Novel Vaccine Technologies in Veterinary Medicine: A Herald to Human Medicine Vaccines
Explosion of Genetic Vaccines in Animals Gets Human Attention
By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH | Courageous Discourse | April 16, 2023
The mRNA and adenoviral DNA COVID-19 vaccine debacle in humans has set populations on edge, distrustful of poorly conceived genetic technology. Meanwhile the field has advanced considerably in veterinary medicine. While these shots may protect animals from pathogens over the short term, what are the implications for our food supply? Any of the genetic material transmissible to humans through consumption? Raw or cooked? These and other questions are coming up as more information is being brought forward.
Aida and colleagues have graphically summarized the genetic technologies in use as of 2021 in veterinary medicine. In the consumer meat category at present, only swine are of concern given the use of plasmid DNA, replication incompetent viral vector, and RNA replicon products. Do these technologies cause noninfectious diseases in the animals? Can any of the genetic material survive denaturing during curing and cooking? How about pork intestines harvested for the production of heparin widely used in human medicine? It is conceivable that genetic incorporation of foreign RNA or DNA into humans and production of antigens for example, porcine endemic diarrhea or influenza A, could have untoward effects including autoimmunity similar to that with the COVID-19 vaccines?

Aida V, Pliasas VC, Neasham PJ, North JF, McWhorter KL, Glover SR, Kyriakis CS. Novel Vaccine Technologies in Veterinary Medicine: A Herald to Human Medicine Vaccines. Front Vet Sci. 2021 Apr 15;8:654289. doi: 10.3389/fvets.2021.654289. PMID: 33937377; PMCID: PMC8083957.

Now is a good time for veterinary and human medicine including the FDA and USDA, to come together and review the published studies of these new products on genetic transmissibility to humans and its potential implications. The Aida paper does not even mention the possibility of collateral impact to humans. One can see that developers, sponsors, and authors are blinded with infatuation for molecular biology and have lost sight of biological product safety in the food supply.
Droughts developing more rapidly says global study
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | April 16, 2023
For the first time a new study has confirmed droughts across the world are developing more rapidly as a result of climate change.
The international study identifies flash droughts – which intensify in a matter of weeks – have become more frequent since the late 1950s over 74% of the world’s 33 global regions, especially those over North and East Asia, the Sahara and Europe.
The Met Office’s Dr Peili Wu is one of the paper’s authors. He said: “The transition to more flash droughts is being driven by a combination of rainfall deficit along with amplified rates of soil moisture loss.”
The paper highlights that the transition from slower-onset droughts to flash droughts is projected to expand to most land areas. This transition will become most pronounced with higher rates of global greenhouse emissions.
Obviously, a drought begins with a period with a relative absence of rain or snow. However, increased temperatures and sometimes stronger winds can rapidly amplify the loss of moisture in the soil, exacerbating the speed of the drought’s onset and impacts. This rapidity can lead to the creation of a flash drought. Droughts in their many forms can last for different time periods, from weeks to decades.
This has all the trappings of a study written purposely to “prove” a preconceived agenda.
It is of course predicated on a half degree rise in temperatures, the sort of difference between temperatures in Sheffield and Birmingham. Does Birmingham have flash droughts and Sheffield none? Silly question really.
As Dr Wu admits, “flash droughts” do not actually exist, he himself had to invent the term a few years ago, no doubt to pin them on global warming.
The level of moisture in soils is governed by all sorts of factors, but particularly agricultural practices. To attempt to tease out a climate influence is to all intents and purposes impossible, as it would be undetectable.
But there are other serious issues about this study. The first is that global warming has made the world wetter on the whole.
The second is that extra CO2 in the atmosphere has helped to green the planet. In particular, higher concentrations of CO2 mean that plants lose less water to the air. In other words, transpiration is reduced.
Thirdly global cooling in the 1960s, 70s and 80s led directly to massively severe droughts across a wide swathe of the world, from the Sahel across to India and China. The cause was the expansion of the polar air mass which pushed the rainbelts towards the tropics.
https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000074891
Global warming does not lead to more severe droughts, whether flash or not – global cooling does.
Indeed, the world during the ice age was a very dry one, as cold air can hold less moisture. And it is dry air which sucks the moisture out of the ground like a sponge. That is why cold deserts like the Gobi are every bit as dry as the Sahara.
There is very little global data with which to analyse droughts, but there is plenty in the US.
And NOAA’s data is quite explicit. Droughts are now much less severe than they were in the past.
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/climate-at-a-glance/national/time-series/110/pdsi/all/3/1895-2023
I am quite sure that Dr Wu and his colleagues are perfectly aware of all of this. That is why they have invented flash droughts, which with some dodgy computer modelling has enabled them to claim something which does not exist.
