Science and Pseudo-Science

The Myths Told by Covid Experts – And Now Debunked

BY WILL JONES | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | MARCH 1, 2023

In the past few weeks, a series of analyses published by highly respected researchers have exposed a truth about public health officials during Covid: that much of the time, they were wrong – writes Dr. Marty Makary in the New York Post. He sets out “10 myths told by Covid experts — and now debunked”. Here are the first four.

Misinformation #1: Natural immunity offers little protection compared to vaccinated immunity

A Lancet study looked at 65 major studies in 19 countries on natural immunity. The researchers concluded that natural immunity was at least as effective as the primary Covid vaccine series.

In fact, the scientific data was there all along — from 160 studies, despite the findings of these studies violating Facebook’s ‘misinformation’ policy.

Since the Athenian plague of 430 BC, it has been observed that those who recovered after infection were protected against severe disease if reinfected.

That was also the observation of nearly every practicing physician during the first 18 months of the Covid pandemic.

Most Americans who were fired for not having the Covid vaccine already had antibodies that effectively neutralised the virus, but they were antibodies that the Government did not recognise.

Misinformation #2: Masks prevent Covid transmission

Cochrane Reviews are considered the most authoritative and independent assessment of the evidence in medicine.

And one published last month by a highly respected Oxford research team found that masks had no significant impact on Covid transmission.

When asked about this definitive review, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky downplayed it, arguing that it was flawed because it focused on randomised controlled studies.

But that was the greatest strength of the review! Randomised studies are considered the gold standard of medical evidence.

If all the energy used by public health officials to mask toddlers could have been channelled to reduce child obesity by encouraging outdoor activities, we would be better off.

Misinformation #3: School closures reduce Covid transmission

The CDC ignored the European experience of keeping schools open, most without mask mandates.

Transmission rates were no different, evidenced by studies conducted in Spain and Sweden.

Misinformation #4: Myocarditis from the vaccine is less common than from the infection

Public health officials downplayed concerns about vaccine-induced myocarditis — or inflammation of the heart muscle.

They cited poorly designed studies that under-captured complication rates.

A flurry of well-designed studies said the opposite.

We now know that myocarditis is six to 28 times more common after the Covid vaccine than after the infection among 16- to 24-year-old males.

Tens of thousands of children likely got myocarditis, mostly subclinical, from a Covid vaccine they did not need because they were entirely healthy or because they already had Covid.

Dr. Makary blasts the CDC for weaponising research by “putting out its own flawed studies in its own non-peer-reviewed medical journal, MMWR“.

“In the final analysis, public health officials actively propagated misinformation that ruined lives and forever damaged public trust in the medical profession,” he adds.

Worth reading in full.

March 1, 2023 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, United States | Leave a comment

The FDA’s Paxlovid Pandemonium

By David Gortler | Brownstone Institute | February 27, 2023

Back in August of 2022, I wrote a piece on Pfizer’s Paxlovid approval. I talked about how the White House awarded Pfizer billions of taxpayer dollars before producing conclusive findings of safety or efficacy to the FDA.

In approving Paxlovid, the Biden White House and the FDA also seemed to deliberately ignore hundreds of clinical trials conducted on hundreds of thousands of patients detailing the established safety and efficacy of IVM and HCQ.

Like many other things the Biden White House implements, they force through a multitude of ideas, concepts and public health mandates which “seem” like they could work, but without the requisite conclusive scientifically obtained evidence that they will work.

On top of that, the White House doesn’t seem interested in learning. They repeat their mistakes in establishing America’s policies time and time again. Emergencies or not; there is no excuse for foregoing the scientific method (or using poor testing methodologies) thereby placing the Americans at risk – especially when it comes to public health.

Paxlovid is just one of dozens of examples of public health mendacity (too many to list here) pushed by the chaotic Biden White House and its ethically pliant partisan marionettes at the FDA. In the case of Paxlovid, not only was evidence of failure deliberately ignored; prospective testing methodologies were altered mid-trial to favor a positive outcome when it became apparent that the Paxlovid trial results would not meet their original endpoints. In fact, Pfizer had already opted to stop its Paxlovid trial, but then changed their minds after the FDA intervened via the White House.

Even worse: Its not the first time the FDA has forsaken science under Biden (I warned this would be a repeating theme in early 2021). Paxlovid was a failure, but the White House had foolishly already paid Pfizer $5.3 Billion in advance. Rather than admit failure and epic waste, the FDA then stepped in and with zero transparency, altered the established clinical trial parameters mid-trial to make Paxlovid’s findings seem better than they were. Pfizer then completed the trial, declared Paxlovid a success and the White House doubled-down on its $5.3 Billion investment, spending a sickening total of $10.6 Billion on Paxlovid.

That moral and scientific decision was approved by America’s insufferable, self-righteous taxpayer-funded civil servants who proclaim the left is “the party of science” and celebrated that when Biden was elected, “the adults are back in charge.”

“Following the science” is their tired jingle, but not their actual policy.

Even more outrageous were the number of nurses, pharmacists and physicians who witnessed – and fully recognized the scientific misconduct – but remained (and continue to remain) silent, inexplicably choosing to follow clinical recommendations from politicians, bureaucratic hospital administrators, mainstream news or social media. It is impossible to overstate the cowardliness, conformism and malpractice of these professionals in betraying their oaths to protect patients.

In reality, Americans still don’t have answers form the White House, FDA or any other HHS officials on:

1) The White House’s logic of purchasing $10.6 Billion of Paxlovid, and without concrete evidence of safety and effectiveness;

2) How many unused Paxlovid doses remain that will ultimately expire and be thrown away due to non-use, milder disease making it epidemiologically unnecessary;

3) Disclosure of the real-world incidence of “rebound” Paxlovid infections (which would be hard for drug safety epidemiologists to uncover because the White House, Pfizer and FDA have every reason in the world to under-report it, plus “rebound” is not an official [MedDRA] adverse event reporting term);

4) The current/historical prescribing and rates and other Paxlovid adverse event updates;

5) A full disclosure of communications with Pfizer, the White House and FDA officials with a scientifically legitimate explanation of why altered critical parameters of the Paxlovid were made mid-trial and in lieu of starting a completely new trial;

6) An official pharmacologic, mechanistic explanation of “Paxlovid rebound” ;

7) Why the Paxlovid trial was compared to placebo only, and had no IVM / HCQ / other comparator arms.

February 28, 2023 Posted by aletho | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | FDA, Joe Biden, United States | Leave a comment

Cardiac testing at Washington public event found 53% myocarditis rate, including 2 active duty US military pilots – what does it mean?

By Dr. William Makis MD | COVID INTEL | February 27, 2023

An interesting story was reported on Feb.26, 2023 by News 8 WTNH, New Haven, CT. They took the story down about 24 hours later but it is still available on EIN Presswire (click here).

“Nearly 500 people from Washington, Oregon and Idaho gathered at the Wenatchee Convention Center in Washington State on Saturday, January 28 to hear and share stories of…injuries and deaths from COVID shots and hospital protocols; careers upended and families torn apart by mandates; and numerous harms from closures of schools, businesses and churches.”

“Heart screening was available and conducted using multifunction cardiogram technology, or MCG, provided by HeartCARE Corp”

“we had the opportunity to perform Multifunction Cardiogram™ screens on a variety of participants…over half of those tested (16 of 30 people) (53%) had positive markers for myocarditis. Two of these were active duty US Military pilots.”

Studies on rates of post COVID-19 vaccine myocarditis

The rates of post COVID-19 vaccine myocarditis are much, much higher than what Public Health Authorities have admitted to (most will admit to about 1:5000).

There are two key studies on what the real rates of post COVID-19 vaccine heart damage may actually be:

Prospective Thailand study of 202 boys showed 1:30 (7/202) boys ages 13-17 developed myocarditis or pericarditis within a week after 2nd dose of Pfizer COVID-19 mRNA (click here).
Professor Christian Mueller, University Hospital Basel Switzerland conducted testing on 777 healthcare workers within a week after COVID-19 booster shot, and found increased troponinemia in 22/777 (1:35) that had no other cause other than the COVID-19 booster shot (click here)
“The actual incidence of post-vaccination myocardial lesions is 2.8% vs 0.0035% of myocarditis in retrospective studies (unvaccinated)”

“The incidence of myocardial lesions is 2.8% (1:35), or 800 times higher than the usual incidence of myocarditis (in unvaccinated)” the researchers add.

