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 |
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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 |
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The agency must have told some truths, but it’s hard to identify those statements.
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?
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.
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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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.
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:
So why do these floods appear to be getting worse? There is a very simple reason – deforestation.
According to the BBC themselves:
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.
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 |
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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 |
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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
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 |
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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 |
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Studies, trials by Pfizer Biontech were “seriously flawed” and fraught with “many irregularities” German journalist finds. It’s all beginning to dawn on the media…
Emergency approval based on sloppy and deceptive trials and studies?
At Germany’s flagship daily Die Welt, journalist Elke Bodderas recently penned an investigative article: The Many Irregularities In The Pfizer Approval Study
Until recently, Germany’s mainstream media had refused to report on the glaring number of side effects of the COVID 19 mRNA vaccines, dismissing them has disinformation spread by rightwing crackpots. But now there’s no denying something has gone terribly awry, and that the “crackpots” had been right all along.
Cover-up?
In her article, Bodderas concedes that the Biontech/Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine appears to have been “based on incorrect documentation”, that there is “growing doubt about the data from the pivotal Phase 3 trial” and that “Pfizer is dodging the accusations and refusing to be scrutinized.”
The metropolis Buenos Aires was a key area for test phase with almost 6000 of the 43,548 test subjects worldwide, and things there, according to Die Welt’s Bodderas, “did not go as they should have”.
The “significant, consequential irregularities” that arose during the trials “cast the entire study of the efficacy and side effects of the Biontech/Pfizer vaccine in a different light.”
No one believes “safe and effective”, not even the media
In Germany, the days of believing the new mRNA vaccines by Biontech and Pfizer are “safe and effective” are finally disappearing as a reluctant mainstream media begins to report on the glaring adverse effects and the now well-known inadequately conducted trials.
In other parts of the world, it’s been long known that these new experimental vaccines not only did not work like they once had been claimed to do, but that they also never prevented the transmission of the virus and had numerous, dangerous side effects. Only now, months later, are these now well-known facts beginning to dawn on Germany’s mainstream media.
Shoddily conducted trials
Die Welt reports on how Argentine test candidate Augusto Roux, a 36-year old lawyer, felt unwell after having received his second dose in the trials, then “experienced shortness of breath, burning chest pain, nausea, and fever” and that “his urine turned black like cola” before passing out. After having been admitted to a hospital, physician Gisela di Stilio suspected an “adverse reaction to coronavirus vaccine (high probability).” But Roux was simply dropped from the December 2020 study, and never appeared in subsequent evaluations. Instead he was counted as having suffered from COVID-19.
Suppression of unwelcome results?
In total, “In one fell swoop, the test administration [in Buenos Aires] had said goodbye to 53 subjects on August 31, 2020. The test candidates had been ‘unblinded.’” reports Die Welt’s Bodderas.
Die Welt adds: “A total of 302 subjects of the vaccine group were deleted from the study after the second vaccination and thus not included in the evaluation. 200 of them came from Buenos Aires. Have unwelcome results been suppressed here?”
According to Bodderas, “Deaths were concealed, serious side effects were not registered, and the study protocol was violated several times.”
“The case casts a bad light on Pfizer, a company that has often been plagued by scandal in the past, but also on the regulatory agencies EMA and FDA.”
Bodderas also appeared on Bild’s Viertel Nach Acht: “Serious Flaws in Pfizer BioNTech Vaccine Study.”
February 26, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | COVID-19 Vaccine, EMA, FDA, Germany, Pfizer |
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In an interview with CNBC News in September 2020, Dr. Albert Bourla, the veterinarian Chief Executive Officer of Pfizer — the second largest pharmaceutical company in the world by revenue — said that anyone refusing to take the BioNTech vaccine will become “the weak link that will allow the virus to replicate”, and assured the public that “we will develop our product, develop our vaccine using the highest ethical standards”.
It was a dangerous claim to make, even for a CEO and investor making billions out of the experimental mRNA gene therapy product. Pfizer has a long history of paying out vast sums in out-of-court settlements to avoid not only claims in civil cases but also prosecution on criminal charges resulting from the fraudulent promotion, unapproved prescription and injury, including death, from use of its products. It has also offered millions in payments to doctors and scientists to prescribe, test, approve and recommend them to the public. So let’s have a look at what Dr. Albert Bourla means by Pfizer’s ‘ethical standards’.
