Ask the average person in whatever country you choose what his chances of hospitalization with or death from COVID are and the answers will shock you. Nearly everyone you speak to is completely uninformed.
Naturally it is impossible to make rational decisions amidst this degree of ignorance.
Now is as good a time as any for some perspective.
The survival rate for people in the 0-19 age group is 99.997 percent. For 20-29 it’s 99.986 percent. You can find all the figures in the graphic below.
The data come from a recent paper by Stanford’s Cathrine Axfors and John Ioannidis, “Infection fatality rate of COVID-19 in community-dwelling populations with emphasis on the elderly: An overview.” Here’s how it breaks down:
A person under 50 is therefore at greater risk of death from drowning, choking on food, sunstroke, or from a sharp object.
This is not to say that we’re not dealing with a nasty virus for some people who contract it. But do you think the average person has any idea that the numbers for survival are this high?
In the UK, the Daily Mail just published an article called, “Is it time to stop obsessing over Covid figures? Statistics reveal virus is NOT the biggest killer — with heart disease, dementia and cancer each claiming four times as many lives in an average week last month.”
“Even before the rollout of the vaccine,” the article notes, “fewer than one per cent of people who caught Covid died. Now, scientists say that figure is ten times smaller.”
They included this graphic, for perspective:
Much as I welcome this, it’s pretty rich for the British press (or indeed any press) to publish an article and a chart like that, though, scratching their heads as to why people are obsessed about COVID, when they themselves are directly responsible for the misinformation that brought about that obsession.
Remember when the Washington Post called Iowa the “state that doesn’t care if you live or die” when that state removed its COVID restrictions? That was seven months ago.
Here’s the chart. Think we’re going to hear any apologies, or any “gee, I guess I don’t understand this virus as well as I thought,” or…?
According to Facebook’s content transparency report for the first quarter of 2021, released in mid-August 2021, the most popular article shared on the platform between January 2021 and March 2021 was about a 56-year-old Miami, Florida, obstetrician who died two weeks after his first Pfizer injection.1
The story initially ran in the South Florida Sun Sentinel 2 April 8, 2021, and was republished by the Chicago Tribune that same day.3 The doctor, Dr. Gregory Michael, received his first dose December 18, 2020.
Three days later, he developed small spots on his hands and feet, which prompted him to go to the emergency room, where they found he had an abnormally low blood count. Platelets stop bleeding by clotting, and when platelets drop too low, internal bleeding can occur, resulting in what looks like blood blisters on the skin.
Michael remained in intensive care for two weeks, but no matter what they did, his platelet count refused to budge. During the night of January 3, 2021, he died of a massive stroke. According to the coroner, the COVID injection could not be ruled out as a contributing or causative factor.
In a Facebook post, Michael’s widow stated he’d been “very healthy” and that he’d been a COVID-19 vaccine advocate. His death caused her to question the safety of the shot, however.
“I believe that people should be aware that side effects can happen, that the vaccine is not good for everyone and in this case destroyed a beautiful life, a perfect family and has affected so many people in this community.” she wrote. “Please do not let his death be in vain please save more lives my making this information news.”4
Even Viral Content Has Minor Reach
According to The New York Times,5 Facebook held off on publishing the first-quarter report for fear the findings might “look bad for the company.” Executives decided they wanted to make some “key fixes to the system” before releasing it. That’s why it wasn’t published until August.
Interestingly, the report reveals that even when something goes viral, the total number of views is still a tiny fraction of the overall content. Even the biggest accounts make up but a small portion of overall content views. Combined, the top 20 accounts with the most views during the first quarter — which included UNICEF, The Dodo and LADbible — accounted for only 1.18% of all U.S. content views.
As noted in the report, this “shows that, even though it may seem like a page or post has extensive reach on the platform, that isn’t the case when measured against the total amount of content available on the platform.”
Facebook Calls Out CCDH for Manufacturing ‘Faulty Narrative’
As you may know, an obscure one-man organization funded by dark money called the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) has published several reports, including “The Anti-Vaxx Playbook,”6 “The Disinformation Dozen”7 and “Disinformation Dozen: The Sequel,”8 in which the founder, Imran Ahmed — an unregistered foreign agent — claims to have identified the top most influential “anti-vaxxers” in the U.S.
In a completely unexpected turn of events, Facebook is now calling out the CCDH for having manufactured a faulty narrative without evidence against the 12 individuals targeted in its reports (myself included).9
This is important, seeing how the CCDH reports have been the primary “reference” source of authority used by media and government officials to smear, threaten and infringe on American citizens’ right to free speech.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security even lists promulgating “false narratives” around COVID-19 as a top national security threat, which basically puts a “domestic terrorist” target on the backs of those of us who have been identified by the CCDH as the most prolific “superspreaders” of COVID misinformation.
As reported by GreenMed Info :10
“Google now shows an astounding 84,700 search results for CCDH’s defamatory phrase ‘disinformation dozen. ’Amazingly, this includes 16,000 news stories within the international press, approximately 100% of which are word-for-word amplifications of CCDH’s claims/defamatory statements and reported uncritically as fact.
In addition, the Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, the White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, and president Biden all used CCDH’s report as the sole source for their own defamatory accusations, reaching a dangerous rhetorical climax on July 20th when Biden stated that these 12 individuals are literally “killing people” [by spreading misinformation].”
No Evidence to Support ‘Misinfo Superspreader’ Claim
In an August 18, 2021, Facebook report, Monika Bickert, vice president of Facebook content policy, sets the record straight, and in the process, demolishes the CCDH’s claims:11
“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 …
That said, any amount of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation that violates our policies is too much by our standards — and we have removed over three dozen Pages, groups and Facebook or Instagram accounts linked to these 12 people, including at least one linked to each of the 12 people, for violating our policies.
We have also imposed penalties on nearly two dozen additional Pages, groups or accounts linked to these 12 people, like moving their posts lower in News Feed so fewer people see them or not recommending them to others. We’ve applied penalties to some of their website domains as well so any posts including their website content are moved lower in News Feed.
The remaining accounts associated with these individuals are not posting content that breaks our rules, have only posted a small amount of violating content, which we’ve removed, or are simply inactive.
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.”
It’s worth restating the key point in this quote: Combined, the top 12 individuals and organizations identified by the CCDH as being responsible for a whopping 73% of vaccine misinformation on Facebook, are in fact only responsible for 0.05% of vaccine-related content — 1,460 times lower than the CCDH’s outrageous claim. That’s no small discrepancy.
CCDH Claims Blasted as Unjustified and Biased
Bickert goes on to refer directly to the CCDH report “The Disinformation Dozen,”12 stating:
“The report13 upon which the faulty narrative is based analyzed only a narrow set of 483 pieces of content over six weeks from only 30 groups, some of which are as small as 2,500 users.
They are in no way representative of the hundreds of millions of posts that people have shared about COVID-19 vaccines in the past months on Facebook.
Further, there is no explanation for how the organization behind the report identified the content they describe as ‘anti-vax’ or how they chose the 30 groups they included in their analysis. There is no justification for their claim that their data constitute a ‘representative sample’ of the content shared across our apps.”
