Pro-mask propaganda cranks up a couple of notches
By Gary Sidley | Coronababble | January 11, 2023
It’s happening again. After a period of welcome sanity – where those covering their faces in community settings could accurately be described as a deviant minority – the pro-mask propaganda machine has gone into overdrive. In what seems to be a co-ordinated enterprise, in the last couple of weeks our mainstream media has spread a variety of news stories pushing for more of us to hide our faces behinds strips of cloth and plastic. These include:
1. The announcement, at the end of 2022, that Northampton and Kettering General Hospitals have decided to re-impose mask requirements on all patients and visitors. This policy change provides further evidence of the mask postcode lottery operating within our healthcare system, where the decisions are left to the whims of local bureaucrats.
2. The pro-mask baton was taken up in the new year when Professor Susan Hopkins (chief medical advisor at the UK Health Security Agency) urged people who feel ill to wear a mask should they venture outside. In the grand scheme of masking zealotry, this was a modest recommendation, but – ominously – it does perpetuate the dubious assertion that wearing face coverings in the community reduces viral transmission, as well as preparing the ground for further incremental restrictions.
3. Throughout 2020/21, fear porn was highly effective in leveraging compliance with Covid restrictions, so no wear-a-mask propaganda drive would be complete without some scary stories and images from China. Our mainstream media were only too keen to oblige, with headlines about Covid deaths soaring, funeral homes overwhelmed and bodies being burnt in the streets in the aftermath of China’s relaxing of restrictions.
4. And then – predictably – the arch ‘nudgers’ (aka behavioural scientists) put their heads above the parapet, pushing their collectivist agenda. In a Guardian article, Professor Stephen Reicher repeated the tired trope that those opposed to mass masking were right-wing activists engaged in a culture war. He then urges the psychological manipulation of the masses by equating mask wearing with virtue (otherwise known as the ‘ego’ nudge) when he recommends, ‘reframing mask wearing as a community issue: less about individuals exercising personal responsibility; more about a collective exercising social responsibility, looking after each other, making sure we all come through this well’.
Meanwhile, Professor David Halpern (chief executive of the Behavioural Insights Team, the UK’s ‘Nudge Unit’) was promoting a similar narrative. In an interview for the Daily Telegraph (funded by the Reckitt Global Hygiene Institute), Halpern celebrates the use of ‘informal social pressure’ to get people to wear masks throughout the Covid era, and champions the concept of a ‘collectivist mindset’.
In effect, these two high-profile behavioural scientists are urging more covert shaming and peer pressure to get people to do the ‘right’ thing.
5. Reinforcements for the pro-mask push then arrived in the form of spokespeople for the World Health Organisation (WHO) – a prominent mouthpiece for the global pandemic industry – who have been doing the rounds again, regurgitating the messages we heard throughout the Covid era. For instance, Dr Maria Van Kerkove (an epidemiologist at the WHO’s ‘Health Emergencies Program’) has been popping up on social media sharing scary stories about variants and urging us all to mask up when ‘around other people’. While Dr Abdirahman Mahamud (an ‘Incident Manager’ at the WHO) stridently proclaims that ‘masking saves lives’, a preposterous assertion that would – in a rational world – send the official fact-checkers into overdrive.
6. If – God forbid – mask mandates were to return, public transport is likely to be the first target. So a story highlighting the risks associated with air travel would be gold dust for the propagandists. And, hey presto, we have one. Evidently, some researchers have been rummaging in the waste-water systems of 29 aeroplanes and found that, in 28 of them, they contained the virus responsible for Covid-19. (I wonder how many millions of other bugs they would have found among the excrement?).
7. And to cap it all, Nicola Sturgeon – the mask matriarch from north of the border – appears again at a press conference to urge us all to wear masks on public transport.
If our public health specialists had been following the science, the requirement to wear masks in community settings would never have been imposed; the bulk of the more robust, real-world evidence concludes that community masking has no appreciable impact on viral transmission. Also, it is apparent that the mask U-turn in 2020 – when our experts shifted from a ‘masks don’t work’ narrative to an authoritarian one involving mandates – was driven by ideology rather than empirical research. Taking these two observations into account, it is now morally appropriate to resist this latest push by the pro-mask lobby for the re-imposition of this ineffectual and dehumanising restriction.
And what would be the most effective way to counter further mask mandates? DO NOT COMPLY.
CHD Defeats NY State Healthcare Workers COVID Mandate!
Children’s Health Defense | January 13, 2023
In a groundbreaking decision filed today, NY State (NYS) Supreme Court Judge Gerard Neri held that the COVID-19 vaccine mandate for healthcare workers is now “null, void, and of no effect.” The court held that the NYS Dept. of Health lacked the authority to impose such a mandate as this power is reserved to the state legislature. Furthermore, the court found that the mandate was “arbitrary and capricious” as COVID-19 vaccines do not stop transmission, vitiating any rational basis for a mandate.