My Take…

I believe myocarditis (heart inflammation) is responsible for vast majority of post COVID-19 sudden deaths that we are seeing now, and health authorities have intentionally downplayed the risk of myocarditis post COVID-19 vaccination.

They don’t want to conduct autopsies on sudden deaths now, because they don’t want us to know that the risk of post-vaccine myocarditis and sudden cardiac death was always much higher than what they admitted to publicly.

Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health admitted to a myocarditis risk of 1 in 5000 and he was lambasted by pharma-captured Ontario doctors who didn’t want any truth to be known (click here)

But both the Thailand study and Swiss study suggest a myocarditis risk of 1:30 or 1:35 per vaccine dose. That means 3% of all COVID-19 vaccinated people could be walking around with heart inflammation (myocarditis) they don’t know they have, which puts them at increased risk for sudden cardiac death, during exercise or in the early morning hours (the trigger for sudden cardiac death is a surge of stress hormones).

The Washington event cardiac testing was not scientific and 53% of people walking around with myocarditis seems very unlikely. But it raises a crucial question.

WHAT IF the risk of post COVID vaccine myocarditis actually increases with time?

As reported by Dr.Peter McCullough, we know that spike protein circulates at least 28 days after injection, and gets delivered to the heart during that time (click here).

The Thailand and Swiss studies tested people only within the 1st week after COVID-19 vaccination and 3% had heart inflammation or heart damage.

What if this gets worse as time goes by? What if the risk of myocarditis actually increases from 3% because the spike protein which inflames the heart continues to circulate for 28 days after injection and probably even longer?

That is what this Washington public cardiac testing is suggesting.

I am also concerned about those 2 pilots with inflamed hearts.

February 28, 2023 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | COVID-19 Vaccine | Leave a comment

This Was a Test of the Emergency Use Authorization System

By Laurie Calhoun | The Libertarian Institute | February 27, 2023

Data continues to emerge according to which not only were the mRNA shots ineffective at preventing infection and transmission of COVID-19, but they may have caused widespread harm to persons cajoled or coerced into undergoing vaccination, despite their own relative invulnerability to the worst effects of the virus. Anecdotal cases abound, but diehard regime narrative devotees continue to dismiss such “incidents”—thousands of which are recorded in the government’s own VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Effects Reporting System) database—as purely coincidental. It is more difficult to downplay reports involving entire cohorts, such as the increased incidence of myocarditis among young males, which the CDC itself has acknowledged. Some critics have suggested that a disproportionately high percentage of pregnant women in Pfizer’s initial trial of the shots suffered miscarriages.

Back in November 2021, in the midst of the widespread and aggressive “Vaccinate everyone!” campaign, I spoke with a woman in Oregon who matter-of-factly mentioned that her (vaccinated) daughter had suffered three recent miscarriages. Recognizing that it was too late to do anything anyway, given that the daughter had already been vaccinated, I did not dare to suggest that her troubles may have been caused by the shots she had no doubt been exhorted by her doctor to take. At that time, following the lead of CDC director Rochelle Walensky, health officials everywhere were in the midst of a marketing blitz according to which COVID-19 vaccination would protect mothers and their babies alike.

I said nothing to the woman in Oregon about the dangers of introducing foreign substances into pregnant women (although I had written about it), but I did naturally wonder at the time whether there might be a causal connection between the poor daughter’s miscarriages and the shots, given the biological activity of the spike protein already known to induce blood clotting and heart troubles. The mother of the young woman—who was pregnant again, for a fourth time—seemed optimistic that somehow there was nothing to worry about, even after three failed attempts to bring a baby into the world. It is possible, I realized then and continue to own, as I must, that the woman was simply unable, for unrelated reasons, to carry a child to term. But given that the biologically active spike protein is what the original virus used to access cells, and production of lots of it was induced by the injected mRNA, it would not take a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist to surmise that the pregnancies may have been sabotaged by the shots.

Critics such as feminist scholar Naomi Wolf, who early on in the pandemic raised questions about the shot’s safety, given many reports of irregular menstrual cycles in women who under went vaccination, were denounced as purveyors of misinformation and immediately deplatformed by the social media giants. Only recently have such “conspiracy theorists” been permitted to articulate their concerns in the public sphere once again—and only on some platforms, including Twitter, which to Elon Musk’s credit reinstated thousands of accounts shut down for the crime of deviating from the narrative favored by the pharma-government alliance. If the shots are indeed dangerous to fetuses, it is needless to say too late for all of the pregnant women tricked into believing that because the CDC insisted that there was no evidence of risk to them and their offspring, they should therefore roll up their sleeves.

That Pfizer knew all along that their mRNA shots had effects upon women’s hormonal systems was corroborated through Project Veritas’ sting operation involving a Pfizer research director, Jordon Triston Walker. In the recorded interview thought by him to be a friendly conversation with a date, Walker observed that the shots seemed somehow to be affecting the endocrine systems of women. The delicate hormonal balance needed to maintain a pregnancy suggests an immediate connection between the widely reported menstruation irregularities of women and the incidence of miscarriages in some of the initial trial subjects.

The data interpreted by some critics to imply that miscarriage was one of the many possible side effects of the Pfizer shot were made public only recently, with the release of a large trove of court-ordered documents which the company is now required by law to provide, despite its initial insistence that it would take seventy-five years to do so. Setting aside the question of whether miscarriage is in fact a side effect of the shots, the very idea that it would take so many years to make public the documents said to have served as the basis for the FDA’s (Food and Drug Administration’s) decision to grant the Pfizer product Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), so that it could forego the customarily stringent multi-year testing program required of pharmaceutical products more generally, struck many people as absurd.

To my mind, the situation constituted a classic Charybdis and Scylla. If it was humanly impossible to process and assess all of the data (all 451,000 pages of it) in the short period between the creation of the vaccines and December 11, 2020, when the EUA was granted, this could be taken to imply that the persons on the committee incompetently executed their role and indeed based their decision to approve the shots primarily on Pfizer’s obvious wish that they do so. Alternatively, it was always possible to process the documents for publication, and the company’s resistance to doing so was due to the content of the documents themselves, which might harm the ambitious sales program to vaccinate everyone on the planet with the new product.

The director of the CDC, Rochelle Walensky, encouraged pregnant women from the beginning to get the shots, quite deceptively claiming that there was no cause for worry about possible health risks to fetuses. The safety information provided with the original shots itself indicated that pregnant women had been excluded from the initial trials, as they are for most pharmaceutical products. The reason why pregnant women are not included in early stage clinical trials of products intended for the general population is because they represent a special case, given the fragile chemical environment enveloping the fetus. It is a matter of common knowledge that developing human beings are highly sensitive to and often endangered by foreign substances—alcohol and nicotine being two well-documented examples. The vulnerability of fetuses was most notoriously and unforgettably demonstrated when pregnant women were prescribed Thalidomide on the basis of clinical trials which, again, excluded pregnant women. As in the case of the COVID-19 vaccines, Thalidomide was distributed by doctors under the misleading marketing line that there was no evidence that it would harm fetuses. Thalidomide killed thousands of babies and deformed thousands more before it was finally withdrawn from the market.

We now know from Pfizer safety data recently released that some of the women in the initial trial were in fact pregnant—apparently without having known that this was the case at the time, which was why they were not excluded from the trial. The vaccines may or may not have caused their reported miscarriages, but the fact that the CDC would encourage pregnant women, on the basis of nearly no data, to undergo vaccination betrays a reckless disregard and their true goals in injecting everyone everywhere, even members of low risk cohorts, with the mRNA treatment. Ignorance is bliss for pharmaceutical companies, which can continue to market and sell products for years, reaping billions of dollars of profits, before finally halting sales on the basis of widely reported and what come eventually to be undeniable post-launch problems, as in the cases of Vioxx, Belviq, Baycol, etc.

Above and beyond the profit motive was plausibly the desire to test the newfangled mRNA technology on the largest sample of human beings possible—whether or not they actually needed any treatment whatsoever in contending with COVID-19. Of course, if the desire on the part of Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla and Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel was to make strides ahead in the research and development of other lucrative medications, then the quest for data, too, was ultimately driven by the profit motive—albeit looking forward, to future possible blockbuster drugs.

