BBC Brags About Hornsea Wind Farm–But Forgets To Mention The Cost
Hornsea Wind Farm
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | June 9, 2020
In his puff piece for renewable energy today, the BBC’s Justin Rowlatt noted that:
Now the UK has the biggest offshore wind industry in the world, as well as the largest single wind farm, completed off the coast of Yorkshire last year.
Nothing could sum up the moronic obsession with renewable energy better than this statement. There is in fact a good reason why we have the biggest offshore wind industry – we are the only country daft enough to pay the exorbitant bill for it.
The largest wind farm, of course, is Hornsea, a 1200MW project. It may be the biggest, but it also happens to be one of the most expensive sources of electricity in the world.
The contract price for Hornsea is £162.47/MWh, which under CfD is a guaranteed price, which will be index linked for 15 years. In short, a licence to print money.
https://www.lowcarboncontracts.uk/cfds/hornsea-phase-2
The current market price for electricity is below £20/MWh, so Hornsea is getting eight times what it would get if it had to trade in the market.
https://www.energybrokers.co.uk/electricity/historic-price-data-graph
At current prices, Hornsea will receive an annual subsidy of about £600 million. OK, if prices recover to more normal levels of around £40/MWh, once economic activity recovers, the subsidy will be slightly less.
But here’s the rub. Whether prices are high or low, Hornsea’s owners will receive their guaranteed price anyway. The system even allows them to sell every single unit of electricity they generate, and if there is a surplus of power in the market, they will get paid NOT to produce.
In other words, there is no commercial risk for Hornsea at all. A licence to print money, all at the expense of bill payers.
Hornsea, by the way, is joint owned by Oersted (formerly DONG) and Global Infrastructure Partners LLP, a global wealth fund. I find it hard to understand how sending hundreds of millions of pounds every year to either of those companies can possibly benefit the UK economy.
Maybe Justin Rowlatt might be able to explain?
Now Comes the Davos ‘Great Reset’
By F. William Engdahl – New Eastern Outlook – 09.06.2020
For those wondering what will come after the Covid-19 pandemic has successfully all but shut down the entire world economy, spreading the worst depression since the 1930s, the leaders of the premier globalization NGO, Davos World Economic Forum, have just unveiled the outlines of what we can expect next. These people have decided to use this crisis as an opportunity.
On June 3 via their website, the Davos World Economic Forum (WEF) unveiled the outlines of their upcoming January 2021 forum. They call it “The Great Reset.” It entails taking advantage of the staggering impact of the coronavirus to advance a very specific agenda. Notably enough, that agenda dovetails perfectly with another specific agenda, namely the 2015 UN Agenda 2030. The irony of the world’s leading big business forum, the one that has advanced the corporate globalization agenda since the 1990s, now embracing what they call sustainable development, is huge. That gives us a hint that this agenda is not quite about what WEF and partners claim.
The Great Reset
On June 3 WEF chairman Klaus Schwab released a video announcing the annual theme for 2021, The Great Reset. It seems to be nothing less than promoting a global agenda of restructuring the world economy along very specific lines, not surprisingly much like that advocated by the IPCC, by Greta from Sweden and her corporate friends such as Al Gore or Blackwater’s Larry Fink.
Interesting is that WEF spokespeople frame the “reset” of the world economy in the context of the coronavirus and the ensuing collapse of the world industrial economy. The WEF website states, “There are many reasons to pursue a Great Reset, but the most urgent is COVID-19.” So the Great Reset of the global economy flows from covid19 and the “opportunity” it presents.
In announcing the 2021 theme, WEF founder Schwab then said, cleverly shifting the agenda: “We only have one planet and we know that climate change could be the next global disaster with even more dramatic consequences for humankind.” The implication is that climate change is the underlying reason for the coronavirus pandemic catastrophe.
To underscore their green “sustainable” agenda, WEF then has an appearance by the would-be King of England, Prince Charles. Referring to the global covid19 catastrophe, the Prince of Wales says, “If there is one critical lesson to learn from this crisis, it is that we need to put nature at the heart of how we operate. We simply can’t waste more time.” On board with Schwab and the Prince is the Secretary-General of the UN, Antonio Guterres. He states, “We must build more equal, inclusive and sustainable economies and societies that are more resilient in the face of pandemics, climate change and the many other global changes we face.” Note his talk of “sustainable economies and societies”—more on that later. The new head of the IMF, Kristalina Georgieva, also endorsed The Great Reset. Other WEF resetters included Ma Jun, the chairman of the Green Finance Committee at the China Society for Finance and Banking and a member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the People’s Bank of China; Bernard Looney, CEO of BP; Ajay Banga, CEO of Mastercard; Bradford Smith, president of Microsoft.
Make no mistake, the Great Reset is no spur-of-the moment idea of Schwab and friends. The WEF website states, “COVID-19 lockdowns may be gradually easing, but anxiety about the world’s social and economic prospects is only intensifying. There is good reason to worry: a sharp economic downturn has already begun, and we could be facing the worst depression since the 1930s. But, while this outcome is likely, it is not unavoidable.” The WEF sponsors have big plans: ”… the world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a “Great Reset” of capitalism.” This is big stuff.
Radical changes
Schwab reveals more of the coming agenda: “… one silver lining of the pandemic is that it has shown how quickly we can make radical changes to our lifestyles. Almost instantly, the crisis forced businesses and individuals to abandon practices long claimed to be essential, from frequent air travel to working in an office.” These are supposed to be silver linings?
He suggests that those radical changes be extended: “The Great Reset agenda would have three main components. The first would steer the market toward fairer outcomes. To this end, governments should improve coordination… and create the conditions for a “stakeholder economy…” It would include “changes to wealth taxes, the withdrawal of fossil-fuel subsidies, and new rules governing intellectual property, trade, and competition.”
The second component of the Great Reset agenda would ensure that, “investments advance shared goals, such as equality and sustainability.” Here the WEF head states that the recent huge economic stimulus budgets from the EU, USA, China and elsewhere be used to create a new economy, “more resilient, equitable, and sustainable in the long run. This means, for example, building ‘green’ urban infrastructure and creating incentives for industries to improve their track record on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics.”
Finally the third leg of this Great Reset will be implementing one of Schwab’s pet projects, the Fourth Industrial Revolution: “The third and final priority of a Great Reset agenda is to harness the innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution to support the public good, especially by addressing health and social challenges. During the COVID-19 crisis, companies, universities, and others have joined forces to develop diagnostics, therapeutics, and possible vaccines; establish testing centers; create mechanisms for tracing infections; and deliver telemedicine. Imagine what could be possible if similar concerted efforts were made in every sector.” The Fourth Industrial Revolution includes gene-editing biotech, 5G telecommunications, Artificial Intelligence and the like.
UN Agenda 2030 and the Great Reset
If we compare the details of the 2015 UN Agenda 2030 with the WEF Great Reset we find both dovetail very neatly. The theme of Agenda 2030 is a “sustainable world” which is defined as one with income equality, gender equality, vaccines for all under the WHO and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) which was launched in 2017 by the WEF along with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
In 2015 the UN issued a document, “Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” The Obama Administration never submitted it to the Senate for ratification knowing it would fail. Yet it is being advanced globally. It includes 17 Sustainable Development Goals, extending an earlier Agenda 21. The 17 include “to end poverty and hunger, in all their forms and dimensions… to protect the planet from degradation, including through sustainable consumption and production, sustainably managing its natural resources and taking urgent action on climate change…“ It calls for sustainable economic growth, sustainable agriculture (GMO), sustainable and modern energy (wind, solar), sustainable cities, sustainable industrialization… The word sustainable is the key word. If we dig deeper it is clear it is code-word for a reorganization of world wealth via means such as punitive carbon taxes that will dramatically reduce air and vehicle travel. The less-developed world will not rise to the developed, rather the other way, the advanced civilizations must go down in their living standards to become “sustainable.”
