Meddling with modelling
Divisive and false claims that the unvaccinated are a danger
Health Advisory & Recovery Team | May 6, 2022
This paper, published in the “peer-reviewed” Canadian Medical Association Journal, quite simply represents an amoral, unethical and utterly transparent attempt to use pseudoscientific modelling to fabricate a false narrative. The apparent objective seems to be sowing divisions in society by marginalising and vilifying the unvaccinated.
The paper describes a “study” which is nothing of the sort. It actually describes a model which the authors have constructed. This is an unnecessarily complex model — and suspiciously so. The model itself has been very expertly taken apart by Jessica Rose here and Drs Rancourt and Hickey for the Ontario Civil Liberties Association here.
The authors appear to have tested their model to death to find the optimal combination of inputs which results in the “narrative” they wish to promote.
The logical flaws in this approach have been brilliantly analysed by Dr Byram Bridle, including a critique of the assumptions made for the various input parameters. Among the more egregious examples are:
(1) the model assumes 80% effectiveness against infection for the Covid injections vs omicron, whereas real-world data suggests zero — at best.
(2) the model assumes very little pre-pandemic immunity present within the community (they assume just 20% when for some time the evidence has suggested much higher levels, especially against severe illness).
(3) the model assumes no waning of efficacy at all over time, a claim not even made by the most ardent promoters of the covid vaccines.
Many news outlets — including Forbes — appear to have been taken in by this sham science and are reporting it as a bone fide “study” with no critical analysis whatsoever, this being their key message:
“The findings counter the common argument that the decision to get vaccinated is a personal one, the researchers said, as the unvaccinated are ”likely to affect the health and safety of vaccinated people in a manner disproportionate to the fraction of unvaccinated people in the population.”
One commentator on Twitter acerbically — though rather accurately — summed up the Forbes article thus:
It is quite clear that the model and the entire article has been constructed to push a political agenda, namely to neutralise the growing realisation by the population that the story they were told in relation to the Covid 19 injections is entirely false. Contrary to the authorities’ official narrative, in the context of Omicron the injections don’t reduce infections or transmission, and actually probably even increase them. Far from being a selfish act, it was in fact entirely rational — and beneficial to one’s fellow man — to decline the injection.
To use Dr Bridle’s words, the paper is actually “Fiction Disguised as Science to Promote Hatred”.
We support and join the many voices calling for this paper to be retracted.
Postscript: When Denis Rancourt, one of the authors of the Ontario Civil Liberties Association’s statement, tweeted the essence of their complaint with it, the paper’s author — David Fisman — didn’t respond by way of any form of scientific justification — he threatened legal action.
US bragging about its direct involvement in Ukraine may lead to uncontrollable escalation
By Drago Bosnic | May 6, 2022
On May 4, the New York Times published a highly controversial article openly bragging about how the United States has been providing critical intelligence about the location and movement of Russian troops, which has allowed Ukrainians to target them. The publication also claims that “many Russian generals have died in action in the Ukraine as a result,” citing senior US officials. However, this is hardly news, since the US and NATO have been doing it since day one of the special military operation in Ukraine. The Russian military has been warning the political West about this issue. And yet, the US and NATO aren’t only ignoring the warnings, but are also openly bragging about their actions which are contributing to the death of Russian military personnel in Ukraine as we speak.
The claim that “many Russian generals have died” is questionable at best, but it does show the US and NATO’s determination, whose involvement is key to prolonging the conflict. An epidemic of fake news about alleged injuries or even murder of Russian High Command officers has become the mainstay, even among the once-respected Western media. According to these news outlets, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu has so far survived at least two heart attacks “due to bad performance and high casualties of the Russian military” and even “Putin’s order to shoot the Defense Minister for his failures in Ukraine”.
These claims are not just outright lies, but simply ridiculous. However, they expose the mainstream media in the US and other NATO countries as an inalienable part of the military and (geo)political structure. Their reporting is designed not just to demoralize the opponent, but also to boost public morale, galvanize it and push for more support for a potential war with the targeted country or even a group of countries. This is exacerbating the already high tensions between the political West on one side and Russia and its allies on the other.
When the special military operation started, the US and NATO at least claimed their non-involvement, even though everyone knew they were involved. But the very statement they weren’t sent a message that NATO will not escalate tensions. However, this report has now changed that. By admitting effectively direct involvement in the conflict, the US and NATO are opening the door for further escalation, which most certainly will not be appreciated by Russia, whose leadership has already given strong statements regarding this issue.
The intelligence sharing is part of “a stepped-up flow” in US assistance that includes heavier weapons and billions in military supplies, demonstrating how quickly the “early American restraint” on support for Ukraine has shifted as the war enters a new stage, the NYT reported. This is further proof that the US is not interested in de-escalation. On the contrary, the latest “lethal aid” package President Biden announced is said to be $33 billion, a truly staggering sum, orders of magnitude greater than Ukraine’s annual military budget.
“The administration has sought to keep much of the battlefield intelligence secret, out of fear it will be seen as an escalation and provoke President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia into a wider war. American officials would not describe how they have acquired information on Russian troop headquarters, for fear of endangering their methods of collection. But throughout the war, the U.S. intelligence agencies have used a variety of sources, including classified and commercial satellites, to trace Russian troop movements,” the NYT report added.
This statement alone should trigger alarm across the globe. The admission that the US military and intelligence services are using commercial satellites in their operations sets a dangerous precedent which further blurs the line between civilians and the military. This comes at a time when companies such as SpaceX are accused of using their products and services, most notably the Starlink satellites, to help the Ukrainian military target Russian and DLNR units. It’s clear the US is mobilizing all of its assets in an attempt to weaken Russia. In fact, this is exactly what US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin openly stated. He went so far as to say that “we want to see Russia weakened to the degree it cannot do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.”