- In 1992, Pfizer agreed to pay between $165 million and $215 million to settle lawsuits arising from the fracturing of the Bjork-Shiley Convexo-Concave heart valve, which by 2012 has resulted in 663 deaths.
- In 1996, Pfizer conducted an unapproved clinical trial on 200 Nigerian children with its experimental anti-meningitis drug, Trovafloxacin, without the consent of their parents and which led to the death of 11 children from kidney failure and left dozens more disabled. In 2011, Pfizer paid just $700,000 to four families who had lost a child and set up a $35 million fund for the disabled. This cover-up was the basis of the John Le Carré book and film The Constant Gardener.
- In 2004, Pfizer’s subsidiary Warner-Lambert was fined $430 million to resolve criminal charges and civil liabilities for the fraudulent promotion of its epilepsy drug, Neurontin, paying doctors to prescribe it for uses not approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
- In 2009, Pfizer spent $25.8 million lobbying Congressional lawmakers and federal agencies like the Department of Health and Human Services. Its expenditure on federal lobbying between 2006 and 2014 came to $89.89 million. In 2019 it spent $11 million lobbying the federal Government.
- In 2009, Pfizer set a record for the largest health care fraud settlement and the largest criminal fine of any kind, paying $2.3 billion to avoid criminal and civil liability for fraudulently marketing its anti-inflammatory drug, Bextra, which had been refused approval by the FDA due to safety concerns.
- In 2009, Pfizer paid $750 million to settle 35,000 claims that its diabetes drug, Rezulin, was responsible for 63 deaths and dozens of liver failures. In 1999, a senior epidemiologist at the Food and Drug Administration warned that Rezulin was “one of the most dangerous drugs on the market”.
- In 2010, Pfizer was ordered to pay $142.1 million in damages for violating a federal anti-racketeering law by its fraudulent sale and marketing of Neurontin for uses not approved by the FDA, including for migraines and bi-polar disorder.
- In 2010, Pfizer admitted that, in the last six months of 2009 alone, it had paid $20 million to 4,500 doctors in the U.S. for consulting and speaking on its behalf, and $15.3 million to 250 academic medical centres for clinical trials.
- In 2012, Pfizer paid $45 million to settle charges of bribing doctors and other health-care professionals employed by foreign Governments in order to win business. The Chief of the Securities and Exchange Commission Enforcement Division’s Foreign Corrupt Practices Act Unit said: “Pfizer subsidiaries in several countries had bribery so entwined in their sales culture that they offered points and bonus programs to improperly reward foreign officials who proved to be their best customers.”
- By 2012, Pfizer had paid $1.226 billion to settle claims by nearly 10,000 women that its hormone replacement therapy drug, Prempro, caused breast cancer.
- In 2013, Pfizer agreed to pay $55 million to settle criminal charges of failing to warn patients and doctors about the risks of kidney disease, kidney injury, kidney failure and acute interstitial nephritis caused by its proton pump inhibitor, Protonix.
- In 2013, Pfizer set aside $288 million to settle claims by 2,700 people that its smoking cessation drug, Chantix, caused suicidal thoughts and severe psychological disorders. The Food and Drug Administration subsequently determined that Chantix is probably associated with a higher risk of heart attack.
- In 2013, Pfizer absolved itself of claims that its antidepressant, Effexor, caused congenital heart defects in the children of pregnant woman by arguing that the prescribing obstetrician was responsible for advising the patient about the medication’s use.
- In 2014, Pfizer paid a further $325 million to settle a lawsuit brought by health-care benefit providers who claimed the company marketed its epilepsy drug, Neurontin, for purposes unapproved by the FDA.
- In 2014, Pfizer paid $35 million to settle a law suit accusing its subsidiary of promoting the kidney transplant drug, Rapamune, for unapproved uses, including bribing doctors to prescribe it to patients.
- In 2016, Pfizer was fined a record £84.2 million for overcharging the NHS for its rebranded and deregulated anti-epilepsy drug Phenytoin by 2,600% (from £2.83 to £67.50 a capsule), increasing the cost to U.K. taxpayers from £2 million in 2012 to about £50 million in 2013.