CCDH Meets Definition of ‘Hateful Extremists’
Ironically, while the CCDH claims to “counter hate” online, and Ahmed sits on the Steering Committee of the U.K. Commission on Countering Extremism, CCDH itself actually meets the Commission’s definition of hateful extremists.14 In the 2019 Commission document, “Challenging Hateful Extremism,” the term is defined as:15
“Behaviours that can incite and amplify hate, or engage in persistent hatred, or equivocate about and make the moral case for violence; And that draw on hateful, hostile or supremacist beliefs directed at an out-group who are perceived as a threat to the wellbeing, survival or success of an in-group; And that cause, or are likely to cause, harm to individuals, communities or wider society.”
In addition, in the forward of the report, lead commissioner Sara Khan notes that “Hateful extremists seek to restrict individual liberties and curtail the fundamental freedoms that define our country.”
All of these definitions and clarifications of what hateful extremism is fit the CCDH to a T. Ahmed manufactured data to create a false narrative that 12 individuals pose a threat to the well-being and survival of the whole world, and then used that narrative to incite hate against us and curtail our freedom of speech.
Who Fact Checks the Fact Checkers?
In related news, the self-appointed arbiter of factual truths, NewsGuard, has had to backpedal in recent months and issue dozens of corrections to “fact checks” in which they’ve labeled the Wuhan lab leak theory as a debunked conspiracy theory with no basis in fact.
Since the beginning of the COVID pandemic, NewsGuard has wrongly down-rated 225 websites for articles mentioning the lab leak theory.16 In reality, there’s far more evidence to support the lab leak theory than any other theory, but it took over a year before the weight of this evidence became too obvious for the media to ignore.
NewsGuard’s erroneous fact checks were recently highlighted in an August 11, 2021, report by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER).17
AIER decided to take a closer look at NewsGuard after receiving a request for comments on a NewsGuard fact check article regarding AIER and the Great Barrington Declaration — a statement written by public health experts from Harvard, Stanford and Oxford that calls on government to implement focused protection rather than lockdowns and self-isolation. AIERS investigation found that:18
“… NewsGuard falls far short of the very same criteria for accuracy and transparency that it claims to apply to other websites. Most of the company’s fact checkers lack basic qualifications in the scientific and social-scientific fields that they purport to arbitrate.
NewsGuard’s own track record of commentary — particularly on the Covid-19 pandemic — reveals a pattern of unreliable and misleading claims that required subsequent corrections, and analysis that regularly conflates fact with opinion journalism in rendering a judgement on a website’s content.
Furthermore, the company’s own practices fall far short of the transparency and disclosure standards it regularly applies to other websites … NewsGuard’s staff primarily evaluates scientific claims by appealing to the authority of public figures who they designate as ‘experts’ on the subject in question.
Their approach generally avoids direct examination of the evidence surrounding contested claims, and instead cherry-picks a figure to treat as an authoritative final word … many of their preferred authorities are political officeholders rather than persons trained in scientific or social-scientific methods.
By selectively curating cherry-picked political authorities rather than evaluating evidence directly, NewsGuard’s approach to fact-checking effectively sidesteps the scientific method. This strategy is rendered even more problematic by the general lack of scientific expertise within NewsGuard’s team of writers.
We examined the educational credentials, including the highest degree listed, for 28 publicly identified staff members on NewsGuard’s website. The company’s staff page reveals shockingly little expertise in either the hard sciences such as medicine or social sciences such as public policy, economics, and related fields …
Most NewsGuard articles on Covid-19 topics and policies are written by [NewsGuard Deputy Editor for Health, John] Gregory, whose only identified qualification is a bachelor’s degree in Media Arts … Gregory would not qualify as an expert in most of the fields he is responsible for fact-checking …
Of course, non-experts have every right to offer opinions on scientific and social-scientific matters. Whether or not they should be taken seriously as fact checkers or act as arbiters of scientific disputes is another question entirely.”
NewsGuard Staff by Field and Highest Degree Attained
NewsGuard Apologizes for Erroneous Fact Checks
After being confronted about its erroneous fact checks on the lab leak theory, NewsGuard offered the following apology in a statement sent to AIER:19
“NewsGuard either mischaracterized the sites’ claims about the lab leak theory, referred to the lab leak as a ‘conspiracy theory,’ or wrongly grouped together unproven claims about the lab leak with the separate, false claim that the COVID-19 virus was man-made without explaining that one claim was unsubstantiated, and the other was false.
NewsGuard apologizes for these errors. We have made the appropriate correction on each of the 21 labels.”
AIER commented on the apology:20
“Gregory and his colleagues appear to have simply decided that their own premature dismissal of the lab leak hypothesis equated to ‘fact’ and proceeded to penalize other sites not for factual errors, but rather for diverging from NewsGuard’s own editorial position on the same subject.
When this position turned out to be mistaken, NewsGuard pivoted to remove the errors — albeit in non-transparent ways that downplay the significance or pervasiveness of their mistake.”
NewsGuard Fails to Fulfill Its Own Credibility Criteria
In their report, AIER goes on to apply the criteria NewsGuard uses to evaluate a website’s credibility to NewsGuard itself. It’s ranking? A paltry 36.25 out of 100. According to AIER:21
“This website fails to adhere to several basic journalistic standards, and should be used with extreme caution as a source for verifying the reliability of the websites it purports to rate …
When we see fact checkers like NewsGuard, who not only fail to uphold their high-sounding principles but even publicly encourage working with the government to suppress speech, we should raise red flags.”
The NewsGuard ratings are meant to influence the reader, instructing them to disregard content with cautionary colors and cautions. That it would serve as the thought police of the technocratic establishment that seeks to silence dissent and bury information that doesn’t help move the Great Reset agenda forward is no surprise.
Especially considering its primary startup capital came from Publicis Groupe,22 a PR group that represents most of Big Pharma, including vaccine makers, and Big Tech. NewsGuard is also backed by Microsoft23 and Google.
The Publicis Groupe has been manipulating what people think about commercial products for nearly a century. Over that century, this advertising and communications firm bought or partnered with targeted advertising avenues, beginning with newspapers, followed by radio, TV, cinema and the internet.
With revenue avenues secured, Publicis’ clients and partners built a global presence that dominated the advertising world. Be it tobacco or sugar, Publicis Groupe found a way to promote and strengthen big industries. Publicis was recently sued24 for its deadly and illegal marketing of Purdue Pharma’s opioid products.
When you consider that Publicis describes its business model approach as putting clients and their needs and objectives at the center of all they do so their clients can “win and grow,” it’s easy to see what’s driving NewsGuard.
Overall, NewsGuard is just another big business aimed at keeping the chemical, drug and food industries, as well as mainstream media, intact by discrediting and eliminating unwanted competitors and analysts who empower you with information that runs counter to any given industry’s agenda.
If you’re as disturbed by censorship as I am, be sure to contact your local library today to find out if they’re one of the more than 700 libraries using NewsGuard. If they are, then ask them if they’re aware of NewsGuard’s censorship of truthful news that is now encroaching on scientific freedom and threatening the very roots of our democracy.
If your local library is using NewsGuard, it would be helpful to start a campaign to get it removed. Contact your neighbors and let them know what is happening so they can kick out this public health threat. Likewise, whenever you see someone referencing reports by the CCDH, call them out on it.
A story in the Washington Post, titled “How climate change helped make Hurricane Ida one of Louisiana’s worst,” with Hurricane Ida as its news hook, asserts human caused climate change is driving more intense hurricanes. This is false. Data show tropical storms and hurricanes are neither more numerous nor more powerful than they have been historically. Not in Louisiana and not anywhere else.
