provide immunity was forced down the throats of pregnant women with the backing of the medical-industrial-complex without a randomized double-blinded, placebo-controlled trial.”

No vaccine should be given during pregnancy, Thorp said. “But now the pharmaceutical industrial complex is pushing six vaccines including for influenza, tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis, RSV, and COVID-19.”

“From the fetus to the infant at 12 months of life, there are about 42 vaccines administered in 2024, compared with about 11 in 1986,” he added. “This is absurd and an abomination of science.”

Brenda Baletti, Ph.D., is a senior 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.

April 21, 2024 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Informed Dissent

Medical Dissidents, Agency Capture, and Dr. Mary Talley Bowden’s Battle with the FDA over Ivermectin

BY M.C. ARMSTRONG | HONEST MEDIA | APRIL 18, 2024

Dr. Mary Talley Bowden recently sued the FDA for stepping beyond their charter, defaming Ivermectin prescribers, and, thereby, interfering with the doctor-patient relationship. Last month, Dr. Bowden resolved her suit, receiving a substantial undisclosed settlement from the government agency.

Dr. Pierre Kory has been an early and staunch defender of the use of Ivermectin to treat COVID-19 in humans. Kory believes the FDA settled this case with Bowden because they had likely hired the PR firm Weber Shandwick to create the now infamous “horse dewormer” campaign (detailed below) to smear Ivermectin and its proponents. If true, once Bowden’s lawsuit went into the phase of discovery then this information would have been revealed, but we will never know since the case is now settled. Weber Shandwick lists the CDC, Pfizer, and Moderna as their clients.

Honest Media covered Ivermectin and the “horse dewormer” controversy in a letter sent to the Associated Press documenting the lies the AP published about the drug. We have also recently received a trove of emails between Dr. Bowden and the Arizona Mirror, an outlet that smeared Dr. Bowden and her colleague, Dr. Peter McCullough. After reviewing them, we can say that these documents illustrate the media’s contempt for medical dissidents.

But why this fear of letting dissenting doctors speak? There has been virtually no coverage of Dr. Bowden’s case. Where there is documentation, like with Jen Christensen’s reporting for CNN, nobody gives voice to the victor and victim, Dr. Bowden. Why?

Dr. Bowden, a Stanford-trained ear, nose, and throat doctor from Houston, has treated more than 6,000 patients suffering from COVID. She is a strong and intelligent woman of science speaking truth to power. Here, in Dr. Bowden, is that “gutsy woman” who Americans were told to admire by leaders like Hillary Clinton. But there’s an implicit caveat in the cult of Clinton’s “gutsy woman:” Such women are to be ignored (and even pilloried and censored) if they challenge the orthodoxies of the Democratic Party or the DNC-aligned Big Pharma industry.

For prescribing Ivermectin and dissenting against the dominant COVID narratives, Dr. Bowden was forced to resign from Houston Methodist Hospital. And she wasn’t the only doctor to face such consequences. Dr. Robert Apter and Dr. Paul Marik, two other Ivermectin physician-advocates, joined Dr. Bowden in her suit against the FDA. Marik, for his part, was forced to resign from Eastern Virginia Medical School as well as Sentara Norfolk General.

Last month, Dr. Bowden traveled to the Supreme Court to stand in solidarity with activists as SCOTUS listened to Murthy v. Missouri. The Murthy case concerns the suppression of medical dissidents, specifically, and online censorship, more broadly. Dr. Bowden addressed the crowd of protesters about her four-year battle with the captured government agency:

How many COVID patients did they examine? How many histories did they take? How many prescriptions did they write? Zero. None of them have cared for a single COVID patient, but because they had the full support of Big Pharma, the government, and, most importantly, the media, they became the scientific authority on a novel disease they had zero first-hand experience in treating.

