Incentivizing Censorship: a Snitch in Every Skull
Traveling the nine circles of thought-police hell with TJ Coles, the cancelled University of Plymouth academic.
Helen of desTroy | January 22, 2023
An informational iron curtain is coming down across the West, and its architects are determined to make examples out of those who refuse to pick a side. Our Democracy™ has adopted a zero-tolerance policy for pollution of the information ecosystem, and the Thought Police are standing by to halt rogue infodemics in their tracks, lest the people lose trust in their institutions. Dr. Tim Coles, a freelance writer and postdoctoral researcher until recently at the University of Plymouth didn’t realize he was in their crosshairs until he found himself locked out of his university email account in October. Tech support was no help; department staff refused to talk to him, closing ranks and sending him a threatening email demanding he cease contact. Clearly, he had violated some unwritten law. But what?
The chain of emails that had culminated in his removal only raised further questions about why an apparent stranger whom Plymouth has refused to name – a university employee, he suspects – had complained about his writing for Australian magazine Nexus to his old PhD examiner. In a Kafkaesque turn, the complaint lacked a single concrete accusation of wrongdoing that Coles could defend himself against, instead equivocating around familiar “conspiracy theorist” tropes.
At any rate, no one had thought to consult Coles, perhaps believing him to be a disgruntled ex-student trading on his old university email rather than a researcher whose work at the university was funded by an outside trust and had nothing to do with his political writing. Rather than pause for clarification, his PhD examiner appeared to jump in with both feet, urging tech staff to help get Coles “off [the university’s] books.”
While a prolific writer on many controversial topics – US funding and training of neo-Nazis in Ukraine, the West’s neocolonial plunder of Africa under the guise of fighting terrorism, and Big Pharma’s giant power-grab under cover of Covid-19 unholy alliance of Big Pharma and Big Tech amid the coronavirus outbreak are just a few – Coles believes he ran afoul of the university censors with a series of articles about intelligence agencies blackmailing people with child sexual abuse that ran in Nexus not long before the cancellation effort began. That particular subject has a tendency to get journalists killed, and Coles wonders if his ejection from Plymouth might be a warning shot from groups displeased with his inquiries. He acknowledges, however, that the timing may be a coincidence – Hope Not Hate and other intelligence-controlled censorship advocates were apparently trying to have Nexus banned in the UK around the same time for its publication of unorthodox views on Covid-19.
While he believes the evidence in the email chain is enough to prove wrongdoing by the university, Coles couldn’t even file a complaint through the normal channels, as his inquisitors had roped the complaints department into their conspiracy by including them in the email chain. He has considered releasing the messages publicly as a last resort, but first plans to employ an outside arbitrator and give the System one last chance – more than he was given, at any rate.
Dr. Coles is far from the first to be booted from a British university campus for thoughtcrime. He sees parallels between his case and that of David Miller, the University of Bristol sociology professor who was subjected to a ferocious academic inquisition and ultimately drummed out of his post in late 2021 after the Board of Deputies of British Jews deliberately misinterpreted comments he had made about Israel weaponizing Jewish students abroad. The university’s Union of Jewish Students had been attacking him for years before seizing upon the supposedly discriminatory comment, which they only heard because they had sent in an activist ’spy’ to monitor one of his classes – ironically validating the professor’s claims better than his own arguments could have.
Like Coles, Miller was never directly confronted by his accuser, who opted for mealy-mouthed pseudo-accusations (“conspiracy theorist,” “inciting hatred”) over potentially-disprovable crimes. Like Plymouth, Bristol took the side of the accuser against its employee almost reflexively. Former Labour MP Chris Williamson, himself a victim of the Israeli lobby’s devastating smear machine, joined the Support David Miller campaign in warning that the university’s failure to stand up for the professor would only encourage “bad faith actors” to pursue further censorship.
Shortly before the lobby finally convinced Miller’s university to mount an investigation into his supposed bigotry, he observed that such pressure tactics were imported from the Israel lobby in the US and pointed out that if any other foreign lobby attempted to wage such total war on its critics, they would be “laughed out of the room.” But Coles’ experience suggests other groups have taken lessons from the Israelis – and that Williamson’s warning was prescient.
Academic “cancel culture” is a well-known scourge of American campuses, where careless tweeting costs lives and professors can be axed for using the wrong pronouns. But while most discussion of the phenomenon centers on the targeting of conservative professors, it has targeted left-wing heterodoxy with equal fury, as tenured New York University media studies professor Mark Crispin Miller discovered when a student demanded his firing via Twitter after taking offense to a discussion questioning the utility of masks in his 2020 class on Propaganda.
Like Coles and his fellow Miller across the pond, Miller was attacked by university colleagues with vague allegations of “attacks on students and others in our community,” “aggressions and microaggressions,” and “explicit hate speech” and an investigation was launched behind his back even in the absence of any specific forbidden act. Administrators went one step further and contacted all his students to remind them of the CDC’s mask guidance, lest their fragile minds have been corrupted by the conspiracy theorist in the classroom. They couldn’t fire him – he was tenured, after all – but they did their best to make his life so miserable that he would leave, forbidding him from teaching his beloved Propaganda class, and he has been on sabbatical since.
Even Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch, was recently denied a fellowship at the Carr Center for Human Rights, part of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, on the basis of wrongthink – what its dean described as his “anti-Israel bias.” Roth has toed the line on foreign policy groupthink elsewhere, dutifully demonizing Putin, Assad, Trump, and so on as the needs of Empire demanded. But his refusal to ignore Israel’s increasingly bold apartheid policies got him the David Miller treatment despite years of faithful service. If Roth isn’t safe, many academics have begun to wonder, what the hell are they going to do to me?!
While Dr. Coles questions if universities were ever really the freethinkers’ utopia so many academic misfits yearn for, there is no denying groupthink has tightened its hold in recent years. While an academic might once have been left alone to research controversial subjects on his own time so long as he didn’t embarrass his employer, this laissez-faire approach has been replaced by an administrative panopticon that is both hyper-responsive and reflexively condemnatory – a “cottage industry of shutting people down.” Censorship has been outsourced from the state and its corporate minions to “academics and think tanks who are given a well-funded government hammer so they see everything as a nail of disinformation,” Coles explains. Not simply salaried, they are financially incentivized to bag-and-tag as many pieces of “disinformation” as they can, essentially bounty hunters for inconvenient truths, enabling a much tighter, more granular control of information than was ever possible under a traditional totalitarian model.
These programs and campaigns – with names like Integrity Initiative, Center for Countering Digital Hate, Trusted News Initiative – initially appear to be independent nonprofits that just happen to share a common devotion to fighting fake news. However, their cooperation is more than superficial, with many of the same entities ultimately directing their actions as they work together to artificially muscle the discourse in the desired direction, choking off competing narratives while maintaining plausible deniability regarding their connections to the state.
In this model of soft totalitarianism, the dissident is not so much ordered to cease publishing objectionable ideas, or even threatened with execution or creative torture. He is merely subjected to mounting insults, ‘nudged’ in certain directions, and gradually stripped of resources, especially any public platform he may have had in accordance with his refusal to follow the rules. Amid this complex ballet of carrot and stick, he is constantly reminded that these are his decisions, making him (in his own mind, at least) a willing participant in his own spiritual suffocation.