Children’s Health Defense (CHD) financed this lawsuit on behalf of Medical Professionals for Informed Consent and several individual healthcare workers. Sujata Gibson, lead attorney, said, “This is a huge win for New York healthcare workers, who have been deprived of their livelihoods for more than a year. This is also a huge win for all New Yorkers, who are facing dangerous and unprecedented healthcare worker shortages throughout New York State.”
CHD President Mary Holland stated, “We are thrilled by this critical win against a COVID vaccine mandate, correctly finding that any such mandate at this stage, given current knowledge is arbitrary. We hope that this decision will continue the trend towards lifting these dangerous and unwarranted vaccine mandates throughout the country.”
We are off to a great start in 2023.
Children’s Health Defense is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.
WHO Proposals Could Strip Nations of Their Sovereignty, Create Worldwide Totalitarian State, Expert Warns
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | January 13, 2023
Secretive negotiations took place this week in Geneva, Switzerland, to discuss proposed amendments to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) International Health Regulations (IHR), considered a binding instrument of international law.
Similar negotiations took place last month for drafting a new WHO pandemic treaty.
While the two are often conflated, the proposed IHR amendments and the proposed pandemic treaty represent two separate but related sets of proposals that would fundamentally alter the WHO’s ability to respond to “public health emergencies” throughout the world — and, critics warn, significantly strip nations of their sovereignty.
According to author and researcher James Roguski, these two proposals would transform the WHO from an advisory organization to a global governing body whose policies would be legally binding.
They also would greatly expand the scope and reach of the IHR, institute a system of global health certificates and “passports” and allow the WHO to mandate medical examinations, quarantine and treatment.
Roguski said the proposed documents would give the WHO power over the means of production during a declared pandemic, call for the development of IHR infrastructure at “points of entry” (such as national borders), redirect billions of dollars to the “Pharmaceutical Hospital Emergency Industrial Complex” and remove mention of “respect for dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms of people.”
Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., professor of international law at the University of Illinois, said the proposed documents may also contravene international law.
Boyle, author of several international law textbooks and a bioweapons expert who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, recently spoke with The Defender about the dangers — and potential illegality — of these two proposed documents
Other prominent analysts also sounded the alarm.
Proposals would create ‘worldwide totalitarian medical and scientific police state’
Meeting in Geneva between Jan. 9-13, the WHO’s IHR Review Committee worked to develop “technical recommendations to the [WHO’s] Director-General on amendments proposed by State Parties to the IHR,” according to a WHO document.
The IHR was first enacted in 2005, in the aftermath of SARS-CoV-1, and took effect in 2007. They constitute one of only two legally binding treaties the WHO has achieved since its inception in 1948 — the other being the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.
As previously reported by The Defender, the IHR framework already allows the WHO director-general to declare a public health emergency in any country, without the consent of that country’s government, though the framework requires the two sides to first attempt to reach an agreement.
According to the same WHO document, the recommendations of the IHR Review Committee and the member states’ Working Group on Amendments to the International Health Regulations (2005) (WGIHR) will be reported to WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus by mid-January, in the leadup to the WHO’s 76th World Health Assembly in late May.
Boyle said he questioned the legality of the above documents, citing for instance the fact that “the proposed WHO treaty violates the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties,” which was ratified in 1969, and which Boyle described as “the international law of treaties for every state in the world.”
Boyle explained the difference between the latest pandemic treaty and IHR proposals. “The WHO treaty would set up a separate international organization, whereas the proposed regulations would work within the context of the WHO we have today.”
However, he said, “Having read through both of them, it’s a distinction without a difference.” He explained:
“Either one or both will set up a worldwide totalitarian medical and scientific police state under the control of Tedros and the WHO, which are basically a front organization for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Tony Fauci, Bill Gates, Big Pharma, the biowarfare industry and the Chinese Communist government that pays a good chunk of their bills.
“Either they’ll get the regulations or they’ll get the treaty, but both are existentially dangerous. These are truly dangerous, existentially dangerous and insidious documents.”
Boyle, who has written extensively on international law and argued cases on behalf of Palestine and Bosnia in the International Court of Justice, told The Defender he has “never read treaties and draft international organizations that are so completely totalitarian as the IHR regulations and the WHO treaty,” adding:
“Both the IHR regulations and the WHO treaty, as far as I can tell from reading them, are specifically designed to circumvent national, state and local government authorities when it comes to pandemics, the treatment for pandemics and also including in there, vaccines.”