The Indoctrinators, Part 3: Bill Gates
This is the third in our series about four well-known men whose purposeful social engineering over the years has undermined national democracies and economies, and created fertile ground for the final realisation of their post democracy dream of a global socialist/fascist world, controlled by supranational organisations such as the United Nations (UN), the World Health Organisation (WHO) and of course, themselves. They are George Soros (you can read Tuesday’s article here), Klaus Schwab (yesterday’s article is here), Bill Gates (today) and David Attenborough.
By Karen Harradine | TCW Defending Freedom | April 13, 2023
BILL Gates has a messiah complex. His obsession with ‘climate change’, vaccines and people control is proving dangerous for the world. Only a few weeks ago he gave voice to his latest megalomaniac plan for a global pandemic prison state. And as the past proves, what Gates wants he usually gets.
Together with his fellow Indoctrinators, George Soros and Klaus Schwab, 67-year-old Gates has not missed the opportunity provided by the Covid-19 crisis (which he helped to engineer) to further his revolutionist ‘global development’ green agenda. Following their precedent, he too created a foundation through which to impose his ghastly visions on an unfortunate world.
Since its inception in 2000, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), under its philanthropic guise, has found plenty of useful idiots across world governments willing to fund and support it. Successive witless British Prime Ministers, up to and including Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, have fallen under his spell with Gates hugely benefiting from this priceless endorsement and publicity. Given his malign agenda, Western taxpayers have literally been paying for their own demise.
Gates is an enthusiastic partner of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and attendee at their gatherings in Davos, which he typically uses to announce his latest plans to drain the West of its resources to fund his vaccine and climate change lunacy. In 1999, he formed the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), which he cleverly partnered with the United Nations (UN), BMGF, foreign aid agencies and pharmaceutical companies. It was to become, together with the BMGF, the second biggest source of funding to the World Health Organisation (WHO).
More than 80 per cent of the WHO’s budget comes from voluntary contributions by member states and donors. In 2021, the BMGF was the second largest contributor with $375million, and GAVI the fourth with $245million. Both have a long history of influencing the WHO (the BMGF’s first donation was in1998). Uniquely the BMGF became its official partner in 2017, further focusing the WHO’s public health priorities on to vaccines. An enabler of and publicist for the toxic Covid-19 vaccine, his close connection with the WHO has reaped him huge profits.
The WHO’s deeply disturbing proposed Pandemic Treaty effectively puts into action Gates’s planned grasp for global control as he detailed in his 2022 book, ‘How to Prevent the Next Pandemic’. It has been long in the planning.
In 2003, on a Davos panel called ‘Science for the Global Good’, Gates announced his foundation’s gift of $200million to the US National Institutes of Health to set up the Grand Challenges in Global Health, a vehicle for shifting US tax money into the developing world in pursuit of Gates’s own interests.
In 2010, Gates and his wife heralded a ‘decade of vaccines’ at Davos, pledging $10billion to fund vaccines in ‘poor countries’, a vaccine zealotry which has had some appalling outcomes for which Gates has expressed no remorse. In one example, nearly half a million children in India were paralysed after taking BMGF-funded polio vaccine. Despite such appalling consequences, Gates, with an honorary knighthood in the bag from the Queen, is still widely regarded as a benign philanthropist. There’s no doubt that money buys reputation.
Like Soros, Gates has a prominent platform on the WEF website to promote green investments worth billions of dollars. A devotee of the UN’s Agenda 2030, Gates is co-chair of the Global Commission on Adaptation.
Today, thanks to our unprincipled politicians, Gates has a hotline to Downing Street and Britain finds itself in the clutches of a megalomaniac. His tentacles reach far and wide, from shaping energy policies and dominating scientific organisations and academic research, to financing the mainstream media.
In 1997, Tony Blair invited him into Downing Street to sell his flawed computer system, going on to host him several times, implementing policies based on his dictates and in his financial interests. It was an association Blair was to prosper from, later getting $3.2million for his Global Africa initiative and more than $25.2million for his Institute of Global Change.
In 2010, Gates and his wife visited the Department for International Development (DFID) to hector ministers on supporting foreign aid while promoting his Living Proof project, funded also by Soros’s Open Society Foundations and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Billionaires persuading politicians to plunder public resources to fund their own megalomaniac ambitions is not just deeply distasteful but wrong. Yet between 2011 and 2019, Gates got DFID to give over £60million for BMGF development projects.
In 2016, George Osborne pledged £2.5billion to another BMGF association, the Ross Fund. Three years later, the BMGF and World Bank ‘partnered’ with DFID to shovel more taxpayers’ money to foreign despots in the name of ‘education systems’.
In November 2020, after Johnson played his part in the hysteria over Covid-19, Gates met him and pharmaceutical companies and plotted how to prevent ‘pandemics’. Johnson then gave £800million to the BMGF’s vaccine initiative, COVAX.
A year later, Johnson reunited with Gates and promised a further £400million to fund his green investments.
In Sunak Gates has a willing apprentice. In February, the pair met to discuss wasting more money on Gates’s terrifying ‘climate change’ goals.
