Another Extraordinary Murder in Washington D.C.
Mary Mahoney was allegedly the victim of a botched robbery in the Georgetown Starbucks

Mary Mahoney, murdered on July 7, 1997
By John Leake | Courageous Discourse | November 6, 2022
When Seth Rich was murdered in Washington D.C. on July 10, 2016, the Metropolitan Police Department immediately proposed that it was a “botched robbery.” The case reminded me of the murder of Mary Mahoney in a Georgetown Starbucks on July 7, 1997.
Mary Mahoney was an intern in Bill Clinton’s White House during his first term. She then got a job working as a manager of Starbucks in Georgetown, which was frequented by many notable figures in the Washington political establishment. Her murder (along with her two coworkers) was the first triple murder in the neighborhood’s history. Prior to the crime, not a single homicide had been committed in Georgetown for eighteen months.
Robbery appeared an unlikely motive, as none of the day’s cash proceeds had been taken from the store. Mahoney’s murder occurred during the same period that Newsweek reporter Mike Isikoff was investigating allegations that President Clinton had sexually harassed White House employees—an investigation that would ultimately lead him to Monica Lewinsky. Attorneys for Paula Jones were also seeking corroborating cases of Clinton’s sexual harassment of young women.
A year after the murder occurred, the police received a tip to examine a man named Carl D. Cooper from a woman who had just watched an America’s Most Wanted episode on the triple homicide. For several months, investigators found no evidence linking Cooper to the crime. Then another informant came forth—a former drug addict named Eric Butera, who was himself later murdered in “a robbery gone wrong.”
Based on information gleaned from Butera’s associates, Carl Cooper was arrested. After a grueling four-day interrogation, Cooper confessed, stating that the triple homicide was a “botched robbery” (which just happened to be the official working hypothesis). While held at gunpoint, Mary, refused to give Cooper the keys to the safe—a heroic act to save her 50 billion market cap employer from losing a few thousand dollars. Because Mary refused to give Cooper the keys, he shot her five times, including a shot to the back of the head. He then shot her two coworkers, and then left the store without taking a dime.
Cooper was convicted on the grounds of his confession to the Metropolitan Police. However, in a subsequent interview with an FBI investigator, Cooper recanted his confession. Although the FBI investigator unequivocally stated this in his testimony, the court concluded that Cooper’s initial confession was sufficient for his conviction. Cooper was initially represented by a court-appointed attorney, but after his trial began, his court-appointed attorney was joined by the prominent Washington D.C. defender, Francis D. Carter, who initially represented Monica Lewinsky when Monica stated her willingness to remain silent about her affair with Clinton. Carter drafted an affidavit for Monica in which she stated that she had NOT had an affair with the president. Carter was forced to withdraw this affidavit after Monica made statements to Lynda Tripp (equipped with a secret recording device) confirming her affair with Clinton.
That Carter joined the Carl Cooper defense team strikes me as very peculiar, especially given that Carter did not change the defense strategy. I wonder if Carter’s primarily job was—under cover of client-attorney confidentiality—to deliver a message to Carter pertaining to his sentencing prospects and what he might reasonably expect for his wife (to whom he was apparently very attached) if he stuck with his confession.
Clinton Attorney General Janet Reno initially sought the death penalty for Cooper— the first death-penalty matter brought to trial in the District in nearly 30 years, but federal prosecutors later withdrew this request. To date, no evidence has been found linking Cooper to the triple homicide.
In a related case, the District of Columbia was successfully sued for the wrongful death of Metropolitan Police informant, Eric Butera, as the jury concluded the police had been negligent in protecting him during an undercover operation to obtain more information about the Starbucks triple slaying. The woman who gave the initial tip to America’s Most Wanted later publicly accused the police of refusing to protect her and fell under suspicion for being motivated primarily by the reward money offered by the show.
Since the murders occurred, the crime has been the subject of extensive media coverage, several documentary television features, and hundreds of online commentators. Conventional newspaper coverage of the crimes—primarily conducted by the Washington Post and the Washington Times—consisted entirely of straightforward reporting of information provided by police and judicial officers.