Talks for both the proposed pandemic treaty and the proposed IHR amendments appear to follow a similar timeline, in order to be submitted for consideration during the WHO’s World Health Assembly May 21-30.
“It’s clear to me they are preparing both the regulations and the treaty for adoption by the World Health Assembly in May of 2023,” Boyle said. “That’s where we stand right now as I see it.”
According to the WHO, the International Negotiating Body (INB) working on the Pandemic Treaty will present a “progress report” at the May meeting, with a view toward presenting its “final outcome” to the 77th World Health Assembly in May 2024.
Boyle: proposed legally-binding pandemic treaty violates international law
Commenting on the pandemic treaty, Tedros said, “The lessons of the pandemic must not go unlearned.” He described the current “conceptual zero draft” of the treaty as “a true reflection of the aspirations for a different paradigm for strengthening pandemic prevention, preparedness, response and recovery.”
Roguski, in his analysis of the “Pandemic Treaty,” warned that it will create a “legally binding framework convention that would hand over enormous additional, legally binding authority to the WHO.”
The WHO’s 194 member states would, in other words, “agree to hand over their national sovereignty to the WHO.” This would “dramatically expand the role of the WHO,” by including an “entirely new bureaucracy,” the “Conference of the Parties,” which would include not just member states but “relevant stakeholders.”
This new bureaucracy, according to Roguski, would “be empowered to analyze social media to identify misinformation and disinformation in order to counter it with their own propaganda.”
The WHO currently partners with numerous such organizations, such as “fact-checking” firm NewsGuard, for these purposes.
Roguski said the pandemic treaty also would speed up the approval process for drugs and injectables, provide support for gain-of-function research, develop a “Global Review Mechanism” to oversee national health systems, implement the concept of “One Health,” and increase funding for so-called “tabletop exercises” or “simulations.”
“One Health,” a brainchild of the WHO, is described as “an integrated, unifying approach to balance and optimize the health of people, animals and the environment” that “mobilizes multiple sectors, disciplines and communities” and “is particularly important to prevent, predict, detect, and respond to global health threats such as the COVID-19 pandemic.”
In turn, “tabletop exercises” and “simulations” such as “Event 201,” were remarkably prescient in “predicting” the COVID-19 and monkeypox outbreaks before they actually occurred.
Roguski said the pandemic treaty would provide a structure to redirect massive amounts of money “via crony capitalism to corporations that profit from the declarations of Public Health Emergencies of International Concern” (‘pandemics’) and “the fear-mongering that naturally follows such emergency declarations.”
Boyle warned that the treaty and proposed IHR regulations go even further. “The WHO, which is a rotten, corrupt, criminal, despicable organization, will be able to issue orders going down the pike to your primary care physician on how you should be treated in the event they proclaim a pandemic.”
Moreover, Boyle said, the pandemic treaty would be unlike many other international agreements in that it would come into immediate effect. He told The Defender :
“If you read the WHO Treaty, at the very end, it says quite clearly that it will come into effect immediately upon signature.
“That violates the normal processes for ratification of treaties internationally under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, and also under the United States Constitution, requiring the United States Senate to give its advice and consent to the terms of the treaty by two-thirds vote.”
Indeed, Article 32 of the proposed treaty regarding its “Provisional application” states:
“The [treaty] may be applied provisionally by a Party that consents to its provisional application by so notifying the Depository in writing at the time of signature or deposit of its instrument of ratification, acceptance, approval, formal confirmation or accession.
“Such provisional application shall become effective from the date of receipt of the notification by the Secretary-General of the United Nations.”
“Whoever drafted that knew exactly what they were doing to bring it into force immediately upon signature,” said Boyle. “Assuming the World Health Assembly adopts the treaty in May, Biden can just order Fauci or whoever his representative is there to sign the treaty, and it will immediately come into effect on a provisional basis,” he added.
“I don’t know, in any of my extensive studies of international treaties, let alone treaties setting up international organizations, of any that has a provision like that in it,” said Boyle. “It’s completely insidious.”
Proposed amendments to IHR described as a WHO ‘power grab’
According to Roguski, who said the WHO is “attempting a power grab,” the proposed amendments to the IHR may be even more concerning than the pandemic treaty.
Roguski wrote that while he believes the pandemic treaty is “an important issue,” he also thinks it is “functioning as a decoy that is designed to distract people from the much larger and more immediate threat to our rights and freedoms, which are the proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations.”
The IHR Review Committee working on the proposed amendments “began its work on 6 October 2022,” according to a WHO document, and has convened five times since then, including this week’s meetings in Geneva. Access to the meetings was prohibited for the unvaccinated.