The BMGF and its subsidiaries like the Global Fund, which promotes the ominous sounding ‘health security’, has, since its inception in 2002, managed to extract an astonishing £4.5billion from the UK government, with another £1billion earmarked for the next two years. When did British taxpayers vote for that?
Millions today in this country can no longer afford both food and energy costs, they are medically neglected and live in substandard housing. Questions must be asked why politicians are funding this Indoctrinator to dictate policies that are provenly detrimental to British citizens and are only to the benefit of one man. The multi- billionaire land owner, Bill Gates. If a vampire is invited into a home, best be prepared for a bloodbath.
The last in this series will focus on green evangelist Sir David Attenborough.
Doubled Pregnancy Loss Rate, Raised Foetal Abnormality Rate and Concentration of Lipid Nanoparticles in Ovaries – How Could They Call This Vaccine ‘Safe’?
BY ALEX KRIEL AND DR DAVID BELL | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | APRIL 14, 2023
The mRNA vaccines were released globally in early 2021 with the slogan ‘safe and effective’. Unusually for a new class of medicine, they were soon recommended by public health authorities for pregnant women. By late 2021, working age women, including those who were pregnant, were being thrown out of employment for not agreeing to be injected. Those who took the mRNA vaccines did so based on trust in health authorities – the assumption being that they would not have been approved if the evidence was not absolutely clear. The role of regulatory agencies was to protect the public and, therefore, if they were approved, the drugs were safe.
Recently, a lengthy vaccine evaluation report sponsored by Pfizer and submitted to the Australian regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) dated January 2021 was released under a Freedom of Information request. The report contains significant new information that had been supressed by the TGA and by Pfizer itself. Much of this relates directly to the issues of safety in pregnancy and impacts on the fertility of women of child-bearing age. The whole report is important, but four key data points stand out:
- The rapid decline in antibody and T cells in monkeys following a second dose;
- Biodistribution studies (previously released in 2021 through an FOI request in Japan);
- Data on the impact of fertility outcomes for rats;
- Data on foetal abnormalities in rats.
We focus on the last three items as, for the first point, it is enough to quote the report itself: “Antibodies and T cells in monkeys declined quickly over five weeks after the second dose of [Pfizer Covid vaccine] BNT162b2 (V9), raising concerns over long term immunity.” This point indicates that the regulators should have anticipated the rapid decline in efficacy and must have known at the outset that the initial two dose course was unlikely to confer lasting immunity and would, therefore, require multiple repeat doses. This expectation of failure was recently highlighted by Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director at the U.S. NIH.
The three remaining items should be a major cause for concern with the pharmaceutical regulatory system. The first, as revealed in 2021, involved biodistribution studies of the lipid nanoparticle carrier in rats, using a luciferase enzyme to substitute for the mRNA vaccine. The study demonstrated that the vaccine will travel throughout the body after injection and is found not only at the injection site but in all organs tested, with high concentration in the ovaries, liver, adrenal glands and spleen. Authorities who assured vaccinated people in early 2021 that the vaccine stays in the arm were, as we have known for two years, not being honest.

Lipid concentration per gram, recalculated as percentage of injection site.
In terms of the impact on fertility and foetal abnormalities, the report includes a study of 44 rats and describes two main metrics, the pre-implantation loss rate and the number of abnormalities per foetus (also expressed per litter). In both cases the metrics were significantly higher for vaccinated rats than for unvaccinated rats.
Roughly speaking, the pre-implantation loss ratio compares the estimated number of fertilised ova and the ova implanted in the uterus. The table below is taken from the report itself and clearly shows the loss rate for vaccinated (BNT162b2) is more than double the unvaccinated control group.

In a case control study, a doubling of pregnancy loss in the intervention group would represent a serious safety signal. Rather than take this seriously, the authors of the report then compared the outcomes to historical data on other rat populations – 27 studies of 568 rats – and ignored the outcome because other populations had recorded higher overall losses. This range is shown in the right hand column as 2.6% to 13.8%. This analysis is alarming as remaining below the highest previously recorded pregnancy loss levels in populations elsewhere is not a safe outcome when the intervention is also associated with double the harm of the control group.
A similar pattern is observed for foetal malformations with higher abnormality rate in each of the 12 categories studied. Of the 11 categories where Pfizer confirmed the data are correct, there are only two total abnormalities in the control group, versus 28 with the mRNA vaccine (BNT162b2). In the category which Pfizer labelled as unreliable (supernumerary lumbar ribs), there were three abnormalities in the control group and 12 in the vaccinated group.
As with the increased pregnancy losses, Pfizer simply ignored the trend and compared the results with historical data from other rat populations. This is very significant as it is seen across every malformation category. The case control nature of the study design is again ignored, in order to apparently hide the negative outcomes demonstrated.