However, there are still moments when the Pentagon and State Department are giving vague and even contradictory statements regarding this issue. When asked about the intelligence being provided to the Ukrainian side, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said that “we will not speak to the details of that information.” But he acknowledged that the US provides Ukraine with intelligence information. After the NYT article was published, Adrienne Watson, a National Security Council spokeswoman, said that the battlefield intelligence was not provided to the Ukrainians “with the intent to kill Russian generals.”
“Not all the strikes have been carried out with American intelligence. A strike over the weekend at a location in eastern Ukraine where Gen. Valery Gerasimov, Russia’s highest-ranking uniformed officer, had visited was not aided by American intelligence, according to multiple U.S. officials. The United States prohibits itself from providing intelligence about the most senior Russian leaders,” the official said.
This statement clearly refers to the reports that the Chief of Russian General Staff, General Gerasimov was allegedly wounded in a Ukrainian strike during a visit to the frontline units. Again, this shows an almost schizophrenic nature of statements coming from US officials. First, they are bragging about the “decisive role” of their intelligence support to Ukrainians, but as soon as reports of Russian High Command officers being injured surface, they are quick to announce how this support might not be “as decisive as previously thought”.
This just goes to show how dangerous US involvement in Ukraine is. Even though we know the statements about Gerasimov are false, an obvious question arises, what if it were to happen? What if he or any other Russian High Command officer were injured in Ukraine? Does the US truly believe they could just say “it wasn’t our intelligence” in an attempt to control the level of escalation which could plunge all of us into a world-ending conflict?
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
Now will the BBC retract its lies over vaccine threat in pregnancy?
By Kathy Gyngell | TCW Defending Freedom | April 29, 2022
‘WHAT I’ve Seen in the Last Two Years Is Unprecedented’: Physician on Covid Vaccine Side Effects on Pregnant Women. This was Wednesday’s front-page headline on the US newspaper Epoch Times.
You may remember how from early on in the Covid vaccine roll-out the former Pfizer chief Mike Yeadon, as part of his many warnings against the new gene ‘vaccines’, strongly advised against jabbing pregnant women. Not only had there been no pre-clinical reproductive toxicology testing but research on rats showed that the vaccine accumulated in the ovaries. Needless to say the BBC was first out of the traps to dismiss fears that the vaccines could harm fertility or cause miscarriages, and to target Yeadon personally. It put out a special propaganda (News) ‘reality check’ report claiming that the study showing the vaccine accumulating in the ovaries was ‘false’.
It did not take long for TCW’s Neville Hodgkinson, an experienced medical and science journalist, to show just whose claim was false. Once again, however, the BBC got away with it, as have others in ‘authority’.
Will there be any retraction or apology now senior obstetricians are putting their heads above the parapet to report on what they have been seeing amongst their patients?
Dr James Thorp is one such, an extensively published 68-year-old US specialist in obstetrics and gynaecology as well as maternal-foetal medicine, who has practised for more than 42 years. He told Epoch Times that he sees 6,000 to 7,000 high-risk pregnant patients a year and that many complications among them are due to the Covid vaccines.
‘I’ve seen many, many, many complications in pregnant women, in moms and in foetuses, in children, offspring, foetal death, miscarriage, death of the foetus inside the mom,’ he said, adding that what he has seen in the last two years is unprecedented.
Thorp goes on to explain that although he has seen a visible increase in foetal death and adverse pregnancy outcomes associated with the Covid-19 vaccination, attempts to quantify them ‘are hampered by the imposition of gag orders on physicians and nurses’ imposed in September 2021.
You can see the full article here – it is well worth reading.
The tragedy is, as Mike Yeadon comments in the article, that ‘adverse impacts on conception and ability to sustain a pregnancy were foreseeable’. They were, and he did his best to warn us of them, but all the BBC was interested in was discrediting him.
To remind the BBC, this is what he said then, to a Truth for Health Foundation conference, about the special dangers to women of child-bearing age from the gene-based vaccines, as reported by Neville Hodgkinson.
‘We’re being lied to . . . The authorities are not giving us full information about the risks of these products . . . The first is that we never, ever give experimental medicines to pregnant women. The thalidomide tragedy of the 1950s and 60s, in which a new product for morning sickness gave rise to at least 10,000 birth malformations, taught us that babies are not safe and protected inside the uterus, which is what we used to think. Interference by a chemical or something else at a critical stage of development could lead to irreparable damage.
‘Our government is urging pregnant women and women of childbearing age to get vaccinated, and they’re telling them they’re safe. And that’s a lie, because those studies have simply not been done. Reproductive toxicology has not been undertaken with any of these products, certainly not a full battery of tests that you would want.
‘That’s bad enough. Because it tells me there’s recklessness. No one cares. The authorities do not care what happens. But it’s much worse than that.’
Yeadon said he had seen a copy of the biodistribution report obtained from the Japanese regulator. To his horror, he said, ‘what we find is the vaccine doesn’t just distribute around the body and then wash out again, which is what you’d hope. It concentrates in the ovaries of rats, at least 20-fold over the concentration in other background tissues like muscles. And a general rule of thumb in toxicology is: if you don’t have any data to contradict what you’ve learned [from the animal studies], that’s the assumption you make for humans.
‘So my assumption at the moment is that these vaccines are concentrating in the ovaries of every female who has been given them. We don’t know what that will do, but it cannot be benign and it could be seriously harmful.’
His third concern, shared by a German doctor in a petition to the European Medicines Agency eight months ago, is that the spike protein produced by the vaccine ‘is faintly similar – not very strongly – to an essential protein in your placenta, something that’s absolutely required for both fertilisation and formation and maintenance of the placenta’.