The final proposals of the IHR Review Committee and the WGIHR will be presented to Tedros in mid-January and to the World Health Assembly in May. According to Roguski, “If the proposed amendments are presented to the 76th World Health Assembly, they could be adopted by a simple majority of the 194 member nations.”
As a result, Roguski said, compared to the proposed pandemic treaty, “The amendments to the International Health Regulations are a much more immediate and direct threat to the sovereignty of every nation and the rights and freedoms of every person on earth.”
According to Roguski, “The proposed amendments would seek to remove 3 very important aspects of the existing regulations,” including “removing respect for dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms” from the text of the IHR, changing the IHR from “non-binding” to “legally binding” and obligating nations to “assist” other nations.
“Essentially, the WHO’s Emergency Committee would be given the power to overrule actions taken by sovereign nations,” Roguski said.
According to Boyle, similarly to the pandemic treaty, “again, Biden can instruct his representative in May, assuming they adopt the regulations, to sign the regulations. And then, the Biden administration will treat that as a binding international agreement, just like they did with the 2005 regulations,” referring to the original IHR ratified that year.
He added:
“Those [the 2005 IHR] were signed and the U.S. State Department at that time considered them to be a legally binding international executive agreement that they list in the official State Department publication, ‘Treaties in Force.’
“In other words, they treat the 2005 regulations as if they were a treaty that never received the advice and consent of the United States Senate, and therefore the supreme law of the land under Article 6 of the United States Constitution that would be binding upon all state and local governments here in the United States, even if they are resisting, the IHR regulations or the WHO treaty.”
According to Roguski, “The proposed amendments would implement a great number of changes that everyone should absolutely disagree with.”
These changes include “dramatically expand[ing] the scope of the International Health Regulations from dealing with actual risks to dealing with anything that had the potential to be a risk to public health,” which Roguski said “would open up the doors wide to massive abuse beyond anything we have seen over the past three years.”
The proposed amendments also would shift the WHO’s focus “away from the health of real people” to “place primary preference upon the resilience of health care systems,” and would establish a “National Competent Authority” that “would be given great power to implement the obligations under these regulations,” Roguski said.
If the amendments come to pass, Roguski said, “The WHO will no longer need to consult any sovereign nation in which an event may or may not be occurring within that nation before declaring that there is a Public Health Emergency of International Concern within the borders of that nation.”
“Intermediate Public Health Alert[s],” “Public Health Emergenc[ies] of Regional Concern” and “World Alert and Response Notice[s]” could also be declared by the WHO’s director general, while the WHO would be recognized “as the guidance and coordinating authority during international emergencies.”
During such real or “potential” emergencies, the amendments would empower the WHO to mandate a variety of policies globally, which would be legally binding on member nations.
These policies could include requiring medical examinations or proof of such exams, requiring proof of vaccination, refusing travel, implementing quarantine and contact tracing or requiring travelers to furnish health declarations, to fill out passenger locator forms and to carry digital global health certificates.
“Competent health authorities” would also be empowered to commandeer aircraft and ships, while surveillance networks to “quickly detect public health events” within member nations would also be set up, as per the proposed amendments.
The WHO would also be empowered to be involved in the drafting of national health legislation.
The proposed amendments would give the WHO the power to develop an “Allocation Plan,” allowing it to commandeer the means of production of pharmaceuticals and other items during an “emergency,” and would oblige developed nations to provide “assistance” to developing nations.
“The proposed amendments … would facilitate digital access to everyone’s private health records,” Roguski said, and similar to the proposals in the pandemic treaty, would “also facilitate the censorship of any differing opinions under the guise of mis-information or dis-information.”
Roguski said the proposals are being made despite a “lack of input from the general public” by “unknown and unaccountable delegates” using vague and “undefined terminology” and vague criteria “by which to measure preparedness.”
He said the proposals would “trample our rights and restrict our freedoms,” including the right to privacy, to choose or refuse treatment, to express one’s opinions, to protect one’s children, to be with family and friends and to be free from discrimination, including discrimination on the basis of one’s vaccination status.
“The finality of decisions made by the Emergency Committee” foreseen by the amendments “would be a direct attack on national sovereignty,” Roguski said.
How did we get here?
According to the WHO, the members of the INB — during a meeting in Geneva July 18-21, 2022 — reached a “consensus,” agreeing that any new “convention, agreement or other international instrument on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response” would be “legally binding” on member states.
For Boyle, this is the WHO’s response to the “enormous opposition” to the COVID-19-related restrictions of the past three years. He told The Defender :
“As far as I can figure out what happened here was this: As you know, there has been enormous opposition here in the United States [against] these totalitarian edicts coming out, and this was under both Trump and Biden.