Given the controversial nature of the police investigation and judicial proceedings against the man who was charged for committing the crime, it is surprising how little the mainstream media questioned official accounts. Likewise, the TV documentaries simply presented narratives provided by law officers as though they contained nothing that was questionable. This is particularly notable given that substantial details of the official narrative, provided by the same investigating officers, are represented differently in different documentaries. Moreover, some of officers’ statements in the documentaries pertaining to Starbucks procedures and security protocols are NOT consistent with what a veteran Starbucks manager told me.
I would like to interview Carl D. Cooper in prison, but I cannot find him in the federal prison system. Though I have not had the time and resources to dig deep into this component of the story, my preliminary research suggests that his whereabouts in the federal prison system have been concealed.
In 2016, the lead homicide detective in the Mary Mahoney case — Detective James Trainium — published a book titled How the Police Generate False Confessions. It’s a detailed examination of how the police obtain false confessions, and the author is clearly writing from personal experience.
How the US regime attempts to control public perception of its aid to Ukraine
By Scott Ritter | RT | November 5, 2022
NBC News has reported that, according to four people familiar with the incident, a phone call between US President Joe Biden and his Ukrainian counterpart, Vladimir Zelensky, turned testy after the Ukrainian leader pressed Biden for more assistance.
On June 15, Biden called Zelensky to inform him of the recent release of some $1 billion in assistance (this included the drawdown of arms and equipment from US Department of Defense inventories valued at $350 million, and $650 million in additional assistance under the department’s Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative). This type of person-to-person communication had become commonplace since Russia’s decision to send troops into Ukraine in February 2022, with Biden informing Zelensky of each major assistance allocation in a program that had, as of June 15, seen the dispatch of some $5.6 billion in American military aid.
This time, however, rather than thank the US president, as had been the previous practice, Zelensky proceeded to ask for more assistance, citing specific requests for equipment that had not been included in the June allocation of aid. At this point, NBC’s sources say, Biden lost his temper. “The American people were being quite generous, and his administration and the US military were working hard to help Ukraine, he said, raising his voice, and Zelensky could show a little more gratitude,” the NBC story reports.
According to NBC, the source of Biden’s anger went beyond the lack of gratitude shown by Zelensky (NBC reports that the two leaders have since warmed to one another), but rather the growing realization on the part of the Biden White House that support for the blank check being written for Ukraine’s war effort is waning among members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. With the Republicans expected to retake control of the House of Representatives and positioned to do the same in the Senate in the upcoming mid-term elections, the Biden administration appears poised to try to squeeze out another $40-60 billion in aid during the lame duck session between the election and when the present term of Congress expires next January. It is expected that this new aid package will be challenged by the Republicans, who will seek to have its consideration postponed until the new Republican-controlled Congress is sworn in.
Shortly before NBC News broke the story of the contentious Biden-Zelensky phone call, The New Yorker ran a glowing review of the state of US-Ukrainian military cooperation. Entitled ‘Inside the US Effort to Arm Ukraine, the piece, authored by Joshua Yaffa, a contributing writer for the magazine, provides an expansive and yet intimate look at the complex interaction between the US and Ukraine about not only the provision of military equipment, but also the active cooperation between US and Ukrainian military and intelligence officials concerning the actual conduct of the conflict, including the provision of targeting data in support of US-provided artillery systems such as the M777 howitzer and the HIMARS multiple rocket launch system.
Its two main messages can be summarized as follows: first, American weapons are helping Ukraine stand up to Russia and showing the world Putin can be defeated, and second, the US is taking every care not to cross any lines that would escalate the conflict into a direct confrontation with Moscow.
Yaffa is an accomplished writer on Russian affairs. His most recent book, ‘Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia’, has won several prizes, and he has published numerous articles in The New Yorker about the Russia-Ukraine conflict. But even this extensive journalistic record doesn’t prepare one for the scope and scale of the sources Yaffa was able to draw upon in writing his most recent article. It is a ‘who’s who’ of US and Ukrainian officialdom, both named and unnamed, all of whom are well positioned to provide Yaffa with the kind of inside information that makes his article so attractive, both from an informational aspect, and readability.
On the Ukrainian side, Yaffa interviewed Aleksey Reznikov, Ukraine’s defense minister; Mikhail Podoliak, a top adviser to Zelensky; Aleksey Danilov, Secretary of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council; and “a senior Ukrainian military official” close to the commander in chief of the military, Valery Zaluzhny. Ukrainian officials habitually interact with Western journalists as part of their effort to shape the narrative about the ongoing conflict with Russia. The surprise isn’t that Yaffa was able to interview these individuals, but rather what they were willing to open up about – the hitherto obscure details of the sensitive cooperation between the US and Ukraine in the actual conduct of the conflict.