The worry was that an immune response to the spike protein might cause antibodies to bind to the placental protein as well.
There was more. He concluded: ‘I think you can only expect that that is happening in every woman of childbearing potential. What the effect will be, we can’t be certain, but it can’t be benign.
‘So I’m here to warn you that if you are of child-bearing potential or younger, so not at menopause, I would strongly recommend you do not accept these vaccines.’
Blame the unjabbed – whatever the facts
By Guy Hatchard | TCW Defending Freedom | April 29, 2022
The writer is in New Zealand
THE business magazine Forbes has published a story with the arresting headline: ‘Unvaccinated People Increase Risk Of Covid Infection Among Vaccinated, Study Finds.’
The work to which it refers is not in the normal sense a study but is actually a modelling exercise published by the journal of the Canadian Medical Association. Did the Forbes staff writer read the paper very well? I am quite sure not. At the end of paragraph one of the Method section of the original paper, it describes its model, saying: ‘A vaccine that is 80 per cent efficacious would result in 80 per cent of vaccinated people becoming immune, with the remaining 20 per cent being susceptible to infection. We did not model waning immunity.’
Now I am sure you know that the mRNA vaccines do not stop infection and also wane in effectiveness. In other words mRNA vaccination does not confer immunity and its effectiveness does not remain constant as the paper assumes. So what use is this paper and to what do its conclusions apply? Apparently not to the mRNA Covid vaccines.
Lo and behold, one of the paper’s authors, David Fisman, declares competing interests: ‘He has served on advisory boards related to SARS-CoV-2 vaccines for Seqirus, Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Sanofi-Pasteur Vaccines.’
Another author, Ashleigh Tuite, was ‘employed by the Public Health Agency of Canada when the research was conducted’ (aka the domain of Justin Trudeau).
So why publish this story which on the face of it has little relevance to the real-world data of the current pandemic? Forbes magazine is 51 per cent owned by a Hong Kong-based company, Integrated Whale Investments, about which little is known. The Washington Post has suggested that Forbes’s editorial policy has been influenced as a result, but by whom no one really knows.
At this point in the pandemic, it has become clear that boosted individuals are becoming more vulnerable to Omicron than the unvaccinated. So I can only suggest that it might be advantageous for some scientists and politicians to blame the unvaccinated for everything in order to cover up their own mistaken ideas. Or perhaps there are commercial interests anxious to sell more arguably useless vaccines for billions of dollars. You decide.
If the government and their compliant media friends are our one source of truth, as has happened in New Zealand (by decree), then you have no option except to blame the unvaccinated whatever happens.
The actual situation is that the unvaccinated are currently less likely to be hospitalised than the boosted. Thank you to Grant Dixon for compiling and graphing NZ Ministry of Health data, below.
This morning my mask-exempt friend entered a haberdashery shop, whereupon two other potential customers turned and fled. Yesterday she was turned away from a fabric store. I am sure many of you have had similar experiences. The fact of the matter is that almost the whole of the New Zealand population has become subject to fear-based government-sponsored groupthink.
Are we all being conditioned to vote for Jacinda Ardern in next year’s election based on the carefully constructed myth that she is keeping us all safe? We should be keeping our feet on the ground. We should recognise that public relations experts and propaganda promoters are at work full-time, but they are working out of touch with reality.
Meanwhile our whole economy is becoming ever more dysfunctional. As people are too afraid to associate with one another in public, the whole basis of commercial activity is being undermined.
The two large supermarket chains are laughing all the way to the bank. As small businesses are forced to close and their monopoly grows, supermarket prices and profits are entering the stratosphere. Smart individuals are now ordering their vegetables and groceries direct from Australia (as far away from us as Moscow is from London) because they are so much cheaper.
The government is clueless to control this rampant price inflation, along with most things including the pandemic. The public is hoodwinked, queueing fully masked and fully vaccinated to pay through the nose for everyday items without a squeak of dissent.
The ten-year-old son of a friend asked his mother the other day: ‘Which do you think our society is more like – Brave New World or 1984?’ I doubt if either Aldous Huxley or George Orwell could ever have imagined anything so incomprehensibly doublethinking as 2022 New Zealand.
This is the state we have reached through our government’s careful rationing of information and saturation conditioning.
Time we reopened the floodgates of free speech and social media – hold your horses, we might endanger our one source of truth.
Parsing the “data” from Moderna’s selective leaks to the press about its failed clinical trial in kids under 6
The shot made no difference against Covid but it does cause myocarditis and came with a 15% to 17% adverse event rate. Meanwhile the CDC admits that 74.2% of kids already have natural immunity.
By Toby Rogers | April 30, 2022
On Friday, the NY Times and other stenographers for the cartel breathlessly announced that Moderna has asked the FDA to authorize its junk science mRNA shot in kids under 6. Oh, so that means Moderna submitted an application to the FDA? Well, not exactly. From the article:
“A top official at the company said it would finish submitting data to regulators by May 9.”
Wait, so Moderna is “asking” the FDA to authorize its product but Moderna will not even finish its application for another 10 days!? That’s weird. It’s like a kid asking his teacher for a A+ while his homework assignment is half-finished.
So already we’re seeing serious red flags and we’re not even out of the first paragraph.
Of course it gets worse.
To be clear, there is no data because Moderna has not even finished its application. But Moderna and the White House have been selectively leaking numbers to the press that dutifully prints them without question — and those numbers tell us that Moderna’s clinical trial was a disaster.
I need to provide some background and context and then I’ll get into the particular details about this failed clinical trial in kids.