- In May 2018, Pfizer still had 6,000 lawsuits pending against claims that its testosterone replacement therapy products cause strokes, heart attacks, pulmonary embolism and deep vein thrombosis, and were fraudulently marketed at healthy men for uses not approved by the FDA.
- In June-August 2020, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice said they were looking at Pfizer’s activities in China and Russia under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which forbids U.S. firms from bribing foreign officials.
- In November 2021, the British Medical Journal revealed that the Ventavia Research Group had falsified data, unblinded patients, employed inadequately trained vaccinators, and was slow to follow up on adverse events reported in the phase 3 trial for Pfizer’s ‘vaccine’.
- Since 2000, Pfizer has incurred $10.268 billion in penalties, including $5.637 billion for safety-related offences; $3.373 billion for unapproved promotion of medical products; $1.148 billion for government contract-related offences; $60 million under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act; and $34.7 million for ‘kickbacks and bribery’.
Given this record of ongoing corruption and malpractice from, which only its enormous profits have saved it from criminal prosecution by means of out-of-court settlements, it seems extraordinary that Pfizer Inc. is still permitted to manufacture and sell any health-care products. Yet this is the pharmaceutical company we were asked by the U.K. Government, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, the U.K. Health Security Agency and the National Health Service to trust with the mass vaccination of 68 million people with a product that was rushed through clinical trials in seven months, employing experimental mRNA biotechnology whose clinical trials are not due to be completed until March 2023, for a disease with the infection fatality rate not much above seasonal influenza, which statistically is no threat to those under 50 years old, and for which there is no evidence that it prevents infection by the virus.
That was three years ago, during which the British people have paid with their freedoms, their health and their lives for believing the lies of their Government, their National Health Service and international pharmaceutical companies. Subsequent retractions by Pfizer, however, are an opportunity to revisit its claims in more detail.
On December 10th 2020, the U.S. Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee met to evaluate the trial data on the efficacy and safety of Pfizer/BioNTech’s mRNA COVID-19 vaccine contained in the briefing document produced by Pfizer itself titled ‘Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine (BNT162, PF-07302048) Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee Briefing Document‘. It was on the basis of this evaluation that, on December 11th, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted Emergency Use Authorisation to its mRNA gene therapy product. And given the subsequent debate about what Pfizer claimed its ‘vaccine’ would do, it might be useful to review the contents of this document.
The FDA’s Emergency Use Authorisation, which requires less data than standard approvals and is based on a lower standard of proof, was issued for a vaccine “intended to prevent Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by SARS-CoV-2”. It was issued for prevention, therefore, not for reduction of the severity of symptoms, as was claimed when it became clear the gene therapy product did not prevent infection. Pfizer’s claim was that its product had a ‘vaccine efficacy’ of 95% protection against COVID-19 occurring after second days from injection with the second dose. In its clinical trials, a ‘case’ of COVID-19 was defined as a positive RT-PCR test for SARS-CoV-2 and the presence of at least one of the following symptoms: fever, cough, shortness of breath, chills, muscle pain, loss of taste or smell, sore throat, diarrhoea or vomiting. Nothing was said about asymptomatic ‘cases’ of COVID-19, or claimed about the ability of the gene therapy product to stop ‘asymptomatic transmission’ of the virus.
Pfizer’s benefit assessment was that its mRNA vaccine may be able to induce “herd immunity”, induces strong “immune responses”, and “confers strong protection against COVID-19”. This clearly indicates protection against both infection with the virus and the disease. Since transmission of a virus from person to person requires prior infection, Pfizer’s claim that its vaccine protects against infection, and the suggestion that sufficient injections will induce ‘herd immunity’, is also, by extension, a claim that it stops transmission from the injected.