Fact-checkers, once mere newsroom employees tasked with verifying the details of major stories, have been artificially elevated into a caste of gatekeepers, deemed impartial arbiters of truth even as their donor lists burst with conflicts of interest from Pierre Omidyar to Bill Gates to George Soros. This veneer of independence allows them much greater latitude than any equivalent government body, as the ignominious collapse of the US’ Disinformation Governance Board last year proved. This official Ministry of Truth, which would have operated out of the Department of Homeland Security, was a bridge too far even for the American media establishment, which had long since embraced its unofficial equivalent censoring tweets and Facebook posts to keep the world safe for democracy.
All it took to get English-speaking countries to accept the need for these newly-minted (the International Fact Checking Network was only launched in 2015) cognitive babysitters was for a few pathological liars to blame Trump’s 2016 electoral victory and Brexit on Russian disinformation. Never mind that neither hypothesis was ever substantiated, or that both have since been thoroughly discredited – unfiltered access to information has joined the lengthy list of threats to social harmony, and the fact-checkers, having tasted power, are unlikely to return to the newsroom. Given that a free press is integral to a functioning democracy, it goes without saying that any regime looking to dismantle the latter would want to get the former out of the way.
No sooner had Dr. Coles been chased out of his university for his writing in one Australian alt-media magazine then he was engulfed in a censorship firestorm over another. An article appeared earlier this month in New Zealand news outlet Stuff excoriating bookstore chain Whitcoulls for carrying the latest edition of New Dawn, a publication which proudly bills itself as a “forum for alternative, non-mainstream ideas that question consensus reality.” Stuff’s coverage berated the bookstore for exposing unsuspecting customers to the jungle of “conspiracy theories” barely restrained within its pages (full disclosure: I have also contributed writing to New Dawn), focusing its rage on Coles’ “The curious case of Brenton Tarrant,” about the Christchurch mosque shooter.
When Whitcoulls did not immediately capitulate, “disinformation expert” Kate Hannah was called in to warn Kiwis who picked up the magazine that they were enabling “dark agendas” seeking to “destabilize liberal democracy.” Reading Coles’ article wasn’t just engaging in wrongthink, but actually committing a crime, she explained, because the article included information on how to access the illegal-in-New-Zealand helmet-cam video Tarrant recorded while shooting his way through the mosque. Just reading about where to find the video might run afoul of hate speech laws, she mused in a radio interview.
Of course, the article includes no such instructions, nor does it – as Hannah claimed – claim Tarrant didn’t shoot anyone. Coles is baffled by the disinfo expert’s disinfo, but suspects the reason they didn’t include his name (standard practice in establishment hit-pieces) in the pressure campaign is that he could justifiably sue for libel. But the mere threat of legal repercussions was sufficient to keep 99.9% of Kiwis away from the forbidden magazine, and perhaps sensing no sales in its future, Whitcoulls finally pulled the issue from its shelves.
New Zealand’s size and isolation make it a perfect experimental laboratory, and the other Four Eyes haven’t hesitated to use it as such. Nor have the Israelis, whose operation was exposed during the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. The 2019 shooting that launched the current touchless torture regime was preceded as such events often are by a series of odd ‘coincidences’ and foreshadowings. Just a few months before the massacre, a group of American survivors of the Parkland, Florida high school shooting visited the city to discuss “living through a tragedy” with their Kiwi counterparts; two Parkland survivors and a Sandy Hook survivor allegedly committed suicide in the months following the mosque killings. A police drill just happened to be taking place near the fleeing gunman, allowing participants to “heroically” capture him in what media dutifully described as a “hell of a coincidence.”
The speedy gun-grab that followed the tragedy left citizens helpless in the claws of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, and the subsequent clampdown on the internet was unprecedented in any other western “democracy,” with prison sentences meted out for merely sharing a link. Ostensibly to prevent anyone from reading Tarrant’s manifesto or watching the curiously videogame-like footage of the killings, the rules had the effect of banning access to entire video archives, international forums, and other information resources that might have helped the country’s residents make sense of what had just been done to them, and they were designed to be copied by the other four Eyes – or any other country that should want them.
While all five Eyes adopted unprecedented controls on social media during Covid-19, New Zealand went much further than its peers in controlling the actual publication of news. In March 2020, facing rumors that lockdown was imminent, Ardern warned upstanding citizens to avoid all unauthorized sources of information, urging them to stick with the government’s official site as “your single source of truth.” The message didn’t age well – New Zealand was locked down within the week – but her point had gotten across loud and clear. Arrested while protesting Auckland’s return to lockdown in 2021 over just three “cases,” popular radio host and pandemic dissident Vinny Eastwood was only released on the conditions that he remain under house arrest 24/7 and stay off the internet – draconian requirements for a man who made his living live-streaming. He was later permitted back online, but only on the condition that he not advocate against Covid-19 restrictions – a deliberately subjective line in the sand meant to encourage self-censorship above all.
While the media establishment overflowed with praise for Ardern over her iron-fisted suppression of the population – er, pandemic – no one has thought to ask why, if the West questions all Covid-19 stats coming out of China due to government control of all information sources, they believed the numbers coming out of New Zealand. Even news sites like Stuff, which describes itself as “fiercely independent,” are actually public-private partnerships – in this case funded by the New Zealand government and the Google News Initiative, powered by the bonanza of helicopter money that was dumped on the news media in 2020 to fight the “infodemic” of Covid-19 “disinformation.” That the campaign against New Dawn was no organic outrage was clear – Coles’ article is the last in the issue, and the likelihood of an indignant civilian pawing through 70 pages of conspiracy contraband just to find something they can claim is illegal approaches zero. Its favorable result means it will likely become the blueprint for future book-burning campaigns.
But why go after a couple of obscure Australian conspiracy magazines? Especially in New Zealand, but increasingly in the US and Europe, Big Tech no longer allows the average user to stumble upon the kind of content published by New Dawn or Nexus. Even non-Google search results from once-reliable alternatives like DuckDuckGo and Brave have been scrubbed clean of all deviations from the establishment line on topics like Covid-19 or the war in Ukraine, let alone the Christchurch shooting, and as Coles remarked, the censorship is even creeping through time into the Wayback Machine, the internet researcher’s go-to that once contained archives of much of the internet dating back decades – but now increasingly turns up error pages or sloppily retconned fact-checks. However, Kiwis browsing at Whitcoulls had at their fingertips a powderkeg of new information, rendered all the more volatile by three years spent in informational quarantine. Just as a person locked down for months will see her immune system suffer for lack of outside stimulation, any novel pathogens hitting her much harder when she finally goes outside, the Good Citizen who imbibed only Ardern-approved data for three years will likely be unable to muster even the slightest argument against whatever outrageous claims she finds in New Dawn and perhaps become lost to the weak grasp of establishment propaganda forever.