These data indicate that there is no basis for saying the vaccine is safe in pregnancy. Concentration of lipid nanoparticles in ovaries, a doubled pregnancy loss rate and raised foetal abnormality rate across all measured categories indicates that designating a safe-in-pregnancy label (B1 category in Australia) was contrary to available evidence. The data imply that not only was the Government’s ‘safe and effective’ sloganeering not accurate, it was totally misleading with respect to the safety data available.
Despite the negative nature of these outcomes, the classification of this medicine as a ‘vaccine’ appears to have precluded further animal trials. Historically, new medicines, especially in classes never used in humans before, would require a very rigorous assessment. Vaccines, however, have a lower burden of proof requirement than ordinary medicines. By classifying mRNA injections as ‘vaccines’, this ensured regulatory approval with significantly less stringent safety requirements, as the TGA itself notes. In fact, these mRNA gene therapy products (to use the proper term) function more like medicines than vaccines in that they modify the internal functioning of cells, rather than stimulating an immune response to presence of an antigen. Labelling these gene therapy products as ‘vaccines’ means that, as far as we are aware, even today no genotoxicity or carcinogenicity studies have been carried out.
This report, which was only released after a FOI request, is extremely disturbing as it shows that authorities knew of major risks with mRNA COVID-19 vaccination while simultaneously assuring populations that it was safe. The fact that mainstream media have (as far as we are aware) completely ignored the newly released data should reinforce the need for caution when listening to the advice of public health messaging regarding COVID-19 vaccination.
Firstly, it is clear that regulators, drug companies and the Government would have known that vaccine induced immunity tails off very rapidly, with this being subsequently observed in real world data with efficacy against infection falling to zero. Accordingly, the single point in time figures of 95% and 62% efficacy against symptomatic PCR-positive infection quoted for Pfizer and AstraZeneca respectively meant almost nothing since a rapid decline was to be expected. Similarly, the concept of a two dose course was inaccurate as endless boosters would likely have been required given the rapid decline in antibodies and T-cells observed in the monkeys.
Most importantly, the data do not in any way support the ‘safe’ conclusion with respect to pregnancy; ‘dangerous’ would be much more accurate. The assurances of safety were, therefore, completely misleading given the data disclosures in the recent freedom of information release. Regulatory authorities knew that animal studies showed major red flags regarding both pregnancy loss and foetal abnormalities, consistent with the systemic distribution of the mRNA they had been hiding from the public. Even in March 2023, it is impossible to give these assurances, given the fact that important studies have not, to the best of our knowledge, been done. Pfizer elected not to follow up the vast majority of pregnancies in the original human trials, despite high miscarriage rates in the minority they did follow. Given all of the problems with efficacy and safety, the administration of these products to women of childbearing age and administration to healthy pregnant women is high risk and not justified.
Alex Kriel is by training a physicist and was one of the first people to highlight the flawed nature of the Imperial Covid model; he is a founder of the Thinking Coalition which comprises a group of citizens who are concerned about Government overreach. David Bell is a public health physician with a PhD in population health and formerly worked as a scientific and medical officer at the World Health Organisation.
Biden Administration is sued, accused of pressuring Twitter to censor journalist Alex Berenson
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | April 13, 2023
Independent journalist Alex Berenson has filed a lawsuit against President Joe Biden, a Pfizer board member, and others for pressuring Twitter to ban his account.
His account was banned after posting a tweet questioning COVID-19 vaccines.
Initially, Twitter resisted the calls to ban Berenson. However, eventually the social media platform caved to the pressure.
Berenson sued Twitter in a federal court in California, accusing the company of violating its contract with him. The lawsuit resulted in a settlement and Twitter admitting it should not have banned him.
The defendants in the new lawsuit, filed on April 12, are President Biden, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, former White House COVID-19 official Dr. Andrew Slavitt, Pfizer board member Dr. Scott Gottlieb, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, and the White House Director of Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty.
In a meeting with Twitter, Slavitt and other White House officials asked why Berenson had not been “kicked off” Twitter. Slavitt has previously called Berenson a conspiracy theorist.
Flaherty recently said that he remembered Slavitt “expressing his view that Twitter was not enforcing its content guidelines with respect to Alex Berenson’s tweets, and that employees from Twitter disagreed with that view.”
Gottlieb also asked Twitter to suspend Berenson. He has also previously called for the suspension of other people, including former acting FDA commissioner Dr. Brett Girior.
In the offending tweet, Berenson wrote, “It doesn’t stop infection. Or Transmission. And we want to mandate it? Insanity.”
According to his lawsuit, the defendants violated his First Amendment rights.
We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here.
“The government Defendants specifically targeted Mr. Berenson’s constitutionally protected speech and journalism,” the suit states.
“Members of [the Biden] administration engaged in a nearly unprecedented conspiracy to suppress Mr. Berenson’s First Amendment rights.