The subsequent claim by Janine Small, Pfizer’s President of International Developed Markets, during her testimony before the European Union Parliament in October 2022, that Pfizer never tested whether its ‘vaccine’ stopped transmission appears, therefore, to rest on the myth of ‘asymptomatic transmission’. The implication of her statement was that Pfizer’s product only stops infection with SARS-CoV-2 and symptoms of COVID-19. However, the FDA’s Emergency Use Authorisation for Pfizer’s vaccine was based on prevention of both infection and disease. Pfizer’s claim is not evidence, as many afterwards claimed, for the lack of justification for making injection a condition of lifting lockdown or imposing vaccine passports, but rather an attempt to deny responsibility for the failure of its product (from which it has made $69 billion) to meet either of its claims.
An indication of just how unscientific was the FDA’s Emergency Use Authorisation of Pfizer’s vaccine is that it was granted on the basis of protection from infection and disease, while conceding there is no evidence that the vaccine “prevents transmission from person to person“. This is the way the ‘Science’ we mustn’t question or deny but blindly follow is conducted in what I call the global biosecurity state. Indeed, three years after it announced the pandemic in March 2020, the World Health Organisation can still only offer the following justifications for the four vaccines authorised for use in the U.K.
- Pfizer/BioNTech: “There is modest vaccine impact on transmission.”
- AstraZeneca/Oxford: “No substantive data are available related to impact of the vaccine on transmission or viral shedding.”
- Moderna: “There is only modest impact on preventing mild infections and transmission.”
- Novavax: “There is not currently sufficient evidence to date to evaluate the impact of the vaccine on transmission.” (See World Health Organisation, ‘COVID-19 advice for the public: Getting vaccinated’.)
Failure to offer protection against infection or transmission, however, are the least of the failings of Pfizer’s ‘vaccine’. As the evidence of the harms and deaths caused by this experimental gene therapy product injected into the U.K. public becomes too overwhelming for all but the Covid-faithful, the British press, the U.K. Parliament and our Government to ignore, there have been no end of doctors, nurses and medical professionals protesting they thought Pfizer’s biotechnology was ‘safe and effective’. But aren’t they trained to spot when something is going medically very wrong?
As of January 25th 2023, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, responsible for authorising the injection of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine into U.K. citizens, has received 180,005 reports of 517,779 adverse reactions to the injections, over 70% of which reports (127,405) have been classified as ‘serious’, including 884 deaths following injection. Including AstraZeneca’s viral-vector gene therapy product and Moderna’s mRNA gene therapy, the MHRA has received a total of 477,553 reports of 1,555,433 adverse reactions to the COVID-19 gene therapies, 74 per cent of which (355,052 reports) are categorised as ‘serious’, including 2,436 deaths following injection.
By the MHRA’s own estimation, only 10% of serious adverse reactions and 2-4% of non-serious reactions are reported, so the actual tally of injuries, autoimmune disease, reproductive and breast disorders, miscarriages and premature births, facial paralysis, blood clotting, amputations, myocarditis, pericarditis, heart attacks and deaths — all of which were recorded in Pfizer’s own analysis of post-authorisation adverse events as early as February 2021 — is far higher, undoubtedly many times higher. Indeed, this — and not the risible excuses with which the U.K. public has been fobbed off by the U.K. media — is likely a major cause of the huge increase in mortality in the U.K. since the ‘vaccine’ programme was implemented, contributing to the more than 60,000 excess deaths in 2022.
Given which, it is my contention that any medical professional that authorised or administered the injection of U.K. citizens with the Pfizer/BioNTech gene therapy product is at risk of being found guilty in a court of law for failure to give sufficient warning of adverse effects and obtain informed consent.
Simon Elmer is the author of two new volumes of articles on the U.K. biosecurity state, Virtue and Terror and The New Normal, which are available in hardback, paperback and as an ebook. This article is an extract from an article in Volume 2, ‘Bowling for Pfizer’. Please click on these links for the contents page and purchase options. On March 11th, to mark the third anniversary since the declaration of the pandemic by the World Health Organisation, he will be holding a book launch at the Star & Garter, 62 Poland Street, W1F 7NX, upstairs in the William Blake room from 6-8pm. Entry is free, with book signings, a reading and open-mic discussion.
February 25, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | COVID-19 Vaccine, FDA, Pfizer, UK |
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In retrospect, it was surprisingly easy. Here are some of the key features that explain what happened to our world.
For almost three years I’ve been researching Covid topics. Based on this deep dive, I feel qualified to offer opinions on the question of how all the events of the last three years actually materialized.