Moderna applied for Emergency Use Authorization to administer its mRNA shot to adolescents 12 to 17 years old back on June 10, of 2021. But the application has been held up ever since. Why? Myocarditis. From the Wall Street Journal :
The Food and Drug Administration is delaying a decision on authorizing Moderna Inc.’s mRNA Covid-19 vaccine for adolescents to assess whether the shot may lead to heightened risk of a rare inflammatory heart condition, according to people familiar with the matter.
Moderna has at least two big problems in giving this shot to teenagers:
1) The dose they are giving to teenagers is the same dose as that given to adults — 100 mcg of mRNA — which is four times the amount in the Pfizer shot given to adults (25 mcg). So the Moderna shot is great at generating antibodies that target the spike protein of the original Wuhan lab leak strain. But some of that mRNA can migrate to the heart and generate myocarditis as well. Remember, Pharma’s capture of the FDA is so extreme, they should just be able to write “Iz Gud!” on a paper napkin and the FDA will approve it — as they did with Pfizer’s application to inject kids 5 to 11 — in spite of ZERO evidence supporting this use. So if the FDA has held up Moderna’s application in teens for nearly a year, the myocarditis signal must be truly terrifying.
2) Nordic countries are slightly less corrupt than the United States. Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway have all suspended the use of the Moderna mRNA shot in teenagers because its leads to myocarditis. (Finland and Sweden even suspended its use in men under 30 years old.) Even the criminally corrupt European Medicines Agency acknowledged that both Pfizer and Moderna mRNA shots lead to myo- and pericarditis and added a warning to the product insert.
Okay what do we know about Moderna’s clinical trial in kids under 6?
Back on March 23, Moderna put out a press release claiming that:
vaccine efficacy in children 6 months to 2 years was 43.7% and vaccine efficacy was 37.5% in the 2 to under 6 years age group.
The NY Times of course printed that like it was a clay tablet handed directly from God to Moses just as they printed the “90% to 100% effective(TM)” lie in connection with the clinical trial in adults. By now everyone knows that the actual vaccine effectiveness is zero or even negative after 6 months.
Sane people pointed out that vaccine efficacy of 43% and 37% are BELOW the 50% threshold required for FDA authorization. It’s not clear why the geniuses at Moderna did not realize this — perhaps they just wanted to rub everyone’s noses in the sheer criminality of their enterprise?
But somewhere between March 23 and last Friday, Moderna staff got the message so they did what they always do, they just manipulated the data. From the NY Times :
Moderna said Thursday the vaccine appeared to be 51 percent effective against symptomatic infection among those younger than 2, and 37 percent effective among those 2 to 5.
Okay first off, lol that they still cannot get the number above 50% in kids 2 to 5 even when they are just straight up lying about the numbers. But how did they convert 43% to the magical 51% in kids 0 to 2? They simply deleted data that they did not like:
Those results were slightly better than the ones Moderna previously released for children under 2. The company said that was because the second time, the firm excluded infections that had not been confirmed with a P.C.R. test analyzed in a laboratory.
Let’s be clear — this is Moderna’s clinical trial. They control the whole process. If you’re a study participant who is having a heart attack in the middle of the night and call 911 and go to the hospital — they kick you out of the clinical trial for not seeing their doctors and following their protocol. So Moderna is the one who makes the decision as to whether to use “a P.C.R. test analyzed by a laboratory.” To now exclude (without any valid justification) infections that made their clinical trial look bad is gross scientific misconduct. The Moderna application, when/if it is submitted 10 days from now, should be rejected immediately because of this misconduct.
While the clinical trials in kids were failing, Pfizer and Moderna were running a half-hearted campaign to pressure the FDA to approve these shots in kids under 5 — in spite of zero data showing benefit and considerable evidence showing harms. The attempts were pathetic and included hashtags on social media like #immunizeunder5 that were likely only used by people taking money from these monsters. But of course the stenographers eagerly reported on this milquetoast effort and one of the talking points is, ‘well, okay, the shots do not meet the required 50% FDA threshold but some protection is better than none(TM) so please authorize my right to genocide my kids.’
Well, it turns out, these shots do NOT even offer “some protection”:
Moderna’s clinical trial data showed that the antibody response of the youngest children compared favorably with that of adults ages 18 to 25, meeting the trial’s primary criterion for success. Although the trial was not big enough to measure vaccine effectiveness…
What!? “The trial was not big enough to measure vaccine effectiveness.” Isn’t that the whole point of a clinical trial!? So Moderna (and the NY Times ) are saying that the clinical trial made ZERO difference on Covid-related health outcomes including infection, hospitalization, ICU visits, or deaths, because the SARS-CoV-2 virus is not a threat to healthy children in this age group — which we have been pointing out for months.
So how does Moderna try to finesse it? They look at antibodies in the blood, not health outcomes in the real world. They call it “immunobridging”. As I explained at length back in October, this is NOT a scientifically valid way to use immunobridging (claiming likely future health outcomes from antibodies alone when the trial showed no such thing). Immunobriding is only valid if one has clinically validated correlates of protection and conditions prevent one from conducting a proper RCT (neither of which apply in this case).
Even the hand-picked yes-men and women on the CDC’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) acknowledged at their last meeting that they do NOT have “correlates of protection” that would enable them to estimate health outcomes from antibody measures. Eric Rubin (Editor-in-Chief of the NEJM ) even stated, “We know what kind of antibody response can be generated, we just don’t know if it works.”
So Moderna is asking the FDA to authorize its mRNA shot in kids under 6 based on antibodies alone even though every member of the FDA’s VRBPAC acknowledges that antibodies tell you absolutely nothing about likely health outcomes.
(In fact, new evidence suggests that mRNA shots suppress the body’s innate ability to generate anti-N antibodies.)