“Through 2021, they—and a senior board member at Pfizer, Inc. which has made more than $70 billion selling COVID-19 vaccines—worked together to pressure Twitter to suspend Mr. Berenson’s account and mute his voice as a leading COVID-19 vaccine skeptic. The White House and the Biden Administration did this at the same time government officials promoted their views on the necessity of COVID19 vaccination on Twitter, effectively blocking Mr. Berenson from commenting on their own statements or making his own.”
It adds that the permanent suspension “harmed both Mr. Berenson and a clearly identifiable class of nearly 100 million Americans whose interests he helped represent—Americans who either had questions about the vaccine or did not want to be forced to take a shot that they feared had been rushed through development and lost its ability to prevent COVID-19 infections within months.”
The suit is asking the court to stop the government from targeting the journalist and to award him damages.
Bad Pfizer Vaccine Batches Account for 4.2% of doses but 71% of Serious Adverse Events
Explains Why Some Have Severe Side Effects and Others Do Not
By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH | Courageous Discourse | April 13, 2023
I am routinely asked: why are so many people who took the COVID-19 vaccines apparently fine while others are suffering heart damage, strokes, blood clots and are ending up disabled or dead? It has been suspected for many months that there may be variations in vaccine lots or batches that could partially explain these observations. In other words, not everyone is getting the same dose of mRNA.
Under Emergency Use Authorization, the vaccine companies and their subcontractors do not have any inspections of the final filled and finished vials. This is unprecedented for a widely used product of any type. It is possible that lipid nanoparticles aggregate in suspension and so some batches may contain more mRNA than others. Likewise, since lot size has varied over time, it is possible that contaminants from the manufacturing process may be concentrated in some smaller lots compared to larger ones. Finally, there may be product transport, storage, and use factors that denature mRNA including heating, air injected into vials, and multiple needles dipped into the suspension.
The contaminant issue came to light as Japan returned millions of doses when visible debris was seen in the bottom of the vials. Additionally, since metallic beads are used by the biodefense contactors, it is possible that smaller initial lots could have had magnetic debris that explained “magnetism” in the arm where the shot was given as reported early in the vaccine campaign.
A report from Schmeling and coworkers using Pfizer BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 vaccine found that 71% of serious adverse events came from 4.2% of doses (high risk batches) conversely <1% of these events came from 32.1% of doses (low risk batches). The variation explained for the high and moderate risk batches was 78 and 89%, respectively. Thus as more doses were given out of those vials, the greater the number of side effects were reported. This means that the majority of risk is in the shot and not the person who received it.

Schmeling, M, Manniche, V, Hansen, PR. Batch-dependent safety of the BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 vaccine. Eur J Clin Invest. 2023; 00:e13998. doi:10.1111/eci.13998
These are critically important results. They imply the COVID-19 vaccine debacle is indeed a product problem and not due to patient susceptibility in most circumstances. Additionally, the lack of inspections has led to a safety disaster. Some unfortunate patients are getting too much mRNA, contaminants, or both and thus are exposed to damaging and in some cases, lethal injections.
Reuters Aug 2021, Japan suspends 1.6 mln doses of Moderna shot after contamination reports
FDA Commissioner says regulation is needed to target “misinformation” which harms life expectancy
Speech regulation
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | April 12, 2023
In an interview with CNBC, FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf said that online misinformation was harming the life expectancy of people, there is a need for “better regulation” on how to handle health misinformation and that “specific authorities at FDA, FTC, and other areas are going to be needed.”
“We know more and more about misinformation. It relates back to this life expectancy,” Califf said. Why aren’t we using knowledge of diet? It’s not that people don’t know about it. Why aren’t we using medical products as effectively and efficiently as our peer countries? A lot of it has to do with choices that people make because of the things that influence their thinking. The COVID vaccines and the antivirals give us an easy way to talk about it, but this is not limited to those areas. In heart disease, so many people don’t take their medicines, even though they’re now generic and very low-cost, often [they’re] deluded into taking things that are sold over the Internet that aren’t effective.”
According to the FDA commissioner, one of the solutions is telling the “truth is a louder volume.”
“In the good old days, when I was a practicing cardiologist, for the most part, people developed products, they got through the FDA, the label determined what was talked about, the Internet didn’t exist, you advertised in medical meetings and journals. There was sort of a hierarchy of information that went through the prescriber or the implanter in the case of devices to the patient. Of course, the problem in that system is it left a lot of people out. We now know about that. Now, everyone’s included because everyone’s connected to the Internet. But we can put out a statement about what we’ve determined based on the highest level of evidence, within ten minutes, someone who’s thought ten minutes about it can reach a billion people. And there’s nothing that restricts them from telling things that are not true. This has always existed. … But they couldn’t reach so many people,” he explained.
He added that there isn’t enough regulation on health information and that is “impacting our health in very detrimental ways.” As such, he thinks “there is a real need for better regulation of how to deal with this complex information.”
Califf noted that the FDA already has regulatory authority over advertisements content on tech platforms. But he feels the agency could do it better.