The US is very controlling about the release of information about classified cooperation with other nations. This reticence to be transparent extends not only to the US officials involved, but also to the foreign nationals participating in the secret work. In short, there is no way the three Ukrainians would have agreed to sit down and talk to Yaffa about these issues unless their participation had been green-lighted by the Biden administration beforehand.
The extent to which the Biden administration was behind the decision to cooperate with Yaffa on this story becomes clear upon closer examination of the anonymous sources drawn upon for the article. “A Biden administration official involved in Ukraine policy”; “a senior official at the Defense Department”; “a person familiar with Biden White House discussions of Ukraine”; “an administration official”; “a senior US official”; “a US military official” close to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Milley; “a senior Biden administration official”; and “a senior US intelligence official.”
Numerous other sources, both named and unnamed, were also interviewed by Yaffa.
Anyone with any experience with sensitive national security activities knows that there are two hard-fast truths when it comes to such activities – they are highly classified and compartmentalized, and any unauthorized release of information pertaining to such activities is a serious violation of the law, subject to prosecution and imprisonment for anyone caught leaking such information to the press.
Accordingly, either every source cited by Yaffa had been simultaneously overcome with a Lemming-like desire to jump off a figurative cliff, risking losing their careers and going to prison in order to help the young New Yorker contributing writer pull off the scoop of a lifetime, or the Yaffa article was part and parcel of a Biden administration information operation designed to inject a positive narrative about US-Ukrainian military relations into the mainstream discussion on Ukraine in a concerted effort to shape public perception in the lead-up to the mid-term elections.
My money is on the latter.
Good journalism is all about ‘bottom-up’ reporting, where a reporter conceives a story and then runs it to the ground by seeking out interviews with relevant sources. Stenography is about having a story spoon fed to you by sources for the purpose of serving an agenda that has nothing to do with the pursuit of fact-based truth, but rather shaping public opinion about a matter of importance.
Yaffa’s ‘Inside the US Effort to Arm Ukraine’ is a clever piece of government-dictated stenography disguised as journalism and should be treated as such by all who read it.
Russia Says “Top Priority” Is To Avoid Nuclear Clash, Reiterates Purely Defensive Use
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | November 2, 2022
Russia on Wednesday warned that the world’s “top priority” should be the nuclear-armed super powers avoiding confrontation at all costs or else this would lead to “catastrophic consequences.”
“We are firmly convinced that in the current difficult and turbulent situation — a consequence of irresponsible and shameless actions aimed at undermining our national security — the top priority is to prevent any military clash of nuclear powers,” a Foreign Ministry statement said.
While not naming its chief nuclear-armed rivals the United States or the United Kingdom specifically, the Kremlin called on all other nuclear states to “abandon dangerous attempts to infringe on each other’s vital interests.”
The statement reiterated a key tenet of Russia’s official nuclear doctrine, saying, “Russia is strictly and consistently guided by the tenet that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” It reemphasized a nuclear doctrine that is “purely defensive in nature” – which only allows deployment of nuclear arms “when the very existence of our state is threatened.”
In a statement early last month, President Joe Biden expressed that he doesn’t think Russia’s Vladimir Putin will use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. “Well, I don’t think he will,” Biden previously said in a CNN interview. “But I think that it’s irresponsible for him to talk about it.”
Also on Wednesday The New York Times has published some hugely significant claims…
Senior Russian military leaders recently had conversations to discuss when and how Moscow might use a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine, contributing to heightened concern in Washington and allied capitals, according to multiple senior American officials.
President Vladimir V. Putin was not a part of the conversations, which were held against the backdrop of Russia’s intensifying nuclear rhetoric and battlefield setbacks.
But the fact that senior Russian military leaders were even having the discussions alarmed the Biden administration because it showed how frustrated Russian generals were about their failures on the ground, and suggests that Mr. Putin’s veiled threats to use nuclear weapons might not just be words.
According to follow-up reporting in CNN, the alleged Kremlin discussion among top officials of using tactical nukes against Ukraine is based on a US intelligence assessment.