Maurice Strong
To understand the double-speak use of sustainable, we need to go back to Maurice Strong, a billionaire Canadian oilman and close friend of David Rockefeller, the man who played a central role back in the 1970s for the idea that man-made CO2 emissions were making the world unsustainable. Strong created the UN Environment Program, and in 1988, the UN Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) to exclusively study manmade CO2.
In 1992 Strong stated, “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” At the Rio Earth Summit Strong that same year he added, “Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class – involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, air-conditioning, and suburban housing – are not sustainable.”
The decision to demonize CO2, one of the most essential compounds to sustain all life, human and plant, is not random. As Prof. Richard Lindzen an MIT atmospheric physicist puts it, “CO2 for different people has different attractions. After all, what is it? – it’s not a pollutant, it’s a product of every living creature’s breathing, it’s the product of all plant respiration, it is essential for plant life and photosynthesis, it’s a product of all industrial burning, it’s a product of driving – I mean, if you ever wanted a leverage point to control everything from exhalation to driving, this would be a dream. So it has a kind of fundamental attractiveness to bureaucratic mentality.”
Lest we forget, the curiously well-timed New York pandemic exercise, Event 201 on October 18, 2019 was co-sponsored by the World Economic Forum and the Gates Foundation. It was based on the idea that, ”it is only a matter of time before one of these epidemics becomes global—a pandemic with potentially catastrophic consequences. A severe pandemic, which becomes “Event 201,” would require reliable cooperation among several industries, national governments, and key international institutions.” The Event 201 Scenario posited, “outbreak of a novel zoonotic coronavirus transmitted from bats to pigs to people that eventually becomes efficiently transmissible from person to person, leading to a severe pandemic. The pathogen and the disease it causes are modeled largely on SARS, but it is more transmissible in the community setting by people with mild symptoms.”
The declaration by the World Economic Forum to make a Great Reset is to all indications a thinly-veiled attempt to advance the Agenda 2030 “sustainable” dystopian model, a global “Green New Deal” in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic measures. Their close ties with Gates Foundation projects, with the WHO, and with the UN suggest we may soon face a far more sinister world after the Covid19 pandemic fades.
F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University.
UK battery electric car strategy is ‘doomed to failure’
By Andrew Forster | Transport Xtra | June 1, 2020
The Government’s push to electrify road transport is based on naivety, the undue influence of the Committee on Climate Change, and a lack of engineering expertise within Government, an academic has said.
Professor Michael Kelly, the former chief scientific adviser to the Department for Communities and Local Government, issues the warning in a paper published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
He warns the Government’s ambitions for EVs and electric heating in buildings will end in damaging failure.
“When the penny drops and the progress towards all-electric UK is halted, we will be reminded of Ozymandias [two poems that describe how even the greatest men and the empires they forge are impermanent, their legacies fated to decay into oblivion – Ed].
“The rest of the world can look at Britain and choose whether to laugh or weep.”
On battery electric vehicles, he says: “Consider Dinorwig power station, the biggest hydropower energy storage plant in the UK. If all UK cars were battery powered, the nine gigawatts of energy stored behind the dam would be capable of recharging about 60,000 of them, or about 0.25 per cent of the UK fleet.”
If all vehicles have to be electric, “something of the order of 70 per cent of Britain’s entire existing electricity supply capacity will be needed”.
“When we get coded messages from the Climate Change Committee, implying that we will have to rethink the extent to which we are going to be able to travel in future, it is the implausibility of meeting that vast gulf in energy sources that is motivating them to question our lifestyles.”
Kelly points out that the Government’s net zero greenhouse gas target will also require the heating of buildings to be electrified using heat pumps. This will place huge additional demands on electricity supply, particularly in the winter.
Charging battery cars at night, when electricity demand from other sources is low, is only a “partial solution” to the problems, he says. “The current day-night variation in electricity demand is of itself too small to handle the extra load.
“Another suggestion is that we can charge cars during the day, when solar power is high. But in the absence of storage, this would mean charging them from mid-morning to mid-afternoon on sunny days. This is implausible too, and would be unreliable [even] if we could make it happen.”
Turning to local electricity supply issues, he says “we will be adding electric vehicle chargers and heat pumps to almost every home”.
“A fast EV charger for a car draws 7kW, perhaps for six hours, and a heat pump needs 3kW, potentially for much of the day. But the cabling and substations in most suburbs were sized and installed before these technologies were even thought of. So while there is sufficient headroom for electrification of a few households, the whole distribution system will need to be up- graded if demand grows.
“This work will be extraordinarily expensive, but without it there will either be regular ‘brownouts’, or drivers will have to be told where and when they can charge their batteries.”
Kelly dismisses battery storage as a major part of the solution. “The £45m battery installed by Elon Musk outside Adelaide, South Australia, can power that city for 30 minutes. If you wanted to be able to cover a week’s power outage after a major storm, it would cost around 1,300 times as much using batteries as it would with diesel generators. The idea is ludicrous.”
Turning to the raw materials needed to produce batteries, Kelly claims: “If we replace all of the UK vehicle fleet with EVs, and assuming they use the most resource-frugal next-generation batteries, we would need the following materials:
- 207,900 tonnes of cobalt – just under twice the annual global production;
- 264,600 tonnes of lithium carbonate – three-quarters of the world’s production;
- at least 7,200 tonnes of neodymium and dysprosium – nearly the entire world production of neodymium; and
- 2,362,500 tonnes of copper – more than half the world’s production in 2018.
“Put simply, we lack the ability to provide the infrastructure required to deliver electric cars and electric heating on the scale required by 2050.”
Kelly asks why we are trying to do so anyway and pins the blame on the Committee on Climate Change.
“An unelected body, the Committee displays many of the worst features of the administrative state. It has been grossly negligent in turning a blind eye to the complexity of electric vehicles and the related issue of the enforced switch to electricity for domestic heating.
“Committee members don’t have to face the consequences of their policies from voters; politicians, who do have to face the voters, hide behind the Committee in order to duck accountability.
“It is this failure of the UK’s political machinery that I believe is to blame for the situation in which we find ourselves.
“We have set out to decarbonise the economy without anyone having thought through all the engineering issues, let alone put a cost on the exercise.”
Kelly says that, with Covid-19, “it is clear that we will not be able to afford the costs of the net zero transition for decades, if ever”.
“To attempt to plough on would be madness; indeed, it would directly sabotage the UK economy, and without any measurable effect in terms of actually averting any climate change.”
“Surely now is the time for a root and branch cost-benefit review by independent engineers who have no skin in the game of electrifying the UK economy.”
Prince Charles sees ‘golden opportunity’ in Covid-19 pandemic as UK economy faces biggest recession in centuries
By Helen Buyniski | RT | June 4, 2020
The UK’s Prince Charles has said that the coronavirus crisis represents a global “reset moment” – one which seemingly allows leaders to ram through sustainability initiatives as cash-strapped citizens have no choice but to obey.
The virus’ “unprecedented shockwaves may well make people more receptive to big visions of change,” the heir to the British throne declared on Wednesday. He made the comments during a virtual meeting of the World Economic Forum’s Covid Action Platform, announcing the unveiling of his ‘Great Reset’ initiative. Charles cited the dramatic changes wrought by the pandemic as proof that a revolutionary shift was possible, glossing over the destruction the outbreak has wrought on the lives of average Brits to outline his ideal green future.
The project’s aim is to ensure businesses “build back better” in an environmentally-friendly fashion after shutdowns enacted in response to the epidemic left the UK economy in ruins. Businesses would be wise to “think big and act now,” the prince advised, noting “we have a unique, but rapidly shrinking, window of opportunity to learn lessons and reset ourselves on a more sustainable path.”
“It is an opportunity we have never had before and may never have again.”