“And there are so many avenues now by which that information goes around that we have to think hard about what the right regulation is,” he added.
Using COVID-19 vaccination to explain his point, he said: “I’m highly aware that, in our society, people don’t want the government to have too much power, but I think specific authorities at FDA, FTC, other areas are going to be needed. I’m not saying what they are, because I don’t really know, but I do believe we’re going to need to, when we see people being harmed — like, let’s look at vaccination again, very few people are dying from COVID who are up to date on their vaccination. And if – beyond that, even if they get infected, almost no one is dying if they’ve been vaccinated up to date and they’ve gotten an antiviral that’s approved by or cleared by the FDA. So, why is this not happening? We need to work on this.”
Reiterating that misinformation should be countered with truthful information, he said that those who are succumbing to COVID “are the people that are not up to date on their vaccination and don’t encounter clinicians who are up-to-date on the advantages of antivirals. But they’re also people who have been heavily influenced by people on the Internet telling untruthful things about the vaccination. And I’m not arguing here that we should suppress free speech, that’s not — the First Amendment is the First Amendment. But we have to counter that information with truthful information and reach many, many more people.”
Biden to Spend $5 Billion on New Coronavirus Vaccine Initiative Supported by Gates, Fauci and Republican Lawmakers
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | April 123, 2023
The U.S. government will spend $5 billion on a program to accelerate the development of new coronavirus vaccines and therapeutics, White House officials announced this week in an interview with The Washington Post.
Dubbed “Project NextGen,” the new initiative will serve as the successor to the Trump administration’s “Operation Warp Speed,” launched in March 2020 to expedite the development of COVID-19 vaccines.
Similar to Operation Warp Speed, Project NextGen — with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation — will encourage public-private partnerships.
According to Reuters, the project will be managed out of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which will coordinate across various government agencies and private-sector actors, covering “all phases of development from lab research and clinical trials to delivery.”
“Scientists, public heath [sic] experts and politicians have called for the initiative, warning that existing therapies have steadily lost their effectiveness and that new ones are needed,” the Post reported.
The new initiative is based on a “roadmap” for the development of new coronavirus vaccines, formulated by the University of Minnesota and led by a former Biden administration official.
A ‘roadmap’ for ‘better’ coronavirus vaccines
Operation Warp Speed invested approximately $30 billion in the development, manufacturing and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, according to USA Today, with six drugmakers each receiving more than $1 billion, along with a promise of a “guaranteed market” if they successfully developed a vaccine.
Project NextGen was originally to be named “Project COVID Shield,” after some Republican lawmakers called for the launch of an “Operation Warp Speed 2.0” to build on the Trump administration’s legacy.
However, “White House officials wanted some distance from the Trump effort as well as from COVID-focused branding, when much of the country had moved on from the pandemic,” the Post reported, quoting two anonymous Biden administration officials.
The new initiative also will be “more modest,” and have a “more open-ended mission,” unlike Operation Warp Speed, which focused exclusively on COVID-19.
According to USA Today, the initial $5 billion in funding “will be financed through money saved from contracts costing less than originally estimated.”
Ashish Jha, White House coronavirus coordinator, said the new initiative has three primary goals: creating longer-lasting vaccines, accelerating the development of nasal vaccines and bolstering efforts to create “broader” pan-coronavirus vaccines.
The project also includes funding for more durable monoclonal antibodies.
The name “Project NextGen,” made more sense, Jha said, as it is “a different time” with “a different set of goals.” The new name “much more accurately captures what it is that we are trying to do,” he said.
Michael Osterholm, Ph.D., M.P.H., director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota, is helping lead the effort.
In February, CIDRAP developed a “roadmap” for the development of “better” coronavirus vaccines. This “roadmap” serves as the basis for Project NextGen.
Osterholm was a member of the COVID-19 advisory board convened by then-president-elect Joe Biden’s transition team. The board was dissolved when Biden took office in January 2021.
Jha told the Post, “It’s been very clear to us that the market on this is moving very slowly. There’s a lot that government can do, the administration can do, to speed up those tools … for the American people.”
Previously, during a July 2022 White House coronavirus vaccine summit, Jha said:
“We need vaccines that are more durable. Vaccines that offer broader and longer-lasting protection. Vaccines that can stand up to multiple variants. Vaccines that can handle whatever Mother Nature throws at us.”
Osterholm characterized existing COVID-19 vaccines as “really good” but “not great.”
“There is a substantial amount of work [to be done] to take these good vaccines and hopefully achieve better vaccines,” Osterholm said.
Osterholm noted that SARS-CoV-2 is the third new coronavirus to appear in the past two decades — Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome (MERS) and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) were the other two. According to Osterholm, it would be “great” to be prepared for a fourth new coronavirus when and if it appears.
Reuters quoted an unnamed HHS spokesperson, who stated:
“While our vaccines are still very effective at preventing serious illness and death, they are less capable of reducing infections and transmission over time. New variants and loss of immunity over time could continue to challenge our healthcare systems in the coming years.
