In July 2021, The New York Times (NYT) published the hit piece,1 “The Most Influential Spreader of Coronavirus Misinformation Online,” in which they made several blatantly false claims about me. Now, the NYT is upping the ante with an entire documentary dedicated to yours truly, titled “Superspreader.”
Ever since my book “The Truth About COVID-19” came out, the global cabal seems to have lost their collective minds. The New York Times has printed demonstrably false information about me on multiple occasions, CNN reporters have invaded my office and pursued me on my bicycle with unmarked vehicles, the president of the United States has utilized his federal agencies to target me — and my personal and business bank accounts were closed.
Twitter has banned anyone from sharing any link to my website, YouTube banned my account with over 15 years of content, while Facebook and Google have done everything possible to make me disappear. It certainly would be much easier to cave under the pressure, but if we don’t stand up for our rights and freedom now — when will it be too late? I will continue ‘superspreading’ truth and health until my last days.
NYT Hit Parade Continues With ‘Superspreader’
In an August 5, 2022, TV review, Alex Reif writes:2
“News can spread like a virus. In our fast-paced world, it doesn’t take long for either to spread around, which is why it’s so important to get your information from a good source.
In the latest installment of the FX series The New York Times Presents, viewers will get a perfect example of this with ‘Superspreader,’ which takes a look at one doctor with a massive following, who is credited as being the top spreader of misinformation regarding the COVID-19 and vaccine in the wellness industry …
One of the pre-credit notes at the end of the documentary states that FDA Commissioner Robert Califf considers misinformation to be the leading cause of death in the country and because of this …
[A]nother highlight of the film is an interview with Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Encountering Digital Hate who ranked Mercola at the top of ‘The Disinformation Dozen,’ a numbers-based list of the twelve most influential people leading the COVID-19 anti-vaccination effort.
We also see how Mercola was de-platformed by several social media companies and how that hasn’t done all that much to stop the spread of misinformation.
At face value, The New York Times Presents ‘Superspreader’ is about Dr. Joseph Mercola, the empire he built, and the people who believe everything he says without question. But what viewers ultimately walk away with is a reminder that if something seems too good to be true, it most surely is.”
The NYT documentary premieres Friday, August 19, 2022, at 10 p.m. Eastern and 10 p.m. Pacific time, on FX and Hulu.
Truth Tellers Are Being Vindicated Every Day
In the NYT’s July 2021 hit piece, the author, Sheera Frenkel, cited an article I’d published in which she says I questioned “the legal definition of vaccines” and declared the COVID shots were “a medical fraud,” for the simple reason that they don’t prevent infections, they don’t provide immunity and don’t stop transmission of the infection.
According to Frenkel, that was misinformation. According to the U.S. government and its “experts,” the COVID jabs worked like any other vaccine. Check out the short video for a sampling of what Bill Gates, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, mainstream media, Dr. Anthony Fauci and President Biden were saying about the shots in early 2021.
The clear message — the promise — was that if you got the shots, you would not get COVID and you would not transmit it to others. Getting the population “vaccinated” would end the pandemic, for sure. Fast-forward to today, and the reality of the situation is beyond self-evident.
Biden, fully vaxxed and boosted has had COVID twice. Ditto for Fauci and a long list of government officials around the world. Outbreaks have repeatedly occurred at events where every single person present was fully vaxxed. So, the reality is that, back in February 2021, I warned that a medical fraud was being committed, and today, evidence from around the world show I was correct.
The shots do not prevent you from being infected, and they don’t prevent you from spreading it to others. As such, the COVID shots do not function as a vaccine at all, and mass vaccination cannot end the pandemic because you’re just as infectious if you get the shot and contract COVID as you would be if you were unjabbed.
Yet, despite the fact that time has vindicated me, the NYT has decided to double down and put out an entire documentary to cement the “superspreader of misinformation” label to my name when it really should be permanently attached to their own. It probably is important to note that they started their efforts on this video last year, in 2021.
‘Easily Disprovable’ Assertions Are in Fact True
In her 2021 hit piece, Frenkel also highlighted my comments about the COVID shots’ ability to “alter your genetic coding, essentially turning you into a bioweapon spike protein factory that has no off-switch.” According to Frenkel, these assertions “were easily disprovable.”
But did she disprove them? No. Here’s the reality: mRNA vaccines are by definition a genetic instruction set. That’s what messenger RNA (mRNA) is. And the mRNA created by Pfizer or Moderna are synthetic instructions that have never before existed in humans.
This is true for a variety of reasons, but the primary one is the substitution of pseudouridine for uridine to prevent the mRNA from being degraded. Natural mRNA is normally rapidly destroyed and this is by design as your body is very precise about producing proteins and does not produce them willy-nilly.
So is there an off switch? Absolutely not. There’s no off-switch programmed into these jabs. They are relying on your body’s normal degradation systems. The biotech industry has even referred to this reprogramming of your body as turning you into a “human bioreactor.”3
If an off-switch existed, the manufacturers would have assured us of that fact by now. In fact, they probably would have used the existence of a timed off-switch as the justification for boosters, but that has never come up. We know for sure that the mRNA jabs last at least 60 days and that is all we have for hard data. They more than likely last for six months and in some cases could last for years.
Asking Pointed, Nuanced Questions Is Bad?
Next, Frenkel went on to state that:4
“When the coronavirus hit last year, Dr. Mercola jumped on the news, with posts questioning the origins of the disease. In December, he used a study that examined mask-wearing by doctors to argue that masks did not stop the spread of the virus …
[R]ather than directly stating online that vaccines don’t work, Dr. Mercola’s posts often ask pointed questions about their safety and discuss studies that other doctors have refuted. Facebook and Twitter have allowed some of his posts to remain up with caution labels, and the companies have struggled to create rules to pull down posts that have nuance …”
So, I not only committed the “sin” of correctly warning people about the vaccine fraud committed, and had the audacity to follow science and reference published research, but I was also guilty of the “crime” of asking pointed, nuanced questions?
When merely asking questions is deemed a dangerous, if not criminal, act, you know you’re living under an authoritarian regime. It’s certainly far outside the accepted norms of “democracy” and “freedom” that the United States has been a beacon of since its inception.
Ineptitude at Its Finest
Further on in her hit piece, Frenkel makes a truly crucial error that no respectable journalist would ever dare make:
“In an email, Dr. Mercola said it was ‘quite peculiar to me that I am named as the #1 superspreader of misinformation.’ Some of his Facebook posts were only liked by hundreds of people, he said, so he didn’t understand ‘how the relatively small number of shares could possibly cause such calamity to Biden’s multibillion dollar vaccination campaign.’
The efforts against him are political, Dr. Mercola added, and he accused the White House of ‘illegal censorship by colluding with social media companies.’ He did not address whether his coronavirus claims were factual.
‘I am the lead author of a peer reviewed publication regarding vitamin D and the risk of COVID-19 and I have every right to inform the public by sharing my medical research,’ he said. He did not identify the publication, and The Times was unable to verify his claim.”
The problem with Frenkel’s assertion is that I did identify the publication. In fact, I emailed her the direct link. So, she lied. Secondly, my paper is beyond easy to locate. Just put my name into PubMed and you’ll find it. Believe it or not, you can even find it using the most biased search engine on earth, Google.
Daniel Engber, senior editor at the typically highly progressive mainstream media outlet, The Atlantic, commented on Frenkel’s clear ineptitude or malicious prevarication in a tweet:5
“A truly bizarre moment in the NYT piece on Joseph Mercola … you can literally verify the existence of this peer-reviewed publication in one second via googling. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33142828/“
Legal Notice Sent to NYT
July 26, 2021, my attorneys sent the following legal notice to Frenkel at the NYT, demanding a retraction of her false statements:6
“Dear Ms. Frenkel,
The undersigned law firm represents Dr. Joseph Mercola in connection with the attached article that was widely published on July 24, 2021. We are providing notice that you have made several false and defamatory statements in this article:
1.You identified that you could not validate that Dr. Mercola published a peer reviewed study on Vitamin D in the severity of COVID-19. Dr. Mercola provided the direct link in response to you (attached) and any journalist or fact checker would simply find the study by searching “Mercola” in PubMed.
2.Your article falsely states Dr. Mercola has been fined “millions” by the FDA. This is completely fabricated, Dr. Mercola has never been fined by the FDA.
… On behalf of Dr. Mercola, we hereby demand you immediately retract the article. We also request that you preserve all communications and documents that relate to Dr. Mercola.”
Where’s the Proof That I Am the ‘No. 1’ Misinformant?
To this day, the NYT insists I’m the No.1 spreader of misinformation online, based on the fabrications of a group called Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) — a “foreign dark money group,” to quote Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley,7 which sprang out of nowhere to create lists of people to be censored into oblivion.
The CCDH’s data gathering is so questionable, even ultra-biased Facebook ended up publicly criticizing it. In an August 18, 2021, Facebook report, Monika Bickert, vice president of Facebook content policy, set the record straight:8
“In recent weeks, there has been a debate about whether the global problem of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation can be solved simply by removing 12 people from social media platforms. People who have advanced this narrative contend that these 12 people are responsible for 73% of online vaccine misinformation on Facebook. There isn’t any evidence to support this claim …
In fact, these 12 people are responsible for about just 0.05% of all views of vaccine-related content on Facebook. This includes all vaccine-related posts they’ve shared, whether true or false, as well as URLs associated with these people.”
At the time that Frenkel made her accusations, a Crowdtangle search for Facebook posts about the COVID jabs, from mid-June to mid-July 2021, also confirmed that my online reach was negligible. Topping the list of top performing Facebook posts expressing negative views about the COVID jabs was Candace Owens, followed by the mainstream news outlet ABC World News Tonight.9
The befuddling reality here is that most of the people identified as “top spreaders of misinformation” actually have negligible reach — at least compared to the people on this Crowdtangle list. None of the CCDH’s “top vaccine misinformants” are on the list above, and our reach certainly has not improved or expanded since then.
If You’re Targeted, You’re On-Target
This naturally raises the question, why were we targeted in the first place? Is it because we have high credibility from being one of the first natural health sites on the web with the most followers? Is it because we’ve spent a quarter of a century gaining people’s trust by mostly being correct about the health care system and criminal Big Pharma behavior?
Is it because we, more than others, have well-established credibility and are directly over the target? Is it because we have the experience and know-how to make accurate predictions? Is it because we see and explain the bigger picture?
Or is it some other reason entirely? It’s a mystery, really, but what is clear is that we’ve been deemed a threat to the official propaganda narrative, and I, for whatever reason, am at the very top of that threat identification list. Well, I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: I’m beyond truly honored to have been widely disparaged by one of the arms of the U.S. military and intelligence operations.
Being targeted in this fashion — tedious as it may be — is in fact a badge of honor. It tells me I’m doing the right thing, and that I’ve not misinterpreted the intentions behind the COVID machinations. More so than any intuition, it tells me I’m on target.
In the bright light of undeniable reality — as it is, a year later — it’s clear that Frenkel’s hit piece has not aged well. I doubt the NYT’s “Superspreader” documentary will fare much better. In the final analysis, if you want any hope of controlling your health, and that of your family, you’d be wise to understand legacy media speaks in Orwellian Doublespeak and reality is the opposite of virtually everything they are telling you.