While details of the royal’s big plan were somewhat elusive, buried under an avalanche of buzzwords, it involves a series of industry- and issue-specific roundtables, a social media networking component and “virtual hubs” aimed at attracting young people and “fostering innovation” through “thought leadership and practical solutions.” He called for a “paradigm shift” that “inspires action at revolutionary levels and pace,” taking inspiration from the rapid transformation of industries such as mobile technology and space exploration to interweave sustainability into the financial system.
It’s not like the UK is in a position to say no, he hinted, threatening naysayers with several flavors of climate-induced doom. “We have no alternative because otherwise, unless we take the action necessary, and we build again in a greener and more sustainable and more inclusive way, then we will end up having more and more pandemics and more and more disasters from ever-accelerating global warming and climate change,” the prince proclaimed.
While Prince Charles stressed in a promotional video accompanying the big reveal that “global warming, climate change, and the devastating loss of biodiversity” are the chief threats facing humanity, the majority of Britons are likely to be more concerned with the devastating recession threatening to engulf the nation completely. The Bank of England warned last month that the UK economy could shrink by 30 percent by the end of the summer. The central bank’s dire predictions – its first official forecast since the pandemic took hold – warned that GDP could decline by 14 percent for 2020, the sharpest single-year drop in over three centuries. And while the Bank of England claimed UK families entered the crisis “in a stronger position than they were before the 2008 financial crisis,” the Office of National Statistics revealed in April that the economy was already headed south even before the lockdown was imposed in March.
By the start of May, one-fifth of British retailers had permanently closed their doors, according to the British Chamber of Commerce. It also warned that while a third of the country’s economy was “shut down,” another third was only functioning “with some difficulty.” Some two-thirds of UK businesses have sought government assistance to pay furloughed staff, but help has been slow in coming. Still, the UK is behind only Singapore and Japan in terms of the amount of money it has pledged toward helping businesses recover from the crisis, earmarking the equivalent of 8.5 percent of its GDP – about £120 billion – for emergency loans, financing, and grants. This places the needy wholly at the mercy of the government – which, if Prince Charles has anything to say about it, will wrest serious sustainability concessions out of them before they’re allowed to go forward.
The UK has suffered greatly under the pandemic, recording the second-highest number of coronavirus deaths worldwide – over 39,000 as of Thursday, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University. Public trust in the country’s response to the virus has also been shaken dramatically, with just 51 percent of respondents to a survey conducted last month reporting they approved of London’s handling of the epidemic – an 18-point drop over the previous month. Imperial College professor Neil Ferguson, the disgraced architect of the UK lockdown policy, probably didn’t help matters earlier this week when he quietly admitted his draconian stay-at-home restrictions were no better than Sweden’s no-lockdown response in terms of saving lives.
Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23
Fantasy Wish List Masquerades as Climate Poll
Green lobby group invites public to endorse green fantasies
click for source
By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | June 1, 2020
Last week, a raft of newspaper headlines declared “Canadians still support climate action: poll.” We are intended to believe that “COVID-19’s economic and health challenges haven’t diminished” ordinary people’s enthusiasm for green policies. But this poll has oodles of problems.
First, it was sponsored by Clean Energy Canada. Embedded within the term clean energy is the philosophical argument/political statement/moral judgment that our current, dominant forms of fossil fuel-based energy are dirty.
A ‘clean energy’ outfit isn’t neutral. Its entire purpose is to promote some ideas and to disparage others. What actually happened here is an organization with an agenda drew up a fantastical wish list, and then invited Canadians to agree that the items on that wish list are awesome.
Big surprise that lots of people think upgrading broadband Internet service and public transit are a good idea – especially when the pollster, Abacus Data, declares them “part of an effort to attract companies to invest and grow businesses in Canada.”
Big surprise that lots of people like the idea of “Creating more spaces in towns and cities where people can walk and cycle without fear of vehicles.” But the realistic questions, surely, are:
– how much do such projects cost?
– what other ways might we need/choose to spend the same money?
Big surprise that, in the words of Clean Energy Canada’s press release,
91% are interested in the idea of Canada as the world leader in electric buses.
As if that were a likely scenario. Canada contains half of 1% of the world’s total population. We are a geographically huge country, with an exceptionally low population density. This is just delusional.
Big surprise that many people are in of favour “Making public transit free to help get more cars off the road and reduce emissions and congestion.” But nothing is free. The germane questions are:
– who should cover some portion of public transit costs – those actually using it, or everyone via their tax contributions to various levels of government?
– is a devastating economic crisis the right time to increase government expenditures and responsibility?
This poll would have been truly useful had it asked people whether the coronavirus pandemic has changed their attitudes toward using public transit. Are they now more likely to pack themselves into crowded commuter trains, city buses, and subways than a year ago? Less likely? Or the same?
I relied on public transit during the three decades I lived in downtown Toronto. Prior to this pandemic, I would never have described myself as a germophobe. But I now reside in a small town – and the world has changed.
The next time I visit Toronto, I’m unlikely to repeat my previous routine – parking the car an hour away, boarding a commuter train, relying on subways, buses, and streetcars within the city, then boarding another commuter train.
I now see public transit as risky. For me and for others. The idea of taking any form of public transit during rush hour fills me with dread.
I can’t be the only one.
Public transit has always struggled. Ridership was already in decline is many jurisdictions, before the pandemic struck (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).
Services such as Uber had already altered the landscape. During these widespread lockdowns, more people have discovered that working from home is possible and desirable. Add in infection concerns, and public transit may never recover.
Destroying the environment to save it
Pseudo-green energy will wreak devastation, pretending to prevent exaggerated climate harm
By Paul Driessen | Watts Up With That? | May 31, 2020
“We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” The infamous Vietnam era quotation may or may not have been uttered by an anonymous US Army major. It may have been misquoted, revised, apocryphal or invented. But it quickly morphed into an anti-war mantra that reflected attitudes of the time.
For Virginians and others forced to travel the path of “clean, green, renewable, sustainable” energy, it will redound in modern politics as “We had to destroy the environment in order to save it.”
Weeks after Governor Ralph Northam signed Virginia’s “Clean Economy Act,” which had been rushed through a partisan Democrat legislature, Dominion Energy Virginia announced it would reach “net zero” greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. To do so, the utility company will raise family, business, hospital and school electricity bills by 3% every year for the next ten years – as these customers and state and local governments struggle to climb out of the financial holes created by the ongoing Coronavirus lockdown.
Just as bad, renewable energy mandates and commitments from the new law and Dominion’s “integrated resource plan” will have major adverse impacts on Virginia and world environmental values. In reality, Virginia’s new “clean” economy exists only in fantasy land – and only if we ignore “clean” energy CO2 emissions, air and water pollution, and other environmental degradation around the world.
Dominion Energy plans to expand the state’s offshore wind, onshore solar and battery storage capacity by some 24,000 megawatts of new “renewable” energy by 2035, and far more after that. It will retain just 9,700 MW of existing natural gas generation, and only through 2045, build no new gas-fired units, and retire 6,200 megawatts of coal-fired generation. This will reduce in-state carbon dioxide emissions, but certainly won’t do so globally. The company intends to keep its four existing nuclear units operating.
To “replace” some of its abundant, reliable, affordable fossil fuel electricity, Dominion intends to build at least 31,400 megawatts of expensive, unreliable solar capacity by 2045. The company estimates that will require a land area some 25% larger than 250,000-acre Fairfax County, west of Washington, DC. That means Dominion Energy’s new solar facilities will blanket 490 square miles (313,000 acres) of beautiful croplands, scenic areas and habitats that now teem with wildlife.
That’s almost half the land area of Rhode Island, eight times the District of Columbia, 14 times more land than all Fairfax County parks combined – blanketed by imported solar panels. Still more land will be torn up for access roads and new transmission lines. All this is just for Dominion Energy’s solar panels.
The panels will actually generate electricity maybe 20-25% of the year, once you factor in nighttime hours, cloudy days, and times when the sun is not bright enough to generate more than trifling electricity.