By the time Hurricane Ida made landfall in Port Fourchon, La., on Sunday, it was the poster child for a climate change-driven disaster. The fast-growing, ferocious storm brought 150-mile-per-hour wind, torrential rain and several feet of storm surge to the most vulnerable part of the U.S. coast. It rivals the most powerful storm ever to strike the state.
“People there are going to get blasted,” said Kerry Emanuel, an atmospheric scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies the physics of hurricanes and their connection to theclimate. “This is exactly the kind of thing we’re going to have to get used to as the planet warms.”
As powerful as Ida was when made landfall, the Post and Emanuel are wrong to link Ida or any particular hurricane to climate change.
Ida may rival the most powerful hurricanes ever to strike Louisiana, but that does not make it unique. Research shows since 1957 alone five hurricanes have made landfall in Louisiana with wind speeds exceeding 150 mph. The most powerful of those five hurricanes, 1969’s Category 5 Camille, had wind speeds exceeding 190 mph. Three of the five Category 4 or higher hurricanes Louisiana has experience in the past 70 years occurred during late 1950s and 1960s during a period when the earth was undergoing a period of modest cooling, and many scientists were warning of a coming ice age.
Data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Hurricane Center (NHC) show hurricanes have neither become more numerous or more powerful during the past half-century of modest warming.
Since 1878, about six to seven hurricanes have formed in the North Atlantic every year. Roughly two per year make landfall in the United States. The total number of hurricanes (particularly after being adjusted for improvements in observation methods) and the number reaching the United States do not indicate a clear overall trend since 1878.
EPA’s conclusion that hurricanes have not become more numerous in recent years is unsurprising, because, U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2018 interim report came to essentially the same conclusion. As illustrated in figure 1 below, IPCC data demonstrates no increasing trend in tropical cyclone or hurricane numbers.
Figure 1. Tropical cyclone frequency through August 2021. Dr. Ryan Maue
NHC data indicate hurricane impacts on the United States are at an all-time low. The United States recently went more than a decade, 2005 through 2017, without experiencing a major hurricane measuring Category 3 or higher, making landfall—the longest such period in recorded history.
This can be seen in Figure 2 below showing the large gap with no major landfalling hurricanes (Category3 or greater) in the U.S. on the right-hand side.
Figure 2. Landfalling hurricanes category 3 or greater through 2020. Dr. Roger Pielke Jr.
Also from 2009 through 2017, the United States experienced the fewest number of hurricane strikes over any eight-year period, since records have been kept.
The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 6th Assessment Report, released in early August, also finds limited evidence human caused climate change is causing more frequent or stronger hurricanes.
“There is low confidence in most reported long-term (multidecadal to centennial) trends in TC frequency- or intensity-based metrics,” writes the IPCC.
This is not surprising. As explained in Climate at a Glance: Hurricanes, warm ocean water is just one factor driving the formation and intensification of hurricanes. Wind shear inhibits strong storms from forming and rips apart storms that have already formed. Science indicates global warming is likely to cause more wind shear in places where hurricanes form and intensify. This is precisely what happened to Henri, in mid-August, with wind shear shredding its top reducing it from a minor hurricane to a tropical depression in a relatively short period of time.
While the human toll and economic costs of Hurricane Ida have yet to be totaled up, they are likely to be great. However, contrary to the Washington Post’s article, there is no evidence the recent modest warming of the earth contributed to Ida or any other recent hurricane’s formation or intensity. The facts show, recent hurricane numbers and wind speeds are well within historical norms. The Post should stop selling unwarranted climate alarmism on the back of real human misery.
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D. is managing editor of Environment & Climate News and a research fellow for environment and energy policy at The Heartland Institute.
But this is the crucial page. Look at the bottom line.
Again, 402 deaths out of 47 008 cases in vaccinated; 253 deaths out of 151 054 cases in unvaccinated. If you get covid having been vaccinated, according to this data, you are much more likely to die than if you were not vaccinated!
Obviously some allowance must be made for more elderly people being vaccinated, but not enough to change the bottom line: this vaccine is not nearly as effective as advertised.
And with all its unknowns, and a much higher adverse reporting number than all other vaccines combined, a complete recalibration of global policy is the only moral option.
The powers that be will not admit there is something terribly wrong. They will not acknowledge the clear science that people with natural immunity, and the young and healthy, do not need to take the risks of these injections. Read this very important piece on natural immunity. Reliable studies showing the superiority of natural immunity are just ignored by our overlords.
Instead they will jab and jab and jab again. The vaccine passports will be renewable every six months. Countries are ordering up to 8 shots per citizen. The masks will not go away. Israel, the pre-eminent vaxxed nation, is in lockdown.
The report also made one other important admission:
In other words, getting vaccinated to protect others is not true!
This is NOT a sterilising vaccine that stops diseases like polio or hepatitis using live virus. This is for you alone. Which means, as experts like Martin Kulldorff, biostatistician, epidemiologist and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford University and research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, have long said, it makes zero sense to vaccinate the young and healthy.
We are dealing with a world-historical error, and in fact a global assault on young bodies.
To be clear, I make no advice to anybody about taking the vaccine or not. I may well have decided to take it if I were in a risk category, or if I knew I did not have to wear a mask or get tested after taking a single shot. Your decision should be guided by consulting with a doctor, informed consent, and your own conscience.
And you should ask yourself why there is no explanation for the hundreds of thousands of women experiencing menstrual changes after the shot, or the way vaccines are being mandated at the same time they are under investigation for unknown risks.
What I will say categorically is that you will have to answer one day, in this life or the next, for where you stood on the issue of mandating medicine for the healthy without informed consent, on giving cover for governments to shove things down kids’ noses, and locking down all that makes life worthwhile. Where were you when kids’ freedoms were stolen from them? I doubt there will be much forgiveness from that generation.
Every time somebody posts a meme mocking vaccine hesitance, not only do they alienate the hesitant, and radicalize them, they implicitly endorse a new police state in which a liberal government like Australia feels empowered to pepper spray kids in the face for not wearing a mask that has not been conclusively shown to prevent viral transmission.
For crying out loud, this what even the World Health Organization admits about masks:
The vaccines will not end these measures, especially in countries with low vaccination rates. They cannot, unless these governments admit their massive errors. Their booster shot push makes this unlikely.
Finally, why does the media not even report on governmental data? Why am I reporting this stuff?
I have no idea, but it is truly sinister.
Ask yourself why the media will not even mention the fact that this 23-year-old Irish footballer below, in perfect health, received a vaccine three days before dropping dead:
Over the past year and a half, hysterical media reporting on matters Covid-19 has reduced some people to a fearful state of unquestioning compliance – including a great number of otherwise critically-thinking journalists.
With screaming headlines in bold and large font such as, ‘Will this nightmare ever end?’ and ‘Mutant virus skyrockets…’ and ‘Fear grows across the country: VIRUS PANIC’, and ‘Coronavirus horror: Social media footage shows infected Wuhan residents ‘act like zombies’, it is no wonder many people are in a state of panic.
In times when many are suffering mentally and physically under unnecessary and prolonged lockdowns, the incessant fear porn is causing excessive anxiety, which in turn will affect the health & mental well-being of some, if not many.