This report is all over the media, and all with virtually the same wording, suggesting a carefully coordinated, manufactured story, almost certainly from one of the well funded, climate misinformation organisations.
The BBC headline is grossly misleading, as the 30cm is the water under the boat; As Captain Kempl comments, the river depth is actually 1.5m.
The river gauge measurement of 42cm at Kaub is also widely reported, but is equally misleading, as this measurement is taken near the river bank, rather than at the deepest part of the stream.
In none of the dozens of reports I have read is there any actual historical data to compare against this event, whether rainfall or water level data. We are told this is the lowest water level since 2018, as if this means anything at all. There is no evidence presented to show that this drought is in any way unprecedented, or that droughts are becoming more extreme; merely this claim that appears in most of the articles:
“HGK and other shipping companies are preparing for a “new normal” in which low water levels become more common as global warming makes droughts more severe, sapping water along the length of the Rhine from the Swiss Alps to the North Sea.
“There’s no denying climate change and the industry is adjusting to it,”
However, annual rainfall trends at Mainz, which is just upstream of Kalb, show that while recent years have been drier than the 1980s and 90s, they are no drier than the 1950s. We also see exactly the same trends with April to September rainfall:
And finally, WUWT offers an insight to some of the megadroughts in Germany in the past, notably in 1540.
There is therefore nothing to suggest that this is not just another weather event.
In 2013, the CNN presenter Deborah Feyerick asked if asteroids falling to earth were caused by climate change. Earlier this year, CBS anchor Nate Burleson commented on the Tonga earthquake by saying: “We talk about climate change… these stories are a harsh reality of what we are going through. We have to do our part because these are more frequent.” Last week, the academic networking blog The Conversation discussed the Fagradalsfjall volcano eruption in Iceland and asked: “Is climate change causing more eruptions?”, adding that it had the potential to increase volcanic eruptions and affect their size.
In the climate change show, jumping the shark is now a daily occurrence, particularly in the mainstream media. Gaslighting on a global scale is evident as the media push the command-and-control Net Zero agenda. Bad weather incidents and natural disasters are catastrophised to promote this increasingly hard-left political agenda. But the distinguished atmospheric scientist Emeritus Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT recently voiced the views of an increasing number of people when he said the current climate narrative was “absurd”. Yet he acknowledged that it had universal acceptance, despite the fact that in a normal world the counter-arguments would be compelling. “Perhaps it is the trillions of dollars being diverted into every green project under the sun, and the relentless propaganda from grant-dependent academics and agenda-driven journalists, along with the political control offered to elite groups in society by Net Zero, that currently says it is not absurd,” he speculated.
The Daily Sceptic has written numerous articles presenting evidence that global warming started to run out of steam over 20 years ago, despite the frequent, back-dated and upward temperature adjustments made by state-funded weather services. No science paper exists that proves conclusively that humans cause noticeable changes in the climate by burning fossil fuel. Despite years of research, scientists are no nearer knowing how much temperatures will rise if carbon dioxide doubles in the atmosphere. No link has been shown directly connecting temperatures and CO2 rises (and falls) over the entire paleoclimatic record. Countless natural processes play a part in determining climate conditions. And attempts to link individual weather events to long-term changes in the climate are produced by climate modellers and green activists giving vent to wishful thinking.
In the absence of credible science, there has been a resort to the name-calling, shaming and appeals to authority, common in previous ages. The recent news that the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) had returned to blooming health, and was showing record growth, was a disaster for most mainstream media outlets. All parts had reported for years that the coral was on its last legs due to human-induced climate change. During this time, the GBR observer Professor Peter Ridd was vilified for stating that the reef was a vibrant and healthy ecosystem. He was fired from his post at James Cook University for pointing out the deficiencies in the output of reef science institutions.
In August 2019, the Guardian reported that the former Australian chief scientist Ian Chubb had accused Ridd of “misrepresenting robust science” about the plight of the GBR. Shamefully, it repeated without comment Chubb’s slur that Ridd was relying on the “strategy used by the tobacco industry to raise doubts about the impact of smoking”.
Professor Ridd emerges from the whole sorry affair with his reputation restored and an acknowledgement that true scientists report their findings without fear of the mob, or seeking the favour of the Establishment.
Just days before the news was confirmed that the GBR was continuing to grow back in record amounts, the Guardian ran a long article saying that scientists had demonstrated “beyond any doubt” that humanity is forcing the climate to disastrous new extremes, They hadn’t, of course, and “beyond any doubt” is a phrase borrowed from the criminal law, not science. Professor Terry Hughes from the National Coral Bleaching Taskforce estimated that close to 50% of the GBR coral is already dead. Attribution science is said to show that the hot March weather in 2016 that caused a “catastrophic die-off” in 2016 was made “at least 175 times more likely” by the human influence on the climate. A more realistic explanation, invariably ignored in mainstream media, is that the powerful El Nino experienced in that year warmed sea waters temporarily, and led to a natural burst of bleaching. Full reef health was quickly restored when the effect of the natural oscillation was removed.
The global media gaslighting over political climate change is easier to understand if you follow the money. Earlier this year, the Daily Scepticreported that the Associated Press was adding two dozen journalists to cover “climate issues”. Five billionaire foundations, including the left-wing Rockefeller operation, supplied $8 million. AP now says over 50 jobs are funded from these sources. The BBC and the Guardian regularly receive multi-million dollar contributions from the trusts of wealthy donors. It is estimated that Bill Gates has given more than $300 million over the past decade to a wide variety of media outlets. Democrat power couple James and Kathryn Murdoch also help pay the staff’s wages at AP. On their Foundation web site, it is noted that there is an investment in Climate Central, where meteorologists are used as “trusted messengers” of the links between extreme weather and climate change.
Meanwhile, the foundation of the green technology-funding Spanish bank BBVA hands out annual €100,000 payments. Last year the cash went to Marlow Hood of Agence France-Presse, who describes himself as the “Herald of the Anthropocene”, the latter being a political renaming of the current Holocene era. In 2019 Matt McGrath of the BBC took home the annual prize, while in 2020 it ended up in the coffers of the Guardian.
The White Queen tried to believe in six impossible things before breakfast. It’s a shame climate change wasn’t around in Alice’s day.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor
In the immediate aftermath of the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, many pundits and politicians were eager to describe the events of that day a s a coup d’etat in which the nation was “this close” to having some sort of junta void the 2020 election and take power in Washington.
The headlines at the time were unambiguous in their assertions that the riot was a coup or attempted coup. For example, the riot was “A Very American Coup” according to a headline at the New Republic. “This Is a Coup” insists a writer at Foreign Policy.The Atlantic presented photos purported to be “Scenes from an American Coup.”
This general tactic has not changed since then. Just this month, for example, Vanity Fair referred to the January 6 riots as “Trump’s attempted coup” Last month, Vox called it “Trump’s cuckoo coup.” Moreover, anti-Trump politicians have repeatedly referred to the riot as a coup, and “attempted coup” has become the standard term of choice for the January 6 panel.
At the time, it was obvious that if the riot was a coup at all, it failed utterly. Thus, the debate is now over whether or not it was an attempted coup. On January 8, 2021, I argued the riot was not an attempted coup. Now, 18 months later, after months of “investigation” and testimony to the January 6 committee, we’ve learned new details about the events that occurred that day. And now I can say with even more confidence: the January 6 riot was not an attempted coup.
It was not an attempted coup because it simply wasn’t the sort of event that historians and political scientists—the people who actually study coups—generally define as a coup. Even the Justice Department admits that virtually all of the rioters were, at most, guilty only of crimes such as trespassing and disorderly conduct. Among the tiny minority of those charged with actual conspiracy—11 people—they lacked any sort of institutional backing or support that is necessary for a coup attempt to take place.
Nor is this just some meaningless debate over semantics. Words matter and definitions matter. This should be abundantly clear to anyone in our current age of debates over what terms like “recession” or “vaccine” or “woman” mean. In fact, the use of the term “coup” has been thoroughly weaponized in that outside academic circles it is employed largely as a pejorative to discredit political acts designed to register discontent with a ruling regime or to oppose a ruling coalition. For many, the term coup is now used increasingly to describe political acts one doesn’t like. But if the term “coup” ultimately means “political thing those bad guys did” then it ceases to have any precise meaning at all. But, the use of the term in this way does explain why so many pundits and politicians routinely use the term to label their opponents coup plotters. It’s basically name calling, and really only tells us about the user’s political leanings.
A coup attempt includes illegal and overt attempts by the military or other elites within the state apparatus to unseat the sitting executive.
Although the terms “military” and “coup” are routinely employed together, Powell and Thyne emphasize military involvement at early stages is not necessary:
[Other definitions] more broadly allow non-military elites, civilian groups, and even mercenaries to be included as coup perpetrators. This broad definition includes four sources, including [a definition stating that coup] perpetrators need only be ‘organized factions’. We take a middle ground. Coups may be undertaken by any elite who is part of the state apparatus. These can include non-civilian members of the military and security services, or civilian members of government.
Moreover, it is not necessary that violence actually be used. The presence of a threat issued by some organized group of elites is sufficient.
This definition is helpful because there are many types of political actions that are not coups, even if the intended outcome is a change in the ruling regime. The definition offered by Powell and Thyne is useful because it avoids “conflating coups with other forms of anti-regime activity, which is the primary problem with broader approaches.”
For example, popular uprisings that force ruling executives from power are not generally coups. Intervention by a foreign regime is not a coup. Civil wars initiated by non-elites or other outsiders are not coups.
Why the Jan 6 Riot Was Not a Coup
In the case of the January 6 riot, the rioters had no institutional backing, no promises of help from elites, and no reason to assume they had access to any coercive tools necessary to seize and hold control of a state’s executive apparatus. Nor was Donald Trump even in a position to promise such things. As noted by Elaine Kamarck at the Brookings Institution:
we now know that Trump did not even have the support of his own family and friends nor his handpicked White House staff. To pursue his plans, he had to rely on a close group of advisors known as “the clown show” led by Rudi Giuliani, a pillow manufacturer, and a dot-com millionaire—none of whom was in government and none of whom controlled the most important “assets” (guns, tanks, planes etc.) needed to take over a government. In contrast to most successful coups in history, Trump had no faction of the military, no faction of the National Guard, and no faction of the District of Colombia Metropolitan Police at his disposal.
In other words, the rioters had no avenue to calling upon any faction of the state or group of elites to secure backing. Kamarck continues:
As we learned in some of the most recent hearings, it was Vice President Mike Pence who was in contact with the military and the police, and most importantly, the military and the police were taking orders from Pence not Trump, the commander in chief!
Given that Trump didn’t actually attempt to secure any government agency to secure power for himself, we can guess Trump knew no branch of the federal government was about to step in to illegally secure an extension to his tenure as president. We can never know for sure what Trump was really thinking on that day, but even if Trump sought to encourage a group of protestors to somehow put pressure on Congress—even if by violent means—that’s not a coup. It’s a popular uprising.
The Bolivian “Coup”: The Anti-Morales Protestors in Bolivia
The protests that followed the 2019 elections in Bolivia provide an interestingly similar case to the January 6 riot and demonstrate that it’s often quite debatable as to what constitutes a coup.