Dominion and other Virginia utility companies also plan to import and install 430 monstrous 850-foot-tall bird-chopping offshore wind turbines – and tens of thousands of half-ton battery packs, to provide backup power for at least a few hours or days when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. The batteries will prevent the economy from shutting down even more completely during each outage than it has during the Corona lockdown. Similar policies across America will impact hundreds of millions of acres.
Most of these solar panels, wind turbines and batteries – or their components, or the metals and minerals required to manufacture those components – will likely come from China or from Chinese-owned operations in Africa, Asia and Latin America … under mining, air and water pollution, workplace safety, fair wage, child labor, mined land reclamation, manufacturing and other laws and standards that would get US and other Western companies unmasked, vilified, sued, fined and shut down in a heartbeat.
It is those minimal to nonexistent laws and regulations that govern most of the companies and operations that will supply the “clean” technologies that will soon blight Virginia landscapes and serve the new “clean” Virginia economy. As Michael Moore observes in his new film, Planet of the Humans, other states that opt for “clean” energy will face the same realities.
Thus far, no one has produced even a rough estimate of how much concrete, steel, aluminum, copper, lithium, cobalt, silica, rare earth metals and countless other materials will be needed. All will require gigantic heavy equipment and prodigious amounts of fossil fuels to blast and haul away billions of tons of rocky overburden; extract, crush and process tens of millions of tons of ores, using acids, toxic chemicals and other means to refine the ores; smelt concentrates into metals; manufacture all the millions of tons of components; and haul, assemble and install the panels, turbines, batteries and transmission lines, setting them on top of tens of thousands of tons of concrete and rebar. All of it beyond Virginia’s borders.
No one has tallied the oil, natural gas and coal fuel requirements for doing all this “Virginia Clean Economy” work – nor the greenhouse gases and actual pollutants that will be emitted in the process.
Nothing about this is clean, green, renewable or sustainable. But Virginia politicians and Dominion Energy officials have said nothing about any of this, nor about which countries will host the mining and other activities, under what environmental and human rights standards.
Will Virginians ever get a full accounting? Just because all of this will happen far beyond Virginia’s borders does not mean we can ignore the global environmental impacts. Or the health, safety and well-being of children and parents in those distant mines, processing plants and factories.
This is the perfect time to observe the environmentalist creed: think globally, act locally. Will that be done?
Will Dominion and Virginia require that all these raw materials and wind, solar and battery components be responsibly sourced? Will it require independently verified certifications that none of them involve child labor, and all are produced in compliance with US and Virginia laws, regulations and ethical codes for workplace safety, fair wages, air and water pollution, wildlife preservation, cancer prevention and mined lands reclamation? Will they tally up all the fossil fuels consumed, and pollutants emitted, in the process?
Science journalist, businessman and parliamentarian Matt Ridley says wind turbines need some 200 times more raw materials per megawatt of power than modern combined-cycle gas turbines. It’s probably much the same for solar panels. Add in the millions of wind turbines, billions of solar panels and billions of backup batteries that would be required under a nationwide Green New Deal, and the combined US and global environmental, human health and human rights impacts become absolutely mindboggling.
If you ignore all the land and wildlife impacts from installing the wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and transmission lines – you could perhaps call this “clean energy” and a “clean economy” within Virginia’s borders. But not beyond those borders. This is a global issue, and the world would likely be far better off if we just built modern combined-cycle gas turbines (or nuclear power plants) to generate reliable electricity – and avoided all the monumental human and ecological impacts of pseudo-renewable energy.
When it’s time to select sites for these 490 square miles of industrial solar facilities, will Virginia, its county and local governments, its citizens, environmentalist groups and courts apply the same rigorous standards, laws and regulations that they demand for drilling, fracking, coal and gas power plants, pipelines, highways, timber cutting and other projects? Will they apply the same standards for 850-foot-tall wind turbines and 100-foot-tall transmission lines as they demand for buried-out-of-sight pipelines?
Virginia’s Clean Economy Act will also plunge almost every project and jurisdiction into questions of race, poverty and environmental justice. Dominion Energy and other utility companies will have to charge means-tested rates (even as rates climb 3% per year) and exempt low-income customers from some charges. They will have to submit construction plans to “environmental justice councils” – even as the companies, councils and politicians ignore the rampant injustices inflicted on children and parents slaving away in Chinese, African and Latin American “clean energy” mines, processing plants and factories.
Government officials, utility industry executives, environmentalists and anyone else who promotes wind, solar, battery and biofuel energy need to explain exactly how they plan to address these issues. Future town hall meetings and project approval hearings promise to be raucous, entertaining and illuminating.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, environment, climate and human rights issues.
New tapes of Poroshenko-Biden calls reveal ‘independent’ Ukraine was total US client
© Reuters / Jonathan Ernst
RT | May 19, 2020
On top of firing a prosecutor on orders from US Vice President Joe Biden, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko also robbed his own people by raising tariffs to please his US overlords, according to audio of their alleged calls.
On Tuesday, Ukrainian parliamentarian Andrii Derkach published audio recordings of what sounds like Poroshenko’s conversations with various Obama administration officials in 2015 and 2016. Derkach said he got the audio from investigative journalists, who told him that Poroshenko personally recorded the calls. They have not been independently verified.
If true, however, they show the president in Kiev literally taking orders from Washington, even as the US insisted Ukraine was a sovereign and independent nation free to decide its own destiny.
“[I’m] very well indeed, as usual when I hear your voice,” Poroshenko tells Biden in a May 13, 2016 conversation, where he rushes to tell the US vice president how much “progress” he has made in reforming Ukraine to Washington’s liking.
As one of the examples, Poroshenko cites that he has imposed tariffs of 100 percent, even though the IMF asked for only 75 percent, adding “Give us a yard, please!”
“Poroshenko was willing to strip the Ukrainians naked, and even make money on the tariffs,” Derkach said on Monday, noting that they were indeed raised twice.
Raising tariffs on Russian gas imports – and cutting subsidies to poor Ukrainians – was one of the major demands by the IMF in 2013, which the government of President Viktor Yanukovych balked at, before it was ousted in a US-backed coup in February 2014.
Derkach argues that the tariffs and other concessions Poroshenko made to Washington were intended to unblock the $1 billion IMF loan to Ukraine of which the US was a guarantor. Biden had already leveraged the loan to demand the firing of prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was looking into corruption at the gas company Burisma – which had hired Biden’s son Hunter as a board member earlier that year, presumably as a shield against prosecution.
It became clear after Poroshenko fired Shokin that this would not be enough, and that he would have to give even more, Derkach told reporters in Kiev, pointing to the recordings.
Biden himself boasted about getting Shokin fired at an event in Washington, and his remarks were caught on camera. When current US President Donald Trump brought up the issue of Shokin’s firing with Poroshenko’s successor Volodymyr Zelensky, the Democrats claimed he was improperly seeking foreign assistance in the 2020 election – as Biden was seeking their nomination – and had him impeached in the House of Representatives in December 2019. Trump stayed in office after the Senate acquitted him in February this year. Biden only became the presumptive Democrat nominee in mid-April.
A Cautionary Tale About the WHO
By Larry Romanoff | Moon of Shanghai | May 10, 2020
There appears to be no shortage of claims from multiple informed and independent sources that the WHO has two primary functions, the first as a tool for world population reduction on behalf of its masters, and the second as a powerful marketing agent for big pharma, specifically the vaccine manufacturers. Many critics have pointed out that the ‘vaccination experts’ at the WHO are “dominated by the vaccine makers standing to gain from the enormously lucrative vaccine and antiviral contracts awarded by governments.” And indeed, the advisory and other committees involved with the WHO’s vaccine programs seem heavily populated with those who profit directly from those same programs.