Stated differently, how did all of this madness actually happen?
I quickly identified several big themes or pivotal events that help explain how so many nonsensical and harmful policies became a reality.
Readers can identify other features that that were important in getting us to where we are today. As always, feedback is appreciated and welcome.
Note: “They” = public health officials, establishment authority figures and leaders, myriad vested interests who were all “on the same page” when it comes to Covid policies and narratives.
They sold fear … hard, incessantly, shamelessly, brazenly, unapologetically.
In short, hyper fear of a novel (and “deadly”) virus was THE prerequisite for everything that followed. So how was this mass fear/panic actually produced?
The groundwork must have begun many months and years before the “Wuhan outbreak.”
Multiple “table top” exercises (like Event 201) were conducted to lay the groundwork for what would follow.
All the key “stakeholders” were recruited to participate in these events, often organized by groups like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Politicians, bureaucrats, key media members, physicians, scientists, and representatives of all they key agencies and key organizations were recruited and then participated in these exercises.
Main-Takeaway: Advance “buy in” had already been achieved regarding the key premises of these table-top planning exercises. An event like Covid-19 had already been predicted and this was the blueprint for dealing with this … if you were going to be a part of the enlightened group that was going to help save the world.
Significantly, no participants ever questioned any of the assumptions built-in to these exercises and when Covid was announced nobody wanted to challenge any of the responses.
Appeals to authority, groupthink, wanting to support the “current thing” (to protect your status and career advancement opportunities) helped ensure that no significant dissenting voices would come forward to thwart or block the agreed-upon course of action.
Logistical and legislative actions had already been implemented to ensure nothing or no one could block the response. “Emergency orders” of bureaucrats trumped the need for legislative votes, which were not even required to implement policies that turned the world upside down.
It now seems that the Department of Defense played a larger role (than most realized) in making the key decisions.
Still, Fauci, Birx (a former military doctor), and Collins played a large role in orchestrating policy and getting the president to go along with their recommendations.
At some point, China’s response – locking down parts of their country – was endorsed as the bold and effective solution that should be used everywhere. The outbreak in northern Italy helped create more fear.
I’ve written many articles about “early spread.” However, one of the key planks explaining how what happened in America actually happened was the wide-spread belief that “late spread” of this virus was occurring.
That is, the virus had not yet spread through America (and other countries) and thus it was wise and proactive to implement draconian lockdowns and non-pharmaceutical interventions to slow or stop the spread of the virus. The public was told that that they could “flatten the curve” with just two weeks of inconvenience.
Significantly, nobody in official capacity or the mainstream press ever questioned whether the virus may have already spread throughout much of the country or the world (even though case of Influenza like Illness were rampant in many sections of the country/world).
Organizers of the response, per their table top exercises and research, knew that physicians were among the “most trusted” people in the world. Officials quickly got all the leading medical associations to sign off on the grave threat.
Once the physicians groups were on board, the guidance or marketing became “listen to your physicians.”
The vast majority of leading scientists also quickly came on board … perhaps because they knew going against Anthony Fauci would jeopardize their future research grants.
No one in the mainstream press ever questioned the doomsday scenarios and indeed actively promoted the “this-must-be-done” narrative.
Censorship and cancellation of dissenting voices slowly and then rapidly became a priority. All social media, Big Tech companies and legacy media companies implemented “misinformation” guidelines that had rarely if ever been utilized.
Seeding, funding and establishing “misinformation” experts had actually begun months or years earlier. Almost all at once, these disinformation gurus sprung into action, further muzzling any significant “push back” against the authorized narrative.
I think a key event, rarely mentioned or remembered, was the decision of the Ivy League to cancel its conference basketball tournament in early March. The Ivy League is supposedly a repository of the brightest minds in the world. Once the Ivy League did this, the NBA and other organizations (The PGA cancelled a big golf tournament after one round) quickly followed. The dominoes started to fall and the momentum was set in motion.
Lesson: Be wary of the actions of the Ivy League or elite colleges.
The federal government actually could not compel any citizen, state or city to comply with its “guidance” but this didn’t matter as governors and mayors almost all at once implemented their own, more specific, lockdown orders. Or: They simply followed the federal “guidance.”