“Project NextGen will accelerate and streamline the rapid development of the next generation of vaccines and treatments through public-private collaborations. The infusion of a $5 billion investment, at minimum, will help catalyze scientific advancement in areas that have large public health benefits for the American people, with the goal of developing safe and effective tools for the American people.”
The Post noted, however, that while the outbreak of new coronaviruses in recent decades has “spurred worries about the potential for future health crises,” it might take years to develop a universal coronavirus vaccine, noting that such efforts have been unsuccessful for influenza despite decades of efforts.
Speaking to USA Today, Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, expressed skepticism about Project NextGen’s goals, noting that similar efforts to develop flu and HIV vaccines have been in progress for more than 40 years, without result.
Offit said that the effectiveness of nasal vaccines remains unclear, as they remain in the clinical trial stage at this time. Dr. John Moore, an immunologist at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, expressed a similar view, saying “it’s seriously naïve to believe that it will be easy to make [a nasal vaccine].”
He added that the emphasis on improving existing COVID-19 vaccines, which he described as “amazing,” would likely undermine public trust in those vaccines.
Moore told USA Today that “an initiative like this is much needed and should have been put in place much sooner,” adding that “Anyone familiar with vaccine development knows that translation into a practical product is a much harder and more expensive process” than the creation of a basic vaccine.
“A lot of designs that look good in the early stages fizzle out because they cannot be manufactured efficiently under the conditions required for human trials,” Moore said.
According to Jha though, the new project and its investment in a new generation of coronavirus vaccines “will have very large benefits for other respiratory pathogens we deal with all the time, like flu and RSV.”
Gates, Rockefeller Foundations behind Project NextGen
On Feb. 21, CIDRAP published its “roadmap for advancing better coronavirus vaccines” — with $1 million in support from the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations, “To help jump-start the search for better vaccines [and] develop broadly protective vaccines.”
According to the project description, the funding was used to assemble “an international collaboration of 50 scientists who mapped out a strategy to make the new vaccines a reality.”
Osterholm stated at the time, “If we wait for the next event to happen before we act, it will be too late.”
Bruce Gellin, M.D., M.P.H., chief of Global Public Health Strategy at The Rockefeller Foundation, said that there is an “urgency” to take the next steps, calling for an “equivalent” to Operation Warp Speed.
According to CIDRAP, Gellin “has led several federal vaccine initiatives and has been a technical advisor for groups including Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, COVAX, and the World Health Organization.”
The Gates Foundation is a partner of Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance, which, in turn, closely collaborates with the ID2020 Alliance, which promoted the development of digital ID. Microsoft is a founding member of the ID2020 Alliance, as well as Gavi, the BMGF, the World Bank, Accenture and the Rockefeller Foundation.
CIDRAP received the $1 million grant in April 2022, and by October 2022, had developed a draft version of its “roadmap.” According to Osterholm, it draws on a similar “roadmap strategy” employed by CIDRAP for previous projects, including the improvement of seasonal flu vaccines and the development of a universal flu vaccine.
For the new “roadmap,” these efforts culminated in a 92-page report, and accompanying summary, published in Vaccine journal. The project is divided into five core areas: virology, immunology, vaccinology, animal and human models for vaccine research, and policy and funding.
In an accompanying commentary published in the same issue of Vaccine, Dr. Margaret Hamburg, a former FDA commissioner who is co-president of the InterAcademy Partnership, and Dr. Greg Poland, director of the Mayo Clinic’s Vaccine Research Group, said that COVID-19 vaccines have been effective in preventing serious disease.
Hamburg was a participant in the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s (NTI) monkeypox pandemic simulation in March 2021, based on a remarkably prescient “fictional” monkeypox outbreak in May 2022. She is a board member of the Nature Conservancy and vice president of NTI’s Global Biological Policy and Programs and is on the board of Gavi.
However, according to Hamburg and Poland, there are some problems with the current vaccines, including “notable reactogenicity” in certain individuals, a short duration of protection, and technical requirements that make them difficult to store and administer in remote locations and areas with low resources.
They said the next-generation vaccines may offer additional benefits such as “new methods of delivery — transdermal patches, oral or intranasal vaccines — which are easy to distribute and apply, stimulate mucosal immunity, and potentially block transmission,” adding that this is superior to the current strategy of “chasing” new variants and developing boosters.
Hamburg and Poland said that a universal coronavirus would be easy to stockpile, but the road to the development of such a vaccine could take a “tiered approach,” starting with the creation of a “variant-proof” COVID-19 vaccine, followed by developing vaccines that offer broader protection against various coronavirus families.
Members of CIDRAP said in February that funding would be a challenge for the initiatives set forth in their “roadmap,” due to “shrinking support for large-scale vaccine investments, now that the emergency phase of the COVID-19 pandemic has mainly passed.”