But importantly, CNN cites that there remain dissenting opinions within the US intelligence community. CNN’s reporting begins, “Russian military officials have discussed how and under what conditions Russia would use a tactical nuclear weapon on the battlefield in Ukraine, according to a US intelligence assessment described to CNN by multiple sources who have read it.”
“The assessment, drafted by the National Intelligence Council, is not a high confidence product and is not raw intelligence but rather analysis, multiple people who have read it told CNN,” the report continues, before emphasizing: “For that reason, some officials believe the conversations reflected in the document may have been taken out of context, and do not necessarily indicate that Russia is preparing to use a nuclear weapon.”
It is a significant and eye-brow raising moment when CNN spotlights the likelihood of intelligence ‘cherry picking’ in a story which relates to Russia, which indeed casts serious doubt on the original NYT Times reporting and claims by unnamed US intelligence officials.
Alberta’s New Premier Under Attack For Refusing To Associate With WEF
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | October 31, 2022
Recently noted as an opponent of vaccine and mask mandates, new Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is breaking previously established ties with the World Economic Forum, which has been deeply involved in a “health consulting agreement” revolving around the province’s covid response.
“I find it distasteful when billionaires brag about how much control they have over political leaders,” Smith said at a news conference Monday after her new cabinet was sworn in. “That is offensive … the people who should be directing government are the people who vote for them.”
The United Conservative Party premier said she is in lockstep with federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who has stated he and his caucus will be having nothing to do with the World Economic Forum. Earlier this month, on her first day as premier, Smith stated that people not vaccinated against covid are the most discriminated group she has seen in her lifetime.
In response, the Canadian mainstream media is pursuing a thorough hatchet campaign against Smith, consistently referring to all opposition to the WEF as being based in “conspiracy theory.” As they say, if you want to know who is really in power, all you have to do is find out who you are not allowed to criticize.
After two years of authoritarian lockdowns and attempts to enforce vaccine passports in Canada, Alberta was one of the only regions in the country that asserted political opposition to executive dictates. This helped to support the anti-passport protests by truckers and other Canadians, and led to Justin Trudeau using provisions for terrorism to confiscate donations to the movement. Alberta’s covid averages in terms of infections and deaths are no worse than provinces with strict mandates, proving once again that the mandates achieved nothing in terms of safety, but everything in terms of control.
The Canadian Press and other media outlets claim that criticism of the WEF is built on “online conspiracy accusations, unproven and debunked, that the forum is fronting a global cabal of string-pullers exploiting the pandemic to dismantle capitalism and introduce damaging socialist systems and social control measures, such as forcing people to take vaccines with tracking chips.”
Every “conspiracy” noted in that statement is true – none of them have been “debunked” except perhaps the “tracking chip” claim, which is unnecessary because the WEF was already encouraging governments to use cell phone tracking apps to monitor the vaccine status and movements of their respective populations. Many of these apps were approved by the CDC in the US, and in countries like China they are mandatory.
The World Economic Forum, acting as a kind of globalist think-tank for future policy initiatives, was instrumental in promoting many of the failed restrictions used by various national governments during the pandemic.
WEF head Klaus Schwab specifically mentions in his writings that the institution saw covid as a perfect “opportunity” to implement what he calls the “Great Reset” which includes the concept of the “Shared Economy,” a global socialist technocracy meant to replace free markets and end capitalism as we know it. As the WEF states, you will “own nothing, have no privacy” and you will like it.
This is not conspiracy theory. This is openly admitted conspiracy fact. It is undeniable.
The use of the “conspiracy theory” label is generally a tactic designed to circumvent fair debate based on facts and evidence. If the Canadian Press was forced to defend their position based on the information at hand, they would lose. So, they instead try to inoculate their readers to opposing arguments by calling them “conspiracy theory” in the hope that those readers will never research the information further.
The Canadian media then cites quotations that specifically argue that not working with the WEF would put the Alberta public at a disadvantage because it would cut them off from information that the WEF provides.
It’s important to mention that there is no evidence that the WEF has provided any life saving health information to date concerning the covid pandemic. In fact, there is no evidence that the WEF is useful to the Canadian public in any way. The mainstream media’s bizarre and antagonistic reaction to Smith’s shunning of a foreign organization of elitists that has no loyalty to the Canadian citizenry suggests that they may be operating from a foundation of bias.
Danielle Smith’s bravery in cutting off WEF influence from Alberta is being met with a dishonest media response, but in the long run, she is making the best decision possible. Taking advice from a potential parasite is not good leadership.