Certainly, the steadfast resistance, indeed, the outright refusal on the part of public health authorities such as Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Rochelle Walensky, for more than a year after the launch of the COVID-19 vaccines, to acknowledge the relevance of natural immunity in those persons previously infected, and to recommend appropriate adjustments to the U.S. government’s mandates—for both health care workers and military personnel—supports the hypothesis that one of the overarching aims of the aggressive, relentless vaccine campaign was not to save the lives of the small percentage of human beings vulnerable to the virus, but to amass data.

Corroborating this interpretation, according to which the companies hoped not only to reap a windfall of profits but also to collect a huge amount of data, is the explanation by many critics (including Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Dr. Peter McCullough) of the assiduous suppression of any and every other therapeutic which the vaccine salespersons recognized would compete with and diminish the uptake of the newly patented products. Most importantly of all, ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine were dismissed and denounced by public health authorities, and ridiculed by parroting pundits throughout the media, because EUA cannot be granted to products when alternative therapies are available.

In his conversation with a Project Veritas reporter, Dr. Jordon Triston Walker also shared the potentially explosive piece of information that Pfizer executives had floated ideas such as mutating the COVID-19 virus so as to be able to develop vaccines preemptively. It was not entirely clear from Walker’s remarks whether the intention would be to release those mutated viruses so as to direct the course of the disease in populations, or simply to predict which variants would pop up on the scene naturally, through mutations of the virus in its effort to self-propagate by evading the antibodies induced by the latest shots.

Pfizer responded to the bombshell revelation by effectively minimizing the story through suggesting that the process described by their (now former, I presume) employee was essentially part of the normal, necessary research conducted in producing, for example, the flu shot each year. Nearly everyone by now is more or less aware that the flu shot is a gamble, involving researchers predicting which strains will be most prevalent and virulent. People who undergo inoculation against those versions may still fall ill because they may or may not come in contact with the predicted dominant strains. Some individuals report anecdotally that they were never more ill than during a year when they opted for the “free” flu shot, which clearly indicates that they encountered versions of the pathogen not expected by the researchers who determined the ingredients for the products distributed during that particular flu season. Unsurprisingly, neither anecdotal reports, nor adverse effects, nor even consistently poor efficacy rates have deterred pharmaceutical firms from pushing for widespread uptake of their mediocre flu shot products in very public and misleading advertising campaigns fronted by government health authorities.

Needless to say, if the intention of Pfizer in mutating the COVID-19 virus was to release it into the human population in order to induce countless numbers of persons to seek protection by purchasing (or obtaining from their government) the “vaccine” developed in order to stop that strain, then that would constitute a flagrant violation of any decent person’s basic sense of ethics. Such a possibility would moreover, and disconcertingly, be taken by some to accrue a degree of plausibility to the conspiratorial notion according to which the original COVID-19 virus was not only a gain-of-function product, created by researchers in a lab, but also intentionally released into the world in order to initiate The Great Reset being promoted by members of the World Economic Forum (WEF), led by Klaus Schwab.

More plausible, I believe, is that Pfizer and Moderna, et al., are primarily focused on the future of their other new mRNA products in the works. It is not at all far-fetched to surmise that the relentless, divisive push to vaccinate everyone everywhere with the first mRNA treatment ever tested on a population of human beings, made possible only by the FDA’s EUA, was spearheaded by companies with much broader goals in mind. The CEOs of these companies have publicly vaunted their plans to use mRNA to cure cancer and other intractable diseases, which in fact best explains their manifest fervor to acquire as much data as possible, by all means necessary. Such a program, albeit less explicitly heinous than creating illnesses in order to be able to sell patented cures for the symptoms caused by them, nonetheless involved using all of the people coerced into undergoing treatments for which they had no need as the means to the companies’ mercenary ends.

Further evidence for this admittedly unsavory interpretation can be seen in the push to vaccinate children, even infants, despite the minimal danger posed to them by the COVID-19 virus. If, in reality, the chances of a child dying from COVID-19 is less than the chance of their being hit by a bolt of lightning, then it is hard to see why anyone would push for uptake under a public health pretext. Yet those who wish to foist the product on young persons, including infants, have continued to press the line according to which the virus poses a serious health risk to everyone, and the vaccine will help to protect children along with their parents, this despite data according to which the protection provided by the shots, even to the vulnerable persons who might be said to benefit, plummets to nothing after only a few months. (Preposterously enough, according to one recent study at the Cleveland Clinic, in the longterm, the more shots one has received, the greater become one’s chances of contracting COVID-19!)

A second reason why children have been important for the product companies is peculiar to the United States, where the PREP Act (Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act) protecting companies from liability in the event of adverse effects covers any product approved as a part of the child immunization schedule. Demonstrating their complete capture by pharmaceutical industry forces, on February 9, 2023, the CDC added the COVID-19 shots to the long list of those recommended in the childhood vaccination schedule (which now includes dozens of shots), thus ensuring the product companies massive profits for years to come through the inoculation of persons not at significant risk from the virus, using a product whose already nearly negligible protective capacity for invulnerable persons (a risk reduction of ~1%—or less) spans less than a few months.

Unbelievably enough, the new CDC recommendation for children (beginning at six months) includes the original COVID-19 vaccine, though the wild strain of the virus may no longer exist, along with booster shots, for which the only clinical trial on human beings is currently underway—on the millions of persons who rolled up their sleeves on the basis of safety data gathered from only animal trials. The results are trickling in on the first-round of “bivalent” booster shots, which have so far been demonstrated to have only middling (30%) efficacy in preventing infection by the variant they are attended to address. But the virus will continue to mutate, thus serving as the pretext for producing new booster formulas. This implies that, under the CDC’s immunization guidelines, each new booster shot will of necessity constitute yet another experimental trial, to be conducted, shockingly enough, upon children throughout the years of their development into adults. In other words, children have been set up to serve as test subjects (i.e., human guinea pigs) for each newly developed “booster” to follow in the future as the virus continues to mutate, despite the fact that they make up the least vulnerable cohort of them all.

Why should “vaccines” which do not offer longterm immunity to anyone and are not even necessary for children—the CDC itself explicitly claims that most children will experience only mild symptoms from COVID-19—be included in the battery of time-tested vaccines such as those against polio, measles, etc.? Along with the desire to sell products, and to be able to test new products on children, is, again, scandalously enough, the fact that the CDC’s addition of the mRNA shots to the children’s immunization schedule protects the manufacturers in perpetuity from lawsuits, even after the State of Emergency has ended. President Biden has announced that the State of Emergency will be lifted on May 11, 2023, two months after the CDC added the COVID-19 shots to the children’s immunization schedule.

Because state and local officials follow the cues of the CDC, we can expect to see its recommendation for childhood inoculation by the COVID-19 shots swiftly transformed into mandates for public school children in states throughout the country. This will likely happen in places such as Massachusetts, California, and New York, where health authorities have persisted in retaining laws which restrict the behavior of residents even as new data continues to refute the erroneous premises widely embraced by officials in the spring of 2020 regarding masks, social distancing, etc. Although states such as Florida rescinded the COVID-19 emergency laws, and have passed legislation to protect children, the fact remains: with the federal level CDC recommendation in place, the product companies will retain their protection from future litigation arising from adverse effects, even if the data currently being collected and analyzed eventually demonstrate widespread harm to either children or adults.

It would be a mistake to judge corporations by the moral standards appropriate to individual persons. Corporations are beholden only to their stockholders, and their sole goal is to maximize profit. But the spokespersons for such companies are themselves individual human beings, as are all of the authorities representing public health organizations whose ostensible raison d’être is to protect members of society, not to maximize the profits of their sponsors. When institutions such as the FDA are coopted by mercenary forces, they cease to perform the function which citizens are depending upon them to execute. Because this already happened in the case of the opioid crisis, the fact that people fell for the trick once again in the case of the COVID-19 “vaccines” is best and perhaps only explained by the fearmongering campaign used to psychologically traumatize them to the point where they lost all critical bearings and agreed to undergo an experimental treatment of which most of them had no need.