What about side effects?
Side effects were at a similar level as those from previously approved pediatric vaccines, with fevers in 15 percent to 17 percent of the children, Moderna said.
Any shot with an adverse event rate over 1% should not be authorized. To authorize a shot with a 15 to 17% adverse event would be batsh*t insane.
Furthermore, we know that Moderna and Pfizer make cases of disability and death in their clinical trials disappear — so the actual adverse event rate is surely even higher than 15% to 17%.
Making this nightmare complete, the CDC acknowledged on April 26, 2022, that 74.2% of children ages 0 to 11 are already naturally immune to Covid-19 because of prior exposure. The 74.2% number came from February, so given the rate of increase at the time, by now nearly 100% of children ages 0 to 11 likely already have natural immunity which is superior to artificial vaccine immunity. There is no emergency in this population that would justify an emergency use authorization of this useless toxic product.
So to recap this painful saga:
• Moderna shots cause myocarditis and pericarditis which is why Moderna has not been able to get authorization to inject mRNA into teenagers.
• Moderna shots make no difference in connection with Covid-19 in this age group.
• Moderna shots come with at least a 15% to 17% adverse event rate.
• Nearly all children in this age group are already naturally immune so there is no emergency that would justify an emergency use authorization.
This is not hard to figure out. In a sane world this application would be dead on arrival, whenever Moderna gets around to actually turning in its application. Any reporter worth his/her salt should be ridiculing Moderna’s weird mix of hubris, incompetence, bad “data”, and malevolence. But our country, its “public health” agencies, and the mainstream media are run by Insane Nazi Clowns. I imagine many bougiecrats will drown in their own tears if they are not allowed to genocide their own kids with this shot (and then they’ll celebrate their sacrifice and take selfies with their kids in the ICU when the myocarditis kicks in, proclaiming #getvaccinated). Of course bougiecrats can already get this shot for their kid off label, so my hunch is that it’s really your kids who they want to genocide.
In future articles I’ll have additional thoughts about how we push back. In the meantime, this continues to be our best play and I encourage all of us to just get into the habit of contacting 25 people at the FDA every day to tell them to REJECT both the Moderna and Pfizer applications to inject mRNA into little kids.
Biden’s Mammoth $33BN Ukraine Package Includes Help With Wartime Propaganda
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | April 28, 2022
Politico’s Christopher Miller noted earlier that the record-smashing $33 billion spending package that the White House is proposing for Ukraine actually “dwarfs the annual defense budgets of most nations.” To which we naturally asked: how many billions of dollars does it take to turn a ‘proxy’ war into a ‘direct conflict’?
For starters it’s clear that such a massive amount of taxpayer money means that Washington clearly doesn’t expect that the war will end anytime soon, as multiple US defense and intelligence officials have recently testified. In fact General Mark Milley, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the House Armed Services Committee during the first week of this month that he sees this as a “very protracted conflict” to come that will be “at least measured in years.”
Biden in his Thursday rollout remarks described that the new aid package “begins the transition to longer-term security assistance.” But interestingly as part of this assistance, a key area that the US will fund is what’s essentially information warfare…
Independent journalist and media commentator Michael Tracey has pointed out…
White House fact-sheet says part of the mammoth $33 billion spending package it’s requesting for Ukraine will be to “support independent media.” Because nothing screams “independent” like being directly funded by the US Government as part of its “information warfare” initiative.
Of course, going back to at least 2014 the US government has funded such Ukraine initiatives as “citizen journalism” to push back against ‘Russian influence’ in the country.
As WikiLeaks has documented long ago, there was similarly heavy State Department and US intelligence funding of “independent” and “opposition” media in Syria in the lead-up to and during the decade-long war to try and overthrow Assad.
But this marks a huge expansion of the United States much more directly assisting Ukraine in its media and wartime propaganda efforts. The White House fact sheet detailing the scope of the security aid package spells out in a bullet point:
- Counter Russian disinformation and propaganda narratives, promote accountability for Russian human rights violation, and support activists, journalists, and independent media to defend freedom of expression.
This as “freedom of expression” is often suppressed at home, ironically enough especially targeting independent media outlets.
Also of little comfort to the US taxpayer in terms of a potential eventual path to WW3 between two nuclear armed powers is this section under a header titled Help Ukraine Defend Itself Over the Long-Term…
- A stronger NATO security posture through support for U.S. troop deployments on NATO territory, including transportation of U.S. personnel and equipment, temporary duty, special pay, airlift, weapons system sustainment, and medical support.
Ultimately this means hundreds of millions will go toward propping up “independent media” which will actually in truth be US-state funded pro-NATO information efforts.
Here’s what I found at the reported ‘mass grave’ near Mariupol
A first-hand look at the location where Kiev claims trenches hold thousands of bodies
© Eva Bartlett
By Eva Bartlett | Samizdat | April 28, 2022
According to recent Western media, Russian forces have buried up to 9,000 Mariupol civilians in “mass graves” in a town just west of the Ukrainian city. These reports use satellite imagery as supposed evidence and repeat the claims of officials loyal to Kiev that “the bodies may have been buried in layers” and “the Russians dug trenches and filled them with corpses every day throughout April.”
I went to the site in question and found no mass graves.
On April 23, I joined RT journalist Roman Kosarev on a visit to the location, in the town of Mangush. What I saw were new, orderly grave plots including some still empty ones – an extension of a cemetery that already exists at the spot. No mass pit. Many of the graves have placards with the names and dates of birth of the deceased when available, and the remaining plots were numbered according to burial.
Since the media is essentially copy-pasting from the same source – the former mayor of Mariupol, Vadym Boichenko (who seems to be far from the city now) – I’ll cite from the Washington Post’s article.