Journalists Continue Their Valiant Struggle to Make Monkeypox a Thing
eugyppius | a plague chronicle | october 28, 2022
Remember that scary rash-cum-fever from Africa that was going to be The Next Pandemic before it turned out to infect almost exclusively gay men having unprotected sex with other gay men? Well, you’ll be happy to know that there are still a few media outlets out there trying to make somebody care about it:
Monkeypox is causing devastating outcomes for people with severely weakened immune systems, even as new cases continue to decline in the United States, according to a federal report released Wednesday. At least 10 people hospitalized with monkeypox have died.
More than 28,000 cases of monkeypox have been reported since the U.S. outbreak began in May. While the vast majority recover within weeks, some patients with untreated HIV experienced especially dire consequences, such as losing function of their brain or spinal cord, eyes and lungs despite being given antiviral medication.
The report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is based on the agency’s consultations with clinicians treating 57 U.S. patients hospitalized with monkeypox complications from the outbreak’s peak in mid-August through Oct. 10. It presents the most comprehensive picture of the severe consequences of infection and who is most at risk for serious complications.
You know what other viruses cause “devastating outcomes for people with severely weakened immune systems”? Basically all of them. If you’re sick and dying even the common cold can be dangerous, and here monkeypox is the least of anyone’s worries. Ten deaths (of which seven are still “under investigation” with no officially determined cause) from 28,000 cases works out to a case fatality rate of .036%.
But wait! Monkeypox might still turn out to be bad, somehow, maybe! The outbreak might “accelerate and affect increasingly wider communities,” if it could only be persuaded to circulate among heterosexuals! Or maybe “the virus could get established in an animal host”! Just don’t ask how that could happen! (And who knew the Post would stoop to such unsavoury homophobia?)
It’s funny to laugh at these guys, but sobering to consider how ramped up the pandemic panic machine must be, that even this obvious non-starter got the mileage that it did. This bodes poorly for the future.
The BBC’s Hurricane Unreality Checked
By Paul Homewood |October 26, 2022
I have collaborated with Net Zero Watch to produce this video on hurricanes.
The MSM’s cancer ‘cure’ stories are bio-firm hype, not hope
By Guy Hatchard | TCW Defending Freedom | October 26, 2022
GLOBALISED mainstream media equates not just with a uniform, poorly-informed world, but a manipulated world.
In Britain, the Times runs a story entitled: After centuries of cut, burn and poison, could a jab cure cancer? by Tom Whipple. Eleven thousand miles away in New Zealand, the same story appears in Stuff newspaper.
This is one of those ‘isn’t it wonderful?’ reassuring stories that unfortunately don’t look quite so rosy after close scrutiny, but like bad pennies are turning up everywhere. On the surface informative and exciting, underneath sadly lacking in that investigative depth we were expecting – and certainly over-hyped.
This particular story would not be out of place in a glossy brochure seeking investment funds for BioNTech. According to the Times article, RNA vaccine technology is rather like buying a piece of furniture from Ikea. Each person could very soon have their own personalised cancer vaccine off the shelf. What could possibly go wrong?
The tremendously hopeful note that the story strikes is based on a lot of over-simplified theory and the success (???) of the Pfizer Covid vaccine co-developed with BioNTech. It sounds reassuringly easy to design mRNA vaccines that rush to your aid and eliminate those nasty cancer cells.
Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci, founders of BioNTech, are pictured in white coats, and are quoted promising: ‘We stimulate the immune system, do something magic, and the tumour disappears.’
Heady stuff, but the cited evidence is less than thin. A decorated cancer researcher who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2007, then tried all his innovative ideas out on himself, and died in 2011. In 2020, 16 patients with pancreatic cancer were treated by BioNTech. Eighteen months later, eight have died and eight are cancer-free after 18 months. The details are sadly lacking.
What stage were they at and how does that compare with their expected prognosis? The missing piece of the jigsaw is the article’s lack of scrutiny of the safety of BioNTech’s only commercialised mRNA vaccine product – the Pfizer Covid vaccine.
If you want to ask questions and also seek answers, you will need to turn to a completely different kind of journalism. Igor Chudov is a mathematician – like the Times author – but he writes on Substack and is therefore not constrained by any editorial policy or any no-go areas dictated by the newspaper owners, their advertisers, or subtly imposed government guidelines.