In government documents from the UK’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) dated from March 2020 advice was given saying:
“The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging… This could potentially be done by trained community support volunteers, by targeted media campaigns, social media”
I’d say the UK media campaigns weren’t so much ‘targeted’ as ‘blanket’ but they certainly did the job, and other Western nations got similar directives. The UK government also became the nation’s biggest advertiser in 2020, make what you will of the potential ramifications that could have on cash-strapped newspapers and their supposed ‘independence’.
Having myself been deeply focused on exposing war propaganda and other media lies around Syria, Palestine, Venezuela, and elsewhere over the years, my default position has become one of deep cynicism on mass media reporting. Yes, you can find nuggets of truth, or even excellent journalists in mainstream publications, honestly challenging the narratives.
But those are few and far between, generally you find copy-paste propaganda emanating largely from the bowels of the USA and the UK.
A study by Swiss Propaganda Research (SPR) noted, “most of the international news coverage in Western media is provided by only three global news agencies based in New York, London and Paris.”
Those agencies are AP, Reuters, and AFP. SPR notes:
“The key role played by these agencies means Western media often report on the same topics, even using the same wording. In addition, governments, military and intelligence services use these global news agencies as multipliers to spread their messages around the world.”
Given all of this, I’ve come to believe that with regard to media reporting on Covid-19, my cynicism is well-deserved.
Covid-19 reporting has increasingly been utterly absurd, with stories of people dropping dead in the streets, ice rink morgues to cope with the mountains of bodies, footage of an overcrowded New York hospital (that just happened to be of an Italian hospital), claims of animals testing positive for SARS-CoV-2, and more recently reports of people dying post-jab but we are told ‘it could have been worse!’
This campaign of fear caused the public to massively overestimate the lethality of Covid-19, which as un-alarmist voices note has a survival rate of over 99%.
When months into the outbreak it became apparent that SARS-CoV-2 was far less lethal than first predicted, the media and talking heads moved from talking about ‘Covid deaths’ to ‘positive cases’.
Although relatively early on a goat and pawpaw tested positive for Covid-19, instead of then scrutinizing the accuracy of the PCR test as a means of ‘detecting Covid-19’, the media continued to hype the rise in Covid ‘cases’.
In lockstep, ‘Covid testing’ was increased dramatically using the PCR test (recently revoked by the CDC). This inevitably pumped up the number of ‘cases’, which mass media have in turn promoted non-stop, this in turn gave ammunition to those enforcing lockdowns and vaccines.
By now hundreds of vocal doctors, nurses, virologists, immunologists, and other professionals actually worth listening to, whose data and experience counter the hype pumped out in media have very quickly disappeared from social media, or otherwise deemed quacks, and are thus largely silenced. This leaves the general public mainly getting their information via hyped-up media.
Alongside this, there have been relentless ad hominem attacks on journalists who pose legitimate questions and uncomfortable truths about the official narratives around Covid-19.
For offering perspectives which contradict the standard narratives around Covid-19, journalists have been deemed conspiracy theorists, pandemic-deniers, right-wingers, selfish… I’m sure I’ve missed quite a few slurs.
When it comes to matters Covid-19, it is suddenly unacceptable to question ‘The Science’, question the authorities, or question the same media that sold us WMDs in Iraq and chemical attacks in Syria.
Media are the drivers of Covid hysteria, and it is the daily bombardment of fear porn that confuses average people and enables tyrannical powers to be brought in, largely unchallenged.
As it is the responsibility of journalists to expose lies around wars of aggression, it is also the duty of journalists to do so around Covid-19. For some journalists who have stubbornly refused to hold power to account, instead toeing the line on all things Covid, it appears their fear is of losing an audience and not of a virus.
Whether or not you agree with dissenting voices’ questions and criticisms, we have the right to ask and make them. We do so, knowing that remaining silent in the face of the brutal Covid measures is a guaranteed path to tyranny.
Eva Bartlett is a Canadian independent journalist and activist. She has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Palestine (where she lived for nearly four years).
On August 12, the military contractor CACI International Inc. told its investors that the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is hurting its profits. The same contractor is also funding a think tank that is concurrently arguing against the withdrawal. This case is worth examining both because it is routine, and because it highlights the venality of our “expert”-military contractor feedback loop, in which private companies use think tanks to rally support for wars they’ll profit from.
The contractor is notorious to those who have followed the scandal of U.S.-led torture in Iraq. CACI International was sued by three Iraqis formerly detained in Abu Ghraib prison who charge that the company’s employees are responsible for directing their torture, including sexual assault and electric shocks. (The suit was brought in 2008 and the case is still ongoing.)
In 2019, CACI International was awarded a nearly $907 million, five-year contract to provide “intelligence operations and analytic support” for the U.S. Army in Afghanistan.
During an August 12earnings call, CACI International noted repeatedly that President Biden’s withdrawal from the 20-year Afghanistan War harmed the company’s profits. John Mengucci, president and CEO of CACI International, said, “we have about a 2 percent headwind coming into FY 2022 because of Afghanistan.” A “headwind” refers to negative impacts on profits.
Afghanistan was mentioned 16 times throughout the call — either in reference to the dent in profits, or to assure investors that other areas of growth were offsetting the losses. For example, Mengucci said, “We’re seeing positive growth in technology and expect it to continue to outpace expertise growth, collectively offsetting the impact of the Afghanistan drawdown.”
Similar themes were repeated in an April 22earnings call, where the company lamented the “headwinds” posed by the Afghanistan withdrawal. (Industry and defense publications have picked up on this theme, but framed it in the company’s terms, by emphasizing the offsets to its losses.)
Despite CACI International’s clear economic interest in continuing the war, on the August 12 call, company officials were careful not to editorialize about the Biden administration’s decision. The closest they came was a cautious statement from Mengucci: “At least as of today we’ve watched the administration make the decision to completely exit Afghanistan by 9 – 11 and all I can say is they’re executing on that decision.”
But CACI International does not have to broadcast its positions on the war: Instead, it is funding a think tank that has been actively urging the Biden administration not to leave Afghanistan.
CACI International is listed as a “corporate sponsor” of the Institute for Study of War, which describes itself as a “non-partisan, non-profit, public policy research organization.” Dr. Warren Phillips, lead director of CACI International, is on the board of the think tank. (Other funders include General Dynamics and Microsoft.)
When it comes to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, however, the think tank is extremely partisan. In an August 20paper, the think tank argued that “Russia, China, Iran, and Turkey are weighing how to take advantage of the United States’ hurried withdrawal.”
Jack Keane, a retired four star general and board member of the Institute for Study of War, meanwhile, has been on a cable news blitz arguing against the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, as reported by Ryan Grim, Sara Sirota, Lee Fang and Rose Adams for The Intercept. (The Intercept noted CACI’s International’s backing of the think tank.)
Kimberly Kagan, founder and president of the Institute for the Study of War, told Fox News on August 17 that the U.S. withdrawal could cause Afghanistan to become the “second school of jihadism.” She warned, “It is not clear that the Taliban, which seeks international recognition and legitimacy, is going to want to tolerate or encourage direct attacks on the U.S. from al Qaeda or other extremist groups based in Afghanistan.”
The think tank’s backing from a military contractor was not discussed in these media appearances.
The case of CACI International is not unique. The Intercept notes, “Among the other talking heads who took to cable news segments or op-ed pages without disclosing their defense industry ties were retired Gen. David Petraeus; Rebecca Grant, a former staffer for the Air Force secretary; Richard Haass, who worked as an adviser to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell; and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.”