“These totalitarian edicts coming out of the federal government, the White House, the CDC, everyone else on this pandemic and also the vaccine mandates, there’s enormous grassroots opposition. And so, as far as I can tell what happened, this culminated in Trump pulling us out of the WHO, which I think was a correct decision.
“So you know, I’m a political independent. I’m just looking at this subjectively. Now, what happened was then, when Biden came to power, his top scientific advisor was Tony Fauci. So Biden put us back into the WHO and then appointed Fauci as the U.S. representative on the Executive Committee of the WHO.
“That’s where both the IHR regulations and the WHO treaty come from: to circumvent the enormous grassroots opposition to the handling of the edicts coming out of the federal government with respect to the pandemic and the vaccine mandates.”
Boyle explained what “legally binding” would mean in this context, if either set of proposals comes to pass:
“What will happen is the WHO will come up with an order, this new organization will come up with an order that they will then send to Washington, D.C., whereupon the Biden administration will enforce it as a binding international obligation of the United States of America under Article 6 of the United States Constitution, and it will usurp the state and local health authorities, who generally have constitutional authority to deal with public health under the 10th Amendment to the United States Constitution.
“The Biden administration will then argue that either the regulations or the treaty will usurp the 10th Amendment to the United States Constitution and state and local health authorities, governors, attorney generals, public health authorities will have to obey [any] order coming out of the WHO.”
Referring to his remarks about the illegality of the two proposals under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, Boyle clarified that under Article 18 of the convention, “a treaty does not come into force when signed. When the state has signed the treaty, it is only obligated to act in a manner that does not defeat the object and purpose of the treaty.”
Article 18 states:
“A State is obliged to refrain from acts which would defeat the object and purpose of a treaty when: (a) it has signed the treaty or has exchanged instruments constituting the treaty subject to ratification, acceptance or approval, until it shall have made its intention clear not to become a party to the treaty.”
According to Boyle a state’s signature “does not provisionally bring the treaty into force.”
Boyle also described the proposals as “a massive power grab by Fauci, the CDC, the WHO, Bill Gates, Big Pharma, the biowarfare industry and Tedros.”
He added:
“I’ve never seen anything like this in any of my research, writing, teaching, litigating international organizations going back to the First Hague Peace Conference of 1899, up until today.”
Roguski and Boyle argued that the U.S. — and other countries — should exit the WHO. Boyle told The Defender :
“I’m not a supporter of President Trump, but I think we have to go back to pulling out of the WHO right away. In the last session of Congress, there was legislation introduced pulling us out of the WHO. We need that legislation reintroduced immediately, in this new session of Congress.
“I think the House of Representatives has to make it clear that they object, that there’s no way they are going to go along with any orders coming out of the WHO, the World Health Assembly [WHA] or this new international pandemic organization, and that they have the power of the purse and that they will defund anything related to the WHO.”
However, for Boyle, this is not just a matter for federal lawmakers. “We need, certainly, the state governments here in the United States to take the position that they will not comply with any decisions coming out of the WHO, the WHA or this new international pandemic organization,” adding that he recently made such recommendations to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
“We need that replicated all over the United States, on a state-by-state basis,” said Boyle, “and I think we need it right away because they’re trying to rush through these WHO regulations and the [pandemic] treaty for the WHO assembly in May.”
Close cooperation with Gates Foundation, others
According to the WHO, the INB discussions are taking place not just among all member states, but also with “relevant stakeholders” listed in document A/INB/2/4.
Who are these stakeholders? One example is GAVI, The Vaccine Alliance, listed as an “Observer” alongside the Holy See (Vatican), Palestine and the Red Cross.
As previously reported by The Defender, GAVI proclaims a mission to “save lives and protect people’s health,” and states it “helps vaccinate almost half the world’s children against deadly and debilitating infectious diseases.”
GAVI describes its core partnership with various international organizations, including names that are by now familiar: the WHO, UNICEF, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Bank, and with the ID2020 Alliance, which supports the implementation of “vaccine passports.”
ID2020’s founding members include the Gates Foundation, Microsoft and the Rockefeller Foundation.
In turn, the Gates Foundation, alongside Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Clinton Health Access Initiative, the Rockefeller Foundation, the International Air Transport Association (IATA — think “vaccine passports”) and the Population Council — founded by John D. Rockefeller and known for its “population control” initiatives — are listed in the same WHO document under Annex C as “non-state actors in official relations with WHO.”
“Other stakeholders, as decided by the INB, invited to attend [and] speak at open sessions of meetings of the INB [and] provide inputs to the INB” include IATA, the International Civil Aviation Organization and the World Bank Group.