The federal funding earmarked for Project NextGen would, however, appear to address this issue.
Other challenges the CIDRAP team identified included the “lack of corporate incentives, uncertainty around public demand for a broadly protective vaccine, and the feasibility of expanding vaccine production capacity.”
Gellin, however, said in a Feb. 21 University of Minnesota press release that: “Time and time again, we have seen that investment in science brings solutions. The COVID-19 pandemic galvanized the research community and advanced vaccine R&D efficiently and through broad collaborations,” essentially previewing Project NextGen.
On April 20, CIDRAP will hold a one-hour “scientific webinar,” open to the public, presenting their “roadmap.”
Republican lawmakers, Fauci pressed for ‘Warp Speed 2.0’
Political wrangling delayed the funding of Project NextGen, according to the Post, which reported that Republicans insisted that funds were left over from prior COVID-19 aid packages.
Ultimately, HHS “shifted funds intended for coronavirus testing and other priorities” into the new initiative.
Dr. Anthony Fauci was one of the voices who “spent months pressing Congress for billions of dollars that could be used to develop next-generation vaccines and treatments,” the Post reported, adding that these arguments “largely fell flat” in the face of Republican opposition.
However, according to the Post, “Even some of the Republicans who blocked the White House’s coronavirus funding requests last year said they wanted a ‘Warp Speed 2.0’ to rush updated vaccines and treatments that would better fight the virus.”
In August 2022, former Sens. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and James Inhofe (R-Okla.) wrote to President Biden, stating “Operation Warp Speed was the most successful public health program since small pox. It saved millions of lives, and it should be resurrected as soon as possible.”
Dawn O’Connell, assistant secretary for Preparedness and Response at HHS, told the Post that the Biden administration learned lessons from Operation Warp Speed, including how to speed up vaccine development, and that these lessons would be applied to Project NextGen.
“We’ve learned a lot in these three years,” O’Connell said. She added that some of the lab work related to Project NextGen has begun, and that the government has launched efforts to identify potential partners in the private sector.
“We’ve begun surveying the landscape out there — assessing what vaccine candidates are available, [and] moving through what exciting technologies are there,” she said.
According to the Post, O’Connell and her team informed companies working on the development of monoclonal antibodies that the government may soon make new investments in the technology.
Jha, however, refused to set a timetable for when new products developed under the aegis of Project NextGen would be available to the public, the Post reported.
“The timelines are really going to be predicated on how quickly the scientific advancements continue, and how quickly we can study and measure the efficacy and safety of these products,” Jha said.
Project NextGen is also still without a leader, with the White House “still considering candidates,” according to the Post, which noted that the process is slowed down by “Democrats’ desire to avoid questions of conflicts of interest that dogged Operation Warp Speed, after Trump officials selected Moncef Slaoui, a pharmaceutical industry executive with significant stock holdings, to lead that program.”
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
US professor quits after allegedly faking racism stats – media
RT | April 12, 2023
Florida State University criminology professor Eric Stewart has quietly resigned after a month-long absence amid an inquiry into whether he faked data in multiple studies to inflate the prevalence of racism in the US, the Florida Standard reported last week.
A fellow of the American Society of Criminology, Stewart was first publicly accused of falsifying data in 2019 by the co-author of one of his studies, University of Albany criminology professor Justin Pickett, who claimed Stewart had made several misleading changes to the numbers in their 2011 paper ‘Ethnic threat and social control: Examining public support for judicial use of ethnicity in punishment’ immediately before publication.
The published study claimed that public desire for harsher sentences for black and Hispanic offenders increased in proportion with the size of the minority populations in a community. However, the study data showed no such relationship existed, and that the opposite might even be true. Pickett revealed that his colleague had doubled the sample size while leaving out nearly three quarters of the counties polled, mangling the data to the point of incoherence, and said Stewart refused to turn over the raw data so that Pickett could re-run the calculations himself.
That study and four more were subsequently retracted, but when Pickett tried to bring the matter to the university’s attention, he claims he was met with four months of stonewalling. When the school did eventually mount an inquiry, the three-person panel in charge included two people who had co-authored studies with Stewart, violating Florida State’s conflict of interest policy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that inquiry claimed it had not found enough evidence for fraud and advised against continuing the investigation.
Pickett told the Florida Standard that coverups by colleagues are common in the field, explaining “there’s a huge monetary incentive to falsify data and there’s no accountability. If you do this, the probability you’ll get caught is so, so low.”
Stewart, who is black, complained to the university that Pickett – who is white – had “essentially lynched [him] and [his] academic career.”
In 2020, a sixth paper authored by Stewart was retracted – though not before being cited by 186 other papers. Another investigation found enough merit in the fraud claims to pursue them, apparently imperiling Stewart’s $190,000 per year position. Florida State declined to discuss the matter with the Florida Standard, and Stewart’s profile is still live on the university’s website.
Fear of a Microbial Planet