This cacophony of voices matters because Biden is facing a media uproar over the withdrawal. Pundits and mainstream press outlets that have been ignoring civilian deaths for years are suddenly expressing moral outrage at their hardships now that the war is ending. While there are legitimate concerns about the fate of Afghans as the Taliban seizes control, the vast majority of the firestorm stems from a reflexively pro-war perspective, in favor of the indefinite extension of an occupation that has proven brutal and lethal for civilians. The overwhelming effect is to send the message to Biden, and any future presidents, that they should think twice before withdrawing from a war, lest they have a media revolt on their hands.
But this outcry didn’t materialize out of nowhere. Think tank “experts,” whose organizations are financed by the very companies profiting from the war, play a key part. They are trotted out in front of cameras and quoted in major media outlets, presented as above-the-fray observers. They are well-financed, polished and groomed precisely for moments like these. And the companies financing them get to launder their own objectives through institutions that are seen as respectable, academic and rigorous. It’s a grotesque system that is functioning as it was designed.
In its August 12 call, CACI International simply acknowledged the company’s economic interests out loud.
The narrative that the January 6 storming of the US Capitol was organized on social media contributed to the shutdown of alternative tech app Parler, led to mass social media censorship, and was even used by some Big Tech platforms to justify the permanent suspension of President Trump.
But now, the FBI is disputing this narrative, with multiple current and former law enforcement officials telling Reuters there is scant evidence that the events of January 6 were the result of an organized plot and no evidence that Trump was involved in organizing the storming of the Capitol.
Four current and former law enforcement officials, who have been either directly involved or regularly briefed on the FBI’s investigations into the storming of the Capitol, told Reuters that “the FBI at this point believes the violence was not centrally coordinated by far-right groups or prominent supporters of then-President Donald Trump.”
One of the sources added that “ninety to ninety-five percent of these are one-off cases” and that the remaining five percent “were more closely organized” but “there was no grand scheme with Roger Stone and Alex Jones and all of these people to storm the Capitol and take hostages.”
Additionally, the sources said that the FBI “has so far found no evidence” that Trump or people directly around him were involved in organizing the violence.
These revelations from law enforcement sources directly dispute the January 6 narrative that has been pushed by numerous media outlets which, in the immediate aftermath of the storming of the Capitol, blamed social media and Trump supporters for the events at the US Capitol.
In a January 6 article titled “The storming of Capitol Hill was organized on social media,” The New York Times claimed that groups that had been “bolstered by Mr. Trump” had “openly organized on social media networks and recruited others to their cause.”
The article also directly connected this alleged months-long organization on social media to the storming of the Capitol by stating “their online activism became real-world violence, leading to unprecedented scenes of mobs freely strolling through the halls of Congress and uploading celebratory photographs of themselves, encouraging others to join them.”
Countless other media outlets, including BuzzFeed and ProPublica, pushed the same narrative by claiming that the Capitol rioters had been planning online for weeks.
Not only did these media articles allege that the storming of the Capitol was organized on social media but many also suggested that alt-tech sites such as Gab, Parler, and Telegram were to blame.
The New York Times piece claimed that both Gab and Parler were being “used by the far-right” to share “directions on which streets to take to avoid the police and which tools to bring to help pry open doors.”
And BuzzFeed wrote:
“On pro-Trump social media website Parler, chat app Telegram, and other corners of the the far-right internet, people discussed the Capitol Hill rally at which Trump spoke as the catalyst for a violent insurrection. They have been using those forums to plan an uprising in plain sight, one that they executed Wednesday afternoon, forcing Congress to flee its chambers as it met to certify the results of the election.”
This media narrative, which is now being disputed by the FBI, triggered a wave of online censorship after January 6.
President Trump was banned from all of the major social media platforms days after January 6. Big Tech justified the bans by referencing the events at the Capitol and suggesting that Trump was inciting violence.
Twitter even pushed similar talking points to those being pushed by the media and claimed that “plans for future armed protests have already begun proliferating on and off-Twitter, including a proposed secondary attack on the US Capitol and state capitol buildings on January 17, 2021” were one of the factors that led to it banning Trump.
And Parler was booted from Apple and Google’s app stores and Amazon’s web hosting services within days of the Capitol riot. Apple even echoed the media’s assertion that Parler was being “used to plan, coordinate, and facilitate the illegal activities in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021” in its threat to ban the alt-tech platform from the App Store.
As this media narrative that the storming of the Capitol was organized on social media starts to fall apart, those who were impacted by the subsequent censorship are still feeling its impact.
President Trump is still blacklisted from all of the Big Tech platforms and has lost his ability to reach the millions of followers he had accumulated on these platforms, even after these law enforcement sources said the FBI has found no evidence that Trump or his prominent supporters had anything to do with coordinating or organizing the events of January 6.
And since it was deplatformed by Apple, Google, and Amazon in January, Parler has lost more than 95% of its traffic. According to web analytics service SimilarWeb, Parler’s traffic declined from a peak of over 40 million visits in January to 1.93 million visits in July.
Meanwhile, the mainstream media outlets that pushed this narrative are still given preferential treatment by Big Tech through algorithms that boost their reach by up to 20x.
This phenomenon of mainstream media outlets pushing a narrative that leads to mass censorship, only for the narrative to crumble months later isn’t limited to January 6.
Countless social media users were censored for suggesting the possibility of the coronavirus leaking from the infamous Wuhan lab until the media reversed course and reported that this could in fact be a possibility. Facebook then changed its rules to allow discussions of the lab leak theory but most of those who were censored before the media reversed course still haven’t had their accounts or posts reinstated.
Yet the media outlets that previously claimed the lab leak theory was a “conspiracy” and then reversed course, haven’t faced any sanctions and get to maintain their status as “authoritative sources” that are boosted by Big Tech’s algorithms.
There’s no war so badly lost, it seems, that someone can’t be found to say that it was all a good idea and the problem was not that the war was fought but that it wasn’t fought hard enough. This was once perhaps the purview of conservatively-minded national security types. But since the end of the Cold War it’s been increasingly the opinion of the keyboard warriors in the democracy-promoting intelligentsia who want nothing more than to bomb the world into oblivion for the sake of liberalism and human rights.
So we should hardly be surprised that the debacle in Afghanistan has brought the liberal interventionists out of their closets to argue that America’s never ending wars aren’t the problem – the real problem is that Westerners are lilly-livered softies who are too decadent to stand up and fight against the forces of evil that surround them, and that if we don’t step up the bombing then democracy, liberalism and all the rest of it will collapse in a tsunami of assaults from the liberty-hating Russians, Chinese and Islamists, who together have formed common front designed to destroy us all.
And so it is that Anne Applebaum (who else?) has stepped up to the plate with a little piece in The Atlantic with the catchy title “Liberal Democracy is Worth a Fight.” Of course, the rotten regime that just fell in Afghanistan was hardly a “liberal democracy,” but I guess it was more liberal and more democratic than the Taliban are likely to be, so we’ll let that one slip. The point is clear: liberal democracy is in peril, and Applebaum wants to issue a call to arms: We must fight. Fight, fight, fight. If not, we’re doomed!
And indeed, her article gets off to a fighting start with the following words:
Of all the empty, pointless statements that are periodically repeated by Western politicians, none is more empty and pointless than this one: “There can be no military solution to this conflict.”