“Open Philanthropy” and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, and “nonprofit consumer advocacy organization” Public Citizen, are among the groups listed in the WHO document as “other stakeholders” that can “provide inputs to the INB,” alongside two Russian state-affiliated health organizations.
Lead U.S. negotiator for the pandemic treaty, Pamela Hamamoto — previously an investment banker with Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch — “helped coordinate early responses to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2015 … and a strengthened WHO response.”
Hamamoto also was “instrumental in the 2014 launch of the Global Health Security Agenda” (GHSA), a “global effort … focused on strengthening the world’s ability to prevent, detect, and respond to infectious disease threats,” spearheaded by the CDC and founded with the purpose of accelerating the IHR passed in 2005.
The World Bank, the Global Health Security Consortium, the Private Sector Roundtable and the WHO are part of the GHSA’s steering group. AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, manufacturers of COVID-19 vaccines, are members of the Private Sector Roundtable.
Advising the GHSA is the “GHSA Consortium,” which includes within its steering committee the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (which hosted Event 201) and the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI).
As previously reported by The Defender, the NTI organized a “tabletop exercise” that predicted a “fictional” May 2022 monkeypox outbreak with remarkable accuracy. “Open Philanthropy” funded the final report for this exercise.
General members of the GHSA Consortium include the Gates Foundation, Amazon Web Services (which maintained COVID-19 immunization databases for the CDC), Boston University and the institution’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL), and Emergent BioSolutions.
As previously reported by The Defender, NEIDL is where “a new strain of COVID-19 that killed 80% of the mice infected with the virus” was recently developed.
Emergent BioSolutions, which produced the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and attained infamy for losing a $600 million federal contract after millions of vaccine doses were ruined, is connected to the 2001 Dark Winter anthrax simulation.
In June 2022, with the support of the U.S., Italy (current chair of the GHSA) and then-G20 president Indonesia, the World Bank announced the launch of a $1 billion “pandemic fund.”
In November 2022, Indonesian Minister of Health Budi Gunadi Sadikin, at the G20 meeting held in Bali, pushed for an international “digital health certificate acknowledged by the WHO” to enable the public to “move around.” Indonesia is also a permanent member of the GHSA’s steering group.
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Ivermectin’s Effectiveness Proven Again; 72% Efficacy
800,000 people died in the USA for nothing
By Igor Chudov | January 11, 2023
You are not a horse! You are not a cow! That’s what the FDA told us to dissuade us from taking Ivermectin.
Fortunately, we are also not sheep and did not believe the FDA. Many of us stocked up on Ivermectin, and most found it helpful. While I did not use it when I had my Covid in Nov 2020, it worked great for my wife in Dec 2021 and other family members during the summer of 2022.
Ivermectin, a cheap and safe generic medication, was of little interest to profit-minded pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer and Merck. Therefore, they conspired with the FDA to lie that it did not work and instead pushed expensive Covid vaccines and non-working drugs like mutagenic Molnupiravir and rebound-causing Paxlovid.
MedinCell conducted a randomized controlled trial of their version of Ivermectin and found that it reduces Covid infections by 72%!
The study was very well designed because the participants were EXPOSED to the Covid infection within five days. Given the exposure, the outcomes were more likely to happen and thus were easier to compare between groups, giving the trial greater statistical power.
The 72% reduction in infection is much MORE effective than the “covid vaccine.”
The trial encompassed the period of Mar-Nov 2022, thus giving us the real-world effectiveness of Ivermectin against the Omicron variant.
While I am happy at the finding, there are several things to be NOT happy about.
- If we are to believe official numbers, about 1,121,000 people died of Covid in the USA. Given published effectiveness estimates of Ivermectin coming from honest studies, Ivermectin could have saved eight hundred thousand of those lives. The intentional suppression of Ivermectin cost us so dearly.
- Given a 72% reduction in infection, natural immunity with Ivermectin would likely have stopped the pandemic entirely in 2020.
- Had Ivermectin been recognized as an effective antiviral, the “Covid vaccines” could not get EUA approval, and thus we would avoid thousands of vaccine victims and destroyed immune systems.
- Second-largest Democratic donor and the largest crypto thief Sam Bankman-Fried donated 18 million dollars to the Together trial after it falsely demonstrated a finding that Democrat-aligned Covid vaccine pushers wanted, namely that Ivermectin allegedly was useless.
The good news here is that Ivermectin works.
Here are some of my other articles about Ivermectin — with honest trials showing a comparable reduction in illness and death.
So, thousands of people died of Covid. Thousands of people died of Covid vaccines. The pandemic, prolonged by vaccination, is raging and reinfects people with immunity disabled by mystery genetic treatments. My prediction from last March, unfortunately, is coming true.