Equally, the claims and concerns about population control and reduction are far from conspiracy theories today, with far too much evidence, some of it frightening, that this is indeed a major agenda of the WHO today. We have already seen too much hard evidence of this body’s involvement in both areas to justify dismissing the concerns as implausible fears. Moreover, there is a disturbing list of individuals closely associated with the WHO, who have had either population reduction or mass vaccinations as a pet project; individuals like David Rothschild, David Rockefeller, George Soros, Donald Rumsfeld, Bill Gates, and many more, the list including national organisations like the CDC, FEMA, the US Department of Homeland Security, the Rockefeller and Carnegie Institutes, the CFR, and others.
It is not difficult, on the basis of all the evidence, to conclude the WHO is an international criminal enterprise under the control of a core group, one with European corporate dynasties at its center which, as one writer noted, “provides the strategic leadership and funds the development, manufacturing and release of synthetic, man-made viruses solely to justify immensely profitable mass vaccinations”. We have seen so many instances of an unusual and apparently laboratory-made virus appearing without warning, the onset followed immediately by urgent worried pronouncements from the WHO of yet another mandatory mass vaccination.
We have the rampant production of deadly viruses in secretive labs around the world, and the repeated “accidental” release of those into various populations (think ZIKA) – seemingly inevitably without explanation, apology or even a semblance of actual investigation, much less censure or criminal or civil charges. We also have the blanket legal immunity for all pharma companies in their creation and dissemination of deadly pathogens by vaccination. When we add into this mix the WHO’s history of criminality as with their now-famous tetanus/hCG international sterility program, the curious timing of the onset of AIDS, and the many occurrences of the WHO’s vaccination programs perfectly coinciding with a sudden outbreak of yet another unusual disease in the same areas and populations, one would have to be a hard-core ideologue to not become damned suspicious.
WHO Vaccinations and Population Control
During the early 1990s, the WHO had been overseeing massive tetanus vaccination campaigns in Nicaragua, Mexico, the Philippines, Tanzania and Nigeria. All tell a similar story, one that almost beggars belief but with the facts too clear to refute. Tetanus is a disease whose onset we often associate with stepping on a rusty nail or some such event. It should be clear that men would be at least as likely, if not more likely, to encounter this circumstance than would women, and perhaps careless children more than adults, but the WHO vaccination program was directed only to females from 15 to 45 years of age – in other words, child-bearing ages. In Nicaragua, the targets were females from 12 to 49 years of age.
Also, a single tetanus shot is universally accepted as sufficient to provide protective duration of ten years or more, but the WHO inexplicably insisted on vaccinating these women five times within several months. Shortly after the initiation of these programs, concerns began to emerge about spontaneous abortions and other complications arising exclusively within the vaccinated populations. On suspicion, a group in Mexico had the vaccination serum analysed and discovered it contained the Human chorionic gonadotrophin (hCG) hormone. This hormone is critical to the female body during pregnancy. It causes the release of other hormones that prepare the uterine lining for the implantation of the fertilised egg. Without it, a woman’s body is unable to sustain a pregnancy and the fetus will be aborted. This hormone was injected into the subjects along with the tetanus serum, causing a female body to then recognise both as foreign agents and to develop antibodies to destroy either if they were to ever appear in the body in the future.
Upon becoming pregnant, a woman’s body would fail to recognize hCG as a friend and would produce anti-hCG antibodies, the prior vaccination now inducing her body’s immune system to attack the hormone that is needed to bring an unborn child to term, preventing subsequent pregnancies by killing the hCG which is necessary to sustain them. This means each woman who received the WHO inoculation was vaccinated not only against tetanus but also against pregnancy. (1) (2)
The WHO at first denied the facts and disparaged the results of the initial tests, but following this revelation each nation conducted extensive tests and in all cases the hCG hormone was identified as existing in the tetanus vaccination serum. The WHO eventually went silent and discontinued their program but by this time many millions of women had been vaccinated – and rendered sterile. One important fact is that the three different brands of tetanus vaccine being used in this project were developed, produced, and distributed in secrecy and that none had ever been tested or licensed for sale or distribution anywhere in the world. The companies that produced them were Connaught Laboratories and Intervex from Canada, and Australia’s CSL Laboratories. Connaught is the same firm that, along with the Canadian Red Cross, knowingly distributed AIDS-contaminated blood products for several years during the 1980s, a criminal organisation that should have been executed along with its owners. (3)
Further damning evidence that the Western media censored, was the fact that the WHO had been actively involved for more than 20 years prior in the development of an anti-fertility vaccine utilizing hCG tied to tetanus toxoid as a carrier – precisely the same combination as in these vaccines. According to the WHO’s own reports, they had spent nearly $400 million on this kind of “reproductive health” research. More than 20 research articles have been written on this subject, many of these by the WHO itself, that document in detail the WHO’s attempts to create an anti-fertility vaccine utilizing tetanus toxoid. And they aren’t alone; the UNFPA, the UNDP, the World Bank and of course – whenever we encounter secret efforts at population control – the ubiquitous Rockefeller Foundation, are all allied in this cause, as was the US National Institute of Health. The Government of Norway was also a partner in this travesty, contributing more than $40 million to develop this Tetanus-abortion vaccine.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been heavily funding the distribution of tetanus vaccine in Africa by UNICEF, which is the agency that provided Kenya with the vaccine laced with hCG. Gates said: “The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s heading up to about nine billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps ten or fifteen percent.” (4) The Rockefeller Foundation also heavily funded this vaccine research and distribution. (5) All this amounts to genocide on a planetary scale.
I examined in detail the WHO website and discovered there were dozens of articles, many written by WHO researchers, documenting in detail the WHO’s attempts to create an anti-fertility vaccine utilizing tetanus toxoid as a carrier. (6) Some leading articles included:
- “Clinical profile and Toxicology Studies on Four Women Immunized with Pr-B-hCG-TT,” Contraception, February, 1976, pp. 253-268.
- “Observations on the antigenicity and clinical effects of a candidate antipregnancy vaccine: B-subunit of human chorionic gonadotropin linked to tetanus toxoid,” Fertility and Sterility, October 1980, pp. 328-335.
- “Phase 1 Clinical Trials of a World Health Organisation Birth Control Vaccine,” The Lancet, 11 June 1988, pp. 1295-1298. “Vaccines for Fertility Regulation,” Chapter 11, pp. 177-198, Research in Human Reproduction, Biennial Report (1986-1987), WHO Special Programme of Research, Development and Research Training in Human Reproduction (WHO, Geneva 1988).
- “Anti-hCG Vaccines are in Clinical Trials,” Scandinavian Journal of Immunology, Vol. 36, 1992, pp. 123-126.
As early as 1978, the WHO was actively exploring ways to eradicate much of the population of the Third World. A paper published by the WHO (7) was titled, “Evaluating … placental antigen vaccines for fertility regulation”; The paper acknowledged “substantial progress” in its worldwide eugenics program of culling non-whites, but yet identified “an urgent need for a greater variety of methods” of preventing fertility, and gushed over the fact that “immunisation as a prophylactic measure is now so widely accepted”, that the employment of sterilisation vaccines would be widely appealing (to those dispensing the vaccines) and would offer “great ease of delivery”.
If that isn’t clear, the WHO is saying that vaccinations for other purposes – protection against diseases – are so common and widely-accepted, inoculation is probably the easiest way to sterilise the populations of undeveloped countries. The paper then notes the accumulation of evidence that “there exist proteins specific to the reproductive system” which “could be blocked” by vaccinations and provide a new method of “fertility regulation”. Among the stated advantages of a sterilisation vaccine is that it could prevent or disrupt implantation of the fertilised egg onto the uterus wall, and thereby guarantee that every (non-white) conception would result in a miscarriage or spontaneous abortion, i.e., an anti-hCG vaccine. The paper continues:
“Testing … will reveal whether a single injection is sufficient to achieve the desired level of immunization, or whether several boosting injections will be required. The main desired effect is to achieve a degree of immunization sufficient to: (a) neutralize the hormonal activity of hCG in vivo; and (b) prevent or disrupt implantation at a very early stage of pregnancy. It is not yet established whether immunization with the β hCG peptide conjugate will cause an irreversible biological neutralization of hCG … This will probably vary from individual to individual. In the first case, the indication for immunization will be restricted to sterilization, whereas in the second eventuality … immunization may be considered as a long-lasting but reversible anti-fertility measure.”