As the Bolivian election neared its end on October 24, sitting president Evo Morales began to claim victory. Numerous opponents, however, claimed Morales’s supporters had engaged in electoral fraud. Both sides refused to accept the results of the election, and protests and riots soon erupted across the nation. Morales and his supporters accused the opposition of staging a coup. The opposition accused Morales of the same. Or, more precisely, they accused Morales of attempting an “autocoup”—autogolpe in Spanish—in which Morales was attempting to hold on to power via illegal means.
Ultimately, Morales ended up resigning after he failed to maintain control over the police and military. High ranking officials from those institutions “recommended” Morales resign, and Morales did so soon after. Morales went into exile and Mexico and the opposition became the de facto governing coalition in Bolivia.
There remains no agreement, however, as to whether or not the actions of either side in Bolivia constituted a coup (or autocoup.) Morales’s supporters—mostly leftists—refer to the political crisis following the election as a coup. Those who are convinced Morales did indeed lose the election refer to his efforts as an autocoup. But many also refer to the events as a popular uprising.
For many, the situation in Bolivia in 2019 remains ambiguous, and we can see how it shares many elements in common with the events surrounding the January 6 riot at the Capitol. It began with claims of election fraud, and ended with a group of protestors attempting to pressure congress to change the outcome. This is not fundamentally different from the popular uprisings in Bolivia, except that in the US the outcome was never really dubious. There was never really any doubt as to whether the Pentagon would he helping Trump push through an autocoup. Trump never had any real reason to believe he could hold on to power, even with 900 mostly unarmed protestors trespassing in the Capitol.
“Coup” Now Means “Thing I Don’t Like”
The Bolivia situation also helps to illustrate how the term “coup” is used selectively for political effect. The fact that Morales’s leftist supporters are generally those who favor the use of the term to describe Morales’ removal from office is no coincidence. Those who support one side say it’s a coup, while the other side does not.
We see the same dynamic at work in the U.S., and we should not be surprised that the media has rushed to apply the term to the riot. This phenomenon was examined in a November 2019 article titled “Coup with Adjectives: Conceptual Stretching or Innovation in Comparative Research?,” by Leiv Marsteintredet and Andres Malamud. The authors note that as the incidence of real coups has declined, the word has become more commonly applied to political events that are generally not coups. But, as the authors note, this is no mere issue of splitting hairs, explaining that “The choice of how to conceptualize a coup is not to be taken lightly since it carries normative, analytical, and political implications.”
Increasingly, the term really means “this is a thing I don’t like.” It’s clear the January 6 panel in Congress, and countless anti-Trump pundits use the term in this way to express disapproval and also to justify regime crackdowns against pro-Trump opponents of the regime. It’s easier to justify harsh prison sentences for a disorganized group of vandals if their acts can be framed as a nearly successful coup and therefore a threat to “our democracy.” Moreover, if the situation were reversed, and if protestors invaded the Capitol to support a leftwing, pro-regime candidate, we can be sure that the vocabulary used to describe the event in the mainstream press would be quite different.
Europe had “77 years of almost uninterrupted peace” until Russia chose to end it by “invading” Ukraine, according to a peculiar “analysis” published by the Associated Press (AP) over the weekend. Having thus erased Yugoslavia’s bloody destruction in the 1990s, the author contradicts himself just two paragraphs later.
In a surreal opener, AP’s John Leicester argues that the conflict in Ukraine is the kind of world-changing event on the same level as the first nuclear bomb test in 1945 or the 1969 moon landing. Except the moon landing didn’t really change the world – the Apollo program arguably was NASA’s high water mark – so it’s puzzling why it would even get a mention. Perhaps to emotionally prime the reader for the following whopper, which is that on February 24 this year,. Russian President Vladimir Putin “chews up the world order and 77 years of almost uninterrupted peace in Europe by invading Ukraine.”
Come again? Leicester, who writes from Paris and has covered Europe for AP since 2002, clearly missed out on the Balkans Wars of the 1990s. Not to mention conflicts in the north of Ireland and Cyprus.
People who did not, and live with the consequences to this day, were predictably upset.
The war in Bosnia (1992-1995) certainly did not qualify as “uninterrupted peace” – unless this was considered Europe only on the maps. Nor did the 1999 “humanitarian intervention” in Kosovo, which had consequences that were on display on Sunday. The entire article basically hinges on that one word, “almost.”
It might be possible Leicester – and his AP editors – had forgotten all about these episodes. There is a curious lack of interest in the West in questioning the official narratives of the Yugoslav wars, after all. Except just two paragraphs later, Leicester cites an emotionally charged issue straight out of the Bosnian War – Srebrenica – to compare the Russians to Nazis.
Taking into consideration that his “analysis” is just dripping with emotionally charged language, this suggests that either Leicester and AP don’t consider the Balkans properly “Europe,” or chose to gloss over the conflicts there in order to bend reality to their preferred narrative – that of Russia upsetting Europe’s peaceful slumber.
Just look at this verbiage: “generations of Europeans who had grown up knowing only peace have been brutally awakened to both its value and its fragility.” Or this: “the need to take sides — for self-preservation and to stand for right against wrong.”
Or lamenting that the world was making such “progress, with speedy vaccines against the Covid-19 global pandemic and deals on climate change, before Russia’s all-powerful Putin made it his historical mission to force independent, Western-looking Ukraine at gunpoint back into the Kremlin’s orbit, as it had been during Soviet times, when he served as an intelligence officer for the feared KGB.” Just one trope after another, strung together for maximum emotional impact.
At this point it is tempting, as one online researcher did, to wonder “how quickly the once venerable AP descended into an all-out dumpster fire.” Not just when it comes to the conflict in Ukraine, either – the agency’s almost comical “don’t say recession” coverage of the US economy under President Joe Biden has prompted one pollster to describe them as “disgustingly dishonest” people who have been “shilling” for the Democrats for years.
Another example of this is on display in AP’s coverage of the House January 6 Committee, an unusual collection of Democrats “enriched” by two rabidly anti-Trump GOP representatives. In addition to the emotional undertones, the agency insists on calling the Capitol riot an “insurrection,” a loaded term preferred by the Democrats, in order to invoke the 14th Amendment and disenfranchise the opposition.
Compare that to AP bending over backwards not to describe the 2020 riots as “riots,” but literally anything else. Their explanation? The word “riot” would “stigmatize broad swaths of people protesting against lynching, police brutality or for racial justice, going back to the urban uprisings of the 1960s.”
Instead, the AP’s Stylebook – used by most English-speaking journalists around the world – advises using different euphemisms, depending on who the violence is directed at. In other words, the What matters less than Who is doing it to Whom.
If once is coincidence, twice is happenstance, and three times is enemy action, then this is a veritable onslaught on the very meaning of words, perpetrated by one of the world’s largest “news” agencies. This is about more than Ukraine, or the Balkans wars, or the Biden recession, or the “fiery but mostly peaceful” riots – it’s about reality itself and the people who try to twist it, whatever their reasons.
Defaming journalism on the OPCW’s Syria cover-up scandal, The Guardian and its NATO-funded sources out themselves as the real “network of conspiracy theorists.”
The article is based on what Townsend calls a “new analysis” that “reveals” a “network more than two dozen conspiracy theorists, frequently backed by a coordinated Russian campaign.” This network, Townsend claims, is “focused on the denial or distortion of facts about the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons and on attacking the findings of the world’s foremost chemical weapons watchdog,” the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). According to Townsend, I am named “as the most prolific spreader of disinformation” among the nefarious bunch.
In hawking this purported exposé of “disinformation”, Townsend violated every basic standard of journalism. He did not contact me before publishing his allegations; fails to offer a shred of evidence for them; and does not cite a single example of my alleged “prolific” disinformation. Instead, Townsend bases his claims entirely on a think-tank report that also provides no evidence, nor even assert that I have said anything false. In the process, Townsend failed to disclose that the report’s authors — the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) and the Syria Campaign — are groups funded by the US government and other belligerents in the Syria proxy war. To top it off, Townsend fabricates additional allegations that his state-funded sources do not even make.
As a result, Townsend and the Guardian have engaged in the exact sort of conduct that they falsely impute to me and others: spreading Syria-related disinformation with coordinated support from state-funded actors. The aim of this propaganda network is transparent: defaming journalism that exposes the OPCW’s ongoing Syria cover-up scandal and the dirty war waged by Western powers on Syria.
The OPCW cover-up is arguably the most copiously documented pro-war deception since the US-led drive to invade Iraq. In Western media, as The Guardian’s behavior newly demonstrates, it is also without question the most suppressed.
At the center of the story are two veteran OPCW scientists, Dr. Brendan Whelan and Ian Henderson. The pair were among a team that deployed to Syria in April 2018 to investigate an alleged chemical attack in the town of Douma. They have since accused senior OPCW officials of manipulating the Douma probe to reach a conclusion that baselessly implicated the Syrian government in a chlorine gas attack. Their claims are backed up by a trove of leaked documents and emails that show extensive doctoring and censoring of the Douma team’s findings.
The Douma cover-up extends far beyond the OPCW’s executive suite. It also implicates NATO governments led by the US, which bombed Syria over the Douma chemical weapons allegation, and then, weeks later, privately pressured the OPCW to validate it. Since the OPCW scandal became public, the US and its allies have thwarted efforts to address it.
At the most criminal level, the scandal implicates sectarian death squads armed and funded by the US and allies during their decade-long campaign for regime change in Syria.
At the time of the incident, Douma was occupied by the Saudi-backed jihadi militia Jaysh-al-Islam and under bombardment from Syrian army forces attempting to retake control. Shortly before their surrender, local allies of Jaysh-al-Islam accused Syrian forces of using chemical weapons. They released gruesome footage of an apartment building filled with slain civilians. A gas cylinder was filmed positioned above a crater on the roof. Concurrently, the White Helmets, a NATO and Gulf state-funded, insurgent-adjacent organization, released footage of what it claimed were gas attack victims in a Douma field hospital. Several journalists, including Riam Dalati of the BBC, Robert Fisk of the Independent, and James Harkin of the Intercept, found evidence that the hospital scene was staged. (In February 2019, Dalati claimed that he can “prove without a doubt that the Douma Hospital scene was staged.” Oddly, more than three years later, he has not released his findings).
The White Helmets’ alleged fakery of a chemical attack aftermath, coupled with the censored OPCW findings showing no evidence that a chemical attack occurred, suggest the inescapable conclusion that insurgents in Douma carried out a deception to frame the Syrian government. And given the unexplained deaths of the more than 40 victims filmed in the Douma apartment building, that deception may have entailed a murderous war crime.
Unlike the Iraq WMD hoax, the very existence of the OPCW’s Douma scandal is unknown to much of the Western world. With few exceptions, establishment media outlets have refused to acknowledge the OPCW whistleblowers and the leaks that brought their story to light.
After largely ignoring the OPCW cover-up since it first surfaced in May 2019, the Guardian has now published defamatory claims about journalists, myself included, who have dared to report on the censored facts.
When I wrote The Guardian about the Townsend article’s journalistic lapses, I did not get a response. One week later, I phoned Townsend, who was now back in the office but had yet to reply. In our conservation, which I recorded and recently published, I repeatedly asked Townsend to substantiate his claims about me and identify even a single example of my alleged disinformation.