Every healthy, nonobese person under the age of seventy who underwent COVID-19 vaccination was deceived into serving as a pro bono experimental subject in a pharmaceutical product trial. That millions of well-meaning parents, believing that they are doing the right thing, will on the basis of the CDC’s addition of the COVID-19 shots to the children’s immunization schedule, enroll their progeny in an entire series of such experimental trials, using substances never before tested on human beings, is nothing less than tragic.

Laurie Calhoun is the author of We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age, War and Delusion: A Critical Examination, Theodicy: A Metaphilosophical Investigation, You Can Leave, Laminated Souls, and Philosophy Unmasked: A Skeptic’s Critique, in addition to many essays and book chapters.

February 27, 2023 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, FDA, Moderna, Pfizer, United States, WEF | Leave a comment

CDC Admits It Has No Data to Support Recommending COVID-19 Booster Shots for 12- to 49-Year-Olds

Informed Consent Action Network | February 27, 2023

It can be difficult to keep up with the CDC’s ever-changing COVID-19 booster recommendations, but what is consistent is that the number and frequency of boosters are continually increasing and data supporting these recommendations keeps decreasing. At one point, even mainstream media called out the CDC for the lack of data for these recommendations.

To pin down the CDC on one of its recommendations, in April 2022, ICAN asked the CDC to produce its data that support the efficacy of COVID-19 boosters for 12-49 year olds. The response? Shocking.

The CDC admitted that “A search of our records failed to reveal any documents pertaining to your request.” None. Not one record. Not one study. This means the CDC did not have any data to back up its claims or recommendations for boosters in this age group.

For anyone that has looked at the data regarding boosters, the CDC’s response is unsurprising because study after study shows that repeated boosters increase the chances of contracting COVID-19 disease. For example, as a recent Cleveland Clinic study showed (see Figure 2 in the study), the chances of contracting COVID-19 increase with each additional dose of COVID-19 vaccine.

The above is another piece of evidence in ICAN’s snowballing work to hold our “health” agencies accountable for every unsupported recommendation and false claim made to the public.

See below for more instances where ICAN uncovered “health” agencies making unsupported claims to the public:

February 27, 2023 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science | CDC, COVID-19 Vaccine, United States | Leave a comment

What hasn’t the CDC lied about?

The agency must have told some truths, but it’s hard to identify those statements.

By Bill Rice, Jr. | February 27, 2023

Substack All-Star Igor Chudov just published another important article. This article asks if the CDC was lying all along about “vaccine effectiveness?”

My question (and it’s a serious one) is this: Can someone name ONE pronouncement of CDC officials that either wasn’t a lie or of highly-dubious veracity?

Partial List of Lies …

Per my assessment, the CDC and other national public health agencies and their key experts …

Lied about there being no evidence of early cases in America.

Lied when they said there was no possibility this virus leaked from a lab.

Lied about the effectiveness of masks.

Lied when they said the virus could be spread on physical surfaces.

Lied when they said it would take only two weeks to “flatten the curve.”

Lied when they said that virus transmission could easily happen outside.

Lied about the stats of “cases” and “deaths.”

Lied about the mortality risk to children and healthy young adults.

Lied about ivermectin and HCQ being worthless drugs for treatment.

Lied about remdesivir being a safe drug.

Lied about the vaccines being “safe and effective.”

Lied when they labeled these shots as “vaccines.”

Lied about the “vaccines” and boosters preventing “severe” cases and deaths.

Lied about the necessity or importance of testing people (including the asymptomatic) over and over.

Lied when they attacked and sought to censor people who were telling the truth.

Lied when they “adjusted” estimates of ILI in the Flu Season of 2019-2020 … to make it seem this flu season did not produce “widespread” and “severe” ILI (Covid?) outbreaks.

Before Covid, lied about the effectiveness of the flu vaccines.

A few other questions …

Do liars continue to lie? Will liars lie again?

Do liars often try to cover-up their lies?

Do liars in positions of great power often attack people who try to expose their lies?

Is it smart to continue to trust proven or known liars?

How many lies does some person or agency have to tell before people start to realize they are listening to a liar?

February 27, 2023 Posted by aletho | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | CDC, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, United States | Leave a comment

Hurricane activity not getting worse, new paper shows

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | February 24, 2023

The Global Warming Policy Foundation has today published its periodic review of hurricane activity around the world. The author, climate writer Paul Homewood, says that official data is absolutely clear: they are not getting worse. Indeed, there is some evidence that they are less active in recent years.

Homewood says:

“2021 and 2022 recorded the lowest number of both hurricanes and major hurricanes globally for any two year period since 1980, and this comes against long-term hurricane activity trends that are essentially flat.”

And Homewood calls on journalists to start reporting these undisputed facts to the public:

“While scientists are quite clear that we are not seeing a dramatic increase in hurricanes, or even any increase at all, the public have been conned into thinking that tropical storms are getting worse. It’s high time the mainstream media came clean and told people what is really going on.”

Executive summary

It is widely believed that hurricanes are getting worse as a consequence of climate change. This belief is fuelled by the media and some politicians, particularly when a bad storm occurs. This belief is reinforced because the damage caused by hurricanes is much greater nowadays, thanks to increasing populations in vulnerable coastal areas and greater wealth more generally.

But is this belief correct, or is it a misconception? This study has carefully analysed official data and assessments by hurricane scientists, and finds:

• 2021 and 2022 recorded the lowest number of both hurricanes and major hurricanes globally for any two year period since 1980.
• The apparent long-term increase in the number of hurricanes since the 19th century has been due to changes in observational practices over the years, rather than a real increase.
• Data show no long-term trends in US landfalling hurricanes since the mid-19th century, when systematic records began, either in terms of frequency or intensity.
• Similarly, after allowing for the fact that many hurricanes were not spotted prior to the satellite era, there are no such trends in Atlantic hurricanes either.
• Globally there are also no trends in hurricanes since reliable records began in the 1970s.
• Evidence is also presented that wind speeds of the most powerful hurricanes may now be overestimated in comparison to pre-satellite era ones, because of changing methods of measurement.
• The increase in Atlantic hurricanes in the last fifty years is not part of a long-term trend, but is simply a recovery from a deep minimum in hurricane activity in the 1970s, associated with the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation.

These findings are in line with those of hurricane scientists generally, as well as official bodies such as NOAA and the IPCC.

Paul Homewood: The 2022 Hurricane Season (pdf)

February 27, 2023 Posted by aletho | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

Study Finds Zero Loss of Antarctica Sea Ice – But BBC Spins as “New Record Low”

BY CHRIS MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | FEBRUARY 21, 2023

The catastrophisation of natural events and weather is relentless across the mainstream media as populations continue to be nudged towards an elitist command-and-control Net Zero future. The BBC recently copied a headline from the U.S.-based National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) claiming Antarctica sea ice had hit a “new record low”. Inexplicably missing from the story was the later observation from the NSIDC that since accurate satellite records began in 1979, the trend in the minimum ice extent is “near zero”. Any loss was said to be “not statistically significant”.

To be fair to the writer, BBC science correspondent Jonathan Amos, he did report later in the story that scientists consider the behaviour of Antarctica sea ice to be a “complicated phenomenon which cannot simply be ascribed to climate change”. Of course, as regular Daily Sceptic readers are aware, the Antarctic is a difficult hunting ground for climate catastrophists since over the last seven decades there has been little or no warming over large areas of the continent.

According to a recent paper (Singh and Polvani), the Antarctica sea ice has “modestly expanded”, and warming has been “nearly non-existent” over much of the ice sheet. According to NASA figures, the ice loss is 0.0005% per year. Down at the South Pole, even the most inventive climate alarmists are defeated. In 2021 it recorded its coldest six-month winter since records began, and last year the temperature was 0.4°C colder than the average over the last 30 years. In addition, the Pole recorded no less than seven new daily temperature lows.

The map above shows some warming in the western part of Antarctica, and it is to this area that climate warriors return – again and again. The day before his sea ice story was published, Amos ran with a routine BBC house scare about the Thwaites glacier, often known in green circles as the ‘Doomsday Glacier’. Amos states that glaciers such as Thwaites located in the west may be more sensitive to changes in sea temperature than was thought. “Its susceptibility to climate change is a major concern to scientists because if it melted completely, it would raise global sea levels by half a metre,” he said.