On August 17-18, 1992, the WHO produced a report titled “Fertility Regulating Vaccines”, resulting from a large meeting in Geneva of scientists and ‘womens’ health advocates’ “to review the current status of the development of fertility regulating vaccines.” The meeting was from a joint Special Program of research in reproduction of the UNDP, UNFPA, the WHO and the World Bank. The report stated, “… applied research on FRV’s (fertility-regulating vaccines) has been going on for more than twenty years …”, and discussed not only the anti-hCG vaccines already receiving clinical trials, but the development of other vaccines such as an anti-GnRH vaccine that would extend the temporary infertility due to breast-feeding.
This vaccine was also being field-tested at the time, with the possible intention of employing both antigens in the same vaccine on the assumption that a single vaccine might not sterilise all victims. They also recognised the dangers of administering such a vaccine to women who were already pregnant, and expressed awareness the antibodies would almost certainly be present in the milk and might therefore render the infants permanently sterile as well – with the massive understatement that this “might not be acceptable to all potential users …” From the outset, WHO planners realised that during mass vaccinations, many pregnant women would also be inoculated with the anti-hCG serum, which would inevitably result not only in sterilisation, miscarriages and spontaneous abortions but also incurable autoimmune disorders and birth defects.
The same paper went on to state, “In addition to women being immunized inadvertently during an established pregnancy, fetuses could be exposed to potential teratological effects of immunization …”. In other words, WHO staff would freely inoculate pregnant women, those embryos or fetuses not spontaneously aborting would experience pathological growth from which would result various undefined birth defects. The WHO is not researching ‘reproductive health’, but reproductive impossibility, and their tetanus-hCG vaccine is not in any sense ‘regulating’ the fertility of women but rendering their fertility biologically impossible, which is not quite the same thing. Their own paper stated the vaccination likely “will cause an irreversible biological neutralization of hCG”, which means the permanent sterilisation of innocent women who agreed to receive tetanus shots.
Try to understand what this means: the WHO was for decades receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for research and testing, to produce an antifertility vaccine that would make a woman’s immune system attack and destroy her own babies in the womb, a vaccine they would surreptitiously combine with a tetanus vaccination without informing the victims. To say their deceit was successful would be an understatement. The WHO inoculated more than 130 million women in 52 countries with this vaccine, permanently sterilising some very large percentage of them without their knowledge or consent. It was only when an enormous number of women in all countries experienced vaginal bleeding and miscarriages immediately after the vaccinations, that the hormone additive was discovered as the cause. Suspicions were aroused when the WHO selected only females of child-bearing age and further specified the unheard-of practice of five multiple injections over a three month period, but the health officials in these undeveloped countries still had faith in the white man’s medicine.
Upon the discovery of the hormone in the vaccine, Nigerian physicians reported WHO doctors telling them the hCG hormone “would have no effect on human reproduction”, statements they knew to be false. When this information reached the public, the WHO assumed an offensive and repugnant stand, mocking and ridiculing the nations that had performed the tests and revealed the contamination, condemning them as incompetent, having “unsuitable” testing laboratories, and using improper samples or procedures. WHO officials claimed these nations had “Not the right kind of lab to do the test. The labs know only how to test urine samples . . .” This is the standard response by Western agencies, governments, and corporations, when caught with adulterated products. When Coca-Cola’s drinks in China were found to contain frightening levels of pesticides and chlorine, the immediate accusation was that China’s biological laboratories were all incompetent. When Nestle’s noodles in India were found to contain dangerously toxic amounts of lead, India’s laboratories were all incompetent. The next step is to carefully produce a few samples known to be uncontaminated, provide them to an “independent” laboratory that inevitably pronounces them clean, then move the story off the front page.
When the discovery was made, many nations enacted immediate legal restraining orders against WHO and UNICEF vaccine programs. WHO and UNICEF officials said the “grave allegations” were “not backed up by evidence”, which was nonsense. UNICEF, USAID and the WHO refused to address the evidence like vaginal bleeding, miscarriages and spontaneous abortions. They also refused to discuss the reasons for a series of five closely-spaced vaccinations when one had always been sufficient, ignoring the content of their own published papers stating that multiple injections of a tetanus-hCG vaccine would be necessary for effective sterilisation.
When faced with documented results, WHO officials admitted the hormone did indeed exist “in small amounts” in “some” of the vaccine material, but that this was an inconsequential result of “accidental contamination”. Nobody at the WHO attempted to explain the source of the hCG hormone in sufficient volume to contaminate 130 million doses of a vaccine, nor how that “contamination” could “accidentally” have inserted itself into all those vaccines. The Lancet reported that the US National Institute of Health supplied much of the hCG hormone for WHO experiments and testing. The Western media were of course too busy at the time telling us how evil Iran was, to notice the small issue of 130 million women having been deliberately vaccinated against pregnancy, without their knowledge. As I’ve often mentioned elsewhere, the Western media are excessively fond of demonising Hitler, but Hitler didn’t sterilise 130 million women without their knowledge or consent, so where is the moral outrage against the WHO? The outrage is buried in the fact that none of those 130 million sterilised women were white.
The WHO went silent for a while, but in 2015, Vatican Radio charged that the UN organisations WHO and UNICEF were again executing vast international programs of depopulating the earth by using vaccines to surreptitiously sterilise women in Third World countries, this time in Kenya. It stated that “Catholic Bishops in Kenya have been opposed to the nationwide Tetanus Vaccination Campaign targeting 2.3 million Kenyan women and girls of reproductive age between 15-49 years, terming the campaign a secret government plan to sterilize women and control population growth”. (8) In May of 2018, it was reported that fertility-regulating vaccines were being used in India. (9)
And Polio, Too
In 2009, there was a spreading outbreak of Polio in Nigeria, a direct result of yet another WHO vaccination program, this time directly linked to the vaccine which was made from a live polio virus which always carries a risk of causing polio instead of protecting against it – as the Americans learned to their chagrin many years ago. Today in the West, polio vaccines are made from a killed virus that cannot cause polio. This latest WHO-sponsored outbreak actually began several years prior, which the WHO blamed on the live virus in their vaccines that had somehow “mutated”. So once again, the WHO is causing polio in the undeveloped world, amid evidence that for every case of identified polio there are hundreds of other children who don’t develop the disease but remain carriers and pass it on to others. It has long been recognised that the live oral vaccine used by the WHO can easily cause the very epidemics it pretends to be eliminating, and of course there is no published evidence that the polio virus had in fact “mutated”. The same occurred in Kenya, this time using the hCG hormone tied to polio vaccinations, with the same tragic results. (10)
In late 2013, Syria experienced a sudden outbreak of polio, the first in that country in about 20 years, and in an area that had been under the control of US-backed revolutionary mercenaries. The Syrian government claimed to have evidence that these foreigners brought the disease into the country from Pakistan, from Western (US) agencies. The WHO was active in Pakistan in yet another of its “humanitarian vaccination programs” that strangely coincided in geographic area with a severe outbreak of polio, and Syrian authorities were adamant that the West transmitted it to their nation when 1.7 million doses of polio vaccine were purchased by UNICEF, in spite of the fact that no cases of polio had been seen since 1999. After the mass vaccination program started, cases of polio began to reappear in Syria.