Townsend did not attempt to defend his article’s assertions, beyond claiming that they were based on what was “in a report.” When I pressed further, he claimed that he had to “dash for a meeting” and promised that I would soon hear from the paper’s reader’s editor. (Before I published our phone call, and this article, I emailed Townsend a detailed list of questions and invited him to offer any additional comment. He did not respond).
“Deadly Disinformation”
Townsend could not provide any evidence for his assertions because the report that he parroted offers none as well.
The report, titled “Deadly Disinformation” and authored by The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) and the Syria Campaign, contains bare references to my reporting and makes no effort to refute it. Nowhere does the report even claim that I have said anything false. It simply claims to have “identified 28 individuals, outlets and organisations who have spread disinformation about the Syrian conflict,” and that I am “the most prolific spreader of disinformation” among them.
When the report bothers to mention of anything that I have actually said, it engages in distortion. In its first mention, the report states that I wrote an article that “attacks Bellingcat for its contributions to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).” Here, they not only fail to assert that I said anything false, but offer a false portrayal of what happened.
As for “attacking” Bellingcat — a website that, like the report’s authors, is funded by NATO states that were belligerents in the Syria dirty war – what I really did was expose its disinformation.
In short, the ISD/Syria Campaign’s first purported example of my alleged “disinformation” is an easily verifiable case where I’ve exposed state-backed lies.
The report’s only other substantive example comes when it notes that I have argued that the OPCW probe’s Douma probe “was flawed.” This far understates my case: the OPCW’s Douma investigation wasn’t “flawed”; it’s a scandalous cover-up worthy of global attention. Regardless, yet again, the report does not even assert that my argument is false, let alone try to explain why.
In a July 13th email, I asked the ISD to substantiate their claim that I have spread disinformation, and provide even one example of it. On its website, the ISD claims to “take complaints seriously,” and promises a response “within ten working days.” As of this writing, after 13 working days, I have not heard back.
At The Guardian, OPCW leaks are “problematic”
When I emailed a complaint about Townsend’s reporting, The Guardian admitted fault only on failing to contact me before publishing his evidence-free allegations. This was the result, they claimed, of a “breakdown of communication internally.” I was then offered the chance to respond to the article in 200 words.
A key point in my reply (which can be read here) was that The Guardian and its state-funded source is unable to identify any falsehoods in anything I’ve written “because my reporting on the OPCW’s Douma cover-up scandal is based on damning OPCW leaks.” These leaks, I added, “reveal that veteran inspectors found no evidence of a chemical attack in Douma, and that expert toxicologists ruled out chlorine gas as the victims’ cause of death. But these findings were doctored and censored by senior OPCW officials.”
At The Guardian, this passage set off an apparent alarm. After disparaging my reporting on the OPCW leaks, The Guardian informed me that they would now prevent me from even mentioning them. In a July 8 email, a Guardian editor wrote that the “the part about the OPCW” in my reply “continues to be problematic.” My reference to the OPCW leaks, the editor claimed, “makes an assertion that has been rebutted by an independent inquiry.”
I responded by asking the editor to specify exactly which “assertion” of mine has been rebutted. I also proposed that, if they believe that I have said anything “problematic,” they publish their own rebuttal.
In multiple follow-up emails, the editor failed to identify any “rebutted” assertion of mine. Despite that, the Guardian proceeded to publish my reply without its reference to the OPCW leaks. But this raised a new problem: in censoring my statement, they misquoted me. When I pointed out that error, they updated my reply to finally allow a (minimal) mention of the OPCW leaks.
The Guardian also took me up on my proposal that they publish their own rebuttal:
Editor’s note: Both the ISD and the Syria Campaign list a diverse range of funders and describe themselves as “fiercely independent”. In 2020 the OPCW rebutted claims about its investigation into the Douma incident (Inquiry strikes blow to Russian denials of Syria chemical attack).
As for the “inquiry” that The Guardian claims “rebutted claims about its investigation into the Douma incident,” the inquiry was not independent, and did not rebut anything.
The “inquiry” was appointed by the OPCW’s Director General’s office, the very body that presided over the cover-up. It was also staffed by two “investigators” from the US and UK. These happen to be the two states that bombed Syria based on the Douma allegations that the OPCW fraudulently validated, and that have since tried to bury the scandal at every stage.
As for what the Guardian calls the ISD and Syria Campaign’s “diverse range of funders,” both groups indeed enjoy a diverse range of funders: everyone from NATO governments to NATO government-funded organizations. They also receive support from billionaire-funded foundations that often work in concert with these same NATO governments’ foreign policy objectives.
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s “diverse range of funders,” according to The Guardian.
The ISD’s “diverse” funders include the US State Department, the US Department of Homeland Security, three other US state-funded organizations, and more than two dozen other NATO government agencies. On the private side, the ISD’s funders include the foundations of three of the world’s richest oligarchs: Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Group, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
In using the ISD as a source, The Guardian has a conflict of interest that its article did not disclose. The latter two ISD donors have also given sizeable grants to The Guardian: at least $625,000 from Open Society Foundations since 2019, and at least $12.9 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation since 2011.
Omidyar’s foundation has a direct role in the ISD/Syria Campaign report. The Omidyar Group’s Luminate Strategic Initiatives is listed alongside the German government-funded Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung foundation as the report’s fiscal sponsor.
Omidyar’s sponsorship of an attack on journalism about the OPCW scandal is highly fitting. The Intercept, the self-described “fearless and adversarial” outlet that Omidyar also funds with his vast fortune, has never once acknowledged the OPCW leaks or whistleblowers’ existence. While ignoring the OPCW scandal for more than three years, The Intercept has published multiple articles promoting the allegation that Syria committed a chemical attack in Douma.
Like the ISD, the Syria Campaign is also funded by governments and other belligerents in the Syria dirty war. As The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal reported in 2017, the Syria Campaign was founded by Ayman Asfari, a Syrian-British billionaire oil tycoon and leading financial supporter of the Syrian National Coalition, the largest government-in-exile group established after the Syria conflict erupted in 2011. The Syria Campaign has also done extensive P.R. and fundraising for the White Helmets, the insurgent-adjacent, NATO state-funded organization implicated in the Douma incident.
That these two state-funded groups “describe themselves as ‘fiercely independent'” is apparently enough for The Guardian. I trust that the Guardian would feel differently if they were dealing with self-described “fiercely independent” groups funded by the Russian and Syrian governments.
Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of sources quoted in the ISD/Syria Campaign report are funded or employed by the same NATO state and private sponsors. This includes the White Helmets; the Global Public Policy Institute; Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS); self-described journalist Chloe Hadjimatheou of the BBC, who produced a podcast series that disparaged the OPCW whistleblowers and whitewashed the Douma cover-up; and James Jeffrey, the former US Special Envoy for Syria.
For a report that claims to be concerned with protecting Syrians from “real-world harm,” Jeffrey is a particularly interesting interview subject. Few US officials have been as candid about their willingness to immiserate Syrian civilians in pursuit of hegemonic US goals in their country.
Jeffrey’s proudly self-acknowledged real-world harms on millions of Syrians don’t seem to bother the study’s authors, presumably because their Western state sponsors implement them.
The report is so invested in its state funders’ aims in Syria that it approvingly airs frustration that other governments are failing to toe the NATO line. A “former Western diplomat” complains that “disinformation” on Syria is helping states “avoid making the decisions that we want them to make, say in the Security Council or elsewhere.” (emphasis added). From the point of view of Western officials, the anonymous diplomat is employing an accurate operative definition of what constitutes “disinformation”: any information that causes those deemed subordinate to “avoid making the decisions that we want them to make.”
Fittingly, another anonymous “senior diplomat” laments that supposed Syria disinformation is intended “ultimately to cast doubt upon the legitimacy and integrity of the people doing this kind of [policy] work.” Daring to question the “legitimacy and integrity” of Western policymakers who oversaw a multi-billion dollar CIA-led dirty war on Syria that knowingly empowered al-Qaeda and other sectarian death squads while leaving hundreds of thousands dead — another intolerable act that can only result from “disinformation.”
A member of the US-funded, insurgent-adjacent White Helmets is also given space to lament that alleged “disinformation” is hurting its donations. “We hear about billions of dollars for aid at conferences on Syria but most of that funding goes to the UN,” a White Helmets manager complains. Unmentioned is that European governments have cut funding to the group after their late founder, the lavishly paid UK military veteran James le Mesurier, admitted to pocketing donor funds and financial fraud right before he took his own life.
Having promoted the hegemonic agenda of its state sponsors, the report closes with a thinly veiled call to censor the dissenting voices it targets.
The ISD and Syria Campaign urge policymakers to “adopt a whole-of-government approach in tackling disinformation” and “ensure that loopholes or special privileges are not created for ‘media’ which would only exacerbate the spread of disinformation.” These “privileges” presumably refer to free speech. The report also notes favorably that platforms have addressed “thematic harms such as public health disinformation or foreign interference in elections.” As a result, the report calls on these platforms to “commit to applying similar levels of resourcing… in the context of the ongoing Syrian conflict.” Perhaps they have in mind the censorship of journalism about Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 election, on the fake grounds that the story was “Russian disinformation.”
The fact that this network of state-funded actors is devoting energy to disparaging journalism about the OPCW’s Syria cover-up — and even advocating that it be censored – reflects their powerful sponsors’ desperation to bury a damning scandal.
On top of the two known whistleblowers, Arias has ignored calls for accountability from his original predecessor, founding OPCW chief Jose Bustani, as well as four other former senior OPCW officials. Along with Bustani, former senior UN official Hans von Sponeck has spearheaded the Berlin Group 21, a global initiative to address the OPCW scandal. The US has responded to Bustani by blocking his testimony at the United Nations. Arias meanwhile refused to open a letter that he received from Sponeck’s group, returning it back to sender.
The response of Western media outlets like the Guardian to the stonewalling of these veteran diplomats and senior OPCW officials has simply been to ignore it.
In whitewashing the OPCW cover-up, the preponderance of state sources parroted by The Guardian reveals the ultimate irony in its allegations. While claiming to “identify” a fictional network of Russia-backed disinformation actors about Syria, The Guardian’s Townsend is himself spreading the disinformation of a NATO-funded network that defames voices who expose the dirty war on Syria.
In fact, one of Townsend’s central allegations goes well beyond his state-funded sources. Although Townsend’s article is premised on identifying a “network of conspiracy theorists,” Townsend’s sole source – the ISD/Syria Campaign report – never alleges that such a “network” exists. Nowhere in the report does the word “network” even appear.
Thus, Townsend has not only parroted state-funded sources, but concocted an additional allegation in the service of their narrative. This is not just an ordinary fabrication: in creating the fantasy of a “coordinated”, “Russia-backed”, “network of conspiracy theorists,” Townsend also reveals himself to be the very thing that he accuses his targets of being: a conspiracy theorist.
And given that Townsend not only parrots his state-backed sources but works for an outlet funded by some of the same sponsors, it is fair to say that The Guardian and these state-funded think tanks are a part of the same network.
Consequently, reading the article’s headline — “Network of Syria conspiracy theorists identified”—as a description of The Guardian and the NATO-funded sources that it relied on, the claim is no longer inaccurate.