Many of the problems surrounding the unproven hypothesis of human-caused global warming is that it often fails to correlate with observable reality. Why would well-mixed atmospheric carbon dioxide produce a relative warm spot in Antarctica, but leave the rest of the vast continent in a static deep freeze? In 2017, scientists discovered 91 volcanoes in the West Antarctica Rift System. It brought the number of volcanoes discovered in the area to 138. Their heights ranged from 300 to 12,600 feet, with the tallest as high as Mount Fuji in Japan. The scientists noted that even dormant volcanoes can melt ice because of the high temperature they generate. “Volcanic activity may increase and this, in turn, may lead to enhanced water production and contribute to further potential ice-dynamical instability,” the scientists stated.

Again, to be fair to Amos, he does consider other causes of Antarctica ice stability, although the article is headlined “climate change”. His reporting is mercifully free of the emotional gushings produced by the BBC’s green activist-in-residence Justin Rowlatt. When Rowlatt flew to the area, he witnessed “an epic vision of shattered ice”. To him, the Antarctic is the “frontline of climate change”. Amos does note that Thwaites, a glacier the size of Florida, has retreated in some places by 14 km since the late 1990s. But such movement does not seem unusual. Recently a group of oceanographers discovered that parts of Thwaites had retreated at twice the rate in the past, when human-caused CO₂ could not have been a factor. The retreat could have occurred centuries ago, and is said to have been “exceptionally fast”.

Meanwhile, research has just been published that indicates Antarctica could have been warmer in the recent past from 7,000 to 500 years ago. This type of research is always interesting since it helps debunks a common claim made by alarmists that current temperatures are the highest over the last three million years. But numerous scientific studies have shown that temperatures across the planet have been much warmer for recent periods in the Holocene. This latest study in Antarctica found remains of elephant seals along the Victoria Land Coast of the Ross Embayment, which borders both the West and East Antarctic ice sheets. These days, the area is largely free of elephant seals because of shelves of permanent sea ice frozen to the beaches. It is suggested that seals were able to occupy the beaches in a period of warmth before extensive sea ice pushed them off the present day coast.

“Our work shows that for much of the Holocene, the Ross Sea was less icy and presumably warmer than it is today, and this warmth may have driven retreat of the West Antarctica ice sheet from the Ross Sea during the last 8,000 years, and future warming could continue to push ice retreat,” conclude the researchers.

For climate alarmists, the ice is the gift that keeps on giving – every day is a “new record low”.

February 27, 2023 Posted by aletho | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | BBC | Leave a comment

How Scotland pays back for Malawi (non existent) climate damage

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | February 26, 2023

Today’s climate disinformation from the BBC:

Scotland is one of the first countries in the world to stump up cash for “loss and damage” caused by climate change in poorer countries.

When torrential rains came to the village of Mambundungu in Malawi, people’s homes were washed away but that was not the worst of it.

The flood waters were infested with crocodiles. Children were carried away by them. It was terrifying.

Eventually, in 2015, the villagers couldn’t take any more and moved their entire community to higher ground.

Then the new village began to flood too.

Malawi in southern Africa has been hard hit by the effects of climate change

But it is one of the poorest countries in the world and struggles to pay for the measures needed repair the damage.

That’s where the Scottish government has stepped in, promoting the notion that rich nations should help pay for the damage from climate change in less developed countries.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-64501975

There is naturally no evidence provided of just how these floods are caused by climate change. (Well this is the BBC – what do you expect?)

And if you look at the three long running weather stations in Malawi, no evidence exists that daily rainfall extremes are increasing:

https://climexp.knmi.nl/getstations.cgi

So why do these floods appear to be getting worse? There is a very simple reason – deforestation.

According to the BBC themselves:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210420-the-underappreciated-power-of-human-poo

As we know, deforestation leads to increased rainfall runoff, siltation and floods down valley.

The World Resources Institute studied the problem in 2017, writing:

Nearly a year ago, the New York Times ran a devastating story about the deforestation crisis in Malawi and its impact on residents of Lilongwe, Malawi’s capital city. Illegal cutting of nearby forests was causing water shortages and disrupting the city’s hydroelectric power supply, forcing the government to deploy soldiers to protect the forests. The root of this problem was Malawi’s dependence on wood for meeting energy needs―more specifically, charcoal. Nearly 97 percent of Malawian households depend on wood or charcoal for cooking or heating. Even in urban areas, 54 percent of households use charcoal (a product of wood) for cooking. But there are only so many trees.

Malawi is one of the poorest countries in Africa, where electricity is an uncommon luxury and subsistence farming is the norm. With seemingly few options and climate change adding uncertainty, the situation depicted in the New York Times article seemed hopeless.

https://www.wri.org/insights/malawi-turns-corner-solving-its-deforestation-crisis

Instead of blubbering on about climate change, maybe the Scottish government should be helping Malawi to build a reliable electricity grid, based on fossil fuels.

February 27, 2023 Posted by aletho | Economics, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

When I covered climate change for Reuters I thought CO2 was certainly to blame for rising temperatures. I was wrong

BY NEIL WINTON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | FEBRUARY 23, 2023

The BBC and the mainstream media regularly frighten everyone with the latest climate disaster news with pictures of floods, fires and hurricanes, always followed by scary predictions that things will only get worse unless mankind mends its irresponsible ways.

My alma mater Reuters, the global news agency, used to be above all this hysteria and would relentlessly apply its traditional standards of fairness and balance, but even this mainstream outfit seems to have sold out to the hysterics and axe grinders.

The trouble is, many if not all of these disaster stories, far from being another step in a worsening scenario, are often nothing of the kind. In a recent book Unsettled. What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, And Why It Matters, Steven Koonin uses the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change data to show that if reporters took the trouble to do a minimum amount of checking, most of these incidents would appear to be natural disasters, yes, but not part of some ever worsening syndrome.

Economist Bjorn Lomborg has been pointing out for years that humans are having an impact on the climate, but technology will be a match for any problems. Current Government plans to combat climate change will squander massive amounts of taxpayers’ money and achieve very little in terms of stopping rising global temperature, Lomborg says.

Warmist politicians and lobby groups regularly trash the work of a significant group of climate experts, insulting them with unfounded accusations that they can’t be taken seriously because they have barely perceptible links with ‘Big Oil’ and are ‘climate change deniers’. Criticisms are mainly personal and not aimed at their work. Koonin and Lomborg also suffer the unethical ‘denier’ slur, so let’s destroy that canard first.

Every scientist knows the world’s climate has been gradually and occasionally irregularly warming since the last Ice Age over about 10,000 years. Nobody denies the climate is changing. The ‘denier’ charge is nonsensical. But it performs the useful function of making clear the user knows nothing about climate science. The argument is about the ‘why’ not the ‘if’. Warmists say all the warming is because of man’s activity. The rest say some, a little or none.

Education is another area where balance has been replaced by hysteria-inducing propaganda. Children shown demonstrating on the news are often borderline hysterical. No doubt their teachers didn’t bother to tell them that man-made global warming is a theory not a proven fact, and that it’s okay to talk about different opinions.

If you wonder why much of the mainstream media seem united in accepting that the world will soon die unless humans don hair shirts, freeze in winter and walk instead of driving, you need to know about websites like Covering Climate Now (CCN).

Reuters and some of the biggest names in the news like Bloomberg, Agence France Presse, CBS News, and ABC News have signed up to support CCN, which brags that it is an unbiased seeker after the truth. But this claim won’t last long if you peer behind the façade. CCN may claim to be fair and balanced, but it not only won’t tolerate criticism, it brandishes the unethical ‘denier’ weapon with its nasty holocaust denier echoes. This seeks to demonise those who disagree with it by savaging personalities and denying a hearing, rather than using debate to establish its case.

CCN advises journalists to routinely add to stories about bad weather and flooding to suggest climate change is making these events more intense. This is not an established fact, as a simple routine check would show.

I asked CCN about the nature of its dealings with Reuters and the likes of Bloomberg. Was it to thrash out a general approach to climate change reporting or to be more partisan?

CCN hasn’t replied.

I have a particular interest in Reuters’ attitude because I spent 32 years there as a reporter and editor. The global news agency’s traditional insistence on high standards in reporting makes this liaison with CCN seem questionable.

When Reuters announced its tie-up with CCN in 2019 it said this, among other things.