UNICEF began a similar mass vaccination program with 500,000 doses of live oral polio vaccine in the Philippines in spite of the fact there were no reported cases of polio in the Philippines since 1993. This would fit the pattern from other instances of sudden disease emergencies. I have not managed yet to reconstruct the WHO’s vaccination and other programs in all locations, but sudden outbreaks of viruses are always suspicious since they cannot be created from nothing and must be introduced into a population, and with surprising regularity appear on the heels of some WHO vaccination program. The sudden and inexplicable appearance of the Bubonic plague in Peru and Madagascar are two such events and, increasingly often, the pathogens do not appear to be natural in origin. In particular, the SARS-related camel virus in the Middle East had some obvious signs of human engineering as did the SARS coronavirus itself. There are many other such cases which are far too often linked with the presence of some program of the WHO.
The WHO is also becoming active in China with alarming potential for disaster. As one example, in late 2013, a number of newborn Chinese babies died immediately after being inoculated by the WHO against hepatitis B. The WHO China representative, Dr. Bernhard Schwartlander, called China’s program “very successful”, but I find myself with gnawing suspicions about his definition of ‘success’. The infant deaths may indeed have been an unfortunate accident, but I was not encouraged by Schwartlander’s comment that it is “difficult to establish a causal link between the vaccines and the babies’ deaths”. Knowing the past history of the WHO and their infectious inoculations, the ‘difficulty of establishing a causal link between the WHO vaccinations and civilian deaths’, may have been the part that was ‘successful’.
Pfizer Case Study – The Perfectly-Timed Epidemic
It is by now well-known that many new drugs are accompanied by serious side-effects such as irreversible liver damage, and are often fatal to children. In 1996 Pfizer developed a new antibiotic called Trovan to treat a variety of infections – meningitis being one example. Many of these new antibiotics are very powerful and with side effects that normally make them too dangerous to use for children, often causing permanent liver damage, joint disease and many other debilitating complications. Inexplicably, Pfizer decided to perform test trials on infants. However, Pfizer had the standard problem that FDA certification in the US required clinical trials on humans, and these are almost impossible to conduct in developed countries because no parents are willing to allow their children to take part in such risky clinical trials, to say nothing of the lawsuits resulting from trials gone bad. Therefore these pharma companies tend almost universally to take their trials to poor countries in Africa, Asia and South America where the laws are unprepared and the people don’t understand the risks of untested and unapproved drugs. The American (and European) pharma companies therefore transformed the developing world into an enormous test laboratory that carries no financial liability.
As luck would have it, at precisely the moment when Pfizer was ready to commence clinical trials of this new drug, Nigeria was suddenly and inexplicably hit with one of the worst meningitis epidemics in history. And of course, Pfizer was there to help the Nigerian government deal with the outbreak. But Pfizer didn’t exactly deal with the outbreak; what it did was to conduct a reprehensible clinical trial for its new medication, on a group of victims unlikely to complain. Rather than “helping” as it claimed, Pfizer gathered a trial group and a control group, giving one group Pfizer’s new medication and a competitor’s product to the other. It quickly became obvious that the Americans were not on a humanitarian mission but were saving the expense of live trials. After experimenting on about 200 victims, they gathered their test information and left – right in the middle of the meningitis epidemic, without having saved any lives. The Nigerian government tallied the deaths at about 11,000.
That would have been the end, except that a controversy erupted soon after about the relationship between Pfizer’s need for test trials and the meningitis outbreak. As it happened, the WHO was in Nigeria immediately prior to that time on another of its “life-saving” vaccination programs, this time for polio, and the timing and location of the meningitis outbreak apparently matched perfectly the WHO’s polio vaccination program. And of course it perfectly matched Pfizer’s need for large numbers of test subjects. There were lawsuits and payments, accusations and denials, but to this day Nigeria refuses WHO entry into the country and will not participate in any further “humanitarian” aid from the UN or the WHO. We cannot definitively say that the WHO deliberately created the meningitis epidemic for the benefit of Pfizer’s tests, but it’s the only theory that fits all the known facts and it’s the kind of thing the WHO appears to do on a regular basis. We should note Pfizer’s intention to market Trovan in the US and Europe after its trials on these African children, but the FDA refused to approve Trovan for American children due to the severe dangers.
Pfizer’s behavior after these “field trials” ended was, if anything, even more reprehensible. The lawsuits were based on claims that Pfizer did not have proper consent from parents to use an experimental drug on their children, the use of which not only left many children dead but others with brain damage, paralysis or slurred speech. Pfizer eventually reached a settlement with the Nigerian state government to pay $75m in damages and to create a fund of $35m to compensate the victims. This, after what the Guardian described as “a 15-year legal battle against Pfizer over a fiercely controversial drug trial”. Pfizer not only resisted to the end, forcing the poor families through 15 years of hell before finally relenting, but resorted to extortion and blackmail of Nigerian government officials in attempts to avoid making any payments to the families of the tiny victims of its illegal drug trial. The UK Guardian reported that leaked US government diplomatic cables revealed that “Pfizer hired investigators to look for evidence of corruption against the Nigerian attorney general in an effort to persuade him to drop the legal action”, with the apparent full knowledge and possibly assistance of the US State Department.
The Guardian stated the diplomatic cables recorded meetings between Pfizer’s country manager, Enrico Liggeri, and US officials at the Abuja embassy on 9 April 2009, stating, “According to Liggeri, Pfizer had hired investigators to uncover corruption links to federal attorney general Michael Aondoakaa to expose him and put pressure on him to drop the federal cases. He said Pfizer’s investigators were passing this information to local media.” The Guardian also reported there was no suggestion or evidence Nigeria’s attorney general was swayed by this pressure. Pfizer of course claimed the entire notion was “preposterous”, but we can assume the cables – which were classified as “Confidential” – didn’t lie.
It seems Pfizer was dissembling in all its statements, not only with claims of government approval and parental knowledge, but their claim a Nigerian doctor was in charge and directed the experiments. The government’s study found the local doctor was the director “in name only” and most often was not even informed of the procedures of the study and was typically “kept in the dark”. As well Pfizer used the fake letter from a non-existent department to obtain FDA approval for these clinical trials. Pfizer finally admitted the forged letter was “incorrect”, but I’m not sure that is the most appropriate adjective to use. Pfizer also made the infuriatingly dishonest claim that its antibiotic “Trovan demonstrated the highest survival rate of any treatment at the hospital. Trovan unquestionably saved lives.” Well, maybe, but the data on which Pfizer based this claim were the fact that in one location five patients died after using Pfizer’s drug while six patients died after using another medication, with no data as to infection severity or anything else. At best, an empty and fundamentally dishonest claim.
To deflect the issue of Pfizer’s Trovan being lethal to children, the company claimed that the international body Doctors Without Borders (Médecins sans Frontières) were administering Pfizer’s drug in their own large treatment program, a claim MSF vehemently denied, saying, “We have never worked with this family of antibiotic. We don’t use it for meningitis. That is the reason why we were shocked to see this trial in the hospital.” It was Pfizer’s Liggeri who claimed the lawsuits against Pfizer “were wholly political in nature”, and Liggeri as well who concocted the accusation that MSF had administered Pfizer’s Trovan to children.
In 2006 the Washington Post reported on a lengthy Nigerian government study that concluded Pfizer violated international law by testing its unapproved drug on children with brain infections. The Post apparently obtained a copy of the confidential report which had been hidden away for five years, and which stated Pfizer had never received authorisation from the government for its clinical trial, the apparent authorisation letter having been forged on the letterhead of a non-existent department and backdated to a date prior to the study. According to the Post’s article, the government claimed Pfizer’s ‘humanitarian effort’ was “an illegal trial of an unregistered drug, and a clear case of exploitation of the ignorant.” (11)
The American response was not one of shame for participating in this fraud, nor did the State Department condemn Pfizer for either conducting the drug trials or attempting the extortion and blackmail. Instead, the US ambassador condemned the leak of US embassy cables, as if publicly revealing the crime constituted a worse action than the crime itself. The State Department rushed the high moral ground to condemn “endangering innocent people” and “sabotaging peaceful relations between nations”, ignoring the facts that Pfizer’s trials did far more to ‘endanger innocent people’ and ‘sabotage relations’ than could be done by the revelation of a crime. But in the eyes of the US government, Americans do not commit crimes, and in any case the victims weren’t white. The cables further claimed Pfizer settled only because legal and ‘investigative’ fees had been costing the company more than $15 million per year, which leads one to wonder what occurs in the minds of these people who will spend $15 million a year for 15 years, to avoid paying half that sum to compensate lives they destroyed.