Boichenko, the article notes, “called the site the ‘new Babyn Yar,’ referring to one the largest mass graves in Europe located in the outskirts of Kyiv, where 33,000 Jews where killed by Nazis in 1941 during World War II.”
This is ironic on several levels. A mayor who is whitewashing the neo-Nazis who have run amuck in his city – notably those from the Azov Battalion, who have used civilians as human shields, occupied and militarized civilian infrastructure, point-blank executed civilians – is comparing an alleged (non-existent) mass grave to a Nazi massacre of WWII.
Meanwhile, the Kiev regime has re-written history, making WW2 Nazis and their collaborators heroes of the nation. The most notorious example being the WWII figure Stepan Bandera.
Boichenko’s other alarming claim was that the alleged “mass grave” was “the biggest war crime of the 21st century.” We are only 22 years into it, but we’ve already seen the US-led invasion and destruction of Iraq, the levelling of Syria’s Raqqa, Saudi Arabia’s ongoing war in Yemen – all of which are much stronger contenders than the nowhere-to-be-found “mass graves” of Mangush.
In reality, the site has around 400 individual plots, including nearly 100 empty ones. The 9,000 bodies and “biggest war crime of the 21st century” were unverified claims made by a mayor who fled his city, promoted by media which down the page admitted they could independently verify the claims – but by then, the damage had been done.
Gravediggers disprove mass grave claims
While walking around the site, two men responsible for burials arrived, and when presented with the former mayor’s accusations of mass graves they vehemently rejected the claims.
“This is not a mass grave and no one is throwing bodies into a pit,” one told me.
© Eva Bartlett
According to them, they bury each person in a coffin and separate grave, details are logged in the morgue, and when any documents regarding name and age are given, the plot is marked with a placard containing those details. Otherwise a number is used.
Interestingly, they also noted that a section of the new graves included buried Ukrainian soldiers. “They’re human, too” one of the men said.
For those in doubt as to the location, see Roman’s report: his drone footage shows that it’s precisely the same location as shown in the satellite images used by Western media.
Meanwhile, as Roman noted while walking, mass graves is something Ukraine has previously been accused of. He cited DPR leader Denis Pushilin as having stated that at least 300 such sites have been discovered since 2014.
He also spoke of what he witnessed. “In 2014 or 2015, mass graves were discovered as Azov or Aidar fighters retreated from the Donetsk region. I even saw a woman, she was dug up, she had her arms tied behind her back, she was in the late stages of pregnancy and she had a hole in her head, so that means she was executed.”
American journalist George Eliason, who has lived in Lugansk for many years, has written about these alleged atrocities. In a documentary on the issue, he said: “I’m here for five minutes and then I’m told the first five people they found, it was five decapitated heads. They were all civilians. Who does this to people?”
This story of a mass grave in Mangush is another fake from the Western corporate media, which previously pushed incubator babies being thrown on the floor by Iraqi soldiers, pushed lies about WMDs in Iraq, and carried reports of a chemical attack in Douma that never happened, to name but a few of their litany of hoaxes.
Meanwhile, when I was in Mariupol on April 21 and 22, yes there was destruction – thanks to those Neo-Nazi & regular Ukrainian forces occupying upper floors of residential buildings and using them as military positions, thus drawing return fire on the buildings – but I also saw people in the streets, and the beginning of the cleaning up process before rebuilding can occur.
I’ll repeat what I’ve said on Western media reporting on Syria (which in my experience, from on the ground in that country, is largely dishonest): those who promote these hoaxes and war propaganda have blood on their hands.
After the countless lies emanating from Western corporate media, I would hope people would exercise critical thinking whenever a new claim is pushed, particularly when it is repeated in chorus by the usual suspects.
The Guardian inadvertently shakes up Bucha narrative
By Drago Bosnic | April 28, 2022
When the events in Bucha were first reported, Ukrainian and Western mainstream media were unanimous – Russian Armed Forces were the alleged “perpetrators of the Bucha massacre”, while some even called it a “genocide”. The Ukrainian side claims Russian troops killed at least 412 people, while so-called “independent” sources state there were 50 victims. The peculiar claims were completely unsupported by any actual official investigation by any neutral side. The Kiev regime and their Western sponsors flatly refused to allow an international investigation, while any claims contrary to the official narrative were immediately suppressed. If anyone dared to question the narrative, they would be labeled “conspiracy theorists”, “genocide deniers” and “Putin’s propagandists”.
It is more than clear that such a blunt approach to the events in Bucha is designed to silence not just those opposing the official narrative, but even those who are not invested with either side and simply want answers to legitimate questions regarding the veracity of mainstream media reports. This completely removes any sort of public debate, limiting it to one-sided talkshows where so-called “pundits” are called to brainwash the public into thinking that the Russian military is entirely composed of alleged rapists, murderers, alcoholics, drug addicts, etc. By pushing this narrative, the mainstream media are “normalizing” Russophobia and anyone trying to denounce it is promptly silenced.
However, lies are still lies. And they are significantly harder to sustain than the truth. The truth is just truth, it stands by itself. Lies require the liar to circumvent and twist facts. In other words, more lies are necessary to sustain just one. It’s a neverending rabbit hole which inevitably spirals out of control. And precisely this happened on 24 April, when The Guardian published an article about new findings regarding the events in Bucha. According to the UK-based daily, “independent” investigators found evidence of fléchettes used by artillery (supposedly Russian) in Bucha.
“Independent” pathologists and coroners who are carrying out postmortems on bodies found in mass graves in the region north of Kyiv, where “occupying” Russian forces have been accused of alleged atrocities, said they had found small metal darts, called fléchettes, embedded in people’s heads and chests, the report stated.