Chudov has published a very different cancer story, headlined: Cancer rates are Increasing and may get much worse. Wiped out immune systems take time to manifest.
According to the article, we are seeing the first ripple of a coming storm of cancer deaths. Chudov reports the work of the Ethical Skeptic (another Substack researcher) whose analysis of figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – the public health agency of the US – has shown that the rate of US cancer deaths accelerated in 2021 and 2022, coinciding with the rollout of the Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA Covid vaccine and other biotech vaccines.
It is the effect size that is surprising – 9 sigma. What does this mean? Well perhaps you can remember from your school maths lessons that for a Bell curve, two-thirds of data points lie within one standard deviation of the mean, that is known as 1 sigma. Ninety-five per cent lie within two standard deviations (2 sigma) and 99.7 per cent lie within 3 sigma.
I’m going to translate for you what the observed 9 sigma deviation from the prior pattern of cancer deaths probably implies in very simple layman terms:
1. A hugely statistically surprising number of people already infected with cancer have suffered a rapid progression of their condition to death. Covid vaccination reduced their likely longevity.
2. Some people who previously had no evidence of cancer, and possibly no lifetime expectation of cancer, are becoming ill and dying in the weeks and months following Covid vaccination. And it is not due to Covid infection – it didn’t happen in 2020.
Read Chudov’s article. It is a long read, but well worth the effort. In addition to the US data, he looks at the official UK cancer mortality data, which shows a similar increase. He also quotes another Substack author, A Midwestern Doctor, who analyses and references in detail what it is about mRNA vaccines that causes cancer. The approach is investigative, as we should expect it.
There are concerning issues that Whipple, author of the fawning Times article, chooses not to address. He failed to discuss questions that constitute the normal substance of scientific debate, but his piece was beamed around the world.
We expect the Times to ask questions, but it is not doing so. It has quietly rolled over and followed the biotech PR line. It is not alone – the mainstream media are collectively failing the sniff test.
We are being manipulated. If you want real journalism, it is flourishing elsewhere. GLOBE (the Campaign for Global Legislation Outlawing Biotechnology Experimentation) and other independents are asking vital questions that few are prepared to countenance.
A Tale of Two Pills: Media bias in reporting Ivermectin and ensitrelvir
By Guy Gin | Making (Covid) Waves in Japan | October 21, 2022
Last month, Japanese pharma company Kowa put out a press release of the results of its 1030-person double-blind randomised control trial (RCT) of Ivermectin conducted at 54 institutions in Japan and 2 in Thailand.
Here’s how the results were reported in The Japan Times.

Not effective, you hear! I mean, look at the photo. You don’t get Ivermectin from a pharmacy; you get it from a farmer. Anyway, on to the trial.
A clinical trial was unable to prove the efficacy of the antiparasitic medicine ivermectin against coronavirus variants, according to Japanese drugmaker Kowa Co., which has indicated that it will no longer seek approval for the drug as a COVID-19 treatment.
So this means that not only has IVM not been widely used in Japan (despite what many people outside Japan think) but probably never will be. So what happened? Did the people who took the anti-vaxers’ favourite veterinary medicine all get sick?
In the trial, 1,030 patients with mild COVID-19 were orally administered the drug daily for three days and then compared to others given a placebo.
Ivermectin was found to be safe and few people given the drug developed severe symptoms, Kowa said. But both the group given the drug and the one administered a placebo saw improvements in symptoms, meaning the trial did not show the drug’s efficacy over the placebo as a COVID-19 treatment.
So the reason Kowa was “unable to prove the efficacy” wasn’t because IVM is “not effective”; it was because almost everyone in the placebo group got better quickly too. According to Kowa’s press release, “Both intervention and placebo arms showed milder symptoms around 4 days after the start of administration” and “There were no deaths and hardly any severe cases.”
Although Kowa hasn’t released the full trial details or results, the 0% mortality rate among the 500+ participants in the placebo arm suggests they were mostly at very low risk of severe disease. So the results don’t show IVM was ineffective; they show no medication was necessary for these participants to prevent symptoms worsening or for them to recover quickly.
This a not a new issue in studies on early treatments. Yale epidemiologist Harvey Risch noted the same thing in RCTs showing non-significant effects for another “controversial” drug, hydroxychloroquine.