And there is still more. We have seen so many documented examples of the US courts assuming jurisdiction where they have none, agreeing to try cases without any US involvement that occurred wholly outside the US, in flagrant violations of international law, and indicative only of imperial arrogance. But when Nigeria attempted to file claims against Pfizer in the US, the American courts refused to hear the cases, oddly claiming they had no jurisdiction. And this isn’t the first time the US government, the State Department and the US courts have circled the wagons to protect a US multinational by closing the courts.
In 2004 and 2007, the Nigerian media carried reports which were heavily suppressed in US and Western media that the country was refusing to permit UN health authorities to carry out further administration of polio vaccines, blaming the WHO for having initiated the meningitis epidemic in 1996 that resulted in Pfizer’s highly questionable drug trial in that country. Nigerian leaders were also concerned that polio and other foreign vaccines were deliberately contaminated with sterilising and other agents, as occurred in the Philippines and other nations at around the same time. In much of Africa, there appears to be little remaining of the trust that once existed in international agencies and US and European pharma companies. Today, they are viewed primarily as imperial predators with a distinctly anti-human agenda, or at least an agenda that is anti non-white. The portions of Nigeria and other African nations that do still permit vaccinations now insist these be prepared in a trusted non-Western country with no involvement of the WHO or other Western agencies.
Many nations today insist the WHO is a tool to reduce Muslim populations, a claim that is increasingly difficult to dismiss as simple paranoia, and in fact Nigeria also discovered sterilants in WHO vaccines in that country that were clearly capable of lowering fertility in women. The Western media steadfastly ignore the body of evidence supporting these claims and suspicions, and focus instead on a moralistic concern that “the world might be slipping in its efforts to wipe out polio”, categorising the valid concerns of so many nations as ignorant and uninformed suspicion. The Western media of course are all reading from the same page as the perpetrators of this outrage.
We also have the ever-present corporate apologists, weaving their tapestries of misinformation attempting to irreversibly confuse an issue with irrelevancies and so as to place doubts in the minds of the public. One perennial favorite is a claim that “these attacks on pharmaceutical companies could encourage countries to enact legislation that would lower drug profits, which in turn could hamper the development of new medications”. This foolish statement from Roger Bate, a “fellow” at the International Policy Network, which is a lobby group for big pharma, funded by the usual Foundations and corporations, and dutifully reported by London’s Daily Telegraph in its campaign to confuse the uninformed public. The statement is actually rather clever, suggesting that our condemnation of the atrocities and illegalities of big pharma are somehow unjustified violent “attacks” on undeserving corporations. In the case of Pfizer and its Nigerian Trovan trials, The Telegraph gives us an added incentive to sympathise with big pharma by telling us – without evidence or documentation – that “the Nigerian government’s motives (in condemning Pfizer) have also been questioned”, the issue being morphed from reprehensible drug trials resulting in death of children into one of an untrustworthy government with questionable political motives. Thus will the Western media spin and weave until truth in all its forms disappears from the landscape forever.
Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Notes:
(1) Tetanus vaccine laced with anti-fertility drug; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12346214
(2) HCG found in WHO tetanus vaccine in Kenya; https://nexusnewsfeed.com/article/human-rights/hcg-found-in-who-tetanus-vaccine-in-kenya/
(3) Vaccines and Population Control: A Hidden Agenda; https://www.thelibertybeacon.com/are-new-vaccines-laced-with-birth-control-drugs/
(4) Bill Gates and the anti-fertility agent in African tetanus vaccine;
(5) Rockefeller-Funded Anti-Fertility Vaccine Coordinated by WHO; https://www.globalresearch.ca/rockefeller-funded-anti-fertility-vaccine-coordinated-by-who
(6) One need only search the WHO website for hCG to find the reports.
(7) Clin. exp. Immunol. (1978) 33, (360-375); February 8, 1978
(8) Vatican: UNICEF and WHO are sterilizing girls through vaccines
(9) Fertility-Regulating Vaccines are Being Tested in India; https://vactruth.com/2018/05/30/fertility-regulating-vaccines-india/
(10) Polio Vaccines Laced with Sterilizing Hormone Discovered in Kenya – WHO is Controlling Population?
(11) Panel Faults Pfizer in ’96 Clinical Trial In Nigeria; www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/06/AR2006050601338.html
(12) Drugs companies fund patient groups which attack NHS; https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/3112841/Drugs-companies-fund-patient-groups-which-attack-NHS-decisions.html
Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Global Research, 2020
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Pilpul for Beginners
By Gilad Atzmon | May 18, 2020
Americans may be surprised to learn from Alan Dershowitz that their constitution is far more intrusive and oppressive than what they and their forefathers have believed for generations. The law ‘scholar’ declared yesterday that “you have no (constitutional) right to not be vaccinated.” … continue
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Aletho News- Congratulations On Your Diagnosis
- Scott Ritter says he was ‘de-banked’
- Leaked files tie Epstein to Israel-UAE backchannel and possible kompromat
- Alleged Ukrainian plot to influence Hungarian elections claims postal vote fraud and even a false flag attack
- Australia’s New Hate Speech Bill Is Reckless, Contradictory, and Repressive
- Report: Kurdish Fighters Have Been Entering Iran From Iraq and Clashing With the IRGC
- Trump’s Options in Iran Limited By Military Buildup in Latin America
- Villains of Judea: Paul Singer’s Empire of Debt & Demographic Replacement
- The Gaza ceasefire’s Phase 2 only exists in the media and at UN meetings
- We must act before Palestinian hostages are executed in the world’s worst prisons
- If Americans Knew
- ‘My leg went to heaven before me’: Israeli war extinguishes Gaza childhoods
- Founders of deadly GHF ‘shaping’ new US-backed administration for Gaza: Report
- Genocide isn’t a mistake. Which is why the media can’t tell you the truth about Gaza
- “Praise Allah, There Are Still People Like You”: Jeffrey Epstein Nurtured Israel-Emirates Ties Before Abraham Accords
- 41% drop in Gaza births may be “reproductive violence” – Not a ceasefire Day 97
- Trump family has long record of supporting Israeli causes
- Militant Pro-Israel Group Agrees to Halt Operations in New York
- During “ceasefire,” at least 100 Gaza children killed – clearly NOT a ceasefire Day 96
- Israel Has Demolished 2,500 Buildings in Gaza Since Signing Ceasefire Deal
- Iran, Gaza and the politics of counting the dead
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: Species Extinction Rates Declining Since 1980 – ‘Climate Change Is Not An Important Threat’
- Denmark Places Climate Protection Above Animal Welfare, Poisoning And Culling Cows
- New Study: Greenland Was 3-7°C Warmer And Far Less Glaciated Than Today 6000-8000 Years Ago
- German Media Report That Current Frigid Weather Can Be Explained By Arctic Warming!
- Berlin Blackout Shows Germany’s $5 Trillion Green Scheme Is “Left-Green Ideological Pipe Dream”
- Modeling Error In Estimating How Clouds Affect Climate Is 8700% Larger Than Alleged CO2 Forcing
- Berlin’s Terror-Blackout Enters 4th Day As Tens Of Thousands Suffer In Cold Without Heat!
- Expect Soon Another PIK Paper Claiming Warming Leads To Cold Snaps Over Europe
- New Study: Human CO2 Emissions Responsible For 1.57% Of Global Temperature Change Since 1750
- Welcome To 2026: Europe Laying Groundwork For Climate Science Censorship!
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