There’s an easy solution to this problem, should New Zealand want to solve it. Teach children to think critically, instead of the dumbed-down “media literacy” programs being promoted by every self-proclaimed “disinfo expert” this side of PropOrNot. Thought-stopping “information hygiene” techniques (Google it! Look it up on Wikipedia!) and reflexive appeals to authority (only a scientist can interpret that study for you!) do not help an individual resist persuasion. But a population armed with the ability to recognize an official lie and dismantle it would not allow themselves to be locked down over a few cases of a disease they were almost 100% certain to survive anyway – so of course New Dawn couldn’t be permitted to question Christchurch. It is the (shaky) foundation on which Ardern’s hastily-constructed police state was built. As rumors fly about her surprise resignation on Thursday and the media establishment rends its garments over how “unfairly” this “icon of many” was treated by “far-right extremists,” it seems clear her departure will be weaponized to further crack down on the increasingly nebulous specter of “hate speech.”
Americans who believe the New Dawn affair could only have happened in an unarmed, isolated nation like New Zealand should pay attention to what their Congress is up to. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) earlier this month introduced a bill that would criminalize the publication of “antagonism based on ‘replacement theory’” and “hate speech that vilifies or is otherwise directed against any non-White person or group” on social media if it can be said that the perpetrator of a “white supremacy inspired hate crime” had encountered the material before committing the crime – or that if they had encountered the material, it could conceivably have motivated them to take such actions.
Without bothering to define such critical terms as “hate speech” or even “replacement theory,” often trotted out for effect when the speaker needs to strike an emotional chord, the bill leapfrogs pre-crime to a total reversal of cause and effect. A content creator can be charged with conspiracy to commit a white supremacy motivated hate crime so long as the actual criminal can be shown to have engaged with their content before committing the crime. In fact, they don’t even need to engage with it – so long as the content could theoretically motivate a “person predisposed to engaging in a white supremacy inspired hate crime” to, well, you know. It’s completely subjective, based on what a “reasonable person” would do when no “reasonable person” would be caught dead in the same room as this bill. This means if someone reads the nursery rhyme “Baa baa black sheep” – declared ‘problematic’ nearly a decade ago for its racial overtones – then picks up an AR-15 and shoots a black family at church, the nursery rhyme writers could be charged with conspiracy to commit a white supremacy-motivated hate crime. Jackson Lee herself cited the example of “someone making a post online that catches the attention of someone who then drives to North Texas and kills 20 Mexican Americans” to make clear precisely how unhinged she is.
It’s doubtful that such a case would make it to court, or lead to a conviction if it did, but public opinion – a product of think tank fellows rather than crowds – can turn on a dime. What sorority girl getting sloshed on margaritas in an oversized Cinco de Mayo sombrero in 2012 would have thought she’d be sentenced to remedial readings of “White Fragility” in 2022? The aim is not to create more work for the official censors but to spook the target into silence with fear of what could happen. Leaving the definition of “white supremacy” open-ended allows an ever-larger spectrum of opinion to be cordoned off as toxic, banned from university campuses and social media, and finally memory-holed as unthinkable. At the same time, actual racists like Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion are invited with open arms to travel the US speaking on university campuses, swastika tattoos and all. While the Anti-Defamation League is quick to tar and feather any academic who points out Israeli war crimes, the censorship-loving Jewish organization has issued what amounts to an official indulgence for Ukraine’s biggest Third Reich fanboys.
I know what would look great with that swastika – another swastika!
Given the FBI’s penchant for crafting terrorism plots out of whole cloth, it would be a simple matter to take out all online wrongthinkers in one fell swoop under the white supremacy conspiracy law – just set up the usual militia honeypot for disaffected white boys, hand them the gear and point them at the minority in question, and make sure a manifesto is found nearby conspicuously listing the websites of every influential dissident in America. While last year’s Missouri v. Biden lawsuit proved – and the Twitter Files confirmed – that social media platforms were being used by a dozen or more government agencies to circumvent First Amendment prohibitions on state censorship, this new arrangement would eliminate even the need for that end-run, requiring only the fig leaf of Unacceptable White Supremacist Beliefs™ to justify the most egregious constitutional abuses.
“Replacement theory” – the idea that white Americans and/or Europeans are being deliberately supplanted in “their” nations by swarthy foreign hordes to suit nefarious ruling class purposes – first entered the mainstream discourse when Tarrant, who titled his manifesto “The Great Replacement,” supposedly set out to kill as many Muslims as possible because they were out-breeding Europeans. Tarrant’s manifesto would have gotten quite a few people in trouble as white-supremacy conspirators, many of them dead – it includes poems from Dylan Thomas and Rudyard Kipling, memes, Wikipedia articles, and an infamous passage explicitly citing black conservative commentator Candace Owens as his ideological inspiration. Tarrant and copycats like Payton Gendron (the Buffalo supermarket shooter and friend of the FBI whose manifesto borrowed liberally from Tarrant and others) have helped transform the epithet “conspiracy theory” from CIA-sponsored smear to precursor of violent extremism, though they couldn’t have done it without UNESCO, the World Jewish Congress, and the Council of Europe, who recently joined forces to remind humanity that “conspiracy theories cause real harm to people, to their health, and also to their physical safety.”
Europe has taken the legal lead in equating conspiracy theory to terrorism, banning author David Icke from the entire Schengen Area last year because his scheduled speech at a peace rally in the Netherlands posed a potential “threat to public order.” Rather than stand up to the police state, the media eagerly flew to its side, quoting “experts” who sagely opined that the “danger” posed by Icke’s “conspiracy ideology” was both clear and present and could inflict “lasting harm” upon the country. This is in keeping with the refrain the WHO has kept up all alongside Covid-19 – that a deadly “infodemic” is spreading through sharing unapproved information about the virus, and that good citizens refrain from posting conspiracy theories online because words are equivalent to violence. This is a central part of children’s “media literacy” classes, aimed at building the perfect content filter directly into the child – because Big Brother can’t be everywhere. The idea is to graduate a generation for whom privacy is alien, dissent is criminal, obedience is a competitive sport, and turning in your parents for wrongthink is second-nature, all justified by the vague nonspecific crisis that has been looming in the background since they were born.
The censorship of New Dawn, the university witch-hunts against Dr. Coles and both Millers, the absurd white supremacy conspiracy bill, are all symptoms of the same totalitarian virus gradually sucking the will to resist out of humanity. Just as viruses need host cells to multiply, so does this one require an army of facilitators – “fake news” bounty hunters, “disinformation experts,” and the like – to smooth out humanity’s rough edges into blissful obedience. A pandemic – even an artificially-inflated synthetic one like Covid-19 – has to end, but an infodemic is forever, and this one has proven 100% fatal to human rights.
Meta gave the CDC de facto power to police Covid “misinfo”
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | January 20, 2023
The mask is slipping (pun fully intended), all over the place – regarding the Big Tech/Big Government collusion. Now it’s time to pay close attention to the role played by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
We’ve already been awed – just by the magnitude of the whole thing – if not exactly “shocked” by the Twitter Files.
After all, while it was happening, a whole lot of observers surmised that something of the sort had to be behind the unprecedented and, seemingly inexplicable levels of censorship on the platform.