Our new series of micro-articles deals with the newly everyday occurrence of the modern media simply changing what a word means. Today’s word is “recession”.
The United States is not in a recession. The government want to be very clear about that.
Yes, it’s true that a “recession” is generally defined as…
a period of temporary economic decline during which trade and industrial activity are reduced, generally identified by a fall in GDP in two successive quarters.
And yes, it’s true that the US has likely seen a “fall in GDP in two successive quarters”…but that doesn’t mean there’s a recession.
What is a recession? While some maintain that two consecutive quarters of falling real GDP constitute a recession, that is neither the official definition nor the way economists evaluate the state of the business cycle.
There you have it – the US isn’t in a recession (not a real one, anyway), by this different definition of “recession”.
This does not constitute the Whitehouse changing the definition. They want to be very clear about that, too. And, as usual, the official “fact-checkers” have their back.
The point many of them are clinging to is that we can’t be in a recession because of all the “new jobs”. A startling piece of intellectual dishonesty, since the “new jobs” are not new at all, they’re all the old jobs everyone lost due to lockdown.
At the end of the day the price of energy is skyrocketing, inflation is hitting record highs all over the world, there’s a food crisis and a fuel crisis and a housing crisis and a general cost of living crisis.
… who cares what we call that? Does changing the name change the thing? A recession by any other name is still as deep.
The people in charge believe that as long as they keep changing the names of things it doesn’t matter that everyone is starving. They are wrong.
BBC has a new article out, about the “origins of Covid-19”:
Great, right? If BBC says that Covid origin studies point to the Wuhan seafood market as the source of Sars-Cov-2, then it must be so, right? After all, we trust the BBC and we especially trust science and scientific studies.
BBC’s map of early cases clustering around the market, offers the only real evidence that the BBC article provides, and looks extremely convincing:
Again, the dots represent the first recorded cases of Covid-19. The circled “X”’s are WIV and WIID. Please tell me, after seeing the second picture, are you still sure about the Wuhan’s market being the source? If you are capable of elementary thinking, which all of my subscribers certainly are, you would think that the BBC article is total bunk. And of course, you would be right!
So:
Why did BBC’s map exclude locations of WIV and WIID, which are obviously known to anyone in the news business who is writing about Covid, and are critically important to the story if they wanted to tell it truthfully?
Because if the article included these locations, it would be obvious to any reader that the article is total nonsense and is a completely laughable attempt at misdirection.
Therefore, BBC wanted to lie to us and mislead us by omission.
Okay, then, why did BBC decide to lie to us?
It lied because if BBC showed locations of WIV and WIID on the map, the story of Covid would sound something like this:
Dear Citizens! By pure accident, a Chinese virological laboratory released an experimental deadly virus, whose creation was funded by the NIH. But do not worry: purely by coincidence, NIH scientists also worked on a vaccine against such viruses. We are very fortunate that Moderna, with NIH help, in just TWO DAYS, was able to design a perfect vaccine against Sars-Cov-2. Never mind that previous vaccines took decades to develop. Science works faster now!
Dear Readers: you must take this vaccine. We are certain that it works and if you get vaccinated, you will not get the virus. The virus stops with every vaccinated person. If you do not take our vaccine, you will be fired from your job, will be excluded from society, and will starve for disrespecting science and authorities. This vaccine is safe for pregnancy because there is no proof that it is unsafe for pregnancy (we made sure of that).
The crazy right-wing conspiracists, rogue scientists, and discredited doctors warning that the vaccine is not safe, have been fired from their jobs, lost medical licenses, and were removed from social networks and Google. Therefore, we now have total scientific and medical consensus about the vaccine. Please believe us, because all NIH-funded scientists and still-licensed doctors agree with us. If you do not believe this, you are an ignorant, anti-science fool and a “winter of death” awaits you.
Get vaccinated! Get vaccinated! Get vaccinated! Get vaccinated!
That would be a strange and somewhat less believable story, right? It would be much easier to deal with the general public if the public believed that the virus came from Wuhan’s “wet market”. That’s why BBC is publishing such obviously dishonest articles.
The medical establishment professes to know an awful lot. A few days before lockdown in March 2020, it knew that covid was not a High Consequence Infectious Disease and downgraded it accordingly. Exhibiting an Orwellian capacity for doublethink, it also knew that societies ought to be bludgeoned with lockdowns to prevent the spread of the not so highly consequential, and therefore downgraded, pathogen. In addition, it somehow just knew, without being able to explain why, that a cost-benefit analysis would be superfluous, so none was done. Until July 2020, it knew, based on decades of established science, that masking in community settings was useless in preventing the spread of respiratory illnesses. Then, with no new science to support a 180-degree turn, it just knew that masks had to be mandated.
It was so certain that mass vaccination with the experimental injections was the only course of action to take in the face of the not so highly consequential covid disease that it suppressed alternative cheap, safe and effective treatments. It was also quite sure that it had to censor and threaten doctors like Sam White with debarment because he expressed concerns about mass vaccination with the shoddily tested and hastily marketed novel ‘vaccines’. It somehow reasoned that doctors expressing genuine concern for patient safety was a threat to patient safety and that the only way to guarantee patient safety was for every single doctor, journalist and media outlet to sing from the same Big Pharma-sponsored hymn sheet.
Granted, the medical establishment’s stance during covid has not been underpinned by rational considerations, but that is precisely what has given it so much latitude to respond to ‘the crisis’. There is no limit to what you can know and do when you don’t have to prove rationally how you came to know it. Life is a never-ending carousel of trade-offs. You can either plod through things methodically and get it right or you can blast ahead at Warp Speed with the misplaced confidence of Joe Biden on a bicycle.
So, given the medical establishment’s boundless knowledge in times of crisis, it’s more than a little odd that it does not know why young and apparently healthy adults all over the world are dying in unprecedentedly large numbers. It is uncharacteristically stumped: it professes that there are simply no clues whatsoever to this disturbing phenomenon.
It is in the grip of such uncharacteristic knowledge paralysis that it seems incapable of exploring obvious lines of enquiry, such as asking questions like: when was the last time that governments all over world put a jackboot on the neck of every adult citizen to inject them with novel ‘vaccines’ employing an experimental gene-based technology tested under quality control conditions that would have run-of-the-mill crack dealers shaking their heads in disbelief?
What’s in a name?
Once you unlock the mystery of the medical establishment’s peculiar brand of epistemology, you begin to understand that how it comes to ‘know’ things is directly related to how it defines the problems it is trying to solve. For people who think in straitjackets, the problem of young people dying inexplicably is a medical problem. But, for the unbounded thinkers in charge of the medical establishment, it is a Public Relations problem. Through that lens, the obvious line of enquiry into experimental mass vaccination gets ruled out because it is too rational, too much of a threat to its reputation and too unprofitable.
The solution to this PR problem is to repackage it in such a way that it is seen as an insoluble medical mystery, as insoluble as the mystery of life itself – a mystery that one can debate in philosophical terms but never get to grips with in any practical way. The most insoluble mysteries are those that have been around since the dawn of time and yet continue to evade unravelling. This is axiomatic to the quality of insolubility – Plato, Seneca, Aquinas, Voltaire and Heidegger will have all given it their best shot and yet here we are today, none the wiser. The seed must be sown in the public mind that this is not a new problem that arose coterminously with mass global experimental covid vaccination but has been ‘a thing’ since the dawn of medical things.
The key to all successful narrative management is naming the problem. When Edward Bernays, the father of propaganda, was tasked by the tobacco industry in the early 20th century with breaking the taboo against women smoking cigarettes, he didn’t call them cancer sticks. He called them torches of freedom. With one ingenious stroke of the naming pen, the tobacco industry doubled its market overnight and women won the right to lung cancer.
In a similar vein, society must understand that young adults inexplicably dying before their time is the result of a bona fide disease of unfathomable cause – a mysterious and yet proper medical thing – and not a possible crime against humanity.
At first glance, the name they’ve hit on does not fill you with confidence that the best medical minds were enlisted in the brainstorming session. But it certainly has an air of does-what-it-says-on-the-tin. It is partly for that reason that Sudden Adult Death Syndrome (“SADS”) is a stroke of marketing genius. It’s got an easy acronym that chimes flippantly with the tragic outcome and yet is also readily accessible to authoritative tones after three pints in the pub. This is 90 per cent of the battle in getting the public to understand in no uncertain terms that SADS is ‘a thing’. A serious thing. It trips off the tongue very easily and yet is not so silly that it sounds like the lead-in to a crazy story developed by a contestant in an episode of BBC One’s Would I Lie to You.
As far as the medical establishment is concerned, the perception that SADS on this scale is a recent global phenomenon must be resisted on the grounds that it could become associated with a big new event – like mass global experimental covid vaccination. So no, SADS is not new. It’s been a thing for eons. And for sure, a Google search seems to suggest that SADS has been around for as long as cancer. But Allan Stevo’s investigation using his “8.6 pound Webster’s Encyclopaedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language from 1992” – which is impervious to algorithmic re-engineering – reveals that the term did not exist in 1992. But who are you going to trust – the colourful, digital pages of Google or the crumbling ancient parchments of Webster’s Encyclopaedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language?
I’m not saying there have never been mysterious unexplained deaths of young and apparently healthy adults. They were just so rare that they weren’t on the radar, even of dictionaries whose job it is to define all things known to the vast bulk of humanity. Surely this merits delving into a little deeper?
Whatever you do, don’t solve the problem – autopsies die a sudden death
One way to solve the apparently insoluble problem of sudden adult death would be to conduct autopsies on as many sudden adult deaths as resources will allow. It turns out that the Chief Pathologist at the University of Heidelberg, Dr. Peter Schirmacher, was doing just that very thing. In the summer of 2021, his team had just finished conducting 40 autopsies on people who had died within two weeks of vaccination and concluded that 30-40% of them died from the vaccine. He was pushing for many more autopsies of vaccinated people.
His claims were naturally dismissed by the German Government. From Dr. Schirmacher’s perspective, the dismissal by bureaucrats of his professional autopsy findings must have felt like being an army private in the battlefield reporting by radio to a lieutenant that he’d just been shot in the leg, only to have the lieutenant ask, “How can you be sure?”. But the powerful bureaucrats must have had good reason to dismiss his professional work although these reasons weren’t made clear.
Calls by the Federal Association of German Pathologists pushing for more autopsies of vaccinated people were also treated with disdain. No other autopsies have been performed apart from 15 done by Dr. Arne Burkhardt towards the end of 2021, which found “clear evidence of vaccine-induced autoimmune-like pathology in multiple organs” in 14 of 15 cases, all of which were ignored by all health authorities and mainstream media. No further autopsies have been reported and Dr. Schirmacher and his colleagues have gone quiet, after being so emphatic about the risks and the need for as many autopsies as possible.
On the face of it, the only way to prove what is causing the uptick in mysterious sudden deaths has died a sudden death. But the sensible and mature conclusion to draw from the silence of the autopsy doctors is that they have realised they were wrong and that the powerful bureaucrats and MSM journalists, who know nothing about autopsies, were right. Only a ‘conspiracy theorist’ would think there was a cover-up going on, right?