Because, you see, as the Taliban have just shown, there are military solutions. As Applebaum says, “In many conflicts, probably Syria and certainly Afghanistan, there is a military solution: The war ends because one side wins.”
The problem is that it’s the wrong side that keeps on winning. And that bugs Applebaum. She tells us:
The need to prevent this from happening in other places—to prevent violent extremists from invading places where people would prefer to live in peace and in accordance with the rule of law—is precisely why we have armies, weapons, intelligence agencies, and spies of various kinds, despite all of the mistakes they make and the ugly things they sometimes do. The need to prevent violent extremists from creating structures like al-Qaeda or rogue, nuclear-armed regimes is precisely why North Americans and Europeans get involved in distant and difficult conflicts.
That’s also why the phenomenon of liberal internationalism—or “neocon internationalism” if you don’t like it—exists: Because sometimes only guns can prevent violent extremists from taking power. Yet many people in the liberal democratic world, perhaps most people, don’t want to believe this. … They pretend that … that “solidarity” with the women of Afghanistan, without a physical presence to back it up, is a meaningful idea.
Whoa, there, Anne. That’s not actually “why we have armies, weapons,” and all the rest of it. At least, not historically speaking. Historically, we had them to defend our homelands from attack, or, in the more aggressive periods of our past, so that we could attack other peoples’ homelands and take them from them. Armies aren’t social workers whose aim is “to spread solidarity with the women of Afghanistan.” They’re not suited for that sort of thing. What they’re good for is killing people and blowing stuff up. So if there’s a physical threat out there that can be dealt with by killing people and blowing stuff up, then there’s a role for the military. But “building democracy,” “showing solidarity,” and all that guff – not suitable.
Anyway, Applebaum believes that we are in danger. Now Kabul has fallen, our enemies will have others in their sights: South Korea, Germany, Poland, Estonia, Japan, Taiwan – they are all in peril. Applebaum tells us:
Afghanistan provides a useful reminder that while we and our European allies might be tired of “forever wars,” the Taliban are not tired of wars at all. The Pakistanis who helped them are not tired of wars, either. Nor are the Russian, Chinese, and Iranian regimes that hope to benefit from the change of power in Afghanistan; nor are al-Qaeda and the other groups who may make Afghanistan their home again in future. More to the point, even if we are not interested in any of these nations and their brutal politics, they are interested in us. They see the wealthy societies of America and Europe as obstacles to be cleared out of their way. To them, liberal democracy is not an abstraction; it is a potent, dangerous ideology that threatens their power and needs to be defeated wherever it exists, and they will deploy corruption, propaganda, and even violence to do so. They will do it in Syria and Ukraine, and they will do it within the borders of the U.S., the U.K., and the EU.
Yikes!
Let’s unravel this a bit, as it’s kind of silly.
First, it makes no sense to lump Russia, China, and Iran together as if they are all one thing, and even less sense to put them all together with non-state actors like al-Qaeda.
Second, it just isn’t true that the Russians, Chinese, and Iranians see liberal democracy as “A potent, dangerous ideology that … needs to be defeated,” if necessary through violence. I’m no expert on China and Iran, so I’ll leave that to others, though I suspect that their attitude is not dissimilar to that of the Russians. But as far as Russia is concerned, there is precisely no evidence to suggest that the country’s leadership gives a damn about what form of government or political/social/economic system other nations have. What it cares about is that those nations are prepared to be friendly. If they are, then Russia is friendly back. Thus, the Russian Federation has very good relations with a number of liberal democracies. Armenia is a notional liberal democracy; its recent enemy, Azerbaijan, is not. But Russia is an ally of Armenia, not of Azerbaijan.
Simply put, Applebaum is talking out of her hat.
But on she goes. For she’s keen to persuade us that liberal interventionists are just not wooly-eyed idealists. They’re hard-headed realists. It’s their opponents who are naïve and don’t understand the harsh truths of the real world. She tells us:
In the real world, the battle to defend liberal democracy is sometimes a real battle, a military battle, not merely an ideological battle. It cannot always be fought with language, arguments, conferences, or diplomacy, or by deploying human-rights organizations, UN declarations, and fierce EU statements of concern. Or rather, you can try to fight it that way, but you will lose.
Well, here’s the thing, Ms Applebaum my friend, for the past 20 years, Western states, led by the USA, have not been fighting just by using language, arguments, conferences, and all the rest of it, but by invading countries and blasting them from the sky with real hard ordnance. And guess what, they’ve lost that way too!
And here is where the Applebaumian thesis falls down even according to its own internal logic. For even if Applebaum is right that liberal democracy is under threat from extremists, hard experience shows that military power is not an effective way of dealing with the problem. Our militaries are built to fight other militaries. We’re really good at destroying tanks and planes and all the rest of it. But fighting “extremism” – that’s ultimately an ideological problem and bullets and bombs don’t help a lot; indeed, they often make things worse. The proposed solution doesn’t actually solve the alleged problem.
In Applebaum’s world, our repeated failures in the past 20 years are just a matter of a lack of will and insufficient firepower. If only it were so easy. Would another 20 years and double the firepower have made Afghanistan more secure? What reason do we have to imagine that it would? None at all. Did an all-out invasion of Iraq – and let’s admit it, you can’t have a more in-your-face use of massive military power – solve the problem of extremism in Iraq? Or did it sow the seeds that made the rise of ISIS possible? (You know the answer).
So it’s not like Applebaum’s methods haven’t been tried. They have been, and found repeatedly wanting. So why does she think that it will work next time around? And why do the likes of The Atlantic keep giving people such as Applebaum space to write this nonsense? Now, there’s an interesting question. If we could solve that one, we’d all be a lot better off.
Rural Afghanistan has been rocked by climate change. The past three decades have brought floods and drought that have destroyed crops and left people hungry. And the Taliban — likely without knowing climate change was the cause — has taken advantage of that pain.
While agriculture is a source of income for more than 60% of Afghans, more than 80% of conflicts in the country are linked to natural resources, according to a joint study by the World Food Programme, the United Nations Environment Program and Afghanistan’s National Environmental Protection Agency. In 2019, Afghanistan ranked sixth in the world for countries most impacted by climate change, according to the Germanwatch Global Climate Risk Index.
Over the last 20 years, agriculture has ranged from 20 to 40% of Afghanistan’s GDP, according to the World Bank. The country is famous for its pomegranates, pine nuts, raisins and more. However, climate change has made farming increasingly difficult.
Whether from drought or flood-ravaged soil, farmers in the region struggle to maintain productive crops and livestock. When they cannot profitably farm, they’re forced to borrow funds to survive. When Afghans can’t pay off lenders, the Taliban often steps in to sow government resentment.
“If you’ve lost your crop and land or the Afghan government hasn’t paid enough attention [to you] then of course, the Taliban can come and exploit it,” said Kamal Alam, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center.
The Taliban has capitalized on the agricultural stress and distrust in government to recruit supporters. Alam said the group has the means to pay fighters more, $5-$10 per day, than what they can make farming.
“[Farmers] fall into choices. That’s when they become prey to people who would tell them, ‘Look, the government is screwing you over and this land should be productive. They’re not helping you. Come and join us; let’s topple this government,’” said Nadim Farajalla, director of the climate change and environment program at the American University of Beirut.