The RCT studies proclaimed supposedly as definitively showing no benefit of HCQ use in outpatients have all involved almost entirely low-risk subjects with virtually no hospitalization or mortality events and are uninformative and irrelevant for bearing upon these risks according to HCQ use in high-risk outpatients.
When tested on larger numbers of people for mortality benefit, IVM often performs a bit better.

Next, let’s compare how the JT reported Kowa’s IVM trial press release with how Reuters reported Shionogi’s press release for its 1821-person RCT of its anti-Covid drug ensitrelvir.

Japan’s Shionogi & Co Ltd said on Wednesday its oral treatment for COVID-19 demonstrated a significant reduction in symptoms compared with a placebo in a Phase III trial in Asia.
The drug, a protease inhibitor known as ensitrelvir, met its primary endpoint in a trial conducted among predominantly vaccinated patients with mild to moderate cases of COVID-19, the company said in a statement.
A significant reduction in symptoms! So how many people were kept out of the ICU? Well, the Reuters article didn’t clarify what the main result was, so here it is from Shionogi’s press release.
the median time to resolution of the five COVID-19 symptoms [stuffy or runny nose, sore throat, cough, feeling hot or feverish, and low energy or tiredness] was significantly reduced in those treated with the low dose of ensitrelvir (the dose level submitted for approval in Japan) compared to placebo: 167.9 hours versus 192.2 hours, a statistically significant difference of 24 hours (p=0.04).
Yep, ensitrelvir cleared runny noses 1 day quicker than a placebo. So the media reporting of Shionogi’s results wasn’t dishonest, but it wasn’t exactly candid.
Similar to in Kowa’s IVM trial, no deaths were reported among the 900+ placebo recipients in Shionogi’s trial, which again suggests they were very low risk. So these results give us no idea about whether ensitrelvir will prevent the progression to severe disease in high-risk immunocompromised people, which is what actually matters.
Shionogi also reported that no serious adverse events occurred in the intervention arm. But one problem with not trialing a medication on the type of high-risk people who will actually need it is that the trial probably won’t pick up major safety signals that become clear later.

But as El Gato Malo has said, pharma doesn’t make mistakes in trial design; it makes choices.

“Experts” now admit you will NEVER be “fully vaccinated”
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | October 22, 2022
We at OffG – and many of our fellow alt media sites – have been reporting for over a year now that the Covid “vaccination” campaign will never end.
In short, you will NEVER be “fully vaccinated”.
That much was obvious once health institutions around the world started “updating” their definition of the term.
Israel. America. Britain. New Zealand. Australia… they all did it, and it came as no surprise.
From the beginning, the “pandemic” has been created, policed, enforced and perpetuated through nothing but rhetorical tricks and manipulative language. New names for old things. New definitions for old words.
“Covid” has always been nothing but a pandemic of terminology. The fluid nature of “fully vaccinated” is just another example.
It has already ballooned from “double-jabbed” to “boosted” and “double-boosted”, and with new “vaccines” expected for all the variants, it doesn’t look like any end is on the horizon.
As I said, you’ll never really be “fully vaccinated”… and now they’re admitting it.
In yet another attempt at control through language manipulation, there’s a push on to completely scrub the term “fully vaccinated” from the Covid discourse.
Yesterday NBC News ran this piece, which headlines:
It’s time to stop saying ‘fully vaccinated’ for Covid, experts say—here’s why
Before going on to claim:
If you still say “fully vaccinated” for Covid, it’s time to stop. With new boosters on the market and an ever-evolving virus, experts say the term no longer means being the most protected you can be. They point to two, far more appropriate alternatives to use in this current phase of the pandemic
They also recommend “adjusting your vocabulary” with their suggested new alternative: “up to date”, a frank admission that the Covid boosters will keep on coming, potentially forever.
Essentially, having spent 18 months convincing millions of people to get “fully vaccinated”, they’re now messing with language again to reverse course and strip that designation away.
Meaning all those people who dutifully took their clot shots are not only no longer considered “fully vaccinated”, but never will be, and are now not even allowed to use that phrase because it creates a false impression.
The good news is that vaccine uptake is slowing – it has been for months – and this transparent effort to lay the ground for future booster campaigns will likely fall flat on its face.
And finally, to all the (formerly) “fully vaccinated” out there, we are sorry… but we did try to tell you this would happen.