Public Relations – The Mail Online takes a proper gander at SADS
In any case, why bother with autopsies when, according to this article in the Mail Online, the best medical minds in Australia are getting to grips with the problem by “opening up a new national register”. Yes, that’s right, they’re at the cutting edge of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) in which all our problems will be solved by data, algorithms, AI and registers. We’re leaving behind the grime of autopsies, post-mortems and diagnosing diseased patients by prodding them with stethoscopes and asking them time-wasting questions. We’ve got registers now.
Now, at first glance it might seem that the article would not be out of place in The Onion or the Babylon Bee because of idiotic tautologies like this one:
But pointing out that SADS, a death syndrome, is fatal is not cheap satire. It is a reminder that contained in SADS is both the disease and its inescapable prognosis of death.
Another reason why SADS is more of a thing than any other medical thing is that a diagnosis of SADS can never be wrong. It can only be given after death has occurred and only three boxes need to be ticked – did the deceased die without warning; was the deceased an adult in the prime of life and, crucially; do we intend to follow 4IR protocols to establish cause of death by doing nothing other than entering some data in a register? Yes, to all three? Job done. The clever cardiologist who is quoted extensively in the article jokes that SADS is a “diagnosis of nothing” but, once she has taken her tongue out of her cheek, I’m sure she is only too aware of how clever a diagnosis this is.
After correctly informing the reader that this particular death syndrome is fatal, the article recounts how a typical sudden death unfolds. The victim doesn’t come down for breakfast, but no one is concerned because we (white-collar workers at least) all work from home these days so having a lie-in is par for the course. The whole tone of the description of the tragic death of a young person in the peak of life is bizarrely deadpan. Again, you would be wrong to interpret this apparently tasteless approach as cheap satire. The banal tone is deliberately intended to drive home the point that SADS is just another puzzle in the countless puzzles that the universe, with its twisted sense of humour, flings at humanity on a regular basis.
The article contains pictures of very young actors clutching at their hearts with distressed expressions. Again, you would be wrong to think this is cheap and tasteless. How else are we to understand that SADS really is a thing? I think the visual message here is that if you’re under 40 and find yourself clutching at your heart while out jogging, be appropriately but not overly distressed because, while your heart may stop beating and no-one will ever know exactly why, SADS is definitely a thing. And the national register will never forget you.
Because the article is intended to be as informative as possible, it shares some very helpful warning ‘signs’ of SADS. Top warning sign number one is a family history of a SADS diagnosis. The happy smiley cardiologist who was selected to educate the public about SADS advises that your SADS clock might be silently ticking down if any of the following things have happened to you: fainting from exercise, over-excitement or just being ‘startled’. If you are one of those people who faints at the mere thought of exercise, you would have obviously been on the SADS register a very long time ago, had it been in operation. Your continued existence is actually more of a mystery than SADS itself, but let’s not complicate things any further. Suffice to say your clock is ticking down and your housemates should not be too surprised if you don’t come down for breakfast in the next couple of weeks. At least the Mail Online has prepared them. And you, come to think of it.
If you are wondering why I refer to the cardiologist as “the happy smiley doctor”, click the link to the article and it will be as clear to you as her sparkling eyes and teeth. There is a photo of her beaming as though she has just been awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine when in fact, she is being quizzed about the grizzly business of young people dying for reasons that cannot be fathomed by the best brains in medicine. Why is she happy and smiley instead of sombre and uneasy? Is this another tactless error by the Mail Online inadvertently making the whole article look like cheap satire? Not at all. World War II propaganda used the very same technique to placate the masses in times of great uncertainty. Here is a WWII poster of a woman exuding the same brand of devil-may-care insouciance in the face of adversity:
Ok, so I’ve chosen a Nazi propaganda poster to compare with the happy smiley Australian doctor. Is this in bad taste? Personally, I don’t think so. Today’s brave new world of forced masking, forced lockdowns and forced medical experimentation must be met head-on with bold comparisons. Yesterday’s Nazis weren’t big on bodily autonomy and nor are today’s Australians (or Canadians, or Austrians, or French for that matter). Am I saying, rather unsubtly, that the Western world is becoming the very thing it fought 75 years ago? Only if you believe that people were robbed of the human right to voluntary informed consent by being coerced into taking the ‘vaccines’. ‘Vaccines’ which, let’s be clear, have absolutely nothing to do with the current spate of sudden adult deaths all over the world.
Am I unsubtly hinting that the Mail Online’s proper gander at SADS is actually propaganda for the medical establishment? Only if you believe that the responsible thing to do would be to show a picture of a doctor holding her head in her hands, tears of shame flowing from her eyes for failing to at least consider one potential and obvious cause of the mysterious deaths. I think we’re all in agreement here – that would not be responsible journalism. Far better to show a happy beaming doctor exuding the confidence of someone who is certain that SADS really is a thing, that it’s been a big thing for quite some time and that, while getting a ‘diagnosis’ of SADS is indeed the end of the world for you, you will die knowing that we are getting on top of this very real thing because we’re fighting it with a register and not with futile autopsies.
There’s a mention in the article about the role of genes because you can’t have a totally mysterious and fatal death syndrome (if the Mail Online can get away with this clever tautology, why can’t I?) without genes playing a role. Of course they haven’t, and never will, find a SADS gene, but that’s beside the point when proffering genes causality. Genes are the building blocks of life; your life ends suddenly without warning, ergo there must have been something wrong with your building blocks.
The ‘best advice’ the happy smiley cardiologist can give is: if you’re related to anyone who’s had an unexplained death, ‘it’s extremely recommended you see a cardiologist.’ Which seems pointless because a SADS diagnosis rests entirely on you having no detectable condition right up to the point you clutch your heart in desperation and keel over. If the condition was a recognised detectable one, mitigation strategies would likely kick in pre-heart clutching and, even if you ended up dying from that condition, your death would be labelled something other than SADS by virtue of its having been detected. SADS is the ultimate catch-22 – the doctors don’t know what’s wrong with the patient before they die and there’s no way of knowing afterwards (autopsies now being off the table) so the patient gets a posthumous SADS ‘diagnosis’, and is successfully entered on a register.
The Mail Online article is perfect except for that flawed bit of advice which seems to fail to recognise the complex circular nature of SADS. Telling people to have a thorough check-up before SADS threatens the very existence of SADS. Being cynical, I would say this advice is a ruse to give a boost to the happy smiley doctor’s billings.
WASHINGTON – The Pulitzer Prize Board has rejected former US President Donald Trump’s appeal to revoke awards given to The New York Times and The Washington Post for their reporting on alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election.
“The 2018 Pulitzer Prizes in National Reporting stand,” the Pulitzer Prize Board said in a Monday statement, explaining that it had received several inquiries, including from Trump, about The New York Times and The Washington Post reporting, but independent reviews have found nothing to discredit the prize entries.
“Both reviews were conducted by individuals with no connection to the institutions whose work was under examination, nor any connection to each other. The separate reviews converged in their conclusions: that no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes,” the Pulitzer Prize Board said.
In October of last year, Trump sent a letter to the Pulitzer Prize Board demanding that it rescind the prizes given to over a dozen articles from The New York Times and The Washington Post, arguing that the publications engaged in “false reporting.”
Russia has repeatedly denied claims of its meddling in the 2016 presidential election in the United States.
The BBC is either the worst media organisation on Earth or the best, depending upon your perspective. On the one hand it is a truly world-class propaganda machine. On the other it is completely incapable of challenging government narratives or power because it is effectively a branch of the UK government and is itself beholden to power.
As an agency of the state, the BBC has actively sought to destabilise overseas governments around the world. It is a master of propaganda and frequently lies to the public, either overtly or by omission, with the goal of convincing the people to accept whatever falsehood or agenda it has been tasked to sell.
From top to bottom, the BBC’s commitment to journalistic integrity is missing. It is simply a mouthpiece for the ruling cartel. It comprehensively fails to deliver the most crucial social function of journalism: holding power to account.
According to the corporation’s published values, “trust is the foundation of the BBC.” The Oxford English Dictionary offers a pejorative meaning of the word “trust”: “acceptance of the truth of a statement without evidence or investigation.”
This definition of “trust” seems appropriate for the BBC. While it declares itself to be “independent, impartial and truthful,” it routinely trots out claimed “facts” that lack supporting evidence and produces investigative reports absent any real investigation. Indeed, the BBC broadcasts appalling lies as a matter of course.
And so it is with a certain degree of mirth that we now learn from the BBC that it intends to air a “documentary” about a phenomenon it has already opted to call “vaccine hesitancy.” (Bear in mind: A “documentary” is “a film or television or radio programme that gives facts and information about a subject.”)
The producer of the upcoming programme, due to air on the 20th of July, Craig Hunter, explains:
Moving beyond the often misrepresented debate, this programme reveals why some people remain vaccine hesitant.
The deprecatory word “hesitant” means “tentative, unsure, or slow in acting.” There is no room in the programme-maker’s minds for the possibility that people who chose to remain “unvaccinated” have considered the risk-benefit of these shots, have looked at the available evidence and have decisively concluded that they don’t want a COVID-19 jab.
Hunter’s statement absolutely “misrepresents” the debate. As Craig is the producer of the forthcoming BBC documentary, it seems the chance of the programme delivering a balanced exploration of the issue is remote to non-existent. There is little reason to expect the BBC to provide anything that is “independent, impartial and truthful.”
Indeed, objectively discussing any facet of the alleged pandemic is way beyond the reach of the BBC. As a state propaganda operation, all it can do is parrot the official narrative spouted by the government and its partners, who are, in this instance, the pharmaceutical corporations.
. . . confronting the latest science and statistics to emerge in the field and dissecting how misinformation spreads on social media.
The BBC cannot succeed in this task because the science and the statistics rarely support the disinformation it has been commissioned to spread. Consequently, it must deceive and misdirect its audience to make sure they believe its propagandist tripe. More to the point, the BBC is itself one of the most prolific distributors of online misinformation.
For example, in its press release the BBC says:
After multiple lockdowns and more than 197,000 deaths, experts are warning we’re now entering a fifth wave of the pandemic. So why are five million adults in the UK still yet to receive a single dose of the vaccine?
Putting aside for the moment that there are actually more than eleven million UK adults yet to receive a single dose of the vaccine and the fact that the BBC itself reported that there were just three million less than a week later, the rest of this claim assumes, without good reason, that there was a “pandemic” in the first place. We now know there is very little evidence that a genuine pandemic ever occurred, yet the BBC keeps up its charade by omitting key facts.
Here is one such key fact: In 2009 the World Health Organisation (WHO) suddenly and radically changed its long-time definition of the word “pandemic.” It removed the defining phrase “several, simultaneous epidemics worldwide with enormous numbers of deaths and illness,” replacing it with reference to a disease for which “most people do not have immunity.” Under this definition, practically any new disease can be declared a pandemic. But the BBC won’t inform its audience of the WHO’s changed definition nor the fact that under the original, and more valid, definition, COVID-19 disease could never have been described as a pandemic.