The (CCN) coalition, which includes more than 350 organisations [there are many more now] has no agenda beyond embracing science and fair coverage and publishing more climate change content.

That is clearly not true. It has a partisan agenda and encourages reporters to dismiss those with contrary opinions as ‘deniers’.

The statement went on to quote Reuters Editor-in-Chief Stephen J. Adler:

Reuters is committed to providing the most accurate and insightful coverage of the climate crisis, as it threatens the health, safety and economic well-being of people world-wide. Our hope is that our careful, factual reporting will help nations, businesses and individuals respond to the challenge rapidly and intelligently.

The idea of a ‘climate crisis’ is not widely accepted, but partisans shout about it. It is a very vague claim and hard to define or prove. By Reuters standards shouldn’t this include a balancing view? Certainly, many people believe that there is such a crisis, but lots of people don’t. The idea climate change threatens the health, safety and economic well-being of people worldwide is an assertion, not a fact.

The involvement of Reuters in CCN seems to me to be in direct contradiction to three of its 10 Hallmarks of Reuters Journalism – Hold Accuracy Sacrosanct, Seek Fair Comment, Strive For Balance and Freedom From Bias.

I asked Reuters for its reaction to criticism of its CCN involvement in a new book Not Zero by Ross Clark, published by Forum, and it said this in a statement.

Reuters is deeply committed to covering climate change and its impact on our planet with accuracy, independence and integrity, in keeping with the Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

When I became Reuters global Science and Technology Correspondent in the mid-1990s, the global warming story was top of my agenda. Already by then the BBC was scaring us saying we would all die unless humankind mended its selfish ways. Carbon dioxide (CO₂) was the culprit and had to be tamed, then eliminated. I had no reason to think this wasn’t established fact. I was wrong.

My Reuters credentials meant that I had easy access to the world’s finest climate scientists. To my amazement, none of these would say categorically that the link between CO₂ and global warming, now known as climate change, was a proven scientific fact. Some said human production of CO₂ was a probable cause, others that it might make some contribution; some said CO₂ had no role at all. Everybody agreed that the climate had warmed over the last 10,000 years as the ice age retreated, but most weren’t really sure why. The sun’s radiation, which changes over time, was a favoured culprit.

My reporting reflected the wide range of views, with Reuters typical “on the one hand this, on the other, that” style. But even then, the mainstream media seem to have run out of the energy required, and often lazily went along with the BBC’s faulty, opinionated thesis. It was too much trouble to make the point that the BBC’s conclusion was challenged by many impressive scientists.

Fast forward 20 years and firm proof CO₂ was warming the climate still hasn’t been established, but politics has taken over. Sure, there are plenty of computer models with their hidden assumptions ‘proving’ man is guilty as charged, and the assumption that we had the power and knowledge to change the climate became embedded.

The Left had lost all of the economic arguments by the 1990s, and its activists eagerly grabbed the chance to say free markets and small government couldn’t save us from climate change; only government intervention could do that. Letting capitalism run free was a certain way to ensure the end of the planet; smart Lefties should take charge and save us from ourselves.

The debate about climate change is far from over. I’m not a scientist so I don’t know enough to say it’s all man-made or not. But politicians and lobbyists have decided that we are all guilty. They are in the process of dismantling our way of life, ordering us to comply because it’s all for the future and our children. If we are going to give up our civilization, at the very least we ought to have an open debate. Journalists need to stand up and be counted. The trouble is that requires bravery and energy, and an urge to question conventional wisdom.

Reuters should be leading this movement. All it has to do is stand by its 10 Hallmarks. And maybe tell CCN thanks but no thanks; it needs to apply Reuters principles to its climate reporting.

February 27, 2023 Posted by aletho | Book Review, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Bloomberg, Reuters | Leave a comment

New law sought by Brazil’s Lula to ban and punish “fake news and disinformation” threatens free internet everywhere

Nations seem poised to abandon the core lesson of the Enlightenment: no human institution can or should be trusted to decree Absolute Truth and punish dissent

By Glenn Greenwald | February 25, 2023

A major escalation in official online censorship regimes is progressing rapidly in Brazil, with implications for everyone in the democratic world. Under Brazil’s new government headed by President Lula da Silva, the country is poised to become the first in the democratic world to implement a law censoring and banning “fake news and disinformation” online, and then punishing those deemed guilty of authoring and spreading it. Such laws already exist throughout the non-democratic world, adopted years ago by the planet’s most tyrannical regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey.

If one wishes to be generous with the phrase “the democratic world” and include Malaysia and Singapore – at best hybrid “democracies” – then one could argue that a couple other “democratic” governments have already seized the power to decree Absolute Truth and then ban any deviation from it. But absent unexpected opposition, Brazil will soon become the first country unambiguously included in the democratic world to outlaw “fake news” and vest government officials with the power to banish it and punish its authors.

Last May, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was forced to retreat from its attempt to appoint a “disinformation czar” to oversee what would effectively be its Ministry of Truth. That new DHS agency, at least nominally, was to be only advisory: it would declare truth and falsity and then pressure online platforms to comply by banning that which was deemed by the U.S. Security State to be false. The backlash was so great — the CIA and company are not exactly world-renown for telling the truth — that DHS finally claimed to cancel it, though secret documents emerged in October describing the agency’s plans to continue to shape online censorship decisions of Big Tech.

Brazil’s law would be anything but advisory. Though the details are still yet to be released, it would empower law enforcement officials to take action against citizens deemed to be publishing statements that the government classifies as “false,” and to solicit courts to impose punishment on those who do so.

The Brazilian left is almost entirely united with the country’s largest corporate media outlets in supporting this censorship regime (sound familiar?). The leading advocates of this new censorship law include pro-government lawyers, famous pro-Lula YouTube influencers, and even journalists(!). They are now being invited to and feted in “fake news” and “disinformation” conferences in glamorous European capitals sponsored by UN agencies, because the EU is eager to obtain such censorship powers for itself, and sees Brazil as the first test case for whether the public will tolerate such an aggressive acquisition of dissent-suppression authorities by the state. (Recall that the EU itself, at the start of the war in Ukraine, escalated online censorship to an all-new level by making it illegal for any online platform to host Russian-state media outlets; Rumble’s refusal to obey France’s command to remove RT from its platform forced Rumble to cease broadcasting in France).

Last Sunday, Brazil’s largest newspaper, Folha of São Paulo, announced that I had become a regular columnist for the paper (I will likely publish columns every other week, and those with international relevance will be published in English as well). Their offer came after months of rather intense controversy in which I have been vocally denouncing as dangerously authoritarian the regime of censorship and other weapons of dissent-suppression imposed by a member of Brazil’s Supreme Court, Alexandre de Moraes.

Even prior to enactment of this newly proposed law, the online censorship attacks of this single Brazilian judge, acting with the support of the a majority of its Supreme Court, has been so extreme that even liberal American news outlets have published critical articles on him and what they suggests are his lawless and wild censorship binges (including three in The New York Times, one in the Associated Press and another in The Washington Post ). One New York Times article – published weeks before the first round of the 2022 presidential race that sent Lula and incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro to a run-off – described the judge’s conduct this way:

Mr. Moraes has jailed five people without a trial for posts on social media that he said attacked Brazil’s institutions. He has also ordered social networks to remove thousands of posts and videos with little room for appeal. And this year, 10 of the court’s 11 justices sentenced a congressman to nearly nine years in prison for making what they said were threats against them in a livestream.

The power grab by the nation’s highest court, legal experts say, has undermined a key democratic institution in Latin America’s biggest country as voters prepare to pick a president on Oct. 2. … In many cases, Mr. Moraes has acted unilaterally, emboldened by new powers the court granted itself in 2019 that allow it to, in effect, act as an investigator, prosecutor and judge all at once in some cases.

As the AP articles notes, we were the first to reveal one of Judge de Moraes’ secret censorship orders, which I obtained and then reported on in an episode of SYSTEM UPDATE, which was viewed by more than half a million people:

Despite also being the journalist who – back in 2019 and 2020 – exposed the grave corruption committed by the once-heroic Brazilian judge and prosecutors who imprisoned Lula in 2017 – reporting that won top journalism awards in Brazil, garnered universal praise from the Brazilian left, resulted in an unsuccessful attempt to prosecute me, and ultimately led to Lula’s release from prison and restored his eligibility to run for president in 2022 – both my husband David Miranda (a Congressman until last month) and I have, overnight, become among the most reviled figures by Lula’s followers. This has been in part due to my increasingly active opposition to growing censorship efforts led by this judge and his left-wing allies, censorship which the Brazilian left and their corporate-media allies support with great fervor and with something close to lock-step unanimity.