In retrospect, it’s quite fascinating that almost 100 percent of state and local officials “signed off” on such draconian mandates. It’s also worth noting that Gov. Ron DeSantis, the one prominent politician who did challenge the narrative, became a political superstar almost overnight.
To make it more likely that hospitals and medical clinics signed off on the various treatment guidelines and protocols, the federal government came up with numerous financial incentives (payouts) to get the hospitals and doctors to go along with their program. So hospitals received extra money for treating a Covid patients or if someone was placed on a ventilator.
Congress enacted emergency funding to mollify many groups that might otherwise have suffered economic damages. New money was printed out of thin air. State governments were compensated for implementing the federal program.
Media organizations began to receive advertising funding for promoting Covid safety and, later promoting the vaccines.
Mandatory masking was ordered, which further promoted the requisite fear of the virus.
All big companies signed off on the proposals even while many of their smaller competitors were put out of business, which was fine with the big guys.
Somehow the churches put up no resistance. No meaningful organization put up any resistance.
How did the organizers get virtually 100-percent compliance from all key stakeholders? The answer is found in psychological and sociological reasons: Nobody in a “leadership” role wanted to be a contrarian as this would be dangerous to their careers.
“We are all in this together” was the implied or explicit message. This was a great event in history (like fighting WWII) and the only way to defeat the “enemy” (the virus) was for all citizens to act together … and do what the experts said must be done. In other words, comply.
The fear was ramped up to a new level thanks to 40 to 45-cycle PCR tests suddenly flooding the market (as well as mandatory testing).
The media daily reported “new cases” and “new deaths,” most of which probably weren’t caused by this novel coronavirus.
It was rarely if ever mentioned that the average age of death of a Covid victim was around 82 – which is at or beyond the average life expectancy.
Anyone who questioned the narrative was met with a rejoinder that “XXX,000” people have already died. Unspoken was the fact very few people personally knew one person under the age of 60 who had died, and these official deaths “from” Covid were massively inflated.
In late March 2020 through April 2020 massive spikes of deaths in certain cities like New York City, New Orleans and Detroit received massive media coverage.
Receiving virtually no media attention was the hundreds of other hospitals that were almost ghost towns.
The lockdowns lasted many months (even years) in some states … not “two weeks.”
Nobody questioned why the check-out girls at the “essential” super markets were not becoming casualties of Covid even though they came in close contact with hundreds of customers every day and touched every item the customer had put in their buggies.
At some point, the narrative (pushed by the experts) became that the only thing that would stop or end this pandemic was mass vaccination … so people just had to hold on until Pfizer and Moderna saved the world and ended the pandemic.
The vaccines arrived in “warp speed” and the world got a non-stop dose of this is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” stories.
People were fired for not getting vaccinated or pressured into getting vaccinated (although after the non-stop fear campaign, 75 percent of the country was rushing to their pharmacy to get their shots). Plus, all the medical experts recommended this and everyone trusted their doctors.
At some point, officials no longer needed to pressure the public into “fighting Covid.” Citizens took up the charge themselves. America became an “us against them” society – and the skeptics were the mangy dog “thems.”
When people continued to get sick or infected after vaccination, the narrative became the shots lowered the likelihood you’d have a “severe case.”
The fact the vaccines did not work as advertised actually didn’t damper enthusiasm for the vaccines at all. The Covid vaccines became the only product in world history that was a colossal bust – but still generated record sales and demand.
A spike in “all-cause” deaths began days, weeks or months after the roll-out of the vaccines, but these spikes in deaths were either not reported or were blamed on Covid. Never mentioned was that the vaccines were supposed to make Covid deaths an impossibility.
The “narrative” that the vaccines were “safe and effective” – probably repeated a billion times – was never challenged by anyone in official capacity. In many states and cities, the lockdowns and restrictions were never challenged.
In a nutshell, Project Massive Fear worked.
All the key stakeholders “bought in.” Even if some people eventually realized some of the narratives may have been dubious or false, they’d already risked their reputations and careers by zealously pushing or endorsing these narratives … so they weren’t going to suddenly admit they might have been wrong.
In retrospect, how “they” made all the madness happen was surprisingly easy.
February 25, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
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