But – what in the world was happening at Facebook, around the same time? After all, Facebook is an almost orders of magnitude bigger and more influential social network than Twitter.
For the time being, we don’t have the same “direct line” to internal documents as is the case with Twitter, which was made possible by the dedication to transparency by the new owner himself.
However, what could be dubbed as the “Facebook Files” are based on credible sources, too – Reason is coming out with a story based on confidential emails that emerged thanks to a court case – the state of Missouri suing the Biden administration.
The emails show that Facebook (and by extension Instagram) representatives and the CDC not only kept in touch at all times, but that the tech giant also “routinely asked government health officials to vet claims relating to the virus, mitigation efforts such as masks, and vaccines.”
In turn, the CDC kept a watchful eye on what speech was allowed on Facebook, what policies toward censorship of “inconvenient” Covid topics applied, and this government agency had no problem instructing the social network behemoth how to behave in these instances.
Robbie Soave, a senior editor for Reason, revealed some examples of what was happening in a series of tweets citing the emails and providing screenshots. One shows that in May 2021, CDC started to get involved in “vetting” content on Facebook that concerns Covid vaccines. And CDC had the last word on what was allowed to remain online as “accurate.”
Other emails show that Facebook (Meta) made sure the CDC was given de facto power to police Covid “misinformation,” while at the same time flagging content for the CDC, consulting with it on claims that could “contribute to vaccine refusals.”
At the same time, Reason is acknowledging that this was by no means the only federal agency to engage in similar activities, all aimed at pressuring some of the world’s biggest social platforms to allow only a certain narrative, and discredit any skepticism, even that coming from medical professionals and scientists.
Even President Biden made sure to “contribute” to this effort, when he in June 2021 bizarrely accused Facebook of “killing people.”
This was really meant to say that the giant had better not dare allow any Covid content the White House failed to “vet” behind the scenes – one way or another.
And the giant obliged, sometimes probably even exceeding the level of compliance expected from the administration. An internal email now reveals that Facebook went as far as to “snitch” on its own users making fun of Anthony Fauci, apparently in a bid to defend his reputation – again, at the expense of free speech.
“One email warned the CDC that Facebook users were mocking Fauci for changing his mind about masking and double-masking. The CDC replied that this information was ‘very helpful’,” Soave, the magazine’s senior editor and host on The Hill TV channel, tweeted.
The upcoming, March issue of Reason delves into how the CDC turned into the speech police when it came to pressuring social media to block content that the government agency decided was Covid “misinformation.”
And this was online speech that this, and other government agencies, have no constitutional way of directly suppressing without breaking the law.
“There is a word for government officials using the threat of punishment to extort desired behaviors from private actors. That word is: jawboning,” Soave remarked in one of the tweets.
And one can imagine – and the emails now show – just how gun-shy and ready to please those in power Facebook had become, after years of public vilification, and who knows what kind of pressure behind the scenes in the wake of the 2016 US election.
GMC Blinks First: Regulator Declines to Investigate Dr Aseem Malhotra Over Vaccine Warnings in BBC Interview
BY NIALL MCCRAE | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | JANUARY 21, 2023
To paraphrase the Sound of Music song, “How do we solve a problem like Malhotra?” After receiving several complaints, the General Medical Council has decided not to investigate cardiologist Dr. Aseem Malhotra, who has become a thorn in the side of the medical profession.
Professional regulators have been at the forefront of pandemic discipline, contributing to a culture of fear among practitioners. Severe action has been taken against registrants who criticise or do not comply with the official narrative. I know this from my experience as an officer of the Workers of England Union, representing members brought before the Nursing and Midwifery Council on charges of bringing the profession into disrepute. Apparently the public must be protected against nurses who don’t believe that masks stop airborne respiratory viruses, or who believe in informed consent for novel mRNA vaccines.
A significant strike against this censorial tyranny was by general practitioner Sam White last year. Dr. White was ordered, as a condition of maintaining his clinical licence, to delete his social media posts about COVID-19 and to refrain from making similar comments. Dr. White took the GMC to the High Court and won. The condition was overturned as a breach of his rights to freedom of expression under the Human Rights Act 1998.
Whereas White was an early critic of COVID-19 policy, Malhotra is a relatively recent convert. Initially he promoted the vaccine, but when his fit and healthy father died shortly after receiving the injections, Malhotra changed his mind and began speaking out against the mass vaccination programme. His personal loss came alongside his observation in clinical practice of a marked increase in myocarditis cases (as well as blood clots and other cardiac complications). Malhotra had a review paper published on this phenomenon, and his findings of iatrogenic harm are corroborated by other medical scientists.
Malhotra has repeatedly urged suspension of the vaccination programme until the risks are better understood. He became a darling of vaccine sceptics, with his charismatic and compassionate voice doing the rounds of alt media channels and independent-minded broadcasters working for more mainstream channels (such as Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News, and Neil Oliver on GB News ). However, he was ignored by the legacy media, and it was not until two weeks ago, when he took the opportunity of a BBC interview on statins, that his call was more widely heard.
The context for Malhotra’s BBC appearance was a claim by Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty that cardiac morbidity had increased as a result of limited access to statins during lockdown. Malhotra disagreed, explaining that myocarditis is unrelated to cholesterol level, which statins are meant to control. He instead blamed the vaccines, telling the BBC presenter that this radical medical intervention should be halted. Cue outrage.
The Guardian did a particularly nasty report on Malhotra, smearing him as a peddler of an ‘anti-vax’ conspiracy theory. Numerous doctors expressed their outrage on social media, angered by the BBC giving a platform to this known sceptic, who they accused of hijacking an interview on a different topic. Some reported Malhotra to the GMC.
The GMC’s decision not to act against Malhotra is a victory for science, ethics and common sense, but we should not get ahead of ourselves. This was a reluctant decision by the regulator, as the wording of their response to the referrals shows:
We recognise that Dr Malhotra has views on the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines that are at odds with the national and international scientific and medical communities. We also recognise that his words are strong and there is a question around the accuracy of his statements. There is currently no evidence that Dr. Malhotra has engaged in the type of Covid conspiracy related conduct that has to date justified regulatory action.
Note here the emphasis on consensus, as if that amounts to truth. It seems that if Malhotra had followed the likes of James Delingpole or Maajid Nawaz down the rabbit hole of globalist conspiracy, he would have been in big trouble. The GMC continued:
We also feel it is relevant that Dr. Malhotra started expressing his concerns about the vaccines in late 2021 and by this time the vaccine programme was well underway with the vast majority of vaccines delivered before this time. We would suggest that Dr. Malhotra’s impact on the COVID-19 vaccination programme in the U.K. could only have been negligible.
This is the most worrying line in the GMC response. If Malhotra is right about the risks of these vaccines, the GMC should be concerned that doctors were inhibited from speaking out earlier, thereby potentially saving lives. Instead, the GMC assumes that Malhotra is wrong, and that his remarks have not stopped the biggest vaccination drive in history.