Those left-wing attacks against us began when David announced in January, 2022 that he was leaving his left-wing party PSOL – which had long been opposed to PT and Lula – because he objected to the party’s decision to support Lula’s presidential candidacy in the first round of voting. He instead joined the center-left party PDT in order to support presidential candidate Ciro Gomes.

Because David was the first national left-wing political official to publicly refuse to support Lula’s candidacy in the first-round of voting, it was necessary for PT to make an example of him (and, by extension, of me). The campaign of vilification was deeply personal. Even as a couple accustomed to being the target of such campaigns, the attacks on us from Lula’s followers were unlike anything I had seen in terms of vitriol, unrestrained online mob rage, and the kind of bigoted tropes the left pretends it reviles but instantly unleashes against any member (such as David) of the “marginalized groups” the left believes it owns.

As is true in the U.S., nothing enrages the left and provokes the lowest and most scurrilous attacks more than when a person they believe they own due to their membership in a “marginalized” group who proclaims their independence and right to think critically (in September, I was forced by David’s health crisis to petition the election court to withdraw his re-election candidacy, and the new Congress was inaugurated on February 1 without him).

But those already-lowly attacks escalated severely when I became much more vocal about my increasing concern over the country’s growing reliance on censorship and due-process-free persecution of PT’s opponents. Unlike in the U.S. – where the liberal-left still pays lip service to their support for free speech while clearly acting to subvert it – the Brazilian left barely bothers with this pretense. Many simply acknowledge that they do not believe in free speech, and equate a defense of free speech with fascism. They do so with no apparent recognition of the irony – that the first thing a fascist regime does is ban books and criminalize dissent – and despite the fact that free speech is a right guaranteed by the Brazilian constitution.

For the globalist order increasingly petrified of internet freedom – they blame online free speech for everything from Brexit and Hillary’s defeat to skepticism of health authorities and growing opposition to U.S. support for the proxy war in Ukraine – Brazil has become the perfect test case for seizing state power to censor the internet in the name of stopping “fake news and disinformation.” Nothing fosters support for authoritarianism the way fear does, and much of the Brazilian establishment believes they are fighting a new War on Terror. Even with Bolsonaro vanquished for now in Florida, his party in the last election won the most seats in both houses of Congress as well as key governorships across the country.

Just as the Bush/Cheney government exploited the 9/11 attack, and the Biden administration still exploits the January 6 riot, to justify previously unthinkable assaults on core civil liberties, the Brazilian left – in union with the country’s establishment – is now exploiting the January 8 invasion of government buildings by a few thousand Bolsonaro supporters to argue that anything and everything is justified in the name of their “war on terrorism” (unlike the 3,000 deaths on 9/11, and the deaths of four Trump supporters on 1/6, nobody died or was grievously injured on January 8 in Brasilia). And using the same playbook of neocons to support their crisis-justified civil liberties attacks, anyone in Brazil who even questions the need for new censorship powers and other attacks on dissidents demanded by the government is accused of being “pro-Terrorist” or an “apologist for fascism” (I honestly never thought I would live to see the day when one stands accused of being pro-facist for opposing censorship rather than supporting it, but such are the times in which we live).

That is why Europe, and large sectors of the U.S. establishment, see Brazil as the perfect laboratory to test how far censorship powers can go. With many Brazilians believing they just suffered their own 9/11 or January 6, all power centers know that the perfect time to seize new authoritarian powers and abridge core liberties is when the population is in a state of fear and terror, and thus willing to sacrifice liberties in exchange for illusory promises of security.

And recall that polling data in the U.S. shows that very large majorities of Democrats (and a disturbingly robust minority of GOP voters) would support a law similar to the one pending in Brazil to empower the state to restrict internet freedom in the name of stopping “misinformation.” As Pew found in 2021, 65% of Democrats “say the government should take steps to restrict false information, even if it means limiting freedom of information.” Perhaps the First Amendment would be a barrier to implementation of such a law in the U.S., but there is ample public support, especially on the liberal-left, for state censorship of the internet.

A major reason I accepted the offer to become a Folha columnist is that it gives me a significant platform in Brazil to combat what I regard as these increasingly grave attacks on core liberties, not only because they threaten rights of free speech, due process and a free internet in Brazil, but because they threaten all those values far beyond Brazil’s borders as well. My reporting on this new “fake news and disinformation” law sought by Lula’s government as set forth below includes parts of my first Folha column published last Sunday on the dangers of this newly proposed law, as well as significant new passages I wrote for an international audience and for publication of this new article here on Locals.

Ten days before the run-off voting for the 2018 presidential election which sent Bolsonaro into the presidency, Folha reported that an “illegal practice” was being used to help Jair Bolsonaro win that election. “Companies are purchasing large packages of messaging assailing [Lula’s] Workers’ Party (PT) for mass dissemination on WhatsApp,” Folha explained.

Bolsonaro not only denied the story but accused both Folha and PT of spreading Fake News. As Folha noted at the time, Bolsonaro’s party “intended to sue” his election-year rival Fernando Haddad of PT. Bolsonaro accused PT of “spreading false news.”

Upon winning the presidency, there was no law available to Bolsonaro – similar to the one which Lula’s government is now proposing – that would have empowered his government, or judges sympathetic to him, to ban discussion online of Folha’s reporting by claiming it was “fake news.” But if he did have that power – if the law which PT hopes to implement to govern “fake news” had been in the hands of Bolsonaro’s allies – it is very reasonable to suspect they may have used it to suppress those revelations on the ground that, in the view of Bosonaro’s supporters, the allegations were “false.”

After all, the new law proposed by Lula’s government would empower both the judiciary and the equivalent of Brazil’s Solicitor General (AGU) to take more aggressive action to combat “fake news” online. Among other new powers, the proposed law would permit “an action by the AGU, a body that legally represents the government, to file legal cases against those it regards as authors of false content.”

In a January 19 interview with Folha, Lula’s chief spokesman, Paulo Pimenta, vowed: “we will start to respond more forcefully, more sharply, to information that distorts the truth and is wrong.”

Everyone would love to live in a world in which an omnipotent and benevolent power who rules us allows only truthful statements, while it accurately identifies and then outlaws all false claims. Such a world sounds like paradise: no errors, only truth. Who could possibly be opposed to that?

Unfortunately, human nature makes such a world impossible. If history teaches any lesson, it is clear that treating human leaders or institutions as capable of god-like infallibility and super-human wisdom is quite dangerous.

Humans have tried all this before. For a thousand years prior to the Enlightenment, most societies were ruled by omnipotent institutions – monarchies, empires, churches – that claimed to possess absolute truth and therefore outlawed any views that deviated on the ground that they were “false.”

The core innovation of the Enlightenment, one of the greatest intellectual advancements of human liberation, was that all human institutions are fallible, that they endorse false claims either due to error or corruption, and that every individual must always retain the right to question and challenge their orthodoxies.

In sum, there is no such thing as an institution of authority that can be trusted to decree what Truth is. The oldest indigenous societies, far from Europe, had already internalized this lesson, having discarded faith in centralized authorities in favor of decentralized power and dispersed democratic values. And what is now called “the democratic world” is founded in the view that secular truths are ascertained not by decrees of monarchs, clerics and emperors, but by free and open debate driven by human reason and the sacred right to dissent.

Since the start of the COVID pandemic, it has been bizarre to hear left-liberals throughout the democratic world proclaim their devotion to science while simultaneously demanding that all “false statements” about science be banned. Science cannot exist if one assumes that permanent truth has already been apprehended. Science requires the acknowledgement that even its most brilliant and accomplished experts may have embraced grave errors and faulty assumptions. Scientific truth is unearthed only by permitting challenges to prevailing orthodoxies, not by prohibiting let alone outlawing them.