The latest IPCC report on climate change was released last week, and has signalled a sea-change in the ongoing “big issue”. The Pandemic was fun while it lasted, but it’s time it faded back and we got on with the next stage.
That’s not just my interpretation either, they are quite literally saying it themselves.
Usually, when there’s a big narrative shift looming, you can find one key article that tells you everything you need to know about the plan. For the IPCC report, it’s this iNews article by Andrew Marr. Where he literally uses the phrase “hinge to climate from Covid” several times:
“There is a great turn coming, a change in the terms of political debate, a period of hinge. We are swinging from the many months of coronavirus obsession into an autumn which will be dominated, rightly, by the climate emergency. But much of what we have learned from Covid-19 – about the state, authority, journalism and civil society – is directly applicable to what’s coming next.”
The media have, naturally, been full of headlines on the IPCC report, with varying degrees of alarmism and insanity.
But none of them outline just what the next few months have in store for us better than Marr. The goblinoid face of the establishment, who nauseatingly cheered on Blair in Iraq, can always be relied upon to keep on message. He’s always right there saying the right thing at the right time. And this piece is no exception.
He headlines “Treat people like grown-ups and they will fight climate change like Covid-19”, adding [our emphasis]:
“Education works. We are following the science and as we continue to do so, we will successfully tackle climate-change issues in the same way we faced down the coronavirus.”
He never outright states what this “same way” is, exactly, but it’s not really hard to imagine what he means. His article isn’t about the future, anyway, it’s all about the past.
It’s tracking the tools deployed during the “pandemic”, and how effective they were. A performance review for the politicians and “journalists” who have successfully parlayed a “virus” that poses almost zero danger to the general public into a full-fledged remodelling of society.
He points out how politicians under-estimated how willingly people would leverage their freedoms:
“To begin with [Western leaders] worried that voters would not accept restrictions on their liberties for the greater good. By and large, they were wrong. […] This shaped how Germans, Americans, the French and British – and many more – responded, and allowed societies to change direction faster than anyone would have predicted.”
How easily the media were able to spread misinformation that controlled public opinion:
“The media, so often blamed for almost everything, found new ways to explain complex scientific arguments in ways that most people understood.”
And how these lessons can be applied to messaging on climate change going forward:
“This is a core lesson that needs to be learned, as we hinge from Covid to climate. Public understanding of science has become a security issue. Without it, there will be no public support for the hard decisions on transport, heating and land use.”
The whole thing reads that way, like a cross between a press release and a progress report. Appearing a blithe opinion piece to the uninitiated, but having a clear second layer of meaning to those who know how to read it.
There are throwaway lines propping up globalism (“how little nature notices national borders”), and brief praise for China’s authoritarian government vs the West’s “slapdash” approach and “tardy lockdowns”, but those are B plots.
The story here is “hey guys, this all worked much better than we thought it would, we could do the same thing for climate change”.
DOES THIS MEAN THAT THE PANDEMIC IS OVER?
Not “over”, but certainly on the decline. It’s obvious that the press are prepping the groundwork to leave Covid behind, and turn their focus to the next stage of the Great Reset.
But, all that said, it will be a difficult sell. Harder than Covid, in some ways, because people are so much more used to climate alarm calls. For want of a better word, they have become somewhat immune to it.
What’s more, the establishment clearly knows this, because they’re keeping the pandemic warm on the backburner. Ready to bring it back to the boil should the need arise.
The pandemic is becoming a new forever war, akin to the war on terror. We won’t ever win it, but it will disappear from headlines until they need to shock or distract people.
Marr, for example, doesn’t declare the pandemic over, instead he says:
“The pandemic is not, of course, yet over. It will end raggedly and slowly; and politicians who proclaim victory will quickly sound foolish[…]it will probably feel as if we have beaten this thing.”
Before adding the ubiquitous riders that will keep the “threat” of the Covid alive in the public imagination:
“The Delta variant may be the most contagious virus ever [and] can reinfect the double-vaccinated […] Britain is going to face a period of “bumpiness” in transmission rates and uncertainty about the near future […] the winter may be tough […] Booster jabs will become routine.”
There’s clearly a plan in place. He practically spells it out, claiming Covid19 will be pushed off the front pages…
“Though not every day… this will be bumpy. There will be sudden scares about the emergence of a possible new variant somewhere unexpected; and urgent questions about biosecurity at Heathrow. There will be stories about outbreaks in care homes, or a sudden spike in infections in particular age or ethnic groups.”
Do you see what he’s saying yet?
The pandemic isn’t over, it will just “feel” like it is, while they fill the front pages with big red numbers about climate change.
If people don’t respond to those big red numbers the way they should… well, there just might be another variant. Maybe a racist one.
The pandemic has served its purpose, but they won’t end it yet. Not until they’re sure everyone is good and scared of something else.
SO WHAT COMES NEXT?
It’s not hard to see exactly where this all leads. Mostly because they’re telling us.
“nothing short of transforming society will avert catastrophe”
This isn’t new. This has been bubbling along in the background for months (I have already written two articles about it), but the message is being refined into a simple three-step process:
Point out all the ways Covid and climate change are similar.
“The interesting thing is that so much of the world’s experience during the pandemic relates quite closely to the climate crisis – our human interrelatedness, the importance of effective governance, the centrality of science and its communication.”
Followed by the “covid is worse” [my emphasis]:
“Of course, the two challenges are different. So far, a little over 4.3 million people have died from Covid. Australian and Chinese academics estimate that around five million people are dying each year from the effects of climate change […] Suffice it to say that even if the Delta variant is the most infectious disease mankind has so far faced, the climate emergency is at another level – a reshaper of geography, highly unpredictable and, in short, existential for the planet and its inhabitants.”
Patrick Vallance does the same in his article in the Guardian, and then again in The Times. There are several others along the same lines, such as this one from the Hill, or this one from the International Monetary Fund.
So, the way they’re going to talk about (or should we say say “market”?) climate change action is fairly clear. But what are these hypothetical actions going to be?
Are we seeing any hints as to what this “transformation of society” might entail? Or what these “tough decisions” could be?
Well, there were whispers of climate lockdowns, but they have died away since the outraged reaction. There’s always talk of other schemes, like limiting flights, outlawing beef and “personal carbon allowances”, but these are hardly new.
Andrew Marr’s article contains a couple of hints. But the only specific policy he mentions is forcing households to replace their boilers (“at a high cost to millions of families”), and this somewhat creepy allusion to the importance of the Deep State:
“A final lesson is that Westminster and the state are two very different things. The state includes the NHS, national science labs, networks of experts […] I now feel we should spend less time on the distracting national puppet show and more time thinking about what I might delicately call the deeper sources of authority.”
Mostly, though, the mainstream voices are being very quiet on specifics. I suspect partly to stop the spread of what Marr calls “an outbreak of conspiracy theories in new media”, but mostly because they’re not sure exactly what they want to do yet, and they don’t believe the majority mentally prepared enough.
The COP26 Climate Summit in Glasgow, this November, will be something to keep an eye on. Expect a lot of scary stories in the weeks leading up to it, and then a lot of “policy recommendations” in its wake.
We’re pivoting to climate change guys. Great Reset Phase II is upon us.
WHEN the American actress Jennifer Aniston declared that she would ‘unfriend’ anybody who had refused the Covid vaccine or was an anti-vaxxer, she gained thousands, if not millions, of new fans who agreed with her.