The GMC acknowledged that Malhotra has a right to freedom of expression under Article 10 of the Human Rights Act, although that is not an absolute right for a medical practitioner. His outspoken opinions on the vaccines, according to the GMC, are “not so egregious as to justify a public hearing and a forum for further scepticism to be aired as to aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic and response”.
This, I believe, is the real reason why the GMC has decided not to take any further action. Any proceedings would inevitably attract publicity and give Dr. Malhotra a platform to air his sceptical views. Ultimately, the truth will get out, and those who tried to hide it will be judged by history.
Dr. Niall McCrae is a former university lecturer who now works for the Workers of England Union.
New Study Shows Respiratory Syncytial Virus Not a Hospitalization Threat to Frail Adults
Media Hype Died as Data Show Ambulatory Management is Sufficient
By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH | Courageous Discourse | January 21, 2023
I have noticed on occasion over the past three years that media hype can well up over an infectious disease threat and then for unexplained reasons the story is dropped without follow-up or resolution. Examples include a global hepatitis outbreak in children, monkeypox, group A strep, and the “tripledemic” of COVID-19, influenza, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). Some of these news stories escalate to a frenzy and in the case of monkeypox, President Biden declared a national emergency.
Americans are wondering to this day where is the monkeypox emergency? How has it impacted our lives? Most doctors including myself have never seen a case!
Last fall the fervor over RSV, largely a mild infantile illness was amplified to a point where some doctors were pushing for a third national emergency declaration (SARS-CoV-2, monkeypox, RSV). We were told new vaccines would be needed in every human being. Like the other stories, the RSV scare seems to have disappeared in the media cycle.
Concerns may be allayed in some part by a recent paper from Juhn et al of N=2325 adults including frail seniors that demonstrated a negligible risk (1 hospitalization, 0 deaths) with adult RSV usually manageable with outpatient nebulizer treatments for a few days.
If it occurs in infants and small children, a few hours in an urgent care or emergency department may be needed for breathing treatments, but again the outcomes are very favorable and certainly do not warrant vaccination, frightening news stories, or calls for national emergencies.
Pediatricians Call for National Emergency as Flu, RSV Surge Written by Lisa O’Mary Nov 17 2022
PR firm CEO tells Davos: businesses need to starve platforms that spread “disinformation” of revenue
Demonetizing non-conformity
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | January 20, 2023
During a panel discussion on “disrupting distrust” at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, it was posited that combating the spread of “disinformation” by “right-wing groups” is a crucial step in restoring trust in non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that collaborate with governments and other entities on initiatives aimed at ameliorating global issues.
The CEO of global communications firm Edelman, Richard Edelman, noted with regret the decline in trust towards NGOs in recent years and attributed this shift to the influence of right-wing groups, while noting that companies are now viewed as more trustworthy in addressing matters pertaining to civil society.
“My hypothesis on that is right-wing groups have done a really good job of disenfranchising NGOs,” he said. “They’ve challenged the funding sources. They’ve associated you with Bill Gates and George Soros. They’ve said that you’re world people, as opposed to actually what you are, which is local.”
Edelman said that platforms that allow “disinformation” need to be stripped of advertising, saying that what “business needs to do is deprive platforms that spread disinformation of oxygen, stop advertising, pull your promotion money, make sure that they understand that they have a consequential impact on society.”
The Re-education of Dr Sally Price
A culture of fear and censorship in the Australian medical profession
By Rebekah Barnett | Dystopian Down Under | January 14, 2023
On a Friday in August 2021, Dr Sally Price received a phone call from the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA). There had been an anonymous complaint against her, and AHPRA was to follow up with an investigation.
“So of course, I was checking my email all afternoon,” says Dr Price, who describes the ensuing investigation as, “destructive” and “very stressful.”
At the time, Dr Price was a practicing GP in Perth, with additional qualifications in nutritional medicine and Ayurveda. In over 30 years of practice, Dr Price had never received a complaint, and she was mystified as to which of her patients could possibly have complained to AHPRA.
When the email from AHPRA finally arrived in her inbox, Dr Price was surprised to find that the complaint was not from a patient, but from a social media follower who, to the best of her knowledge, she has never met or had any contact with.
The complaint centred around five Facebook story posts, four of which were reposted content from a non-partisan, pro-choice activist group called Reignite Democracy Australia (RDA). Two of the posts referenced efforts of politicians (in Australia and Italy) to resist vaccination mandates. Another story was a repost offering insight into the physiological effects of the fear response.
The complainant characterised the reposts as “anti-vaccination,” though none of the posts gave advice on vaccination or stated any opinion on the Covid vaccines. This was all that was required for AHPRA to launch an official investigation into Dr Price’s conduct.
AHPRA’s position statement on the Covid vaccination rollout (March 2021) set the bar for such vague complaints to trigger investigations, when they specifically barred doctors from expressing messages that could be construed as anti-vaccination on their social media:
”There is no place for anti-vaccination messages in professional health practice, and any promotion of anti-vaccination claims including on social media, and advertising may be subject to regulatory action.”
Dr Price was given two weeks to respond, during which time she engaged with her indemnity organisation in a highly stressful back-and-forth, knowing that her reputation, and maybe even her licence were on the line. Dr Price was strongly advised to offer to undergo ‘re-education’ at her own cost, so as to avoid more serious consequences, such as suspension, or having conditions imposed.
AHPRA agreed that Dr Price should undergo 10 hours of re-education and submit a letter of reflection detailing what she had learned from the process. “What you have to do is pull your forelock and tell AHPRA that you’ve been a very naughty girl,” says Dr Price.
As part of her re-education, Dr Price was required to study the Australian Medical Association’s (AMA) Code of Ethics (2017). Ironically, this firmly established in Dr Price’s mind that the AMA’s Code of tehics and AHPRA’s position statement on the Covid vaccination rollout were at odds with each other. “As I studied the AMA Code of Ethics, I was struck by how AHPRA’s position statement overrode our professional ethics, and that had me more deeply concerned,” says Dr Price. “It highlighted to me that none of this was ok.”
The AMA’s Code of Ethics states that doctors must, “consider first the well-being of the patient,” (Article 2.1.1) and that they must provide full informed consent before undertaking any tests, treatments or procedures (Article 2.1.4). Dr Price says that AHPRA’s position statement and hawkish regulatory behaviour put the public health agenda before the patient and made it “impossible” for doctors to provide valid informed consent to patients.
AHPRA’s unilateral decision that all doctors must fall in line with the vaccination rollout was also in conflict with the AMA Code’s provision that doctors may conscientiously object to providing certain treatments or procedures (Article 2.1.13), and that they may publicly state opinions contrary to the status quo (Article 4.3.3). Further, the Code requires that doctors “practise effective stewardship, the avoidance or elimination of wasteful expenditure in health care…” (Article 4.4.1), and that they use their “knowledge and skills to assist those responsible for allocating health care resources, advocating for their transparent and equitable allocation.” (Article 4.4.3) These articles imply a responsibility for doctors to speak out and take action when they believe that public health policy could be improved upon.