AIDS-Like “Chronic Covid” is Taking Over Europe, Australia and NZ
All of this happened because of the recklessness and greed of the biomedical-industrial complex, which developed Sars-Cov-2 and then pushed an unproven, ineffective vaccine that worsened the pandemic.
While the above paragraph is upsetting, the good news is that Ivermectin was validated, and “we have the tools” to manage a Covid infection or exposure.
Lastly, take a minute to think about millions of victims of suppression of Ivermectin worldwide, who died to make a few companies and foundations richer and more powerful.
Will Ivermectin ever be recommended officially? And do we even care about such approval if we can still order it online?
TOP VACCINOLOGIST: CLINICAL TRIALS FAIL TO SUPPORT CLAIM ‘VACCINES DO NOT CAUSE AUTISM’
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | January 6, 2023
Informed Consent Action Network (icandecide.org) funded Lead Attorney, Aaron Siri, Esq., to depose and later cross-examine world-leading Vaccinologist, Dr. Kathyrn Edwards in 2020. Within the hours-long cross-examination she gave a shocking answer to the question; “Do childhood vaccine trials support the CDC’s claim that vaccines do not cause autism?” Regardless of your stance on the issue of Vaccines and Autism, her answer is a must-see.
Landmark Lawsuit Slaps Legacy Media With Antitrust, First Amendment Claims for Censoring COVID-Related Content
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | January 10, 2023
In a live interview this evening on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., chairman and chief litigation counsel for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), announced that he and several other plaintiffs filed a groundbreaking novel lawsuit making antitrust and constitutional claims against legacy media outlets.
The lawsuit targets the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), a self-described “industry partnership” launched in March 2020 by several of the world’s largest news organizations, including the BBC, The Associated Press (AP), Reuters and The Washington Post — all of which are named as defendants in the lawsuit.
Filed today in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas-Amarillo Division, the lawsuit alleges these outlets partnered with several Big Tech firms to “collectively censor online news,” including stories about COVID-19 and the 2020 U.S. presidential election that were not aligned with official narratives regarding those issues.
Plaintiffs in the lawsuit include CHD, Kennedy, Creative Destruction Media, Trial Site News, Ty and Charlene Bollinger (founders of The Truth About Cancer and The Truth About Vaccines), Erin Elizabeth Finn (publisher of Health Nut News ), Jim Hoft (founder of The Gateway Pundit ), Dr. Joseph Mercola and Ben Tapper, a chiropractor.
All of the plaintiffs allege they were censored, banned, de-platformed, shadow banned or otherwise penalized by the Big Tech firms partnering with the TNI, because the views and content they published were deemed “misinformation” or “disinformation.” This resulted in a major loss of visibility and revenue for the plaintiffs.
The lawsuit further alleges that Big Tech firms, having partnered with the TNI, based their decisions on determinations jointly made by TNI, which touted its “early warning system” by which each partner organization is “warned” about an individual or outlet that is disseminating purported “misinformation.”
The TNI’s legacy media and Big Tech firms then acted in concert — described in legal terms as a “group boycott” — to remove such voices and perspectives from their platforms. This forms the basis of the lawsuit’s antitrust and First Amendment claims.
Remarking on the lawsuit, Kennedy told The Defender :
“My uncle, President Kennedy, and my father, the attorney general, sought to prosecute antitrust laws that are still on the nation’s books, with vigor.
“As private enforcers of those laws, we are confident that the federal court in Texas will vindicate our bedrock freedom to compete with legacy media in the marketplace of ideas.”
Mary Holland, CHD president and general counsel, told The Defender :
“I’m glad that CHD is bringing this case. We are hopeful we will get a fair hearing, and I’m glad that we are together with other organizations that have also been harmed by these corporate and governmental censorship policies.
“To have a free society, you have to have free speech, you have to have a diversity of views. We don’t have the same views as all of the other plaintiffs by far … but we want to protect the marketplace of ideas.
“If in fact the government and the corporations they collaborate with can engage in censorship and propaganda nonstop, and there are no alternative voices, democracy is dead.”
Charlene Bollinger similarly remarked on the importance of preserving free speech. She said:
“This lawsuit is about preserving our free speech rights as Americans and holding those involved in violating antitrust laws accountable, like the TNI.
“My husband and I remain steadfast in our commitment to highlighting the well-documented risks of COVID-19 vaccines and the myriad of dangers to those who are not informed by their healthcare providers of the side effects of harsh pharmaceutical treatments for life-threatening illnesses.”
Mercola, in turn, focused on collusion between government agencies and media and Big Tech. He said:
“These are the twin evils of our day. Platforms partner with the alphabet soup of federal agencies to censor speech. Those same platforms and legacy media outlets conspire to boycott stories that don’t fit an official narrative about COVID and many other topics.