To say that one believes in science while demanding that “falsity” be banned is like saying that one believes in religion while demanding that prayer be banned. Scientific discovery, like all intellectual endeavors, only advances by a process of trial and error, by challenging and objecting to prevailing beliefs so that error can be uncovered. To ban “false claims” is not to honor and strengthen science but to vandalize and kill it.

From the start of the COVID pandemic, many of the claims made by the world’s most prestigious experts and trusted institutions have turned out to be false or uncertain. As just one example, the World Health Organization announced in February and March of 2020 that asymptomatic people should not wear masks and that doing so could make a COVID infection worse by “trapping” the virus. In April, the recommendation was the opposite: everyone should wear masks regardless of one’s health condition.

In 2018, any Brazilian “fact-checker” would have affirmed as true the statement that Lula was a “thief,” as he was convicted of multiple corruption felonies, which Brazilian appellate courts affirmed on appeal. By 2022, the situation was reversed as Brazilian courts nullified that conviction (in large part based on the revelations of our reporting regarding the corruption on the part of Lula’s judge and prosecutors). As a result, Brazil’s election courts in the 2022 campaign banned campaign materials calling Lula a “thief” on the ground that they were false.

In other words, what was considered Gospel about Lula in 2018 became prohibited Falsity just four years later. That is the unyielding, universal pattern driving human intellectual advancement: what is deemed Truth one minute becomes shameful and discredited the next.

For that reason, at the heart of every censor resides one of the most toxic human traits: hubris. It is astonishing to watch some humans believe that they have managed to liberate themselves from this historical cycle of misperception, misapprehension and error, and instead believe that they have become owners of the Truth. Even with the best of motives, only hubris would lead people to have so much confidence in their truth-finding abilities that they would want the state to make it a crime to question or deny their views of the world. And yet no other mentality than this one can account for someone supporting the kind of law to ban and punish “fake news and disinformation” as the new Brazilian government and its allies in Congress are on the verge of adopting.

Error is the inevitable condition of even the most well-intentioned humans. But most humans do not operate with the purest of motives. Humans with great power are highly likely to abuse that power absent very serious limits. Even if you believe you finally found political leaders with almost god-like virtue, who can be trusted not to abuse such powers when suppressing ideas as “false,” it is extremely likely such laws will be transferred in the future to new leaders with different ideologies and who are more human than the deity you have been fortunate enough to have found.

And as has been widely reported, the new industry to define “disinformation” is largely a scam. It is funded by a small handful of liberal billionaires, and employs highly politicized actors who claim a fake expertise – “disinformation experts” – to masquerade their ideological views as science. Any attempts by the state to make “fake news and disinformation” illegal will almost certainly rely on this fraudulent industry to justify their censorship decisions by claiming that their assessment of truth and falsity has been supported by “experts.”

If Brazil implements this proposed law, it will not be the first time a government is empowered to ban “fake news” on the internet. Other countries live under governments which have been given the power to ban journalism and commentary on the ground that it is judged by the state to be dangerous, to be false, to incite violence, or to foster social instability or even revolutions against the prevailing order.

Regimes with such laws are the planet’s most despotic: Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Singapore and Qatar (whose law, entitled “Crimes against the internal security of the State,” allows the state to “impose up to five years imprisonment on anyone who spreads rumors or false news with bad intent”).

There, the outcome is predictable. All dissent against government orthodoxies and criticism of its leaders are quickly labeled “false” or “dangerous” or designed to incite violence and are censored on that ground. Last May, the UN, warning about a newly proposed “anti-disinformation” law in Turkey, “expressed concern after the vote by the Turkish parliament of a law that could imply the imprisonment of up to three years of journalists and users of ‘social media’ for the dissemination of ‘fake news’.”

Those attacks on dissent using these “Fake News” laws are not due to “abuse of a good law.” They are, instead, the inevitable, arguably the intended, outcome of such a law. No political faction is immune from believing that any dissent from its core pieties is not just misguided but deliberately false and even dangerous.

The dissent-suppressing persecution where such laws have been allowed to flourish are entirely predictable. Only in authoritarian cultures, or ones that wish to return to the pre-Enlightenment days of full submission to institutions of authority, would citizens trust political, governmental or religious officials with the power to declare absolute truth and then, using the force of law, bar any expression that deviates from it.

These abuses of “fake news” laws happen in those countries where those laws have been adopted not because those countries are different than ours, but because they are the same. All powerful leaders, even well-intentioned ones, will be highly tempted to ban dissent on the grounds that it is dangerous or “false.”

Humans, by our very nature, are incapable of acquiring absolute truth about politics or science even with the best of motives. What one generation believes to be proven Truth (the earth is the center of the universe) is demonstrated by subsequent generations to be gross error, though such truth-tellers often suffer severe persecution when “falsity” is rendered illegal (which is why Socrates, Copernicus, Galileo, Voltaire and many others like them wasted years attempting to avoid prison or worse, often unsuccessfully, due to laws banning ideas deemed “false” by the reigning authorities of their era). The intellectual history of humanity has one indisputable lesson: humans will always err when claiming they have discovered such absolute truth that nobody should be permitted to doubt or challenge their claims.

It is likely for these reasons that “the large portion” of the Brazilian legal specialists consulted by Folha about Lula’s proposed law to ban “fake news and disinformation” emphasized “that a legal process of this kind by the government can set a precedent that represents a risk to freedom of expression, given the possibility of being weaponized for judicial harassment against critics and opponents.”

Even if you are lucky to have found the most trustworthy and benevolent leaders in history, ones who are somehow capable of decreeing truth without erring and who use such laws only in the most noble ways – something the Brazilian left believes of Lula and his government – at some point other leaders will be elected and they, too, will have such powers.

When assessing whether one should support a proposed law, the key question is not whether one is comfortable with it in the hands of leaders one likes and trusts, but whether one is comfortable with such powers in the hands of different leaders.

February 26, 2023 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science | Brazil, Human rights | Leave a comment

Republicans race to stop Biden giving WHO power over pandemic surveillance, controlling “disinformation”

By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | February 25, 2023

Republican senators are pushing back against an accord that would give the World Health Organization (WHO) power over member states if it declares a pandemic. The accord, which is legally binding on all member states, will be finalized in Switzerland this week.

The accord will give the WHO power to declare pandemics and require member states to give the WHO the “central role” as “the directing and coordinating authority on international health work” in areas like medical supply chains, treatments and lockdowns. However, the WHO also wants more power over surveillance and controlling “disinformation and fake news” when a pandemic is declared.

17 senators, led by Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson, have introduced the “No WHO Pandemic Preparedness Treaty Without Senate Approval Act.” The bill states that the accord should be called a treaty. As a treaty, it would require approval by two-thirds of the Senate.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

“The WHO, along with our federal health agencies, failed miserably in their response to COVID-19,” Sen. Johnson stated. “This failure should not be rewarded with a new international treaty that would increase the WHO’s power at the expense of American sovereignty.”

However, some legal experts believe the legislation will not stop President Joe Biden from signing the accord as the accord was drafted to bypass Senate approval.

February 26, 2023 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | United States, WHO | Leave a comment

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Seyed M. Marandi: U.S. Military DIVIDED? Iran’s Secret Defense EXPOSED

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‘Israel sees Iran as obstacle to its policies’

Press TV – August 25, 2017

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that Israel felt threatened by Iran’s growing influence in the Middle East. Netanyahu expressed his Iranophobic view in a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Russia’s Black Sea resort of Sochi on Wednesday. Press TV has asked Scott Rickard, former American intelligence linguist from Tampa, Florida, and Brent Budowsky, a columnist at The Hill from Washington, to give their thoughts on the issue.

Rickard said Tel Aviv is concerned about the fact that the regime could not carry out its old project to spread sectarian divisions and pave the way for dismemberment of the countries in the Middle East region because of the Iranian-led resistance against Israeli policies, not only in the occupied territories of Palestine but also in the whole region.

“Iran is not a threat to Israel whatsoever. The threat that Israel sees is the fact that their Oded Yinon Plan is being put to a hold by Iran,” the intelligence linguist said on Thursday night.

“They (the Israelis) look at Iran as a threat only because they have no influence on their governments and Iran is autonomous and is not under the Zionist influence,” he added.

Since the victory of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, Tehran has been critical of Israel’s policies in the region, whereas “no leaders [of other states] even dared to speak out against Zionism,” Rickard argued. … continue

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