Feeling conflicted about how to practice good medicine under these conditions, Dr Price decided to take some leave to reflect and regroup. She lodged a complaint with Ahpra and the Ombudsman, requesting either a waiver to excuse her from the requirements of AHPRA’s position statement, or that AHPRA explain how she might be able to practice under their conditions whilst also keeping to the AMA’s Code of Ethics. No waiver or explanation was provided, and so Dr Price determined that continuing to practice as a GP was untenable. Her registration has since lapsed.
Dr Price says that, as it stands, the system has strayed from its primary purpose of letting doctors be doctors, and putting patients first. She speaks to a culture of fear within the medical profession. “The thing to understand is that doctors feel like someone is always behind them waiting to stab them in the back or put a bag over their head. That’s how it feels being under AHPRA,” she says.
The censorial nature of AHPRA’s regulatory practices was brought into the national spotlight several weeks ago by former AMA president Dr Kerryn Phelps, who recently revealed that she is Covid vaccine injured. In a submission to the federal government’s Long Covid Inquiry (Submission #510), Phelps wrote, in reference to the aforementioned AHPRA position statement,
“Regulators of the medical profession have censored public discussion about adverse events following immunisation, with threats to doctors not to make any public statements about anything that ‘might undermine the government’s vaccine rollout’ or risk suspension or loss of their registration.”
This is a view also held by cardiologist and Australian Medical Professionals’ Society (AMPS) founder, Dr Chris Neil, who warned in a recent article for Spectator Australia, that many medical professionals believe that not only is the AHPRA position statement unlawful, but that “it is at the root of a dangerous shift in Australian Medicine.” Neil points to the changes to the National Law for Health Practitioner Regulation introduced last October in the Queensland Parliament.
The changes, which the AMA strongly opposed, will further compel doctors to fall in line with public policy decided by bureaucrats, and will create a culture of ‘guilty until proven innocent’ by way of publicly naming and shaming medical professionals who are under investigation. AMPS has gone on the defensive with a Stop Medical Censorship national tour, on which medical, legal and other professionals gather to speak to audiences about the implications of censorship in medicine.
Dr Price says she feels damaged by the experience of being investigated by AHPRA, and she may not return to the profession. “I’m not sure that I want to come back. If medicine were to return to its ethical code, I will reconsider.”
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ “Prescribe Freedom” plan bans vaccine passports, supports doctors’ free speech
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | January 19, 2023
Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis plans to introduce legislation that will, among other things, stop Florida from being a “biomedical security state.” The legislation will ban all vaccine passport mandates.
DeSantis said the purpose of the legislation is to “prescribe freedom.”
“When the world lost its mind, Florida was a refuge of sanity, serving strongly as freedom’s linchpin,” the Republican governor said on Tuesday. “These measures will ensure Florida remains this way and will provide landmark protections for free speech for medical practitioners.”
“It required us over the past few years to stand against major institutions in our society: The bureaucracy, the medical establishment, legacy media, and even the President of the United States who, together, were working to impose a biomedical security state on society,” he added.
DeSantis’ surgeon general Dr. Joseph Ladapo said he supports the bill because it would protect the free exchange of ideas between medical professionals.
“As a health sciences researcher and physician, I have personally witnessed accomplished scientists receive threats due to their unorthodox positions,” Ladapo said. “However, many of these positions have proven to be correct, as we’ve all seen over the past few years. All medical professionals should be encouraged to engage in scientific discourse without fearing for their livelihoods or their careers.”
The legislation would protect medical professionals’ freedom of speech by protecting their religious views and their right to disagree with the preferred narrative. The bill would also protect medical freedom of choice by banning discrimination based on vaccination status, testing, and mask-wearing.
Related:
California’s chilling medical misinformation law is an affront to the US constitution
Germany, “standing atop a billion-dollar mountain of masks,” begins to incinerate the rapidly expiring surplus
eugyppius: a plague chronicle | January 20, 2023
From Welt :
Authorities have come up with a term that sounds at least halfway sane. They’re calling it “thermal reprocessing.” Four federal states now claim to have thermally reprocessed – or, in plain language, to have incinerated – a total of 17.25 million expired Corona masks.
Baden-Württemberg has destroyed 6.1 million masks, Saxony 5.5 million, North Rhine-Westphalia 5 million, and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern 656,000 …
The Federal Ministry of Health (BMG) in Berlin has also “thermally recycled” masks in recent months. The number so far is “less than one million units,” a spokesperson said … The destroyed masks were purchased during the peak of the pandemic, and have exceeded their expiration date …
The federal and state governments are currently standing atop a billion-dollar mountain of masks. According to information provided by the Ministry of Health in September, there are a total of 3.7 billion masks in the federal inventory … The federal states have have an additional 180 million Corona masks at their disposal …
The states want to burn even more masks, but for the moment they’re not allowed, because much of the surplus in their possession is technically federal property. Thus they’ve begun begging the government to take the masks back:
“The Interior ministry of Hesse, together with many ministries of other states, have turned to the federal government with an urgent request to either take back their unusable masks … or grant permission for their destruction…” says a spokesperson. Unfortunately, the federal government has not yet agreed. “The Federal Ministry of Health has referenced uncertainties in customs law that the government has not yet been able to clarify.”
I’m going to go out on a limb here, and say the Scholz government is reluctant to write off the masks purely because of the negative publicity it’ll generate. I can’t imagine how customs regulations would prevent the Health Ministry from destroying its own expiring property.
Karsten Klein, chairman of the FDP faction in the Bundestag Budget Committee, has criticised the previous government’s over-procurement: “The coalition has inherited a hugely expensive mask mountain [Merkel health minister] Jens Spahn. As important as federal support for procuring masks was in 2020, under Spahn it led to literal frenzied buying that completely lost sight of actual demand” …
But we haven’t even gotten to the best part. The idiot pandemicists are still hoarding masks, even as they’re burning them:
… Additionally, the “National Health Protection Reserve is still stockpiling masks. The Reserve was established in mid-2020 by the Merkel government to prevent future shortages. According to the Ministry of Health, there are currently 245 million masks in the reserve, part of which will expire at the end of 2023.
Doubts about the usefulness of the Reserve are growing. In November, the Budget Committee called on the government to … examine “whether a federal physical stockpile for the health system is at all necessary or economical” …
For the taxpayer, mask procurement is very expensive. The costs at the federal level alone have totalled 5.8 billion Euros since the beginning of the pandemic.
It’s just so astounding, this entirely pointless and still ongoing mass delusion. Masks do nothing to stop infection, we have spent three years learning in excruciating detail that they do nothing to stop infection, we are now setting fire to millions of masks heedlessly purchased at the height of pandemic hysteria when there was every reason to expect that masks would do nothing to stop infection, and still we’re pouring millions of Euros into some kind of retarded national strategic mask reserve that will also surely be incinerated in the coming years because masks do nothing to stop infection. Even more unfathomable is this ridiculous fiction that useless products which do nothing can ever “expire.” What is the fear, that expired masks will do even more of nothing than new masks?
Everything about Corona is such a multifaceted ridiculous farce.