Since then, others have stepped in to say that the unvaccinated are no longer their friends.
For me, it is just the opposite. I fear I am fast losing friends among the vaccinated, among those who proudly proclaim that they have not only been double-jabbed, but will be queueing to have the booster, so-called, that will be ‘offered’ in the autumn.
Have these people, I wonder, read anything about the vaccines, studied how they work and what they do inside the body? I doubt it. Even journalists, who are supposed to have inquiring minds, have no hesitation in condemning those who have chosen not to be jabbed even while admitting that they are ignorant about vaccines.
The latest was Hilary Rose, writing in theTimes on Monday. Having stated that she knew nothing about vaccines, she went on to say: ‘If the entire medical establishment says that something is for my own good and – crucially – those around me, then who am I to disagree?’
But Hilary, love, the entire medical establishment is not saying that these vaccines are for your own good. Far from it. All over the world, eminent doctors, scientists and virologists – those who DO know something about vaccines – are asking awkward questions about their efficacy and safety.
Hilary blithely ignores all this and instead denounces the ‘rabid anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorists who foam at the mouth in Trafalgar Square’. Warming to her theme, she adds: ‘They’re beyond help and beyond contempt.’ How can she be so sure they are ‘beyond contempt’ if she herself knows nothing about vaccines? Maybe it would be a good idea to mug up on the subject before castigating those who have the courage to protest against the imposition of an experimental drug on ever-younger members of society.
So the question I am asking is: why are we listening to people such as Jennifer Aniston, Sean Penn, Hilary Rose, Daily Mail columnist Amanda Platell and the ultimate loudmouth, Piers Morgan – none of whom know anything about the science of vaccination – and ignoring the research of informed doctors and scientists who are emphatically not ‘rabid anti-vaxxers’ and nor are they foaming at the mouth?
Instead, these scientists are presenting careful research in a calm and considered manner.
As a journalist myself, I used to be proud of my trade. I was given the opportunity to research and investigate many controversial areas, and report on them after I had amassed enough information to be able to write with some authority. I remember one fine journalist, Peter Martin, telling his employers the Sunday Times that he needed three months to research and write an article on cancer that was commissioned by his editor. As an old-school journalist, he wanted to get to the bottom of the subject before feeling confident enough to write about it.
All that has gone by the board since Covid reared its hydra head.
I have yet to read an informed, properly researched article in the mainstream media about coronaviruses, how they work and how they are best treated. No, that is too much like hard work. Much better to castigate all dissidents as nutjobs and crackpots without for a minute listening to what they have to say.
It seems that the louder you shout, the more you will be believed. The still small voice of truth is being drowned out while these ignoramuses – and I use the word in its literal sense – are allowed massive coverage in all sections of the media.
“Pfizer and BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine is just 39% effective in Israel where the delta variant is the dominant strain according to a new report from the country’s Health Ministry” we read in a CNBC report. Astonishment is one’s first reaction when coming across this piece of information, since it was not so long ago the vaccine manufacturers claimed their products were 92 to 98 percent effective.
The manufacturers’ initial claims, however, have been steadily revised down as real-world data has been coming in. In March of this year news came from South Africa that “AstraZeneca vaccine doesn’t prevent B1351 Covid.” A couple of months later, the Hill ran a piece by a Baylor School of Medicine virologist who observed:
“A new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine provides only 51 percent protection against B.1.351 of South Africa.”
Just a couple of weeks ago, we learned that recipients of the Sinovac Biotech’s vaccine have no antibodies after six months. This effectually means that merely half a year after being injected into people’s bodies the vaccine has zero percent efficacy in protecting against Covid-19.
Even factoring for the variants, the hard data makes it quite clear that the initial claims of vaccine effectiveness were greatly exaggerated. This, of course, comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with the dynamic of the pharma industry. Drug manufacturers tend to wildly overstate the efficacy of their products, while doing their very best to understate their side effects. It is for this purpose they conduct trials that are manipulated to obtain the results they wish for. Sadly, they too often get away with it because of the corruption of the system by what is called regulatory capture. This is why the outcomes of manufacturers’ trials are almost never replicated by independent trials or real-world data.
This is what has apparently happened with the Covid vaccines. The manufacturers used the sense of emergency brought on by the Covid pandemic to conduct rushed and incomplete trials which were designed to yield the results they wanted to see. There is every reason to believe that the effectiveness of their injections was nowhere close to the 92-98% range they initially claimed even for the variants that were in circulation at that time.
Needless to say, one has a strong suspicion that even the meagre 39 percent figure is still overstated. This would only be natural, since everyone involved in the vaccination enterprise – the manufacturers, politicians, regulators, the medical establishment and corporate scientists – is trying their best to save face and reputation in the face of this fiasco. Bad though the data is, we can be quite sure that it has been massaged to soften the blow.
You can clearly observe this tendency at work in the CNBC piece which claims that even though Pfizer is only 39 percent effective, it still protects against serious disease. But this is simply not true, which you can easily see if you take the trouble to look into the data put out by the Israeli government. At roughly the same time that CNBC filed its report, the Israeli Ministry of Health published a bulletin which reported on Covid cases in the country. According to their data, there were 137 serious cases in Israel of which 95 were fully vaccinated and 42 unvaccinated or partially vaccinated (see here and here). In other words, the bulk of the serious cases was comprised of those who had received their shots. If the vaccine was as effective in protecting against heavy illness as the article claims, the numbers would look completely different. The figures published by the Israeli Ministry of Health shows that the claims of Pfizer’s efficacy of protecting against serious Covid are simply untrue.
This has been confirmed by the testimony of Dr Kobi Haviv, Director of Herzog Hospital in Jerusalem. In a recent TV interview, Dr Haviv stated that the fully vaccinated people account for about 90 percent of hospitalizations. Given that less than 90 percent of the Israeli population is fully vaccinated, it would appear that the vaccination not only does not prevent you from contracting the disease, but actually increases one’s chances of becoming a serious Covid case. Observes Dr Haviv: “yes, unfortunately, the vaccine… as they say, its effectiveness is waning.” And so it is, indeed. Dr Haviv’s interview is on YouTube so you can hear the truth straight from his mouth. It will be interesting to see how long it will take for the Establishment Censors to take it down.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that Israel felt threatened by Iran’s growing influence in the Middle East. Netanyahu expressed his Iranophobic view in a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Russia’s Black Sea resort of Sochi on Wednesday. Press TV has asked Scott Rickard, former American intelligence linguist from Tampa, Florida, and Brent Budowsky, a columnist at The Hill from Washington, to give their thoughts on the issue.
Rickard said Tel Aviv is concerned about the fact that the regime could not carry out its old project to spread sectarian divisions and pave the way for dismemberment of the countries in the Middle East region because of the Iranian-led resistance against Israeli policies, not only in the occupied territories of Palestine but also in the whole region.
“Iran is not a threat to Israel whatsoever. The threat that Israel sees is the fact that their Oded Yinon Plan is being put to a hold by Iran,” the intelligence linguist said on Thursday night.
“They (the Israelis) look at Iran as a threat only because they have no influence on their governments and Iran is autonomous and is not under the Zionist influence,” he added.
Since the victory of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, Tehran has been critical of Israel’s policies in the region, whereas “no leaders [of other states] even dared to speak out against Zionism,” Rickard argued. … continue
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