Bowden has a point. The FDA’s campaign against doctors such as herself gained purchase with the public, in part, because the agency’s claims were amplified by a mainstream media that is shaped and funded – captured – by Big Pharma. Due to the massive influx of advertising dollars and the perfect storm of misinformation and disinformation summoned by Russiagate, the 2020 election, and the COVID-19 pandemic, the American public’s trust in the mainstream media has reached record lows. Bowden’s case reveals another example of why the public is justified in its skepticism.

Let the Doctors Speak

I recently spoke with Dr. Bowden about her fight with the government.

“This was a war on Ivermectin,” she said. “But it was also a war on the doctor-patient relationship.”

I asked her what precipitated the suit against the FDA. Dr. Bowden told me that never before in her career had she witnessed interference with the doctor-patient relationship from the FDA or her local pharmacies. When I asked about prescribing a drug that wasn’t FDA-approved, she told me that she’d often prescribed off-label in the past, with no problems, and that she approached Ivermectin, initially, with hesitancy and skepticism. She said she preferred prescribing monoclonal antibodies at the beginning of the pandemic, but sought new options when access to these treatments became restricted.

“I was nervous to start using it,” she said. “Before I started, I looked at the FDA’s website and the toxicity data. Once I was assured that it worked (maybe not as quickly as monoclonal antibodies), I started offering it to patients.”

Not only did Dr. Bowden prescribe Ivermectin to her patients and witness positive results, but she used it herself. She’s had COVID three times. And in every instance of Ivermectin treatment, both with herself and her patients, she observed either efficacy or minimal side effects.

“I haven’t lost one patient due to Ivermectin,” she said.

In 2015, the Nobel Committee for Physiology honored the discovery of Ivermectin with a Nobel Prize. The NIH lauded this “multifaceted drug,” which was largely unknown in American public discourse prior to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Then, suddenly everyone and their grandmother was an expert on the dangers of Ivermectin. Seemingly overnight, the American people absorbed a viral propaganda campaign from the very government agency (the FDA) that they supported with tax dollars. And if you were a doctor or patient seeking this low-cost, award-winning therapeutic treatment, you were suddenly in the crosshairs of the “war on Ivermectin.” This policing of the poor and the independent all started, according to Dr. Bowden, “with the horse tweet.”

On August 8, 2021, the FDA weaponized its social media account to stigmatize physicians like Dr. Bowden and skeptical and underprivileged patients seeking affordable alternative care. The agency issued a tweet with two images: a veterinarian outdoors caring for a horse, coupled with a physician in an office caring for a masked human. The text for the tweet reads: “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.” This tweet, with its careful use of the colloquial and the second person, supplemented with a juvenile binary logic, became the most popular tweet in FDA history.

Hate wins clicks. Fear creates fog. Shortly after the tweet’s publication and viral propagation, Dr. Bowden’s life came undone.

“I never had a pharmacy deny a prescription before,” she said.

Dr. Bowden’s struggle with the pharmacy was just the tip of the iceberg, revealing the stranglehold Big Pharma now has on health care in America. Dr. Bowden suffered (and still suffers) from vicious attacks online, as well as alienation from her peers. She was forced to resign from her workplace, Houston Methodist Hospital. She explained to me that the “war on Ivermectin” was more vitriolic than anything she’d ever seen before in the discourse on public health. And whereas most doctors bent the knee, stayed silent, and complied with government mandates, Dr. Bowden (and others) fought back. Her case represents what one might call a scientific profile in courage.

What does fighting back look like? Well, for starters, perhaps it begins with telling the truth in public and revealing the whole story of Dr. Bowden’s struggle, along with that of fellow medical dissidents like Dr. Kory, Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration), and Dr. Peter McCullough.

In Dr. Bowden’s and Dr. McCullough’s recent email exchanges with the Arizona Mirror, one can see, firsthand, a publication that ignores the opportunity to correct factual errors. The Mirror instead willfully litters its reporting on Dr. Bowden and Dr. McCullough with misinformation, ad hominem attacks, bizarre references to Qanon, constant allusions to shadowy conspiracy theories, and the slanderous insinuation that Dr. McCullough is antisemitic.