MHRA Passes the Buck: “All the Covid Vaccine Authorisation Decisions Were Taken by the Government Minister”
The Blame Game Begins
BY NICK DENIM | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | JANUARY 19, 2023
I have just received a very interesting MHRA reply to an FOI request about whether the Healthy Secretary delegated Covid vaccine decisions to the MHRA.
MHRA said “All the Covid vaccines and therapeutics authorisation decisions were taken by the Licensing Minister and were not delegated.”
What makes this so interesting is the wider context. Under the Human Medicines Regulations, the Licensing Authority is the Secretary of State for Health. He or she delegates to MHRA all the work associated with that – licensing of medicines, pharmacovigilance, inspection of manufacturers, enforcement and so on.
But for the Covid vaccines, MHRA is saying that the Secretary of State personally took all the decisions.
I read that as the blame game having started. I’ll explain why.
Back in 2020, MHRA would have known only too well that the clinical trials had been rushed (10 months compared with typical time to market of 5-10 years), had not been comprehensive (e.g. limited pharmacokinetics/pharmacodynamics) and wouldn’t finish until 2024. There were many warnings from experts around the world. MHRA’s line about ‘rolling review’ was, and remains, bunkum.
MHRA scientists and officials would have known about the problems (with all medicines) of scaling up production from small-scale, laboratory-based production for trials purposes to full-scale production. For example, larger quantities of ingredients can be more difficult to mix. They wouldn’t therefore have been surprised to have seen batch problems with the Covid vaccines around the world. One batch resulted in the hospitalisation of 120 children in Vietnam. One batch caused ocular injury to nurses when a vial was broken. In Japan, 1.63 million doses were recalled due to metallic contamination. Probably just the tip of the iceberg.
MHRA then saw adverse event reporting starting to reveal serious safety issues in the U.K. and around the world. First, myocarditis and blood clots, in March 2021, a few weeks after approval of the AstraZeneca vaccine (now effectively withdrawn) and later other heart issues, neurological problems and immunosuppression with Pfizer and Moderna.
MHRA knew in 2020 that the risk to younger age groups from Covid was very low and after rollout it would have seen assessments of vaccine effectiveness falling month on month. It wriggled hard against the evidence in the UKHSA weekly surveillance reports that vaccine effectiveness was even negative for younger age groups.
Since then the Covid vaccine narrative has continued to take a pounding as more clinicians around the world speak up, the research evidence about cardiac, neurological and immunosuppression problems continues to pile up, and the 1,000 per week excess deaths have still not been explained.
MHRA might have been criticised by Baroness Cumberlege for being “unresponsive and defensive”, but its staff aren’t all deaf, blind or stupid. They knew.
So my inference is that the blame game has started.
Mind you, MHRA is on a sticky wicket in any blame game. There are serious shortfalls in its own safety management:
- It doesn’t have a process for investigating individual Yellow Card reports. It says it tries to investigate individual fatal and serious Yellow Card reports but it doesn’t have a process so it doesn’t know how many it has investigated (FOI 21/1109);
- It’s never had a safety audit (FOI 22/562);
- It doesn’t actively seek out real-world data – for example, real-world population-level data such as hospitalisation for ‘adverse events of special interest’ segmented by vaccination status and age. In January 2022, MHRA did not hold such data (CSC 88243) and in August 2022, UKHSA (FOI 22/472) only held population level info on thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS). Instead, it waits for signal detection from Yellow Card reports of adverse events, which are massively under-reported;
- It doesn’t (or can’t) define the quantitative level of risk which is ‘acceptable’ as the basis of “acceptably safe” (FOI 22/390);
- It lost 20% of posts in 2021 due to funding cuts and has 20% vacancies below that new baseline (FOI 22/1007);
- It doesn’t have a process for delegating the authority to approve medicines for public use (FOI 22/1002) or governance of individuals competence (qualification, experience and training) (FOI 22/1007) to MHRA officers;
- It has hidden safety data (FOI 22/1083), redacting numbers in tables on the pretext of maintaining patient confidentiality;
- It appears quietly to have dropped a key strand of its Covid vaccine surveillance: Targeted Active Monitoring. FOI 22/1083 asked for a copy of the latest report but it was 15 months old (August 2021).
But back to “All the Covid vaccines and therapeutics authorisation decisions were taken by the Licensing Minister and were not delegated.” I’m left wondering what safety advice MHRA gave to Chris Whitty and ministers about the Covid vaccines back in late 2020 and early 2021 and subsequently as the serious safety issues started to emerge. And I wonder what briefings MHRA gave to the Commission on Human Medicines Expert Working Group on Covid Vaccine Benefits and Risks and to the COVID-19 Vaccines Safety Surveillance Methodologies Expert Working Group – neither publishes minutes.
It’s high time MPs and the Covid Inquiry started to ask some searching questions.
Until Nick retired a few years ago, he was a Senior Civil Servant in a Government Department.
The WHO wants to control everyone and everything, everywhere, in the name of health, equity and global solidarity
By Libby Klein | Reclaim Ethical Medicine | January 18, 2023
I’ve gone through the “Conceptual Zero Draft” of the proposed pandemic treaty, line by line, trying to figure out what it means. It wasn’t that much fun. But it sure had my eyes out on stalks more than once. Like the bit where WHO can decide what is a fact. And what is a “falsified” treatment. And appropriate money from member States and use it to foist vaccines on people in developing countries. And set aside protections in other treaties if they are inconvenient. And dictate what “social measures” are required in addition to “public health measures”.
My summary of the proposed pandemic treaty is set out below. Notice how broad the scope is. How comprehensively the WHO will be in control of everyone, everything, everywhere, all in the name of health, equity and global “solidarity”.
It’s urgent to oppose this before it rolls over us like a steamroller. The World Health Organisation is working hard on the next draft, for consideration by the “Intergovernmental Negotiating Body” in February, and the World Health Assembly in May 2023 (see timeline below)
(Is the treaty a furphy? A decoy to take our eye off the proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations, which are being negotiated in parallel with the treaty? Maybe, but there’s no way I want to take that risk and assume we can ignore it…)
MUST DO BEFORE FEBRUARY:
- Have a read of this amazing summary of everything the WHO is up to. There is also my summary of the treaty below. If you’re keen also read this plain English translation of the treaty.
- Pick out your 3 favourite horror-story highlights. Which 3 things are the most egregious, in your view?
- Tell your friends and your politicians we need to pull out of the WHO, before it’s too late.
Summary of the proposed pandemic treaty
The WHO is to control everyone and everything, everywhere, in the name of health, equity and global solidarity
Because of climate change and the likely increase in diseases crossing over from animals to humans, and increasing resistance to antibiotics, we are likely to have more pandemics in the future.
If we centralise decision-making about pandemics right across the globe, and if everyone falls into line, everyone can be healthier. Vaccines and other new medical products are the solution to pandemics and the proposed treaty.
The proposed treaty will make sure everyone can access vaccines and other new pandemic products. The WHO is the right body to control everything centrally, because it is the directing and coordinating authority for:
- international health work;
- convening and generating scientific evidence; and
- fostering international cooperation in global health governance.
Everything can impact health, so WHO has to be in charge of everything.