The BBC has left its audience in the dark about a number of other important facts: (1) as of the 19th of March 2020, UK public health authorities did not consider COVID-19 to be “a high-consequence infectious disease” due to its low mortality; (2) all-cause mortality (the overall death rate) in 2020, the year of the so-called “outbreak,” ranked as only the 9th highest death rate in the first two decades of the 21st century; (3) people with injured limbs and stomach pain were being admitted to hospital as registered COVID-19 patients, thus giving an entirely false impression of a severe pandemic disease; (4) there is no statistical evidence of any beneficial effect from any supposed COVID-19 vaccine; and (5) many deaths have been caused, not by any single disease, but by the policy response to an alleged pandemic.
In the press release for its upcoming “documentary,” the BBC refers to the figure of 197,000 UK deaths from COVID-19 as if that figure is scientifically or statistically indisputable. Not only can it be questioned, it has been! So why doesn’t the BBC mention this?
By deliberately using the largest possible figure, the BBC is attempting to elicit an emotional reaction to the highly questionable number of supposed COVID deaths. The BBC is playing on people’s emotions in order to avoid any objective analysis of the data. Its intention is to manipulate its audience into unquestioning acceptance of a story about a severe pandemic which does not stand up to scrutiny.
Let’s pause to make an important point: The collection, analysis and reporting of COVID-19 mortality data has been deliberately altered and manipulated by governments around the world, all of which worked and continue to work in partnership with the WHO. Nowhere has this manipulation been more pronounced than in the UK, where the engineering of COVID-19 mortality statistics has been quite remarkable.
Mainstream media outlets, especially the BBC, have perpetuated baseless fearmongering. For example, for the first time in the history of reporting deaths from a respiratory disease, propagandists like the BBC are reporting cumulative deaths instead of the annual mortality rates or the more common seasonal variation in these figures. If the same were done for, say, influenza, total flu deaths would be measured in millions, depending on the chosen start date for the accumulation of the mortality data.
Another example: The BBC has chosen to report what the government claims to be “deaths with COVID-19 on the death certificate.” While some of these likely were genuine COVID-19 deaths, the expansive, all-encompassing methodology that the government and the WHO created to attribute as many deaths as possible to COVID-19 renders the bulk of these statistics virtually meaningless. In truth, we don’t know how many people in the UK have died as a direct consequence of COVID-19, though estimates in the region of 20,000 – 25,000 seem reasonable.
The BBC never questions the mortality statistics. It simply takes the figures from the government and reports them without any investigation or analysis. This is essentially the BBC’s purpose: to report whatever it is told to report.
In announcing its faux documentary, the BBC says:
In this timely, eye-opening investigation [. . .] Professor Hannah Fry seeks to understand why eight percent of the population remain unvaccinated against Covid-19.
In reality, more than twenty percent of adults in the UK are “unvaccinated.” The BBC can’t even write a press release for its forthcoming documentary without publishing deceptive statistics. So it is safe to say the “documentary” itself will be little more than a marketing promotion for the jabs.
Statistics from the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) on vaccine coverage in England show that the actual percentage of the “unvaccinated” population is very close to thirty percent, not the eight percent the BBC alleges. The English figures are broadly representative of the UK as a whole and can be extrapolated.
Jab uptake increases with age. Thus, if we exclude children under 18, then more than twenty percent of the UK adult population are unvaccinated.
The subsequent uptake of booster jabs has declined markedly from the one-and-two dose uptake. Millions of Brits decided, for whatever reason, that two shots was their limit. Only fifty-two percent have elected to have the first booster (the third jab).
Speaking in December 2021, then-Health Secretary Sajid Javid said that, in order to be considered fully vaccinated for the proposed “covid pass,” one would need to have three jabs. If three becomes the definition of “fully vaccinated,” which seems unlikely given the lack of interest, then currently forty-eight percent of the total UK population, and more than thirty-five percent of the adult population, are not “fully vaccinated.”
The BBC launched its “documentary” by trying to deceive its audience into believing that there is only a tiny fringe minority of indecisive folk who don’t want the COVID jabs. In point of fact, it is nearly half of the UK population.
Not only has the BBC lied about the statistics in its press release, it has even misrepresented the debate it proposed to examine by calling the millions of people who made an informed decision not to have the jabs “hesitant.” But that’s because the BBC is all about propaganda, not journalism.
When some diligent independent researchers did what real journalists are supposed to do and picked up on the BBC’s deception, the BBC simply changed its press release. Since citing real statistics was a bit too tricky for the BBC—after all, it only has an annual budget of around £5 billion—the revisedweb page now reads:
In this timely, eye-opening investigation [. . .] Professor Hannah Fry seeks to understand why a portion of the population remain unvaccinated against Covid-19.
Despite there being no reason to trust anything the BBC ever says, the broadcaster implores its viewers to “trust” it simply by pronouncing its own trustworthiness. For the BBC, your “trust” demonstrates your “faith,” allowing it to tell you stories without the need for investigative journalism or even supporting evidence. By contrast, the evidence invariably reveals that the BBC is completely untrustworthy.
According to BBC, its so-called “documentary” is going to be based on bombarding seven hapless unvaccinated lay people with a barrage of pro-vaccine “experts.” Once browbeaten into submission by these authoritative opinions, the victims will then be subject to the BBC’s logical fallacy tactic of appeal to authority. In other words, these high priests of “the science” will explain how the BBC’s seven victims have been misled by “anti-vaxxer” propaganda.
It is highly likely that even if the seven subjects cogently explain why they have decided not to be injected with experimental concoctions, the BBC will edit out any and all valid points they make—and/or deny whatever evidence they cite. We can make these predictions with relative ease, simply by noting the extraordinary level of deceit already present in the BBC’s press release announcing its “programme.”
We can make still further forecasts about the BBC’s alleged “investigation.” For one thing, it won’t honestly report on the current status of the vaccine trials.
Namely, it will neglect to inform its audience that the NCT04368728 trial of the Pfizer-BioNTech jab isn’t finished. And it will not reveal that neither the NCT04470427 trial of Moderna’s mRNA jab nor Johnson & Johnson’s NCT04614948 Jansen trials have posted any results, because these trials, too, are incomplete. Moreover, the BBC will strenuously avoid pointing out the implication of these facts—probably by not reporting them.
Unless the recipients of these drugs were told that the jabs they were about to receive were experimental, they couldn’t possibly have given their informed consent. Consequently, whenever they weren’t informed, administration of the jab contravened nearly every known medical ethic, including those outlined in the Nuremberg Code. But the BBC won’t mention this, either.
It is also safe to say that the BBC will not tell its audience that AstraZeneca concluded the NCT04516746 trial of its AZD1222 adenovirus jab more than a year before schedule by not bothering to conduct a quality control review, rendering its so-called vaccine trial results practically meaningless.
The BBC will not tell anyone that the British Medical Journal (BMJ)disclosed that both Moderna and Jansen (J&J) confirmed that they had given the jabs to their placebo control groups, ending any prospect of their trials ever meeting the basic standards for randomised controlled studies. When the BMJ asked Pfizer if it had done the same, Pfizer declined comment.
Instead, the BBC will almost certainly claim that the jabs have been through extensive clinical trials. It will just omit the part about them having failed to properly complete any.
The BBC will not acknowledge the freedom of information requests and subsequent court ruling in the US that overturned the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) decision to delay release of Pfizer’s primary safety monitoring data for 75 years. The Federal Court forced the FDA to release the damning results of Pfizer’s own early monitoring of adverse reactions following the jab rollout in the US and Europe.
In the space of just a couple of months, there were approximately 42,000 adverse reactions to the Pfizer mRNA jab alone, with just over 25,000 of those confirmed by medical exam and the other 16,000+ unconfirmed. Of these, more than 1,200 injuries resulted in death. More than 11,000 of the injured had not recovered from their serious adverse event at the time of reporting.
The BBC certainly won’t report the Israeli study, the results of which indicate that the Pfizer jab prompts a marked decline in male fertility.
Nor will the BBC mention that Pfizer’s own research shows that, contrary to all of Pfizer’s marketing claims, the corporation knew during the trial phase that the lipid nanoparticles used in its jabs found their way into the liver, adrenal glands and spleen and, in particular, accumulated in female recipients’ ovaries.
The BBC may well have to acknowledge the more-than-38,000 possible vaccine deaths reported to the US VAERS system, the 2,200 deaths reported in the UK and the 46,000 deaths recorded by the European Medicines Agency. Its “experts” will point out that there is no evidence that these deaths are caused by the vaccines and will say that the risk of the disease COVID-19 is far higher than any known risks from the COVID-19 jabs.
The BBC will almost certainly make extraordinary and extremely silly claims about how many lives the jabs have allegedly saved. Again these claims will be based upon nothing but baseless assumptions about what could have happened according to some spurious “predictive model.” Rather like claiming your anti-unicorn spray has stopped a million unicorns from grazing your lawn because you don’t have any unicorns in your garden.
As we have just discussed, the risks of harm from COVID-19 claimed by the government and its propaganda outlets—the BBC foremost—are so implausible they verge on absurd. Yet the BBC will not inform its audience that, to date, not one of the regulators has produced a comprehensive risk-benefit analysis for any of the jabs. So the inevitable BBC claims that the jab benefits outweigh the risks will literally be based upon nothing at all.
The BBC will not go anywhere near reporting the findings of a team of eminent German pathologists who performed autopsies on 40 corpses of people who died within two weeks of vaccination—and who identified the vaccine as the likely cause of death in one-third of the cases.
Nor will the BBC report statements like those from the UK regulator, the MHRA, that adverse reactions, including deaths, are significantly undereported, with just ten percent of serious reactions and between two percent and four percent of non-serious reactions recorded.
What the BBC will do instead is rely upon carefully cherry-picked scientific papers, a narrow band of selected “expert opinion,” speculative statistics and emotionally charged anecdotes to convince its audience that the seven victims of its hit piece, though well meaning, are all hopelessly deluded due to the scourge of online disinformation. It may well try to squeeze in reference to the proposed Online Safety Act and suggest that this government policy is essential to tackle the disinformation problem fabricated in its documentary.
Of course, if the BBC were serious about its professed wish to “fully explore this complex and deeply divisive debate,” it wouldn’t simply subject a group of ordinary men and women to a tirade of unchallenged claims from its hand-picked group of “experts.” If it really wanted to tackle the debate with any objectivity or journalistic integrity, it would also report the views of some of the many eminently qualified scientists and physicians who do question the COVID-19 narrative and the alleged safety and efficacy of the vaccines.
It would be genuinely interesting to see people like Professor Sucharit Bhakdi, Dr. Mike Yeadon, Professor Carl Heneghan and Professor Arne Burkhardt explain some of their reservations. Perhaps other scientists, physicians and experts who have questioned the vaccines and the COVID-19 pandemic could be heard.
Maybe the statistician and Nobel Laureate Professor Michael Levitt; epidemiologists like Professor John Ioannidis or Professor Knut Wittkowski; experts in clinical drug development such as Alexandra (Sasha) Latypova; or physicians such as Dr. Peter McCullough or Dr. Roger Hodkinson could be invited to challenge the BBC’s preferred experts.
The audience and the seven subjects of the BBC’s attack could then hear both sides of the argument. But that won’t happen.
Alas, many won’t get to see the BBC’s vaccine marketing programme because they have already decided that they will no longer pay for its propaganda to be beamed into their heads. These numbers are swelling all the time, hence the deceptive plan to allegedly end the BBC license fee while a desperate workaround is conjured up to make sure the BBC’s coffers remain stuffed with gargantuan amounts of public money.