“We found several really thin, nail-like objects in the bodies of men and women and so did others of my colleagues in the region,” Vladyslav Pirovskyi, a Ukrainian forensic doctor, told The Guardian. “It is very hard to find those in the body, they are too thin. The majority of these bodies come from the Bucha-Irpin region.”
“Independent” weapons experts who reviewed pictures of the metal arrows found in the bodies, seen by The Guardian, confirmed that they were fléchettes, an anti-personnel weapon widely used during the First World War.
These small metal darts are contained in tank or field gun shells. Each shell can contain up to 8,000 fléchettes. Once fired, shells burst when a timed fuse detonates and explodes above the ground. Fléchettes, typically between 3cm and 4cm in length, release from the shell and disperse in a conical arch about 300m wide and 100m long. On impact with a victim’s body, the dart can lose rigidity, bending into a hook, while the arrow’s rear, made of four fins, often breaks away causing a second wound.
“According to a number of witnesses in Bucha, fléchette rounds were fired by Russian artillery a few days before forces withdrew from the area at the end of March,” the report added.
As with all cases of Western-reported alleged crimes, there are always numerous witnesses, independent international experts, anonymous whistleblowers, etc. We just never get to see them. Which means we should simply take the claims of these people, whose very existence we cannot verify, at face value. And any sort of view opposing this narrative is immediately shut down.
According to Neil Gibson, another “Independent” weapons expert at the UK-based Fenix Insight group, who has reviewed the photos of the projectiles seen, they include the 122mm 3Sh1 artillery round, in use by Russian artillery and which are filled with fléchettes. What Mr. Gibson conveniently “forgot” to mention is that these same shells are used in all post-Soviet countries, including Ukraine. More specifically, the shells fit the D-30 howitzers, which are in service with both Russia and Ukraine, as well as dozens of other countries.
A spokesperson for the Ukrainian Ground Forces was quick to state that Ukraine’s military “does not use shells with fléchettes”. However, facts beg to differ, as surgeons in eastern Ukraine have reported the use of fléchettes by Ukrainian artillery in Donbass warzone since at least 2014. It’s obvious the Ukrainian and Western media find it convenient to use Soviet-era weapons as “proof” of alleged Russian war crimes, while ignoring the fact that these same weapons are used by Ukraine. What’s more, Ukraine is more likely to use them, since they have produced little to no new weapons and munitions since the collapse of the USSR.
Russian forces left Bucha on March 30. It took only a few days for the “independent” pathologists and coroners to file the reports from Bucha. At first, the reports claimed Russian forces allegedly shot civilians at point-blank range. Satellite image company Maxar Technologies claimed its photos provided “critical evidence that mass killings of civilians in the Ukrainian city of Bucha must have occurred when Russian forces were occupying the territory in mid to late March”. Combined with the report about fléchettes, this would mean the Russian artillery fired at the city while Russian troops were there, which defies any military logic.
If the reports about the usage of fléchettes are true, the only logical conclusion is that the Ukrainian military shelled Russian positions after the decision to withdraw from the Kiev and Chernigov regions. Russian forces deployed in Bucha certainly didn’t shell their own positions. Since we now know that the Ukrainian forces have and use fléchettes in their artillery shells, what conclusion can we draw except that the civilians were killed by the side which shelled the city while Russian troops were there?
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
As jabbed athletes collapse, the authorities look the other way
By Guy Hatchard | TCW Defending Freedom | April 21, 2022
THROUGHOUT 2021, attempts were made to debunk persistent reports that an unusual number of athletes were suffering cardiac events which might be related to mRNA Covid vaccination. The main theme of these fact-checking efforts was denial – athletes were not at risk and cardiac events were not happening.
In 2022 this dialogue is evolving because the numbers are growing and harder to ignore. According to an investigative report by OAN, a pro-Trump online US news site, 769 athletes suffered sudden health events between March 2021 and March 2022 with an average age of 23 years. In February, 15 top tennis players were unable to complete their matches in the Miami Open tournament.
Of necessity in the face of mounting numbers of injury reports, the fact-checking dialogue has hesitated on the brink, but on February 1 this year, the Washington Post still labelled stories of adverse effects of mRNA vaccines on athletes FALSE. Its story relied heavily on a discussion of the Danish footballer Christian Eriksen, who suffered a cardiac arrest on June 12 2021 just before half time in a match against Finland. The circulation of the apparently false story that Eriksen had been vaccinated was attributed by the Washington Post to a shady far-Right group in Austria seeking to influence their upcoming election.
Dig deeper and the story gets more murky. Few if any of the participants in this argument on both sides have verified hard facts to hand. The Washington Post, which had probably realised by February that it was quite possible that an unusual number of athletes were unexpectedly falling to the ground, decided to finish its article by asserting that the sporting collapses must be down to Covid, not Covid vaccination. Again no hard facts about actual athletes, just a polarised muck-throwing event.
As a scientist I realise that what is lacking here is reliable data. Why is it lacking? Here is the nub – the authorities are so sure they are right about the safety of vaccines that they are refusing to collect data. New Zealand has refused to institute mandatory reporting of adverse events following mRNA vaccination and other countries are in the same boat. We don’t have a lot of data to go on because it is not being collected. Sporting bodies are not counting either, or perhaps they have lost count or looked the other way.
Delving into the world of psychology, I find this unsettling. Why wouldn’t we collect data? Why aren’t we allowed to ask questions? Why isn’t the Ministry of Health counting and publishing up-to-date medical data on the frequency of cardiac and thrombotic events of all types?