The world needs WHO to control and oversee:
- a global system for production and distribution of medical products
- stockpiling of medical products
- fast-tracking of research and development, and licensing of new products
- sharing of pathogen samples, genetic sequences, and benefits arising from those things being shared
- increased surveillance of diseases
- implementation of digital health
- a system of peer reviews and table-top exercises
- public health and social measures necessary for dealing with pandemics and situations that might give rise to pandemics
- censorship
- All must cooperate with the WHO in relation to all of the above measures.
- Wealthy nations must provide funding for the WHO and for developing countries
- Nations maintain their sovereignty – except where that means other nations are at risk
- Communities must be primed to accept public health measures and social measures
Tho WHO reckons this treaty is urgent and important, so:
- Start date is fast-tracked
- Once in, you can’t get out for 3 years
- The treaty can be amended by majority vote and amendments will apply to everyone.
- No adjudication by a court of law if parties are in dispute.
A “Consensus draft” draft will be considered at the May 2023 World Health Assembly. In other words: by May 2023, the content of the treaty already have been agreed in the backrooms.
Tony Blair calls for WEF and WTO to introduce “digital infrastructure” that monitors vaccination status
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | January 19, 2023
Former United Kingdom (UK) Prime Minister Tony Blair has called for global organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and World Economic Forum (WEF) to push national governments to introduce “digital infrastructure” that monitors who has been vaccinated and who hasn’t.
Blair pushed for this government-controlled digital vaccine database during an appearance at the World Economic Forum’s 2023 annual meeting — a yearly event where powerful business leaders, politicians, and other influential figures meet in Davos, Switzerland to discuss the agendas they want to advance.
The former Prime Minister emphasized the importance of “technology and digital infrastructure” and data collection for surveilling the status of the vaccinated and unvaccinated.
“You need the data,” Blair said. “You need to know who’s been vaccinated and who hasn’t been. Some of the vaccines that will come on down the line will be multiple, there’ll be multiple shots. So you’ve got to have, the reasons to do with the healthcare more generally, but certainly, for a pandemic or for…vaccines, you’ve got to have a proper digital infrastructure, and many countries don’t have that. In fact, most countries don’t have that.”
Blair continued by suggesting that his digital vaccination status surveillance dragnet should be pushed through by the WTO (an intergovernmental organization that regulates international trade), the WEF (an unelected global organization that seeks to “shape global, regional and industry agendas”), and intergovernmental forums such as the Group of Twenty (G20) and the Group of Seven (G7).
“Who are the people that can make this happen?” Blair said. “How do you get the right partnerships in place?…That should happen in the G20 particularly, I think, which is… G7 is an important forum, but the G20 is the broader forum… You’ve got to work out what is it that you want to achieve in order to make sure that any future pandemic is properly handled and what are the partnerships that you’re going to create in order to ensure that the answers you get are the right answers. And then you’re going to have the mechanisms of implementation. And those mechanisms will be partly through the formal institutions that you have, like the WTO, and they’ll also be through organizations like yours [the WEF] which… I think… have many advantages because they don’t get landed with the same bureaucracy and frankly small pea politics around them.”
Blair’s call is the latest of several that he and his nonprofit, The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, have made for an expansion of mandatory digital surveillance infrastructure.
His institute has called for digital IDs and said increased surveillance is a “price worth paying.” Blair himself has also called for mandatory vaccine passports.
And two of the global groups that Blair wants to help push through this digital surveillance system, the WTO and the WEF, are also huge advocates of digital surveillance systems.
The WEF and the WTO have previously pushed “global digital identity of persons and objects.” And the WEF regularly advocates for digital ID programs around the world. This year’s WEF 2023 annual meeting subjected journalists to some of the surveillance technologies it advocates for including digital IDs and biometric scanning.
Not only do these surveillance systems reduce individual privacy but vaccine passports discriminate against citizens and restrict their access to businesses and services.
And the WEF wants to expand this surveillance and discrimination via digital ID. It has proposed a system that monitors online behavior, biometrics, purchases, and more to determine access to a wide range of services.
Related:
How Big Government and Big Tech used COVID to accelerate the adoption of digital ID
Featured Video
The Source of America’s Wars – Kristol Clear
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
Is Israel to blame for the Iraq War?
American Goy | March 10, 2008
I am so tired of this old canard that “Israel had nothing to do with USA’s war with Iraq – in fact, it officially advised America against it”.
Bullshit. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Ceasefire for all or for none: Iran shuts Hormuz over Lebanon attacks
- Strait of Hormuz is Iran’s ‘nuclear weapon’ that forced US retreat: Medvedev
- Energy crisis will last for months – Kremlin envoy
- Europe’s quiet role in the war on Iran
- Forty days that shook the Empire: How Iran turned the tables on US and prevailed
- Netanyahu unilaterally declares Lebanon outside of ceasefire deal
- Israeli leaders: ‘Not a single goal’ achieved in war with Iran
- What on earth just happened? Trump, Iran, and the unlikely ceasefire
- Alberta Bill Would Fine Political Deepfakes $10,000 Without Satire Exemptions
- Iran declares ‘historic victory’ over US, says enemy forced to accept its proposal
- If Americans Knew
- NY Times reports how Netanyahu took the US into Iran War
- A sigh of relief over Iran, but Gaza and Lebanon in dire straits – Daily Update
- Thousands dead and neighborhoods razed to the ground: Aid agencies fear southern Lebanon is becoming the new Gaza
- The war the US is fighting for Israel could cost trillions
- ‘Cigarette Burns, Nail Wounds’: Toddler Tortured in Gaza to Coerce Father
- Trump Says US Sent ‘a Lot of Guns’ to Protesters in Iran
- Israeli forces destroy 17 UN peacekeeper cameras in south Lebanon
- US-Israeli strikes ‘completely destroy’ synagogue in Tehran
- Archbishop for US Military Says Iran War Is Unjust Under Catholic Teaching
- Iranian leaders’ Open Letters to the American People
- No Tricks Zone
- An Inconvenient Tree: Uncovered In Alps… Europe Much Warmer Than Today 6000 Years Ago
- New Study Reports A 60% Slowdown In Greenland’s Ice Loss Rate In The Last Decade
- Low Intensity Tornado Wrecks Major Solar Farm, Creating A Potential Toxic Dump
- New Study Finds Warming Saves Lives…Cold Temperatures 12 Times More Deadly Than Excess Heat
- German Science Blog Accuses PIK Climate Institute Of Hallucinating Climate Tipping Points
- Devastating Assessment Of Comirnaty Vaccine By Former Senior Pfizer Europe Toxicologist
- New Study: CO2 Is ‘Effectively Negligible’ As An Explanatory Climate Change Factor Since 2000
- Former Pfizer Toxicologist Dr. Helmut Sterz Tells Bundestag Hearing Pfizer Vaccine Should Have Never Been Approved
- Energy Expert: Germany’s Nuclear Phaseout Was A “500 Billion Euro Mistake”
- New Research: South Australia’s Mid-Holocene Sea Surface Temperatures Were 4°C Warmer Than Today
Aletho News 