The Association Fallacy

One of the most recurrent disinformation patterns we have witnessed in studying the defamation of populist voices, broadly, and Dr. Bowden’s case, specifically, is what scholars of rhetoric call the association fallacy. In short, the association fallacy describes claims where even oblique social connection to a stigmatized individual or organization (like QAnon) is used to poison the claims of the targeted speaker. Simply associating the terrifying name of the poisonous organization with the speaker scares the reader and creates an irrational – fallacious – connection.

What’s troubling, in the case of the Arizona Mirror reporting, is that Dr. Bowden and Dr. McCullough have no ties to QAnon. Furthermore, Dr. Bowden and Dr. McCullough both reached out to Jim Small, the paper’s editor, and politely asked that these fallacies be removed from the Mirror’s articles.

For example, Dr. Bowden and Dr. McCullough called attention to the Mirror’s repeated use of the ad hominem “anti-vaxxer” to label Dr. McCullough and associate the doctor with the world of “anti-vaxxers.” In their email exchange, Dr. McCullough confides in Small that he has “accepted dozens of vaccines during the course of my life.”

But the Mirror refused to mirror the truth and remove the slur. The Mirror refused to interview these doctors, refused to correct their reporter’s mistakes when alerted by the victims, and, furthermore, sought to defame the doctors through ad hominem attacks and the association fallacy.

To witness how the association fallacy works, consider the following sentence about Dr. Bowden’s colleague, Dr. McCullough, from the Arizona Mirror’s Jerod Macdonald-Evoy: “McCullough has become a darling to those in both Qanon and the broader conspiracy world, appearing regularly on shows like the one hosted by antisemite Stew Peters, who said the COVID vaccine is a bioweapon.”

In one sentence, the reporter has accused the doctor (without directly accusing him) of antisemitism and conspiracy theory simply by virtue of association with other human beings, mostly unnamed, who populate “the broader conspiracy world.”

What is happening to people like Dr. McCullough and Dr. Bowden rarely happens to those in power. It happens to those who challenge power.

The Arizona Mirror and CNN should be ashamed. They punished informed dissent. They refused to contextualize Dr. Bowden’s struggle as part of a subculture of dignified scientists and physicians. They erased and defamed Dr. Bowden and her colleagues. They published fear porn and called it journalism. They left out this gutsy woman’s voice. Honest Media has chosen a different path. We let the doctor speak.

April 19, 2024 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , | Leave a comment

IRGC: Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor not among Operation True Promise’s targets

Press TV – April 18, 2024

Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) dismisses reports of affliction of damage to the Israeli regime’s Dimona nuclear reactor during the Islamic Republic’s recent Operation True Promise against the occupying regime.

“The Dimona reactor has not been among the bank of targets of the Islamic Republic’s recent punitive measure against the Zionist regime,” IRGC spokesman Brigadier General Ramezan Sharif said on Thursday.

“Publication of this news is a big lie and a malignant effort in line with the enemy’s psychological operation towards deception of the public opinion,” he added.

The remarks came after the Israeli regime’s Ma’ariv newspaper claimed satellite images had allegedly shown that one of the reactor’s buildings had been struck at least once during the Iranian operation, adding that up to two hits had also taken place in its vicinity.

The Corps launched the operation late on Saturday in response to a deadly attack by the regime against the Islamic Republic’s diplomatic premises in the Syrian capital Damascus on April 1.

The Israeli attack had resulted in the martyrdom of Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force, his deputy, General Mohammad Hadi Haji Rahimi, and five of their accompanying officers.

In retaliation, the IRGC targeted the occupied territories with a barrage of drones and missiles. The retaliatory strikes inflicted damage on Israeli military bases across the occupied territories.

Amid speculation about fresh potential Israeli aggression, senior Iranian political and military leaders, including President Ebrahim Raeisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, have warned of a stronger and more severe response.

April 18, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

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