There are stories in the popular press (actually not so popular these days) reporting recent excess cardiac events as due to ‘holiday heart syndrome’ or the need for young people ‘to avoid strenuous exercise’. Neither of these had been a thing until 2021. Why hasn’t the MoH quashed these speculative sallies into obfuscation by publishing data? You tell me.
The finger-pointing gets worse. One particular ‘whack-an-antivaxxer’ sport recently originated at Otago Medical School in New Zealand. A popular digest of a study of 1,000 people born in Dunedin in 1972 was reprinted in leading publications around the world. The article implied that anti-vaxxers suffered from sexual abuse, maltreatment, deprivation or neglect, or having an alcoholic parent as they were growing up. They were also described as low educational achievers likely to suffer from mental illness.
I am a little sceptical by nature, so I noticed that the reports were based on an article in a publication called The Conversation, which has received support during the pandemic from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Conversation describes itself as both devoted to academic rigour and seeking to explain science to the general public. Curiously its article about the Dunedin survey contained only one quantitative piece of information – 13 per cent of the respondents were vaccine resistant. No other quantitative information was provided to support the extreme characterisation of the vaccine hesitant in the article.
I tracked down the actual study entitled ‘Deep-seated psychological histories of COVID-19 vaccine hesitance and resistance’. Seven of the ten authors were based in the USA. One of the authors disclosed that he is funded by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The survey completed in April 2021 actually found that 13 per cent of the respondents were vaccine resistant and 12 per cent were vaccine hesitant. So fully 25 per cent of the respondents were vaccine hesitant to varying degrees.
I then rapidly came across an old friend used to distort information: absolute differences versus relative differences.
Of those willing to vaccinate (note the word used is willing, not necessarily keen), 62 per cent had at least one Adverse Childhood Event (ACE). Of those hesitant or resistant to vaccination 73 per cent had at least one ACE. The difference between 62 and 73 per cent is not large in absolute terms.
Based on this small difference, Professor Richie Poulton, a Dunedin-based co-author of the study, was quoted in the Otago Daily Times as saying about the vaccine hesitant and resistant responders:
‘The childhood experiences of those surveyed ranged from sexual abuse, parental neglect, poverty, to isolation and lack of achievement in school. They covered the whole suite of difficulties you can think of that might impinge on a person’s good development. Their personality became very stress reactive – they saw danger or threat where there essentially was none.’
Now you probably did percentages at school, so do you think Professor Poulton’s comments accurately reflect the difference between 62 per cent and 73 per cent exposures to at least one ACE? Because I certainly don’t. A significant percentage of both groups experienced ACEs growing up, but they had different opinions about vaccination.
Wouldn’t it be more productive to ask: why do we have such a high rate of ACEs in New Zealand? Is our mental health service under-funded? Is our education system failing us? Is support for families sufficient?
I went further down the pages examining results of a battery of ‘questionnaires’. I found that although there were measurable differences between the two groups: ‘vaccine willing’ and ‘vaccine hesitant and resistant’, their average scores were well within the standard deviation of the mean standardised score for each test.
This means most of those responding to the survey were relatively average people. The vaccine hesitant and resistant were being falsely characterised as ill-educated social deviants. This sounds like victim blaming. So much for the academic rigour and capacity to explain science to which The Conversation proudly aspires.
Were the media comments about the study an unsupported and false attempt to discredit the unvaccinated and categorise them as outcasts and misfits without the necessary intelligence to think for themselves? The small differences between the two groups were insufficient to justify this black-and-white condemnation widely shared around the world’s media.
There were some differences in educational attainment. Some 35 per cent of the vaccine willing had a BA degree or higher, while 15 per cent of the vaccine hesitant or resistant had a BA or higher. However the Dunedin results may be misleading regarding the influence of education. A study in the USA found that people with a PhD were more likely to be vaccine hesitant, implying that a decision not to vaccinate may possibly be encouraged by the development of high level critical thinking.
In the mainstream media articles, Professor Poulton pleaded with us to feel pity for the unvaccinated, because of their supposed difficult childhood (which was in fact not so different from that of the vaccinated). Was he simply lowering our opinion of the unvaccinated by playing upon stereotypes? Subtly hammering home the current mainstream media messaging that only Right-wing extremists and selfish antisocials remain unvaccinated.
Did he realise that the unvaccinated are legitimately concerned about the vaccinated because they have been unwittingly exposed to serious but as yet unquantified medical risk?
As I am aware that Covid mRNA vaccine adverse events are running at 30-50 times higher than any previous vaccine, I would ask different questions of the data:
- Were those willing to be vaccinated being misled by the inadequate content of their education?
- Do prior adverse experiences provide good reason to be more cautious in future?
The Immunisation Advisory Centre at the respected University of Auckland (incidentally partly funded by pro-vaccine interests) reassuringly says:
‘Confirmed cases of myocarditis are rare. More than 80 per cent of reported cases of myocarditis following mRNA Covid vaccination have recovered quickly with rest and commonly used oral anti-inflammatory medications such as ibuprofen.’
Are you reassured by this, or have you looked at the Medsafe adverse event data where 18,000 mRNA vaccine recipients reported chest pain and shortness of breath – symptoms admitted by the Immunisation Advisory Centre to be indicative of myocarditis?
Have you concluded, like me, that as many as 80 per cent of cases of myocarditis among the vaccinated remain unreported and untreated? A ticking time bomb, of which professional athletes represent only the tip of the iceberg.
The question is, how long are our health authorities going to continue to look the other way and refuse to start counting accurately, appropriately, and retrospectively?
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… In an attempt to cover just three large airbases against a series of salvos of 100+ missiles of various types, the entire US stockpile of PAC-3 interceptors could very conceivably be exhausted in little more than a week or two. … continue
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