Still, we might get to watch “Unvaccinated, with Professor Hannah Fry” when it finds its way on to Odysee, BitChute, Rumble or some other worthy video-sharing platform. If so, it will perhaps be interesting for some to see how accurate or inaccurate this article is.
In the meantime, let’s give the Beeb the benefit of the doubt and hope this post is way off the mark. Instead of the awful propagandist drivel we might expect, let’s hope the BBC proves that these suspicions are born of nothing but unfounded, anti-BBC bias.
What were the policy cliques, “the intelligence community” and the press that serves both going to do when the kind of war in Ukraine they talked incessantly about turned out to be imaginary, a Marvel Comics of a conflict with little grounding in reality? I have wondered about this since the Russian intervention began on Feb. 24. I knew the answer would be interesting when finally we had one.
Now we have one. Taking the government-supervised New York Times as a guide, the result is a variant of what we saw as the Russiagate fiasco came unglued: Those who manufacture orthodoxies as well as consent are slithering out the side door.
I could tell you I don’t intend to single out the Times in this wild chicanery, except that I do. The once-but-no-longer newspaper of record continues to be singularly wicked in its deceits and deceptions as it imposes the official but imaginary version of the war on unsuspecting readers.
As Consortium News’s properly suspecting readers will recall, Vladimir Putin was clear when he told the world Russia’s intentions as it began its intervention. These were two: Russian forces went into Ukraine to “demilitarize and de–Nazify” it, a pair of limited, defined objectives.
An astute reader of these commentaries pointed out in a recent comment thread that the Russian president had once again proven, whatever else one may think of him, a focused statesman with an excellent grasp of history. At the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, the Allied Control Council declared its postwar purpose in Germany as “the four D’s.” These were de–Nazification, demilitarization, democratization and decentralization.
Let’s give David Thompson, who brought this historical reference to my attention, a deserved byline here:
“Putin’s reiteration of the de–Nazification and demilitarization principles established from the Potsdam Conference is not just some quaint tip of the hat to history. He was laying down a marker to the United States and the United Kingdom that the agreement reached at Potsdam in 1945 is still relevant and valid ….”
The Russian president, whose entire argument with the West is that a just and stable order in Europe must serve the security interests of all sides, was simply restating objectives the trans–Atlantic alliance had once signed on to accomplish. In other words, he was pointing out said alliance’s gross hypocrisy as it arms the ideological descendants of German Nazis.
I dwell on this matter because the imaginary war began with the Biden regime’s and the press’s quite irresponsible misrepresentations of the Russian Federation’s aims in Ukraine. All else has flowed from it.
You remember: Russian forces were going to “conquer” the whole of the nation, wipe out the Kiev regime, install a puppet government and then drive on to Poland, the Baltic states, Transnistria and the rest of Moldova, and who could imagine what after that. De–Nazification, we can now read, is a phony Kremlin dodge.
Next Edition
Having lied outright on this score, the next edition of the comic went onto the market. Russia is failing to achieve its imaginary objectives. Low morale, desertions, poorly trained troops with not enough to eat, logistical failures, lousy artillery, inadequate ordnance, incompetent officers: The Russians were riding for a fall on Ukrainian soil.
The corollary here was the heroism, courage and battlefield grit of Ukrainian troops, least of all, the Azov Battalion, who were not any longer neo–Nazis. Never mind the Times, The Guardian, the BBC and various other mainstream publications and broadcasters had earlier told us about these ideological fanatics. That was then, this is now.
The problem at this point was there were no battlefield successes to report. The defeats, indeed, had begun. In May, roughly when the Azov Battalion, heroic and democratic as it is, was forced to surrender in Mariupol, it was time for — this just had to be — Russian atrocities.
We had the theater and the maternity hospital in Mariupol, we had the infamous slaughter in Bucha, the Kiev suburb; various others have followed. Just what happened in these cases has never been established by credible, disinterested investigators; plentiful evidence that Ukrainian forces bear responsibility is dismissed out of hand. But who needs investigations and evidence when the brutal, criminal, indiscriminately ruthless Rrrrusssians, must be culpable if the imaginary war is to proceed?
My unchallenged favorites in this line come courtesy of CNN, which went long this spring on allegations — Ukrainian allegations, of course — that Russian soldiers were raping young girls and young boys right down to months-old infants. Three such specimens are here, here and here.
The network abruptly dropped this line of inquiry after the senior Ukrainian official disseminating these allegations was removed from office because the charges are fabrications. A wise move on CNN’s part, I think: Propaganda does not have to be very subtle, as history shows, but it does have its limits.
Just after the atrocities narrative had ripened, the Russians-are-stealing-Ukrainian-grain theme began. The BBC offered an especially wonderful account of this. Look at this video and text presentation and tell me it isn’t the cutest thing you’ve ever seen, as many holes in it as my Irish grandma’s lace curtains.
But at this point, problems. Russian forces, with their desertions, antiquated guns, and dumb generals, were taking one city after another in eastern Ukraine. These were not — the fly in the ointment — imaginary victories.
Out with the war-is-going-well theme and in with the brutal Russians’ indiscriminate use of artillery. This was a “primitive strategy,” the Times wanted us to know. In the awfulness of war, you simply don’t shell an enemy position as a preliminary to taking it. Medieval.
Lately, there’s another problem for the conjurors of imaginary war. This is the death toll. The U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission reported May 10 that the casualty count to date was in excess of 3,380 civilian fatalities, bumped up in June to 4,509, and 3,680 civilians injured. (And both sides shoot and kill in a war.)
Goddamn it, they exclaimed on Eighth Avenue. That is nowhere near enough in the imaginary war. Desperate for a gruesomely high death toll, the Times, on June 18, published “Death in Ukraine: A Special Report.” What a read. There is nothing in it other than innuendo and weightless surmise. But the imaginary war must grind on.
The Times’s “special report”— dum-da-da-dum — rests on phrases such as “witness testimony and other evidence” and “the thousands believed killed.” The evidence, to be noted, derives almost entirely from Ukrainian officials — as does an inordinate amount of what the Times publishes.
There is a great quotation: “People are killed indiscriminately or suddenly or without rhyme or reason.” Wow. Is this damning or what?
But another problem. This observation comes from one Richard Kohn, who is emeritus at the University of North Carolina. I hope the professor is having a good summer down in Chapel Hill.
In late June, Sievierodonetsk fell — or rose, depending on your point of view — and in short order so did Lysychansk and the whole of Luhansk province. Now come the ’fessing up stories, here and there. The Ukrainian forces are so discombobulated they are shooting one another, we read. They can’t operate their radios and — an artful back flip here — they are running out of food and ammunition and morale. Untrained soldiers who signed up to patrol their neighborhoods are deserting the front lines.
Holdouts
There are the holdouts. The Times reported last week that the Ukrainians, done for in Luhansk, are planning a counteroffensive in the south to reclaim lost territory. We all need our dreams, I suppose.
To the surprise of many, Patrick Lang, the ordinarily astute observer of military matters, published “Unable to even fix its own tanks, Russia’s humiliation is now complete” on his Turcopolier last Friday. The retired colonel predicts the Russians are in for “a sudden reversal of fortunes.” No, I’m not holding my breath.
Have you had enough of the imaginary war? I have. I read this junk daily as a professional obligation. Some of it I find amusing, but in the main it sickens when I think of what the American press has done to itself and to its readers.
For the record, it is hard to tell exactly what occurs on Ukraine’s tragic fields of war. As noted previously in this space, we have very little coverage from professional, properly disinterested correspondents. But I offer here my surmise, and it is nothing more.
This war has proceeded, more or less inexorably, in one direction: In the real war, the Ukrainians have been on a slow march to defeat from the first. They are too corrupt, too mesmerized by their fanatical Russophobia to organize an effective force or even to see straight.
This is not a grinding war of attrition, as we are supposed to think. It has proceeded slowly because Russian forces appear to be taking care to limit casualties — their own and among Ukrainian civilians. I put more faith in the U.N.’s numbers than in that silly, nothing-in-it “special report” the Times just published.
I do not know why Russian forces approached the outskirts of Kiev from the north early in the conflict and then withdrew, but there is no indication they intended to take the capital. There were battles, but they were certainly not “beaten back.” That is sheer nonsense.
I await proper investigations — admittedly unlikely — of the atrocities that have certainly occurred but without, so far, any conclusive indication of culpability.
Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, remarked recently Russia’s objective remains to take most of Ukraine. In a speech at the end of June in Ashgabat, the Turkmenistan capital, Putin appeared notably at ease and asserted, “Everything is going according to plan. Nothing has changed.” The objective, he said, remained “to liberate Donbass, to protect these people, and to create conditions that would guarantee the safety of Russia itself. That’s it.”
Putting these two statements side by side, there is vastly more evidence supporting Putin’s than there is for Haines.
Intentionally or otherwise — and I often have the impression the Times does not grasp the implications of what it publishes — the paper put out a story Sunday headlined, “Ukraine and the Contest of Global Stamina.” The outcome of this conflict, it reported, now depends on “whether the United States and its allies can maintain their military, political and financial commitments to holding off Russia.”
Can they possibly not understand down on Eighth Avenue that they have just described Ukraine as a basket-case client? Do they know they have just announced that the imaginary war they have waged these past four and some months is ending in defeat, given there is no one in Ukraine to win it?
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His web site is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.
By Dr. Elias Akleh* | Sabbah Report | May 24, 2010
A build up of heightened tension in the Middle East is escalating in the last few weeks. American and Israeli postures towards Lebanon, Syria, and Iran have become more threatening. Listening to speeches of political leaders one hears talks only about war not peace. Iranians and Israelis are continuously training hard for a possible showdown. Both sides are conducting extensive war games every month. This led Syrians to claim that Israel is preparing for a soon-to-come another war. The Jordanians also are warning that current stalemate of the peace process is an indication of a war breaking out this summer. The Russian President and his army chief hinted, a few months ago, that the US and Israel were planning for an attack on Iran.
Indeed Iran is, as it has been for last few years, the target of most of the threats and accusations of supporting terrorism. Escalating incitement against Iran the American Defense Department sent last month (April) to Congress a report on Iran’s military claiming Iran could develop intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the US by 2015.
Ignoring the fact that N. Korea, India, Pakistan, and Israel are proven to have nuclear weapons while Iran does not, the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton chose in her speech, to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference at the UN, to focus on Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions putting the whole world at risk as she put it. According to Clinton Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, rather than Israel’s more than 200 nuclear bombs, is destabilizing the Middle East. She called on the world’s nations to rally around US efforts to hold Iran, not other nuclear countries, to account.
The accusation that Usama Bin Laden is living comfortably in Iran had received a boost after the broadcast of a documentary called “Feathered Cocaine”. This echoed the June 2003 claims of the Italian newspaper Corre de la Sierra that Bin Laden was in Iran according to some intelligence report, and according to Richard Miniter’s book “Shadow War”. … continue
This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.
This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.
Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.
Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.
The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
Fair Use
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
DMCA Contact
This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.
If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.
We will respond and take necessary action immediately.
If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.
All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.
Aletho News 