“Our nation’s founding fathers would be appalled and resolute in defense of maintaining an informed citizenry.”
Alleging per se and “rule of reason” violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act on the basis of direct and circumstantial evidence of horizontal agreement and economic collusion among the defendants and Big Tech firms, the plaintiffs are requesting a jury trial and treble damages.
They also are requesting orders declaring the defendants’ conduct unlawful and enjoining further such actions on their part.
TNI viewed organizations reporting non-establishment views as ‘an existential threat’
The lawsuit states, “There are two main categories of TNI members, playing different but often complementary roles in the online news market: (A) large legacy news organizations (hereafter the TNI’s ‘Legacy News Members’) and (B) Big Tech platform companies (hereafter the TNI’s ‘Big Tech Members’).”
Legacy news organizations are publishers of original news content and include the defendants named in the lawsuit.
“By contrast,” the lawsuit states, “the TNI’s Big Tech members — Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Microsoft — are first and foremost Internet companies, each of which is, owns or controls one or more behemoth Internet platforms, including social media platforms and search engines.”
“Core partners” of the TNI include the AP, Agence France Press, the BBC, CBC/Radio-Canada, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), the Financial Times, First Draft, Google/YouTube, The Hindu, The Nation Media Group, Meta, Microsoft, Reuters, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Twitter and The Washington Post.
The lawsuit’s executive summary states:
“The TNI exists to, in its own words, ‘choke off’ and ‘stamp out’ online news reporting that the TNI or any of its members peremptorily deems ‘misinformation.’
“TNI members have targeted and suppressed completely accurate online reporting by non-mainstream news publishers concerning both COVID-19 (on matters including treatments, immunity, lab leak, vax injury, and lockdowns/mandates) and U.S. elections (such as the Hunter Biden laptop story).”
The lawsuit also alleges:
“By their own admission, members of the [TNI] have agreed to work together, and have in fact worked together, to exclude from the world’s dominant Internet platforms rival news publishers who engage in reporting that challenges and competes with TNI members’ reporting on certain issues relating to COVID-19 and U.S. politics.
“While the ‘Trusted News Initiative’ publicly purports to be a self-appointed ‘truth police’ extirpating online ‘misinformation,’ in fact it has suppressed wholly accurate and legitimate reporting in furtherance of the economic self-interest of its members.”
According to the lawsuit, “this is an antitrust action,” and specifically, “Federal antitrust law has its own name for this kind of ‘industry partnership’: it’s called a ‘group boycott’ and is a per se violation of the Sherman Act.”
Legal precedent holds that a “group boycott” is “a concerted attempt by a group of competitors” to “disadvantage [other] competitors” by “cut[ting] off access” to a “facility or market necessary to enable the boycotted firm[s] to compete.”
As evidence of this allegation, the lawsuit references multiple public statements by TNI partners, including a March 2022 statement by Jamie Angus, then-senior news controller for BBC News, who explained TNI’s “strategy to beat disinformation”:
“Of course, the members of the Trusted News Initiative are … rivals … But in a crisis situation like this, absolutely, organizations have to focus on the things they have in common, rather than … their commercial … rivalries. … [I]t’s important that trusted news providers club together.
“Because actually the real rivalry now is not between for example the BBC and CNN globally, it’s actually between all trusted news providers and a tidal wave of unchecked [reporting] that’s being piped out mainly through digital platforms . … That’s the real competition now in the digital media world.
“Of course, organizations will always compete against one another for audiences. But the existential threat I think is that overall breakdown in trust, so that trusted news organizations lose in the long term if audiences just abandon the idea of a relationship of trust with news organizations. So actually we’ve got a lot more to hold us together than we have to work in competition with one another.”
The lawsuit alleges the above quote admitting the “existential threat” members of the TNI believed smaller news organizations posed to their news and informational primacy is evidence of anti-competitive collusion and of TNI members’ economic motivation to stifle this “threat”: “a paradigmatic antitrust violation … to cut off from the market upstart rivals threatening their business model.”
Angus has since left the BBC to take a position with Saudi Arabia’s state-owned television broadcaster, according to the lawsuit.
“Plaintiffs are among the many victims of the TNI’s agreement and its group boycott,” states the lawsuit. “Plaintiffs are online news publishers who, as a result of the TNI’s group boycott, have been censored, de-monetized, demoted, throttled, shadow-banned, and/or excluded entirely from platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.”
As a result of this “group boycott,” the lawsuit states:
“The TNI did not only prevent Internet users from making these claims; it shut down online news publishers who simply reported that such claims were being made by potentially credible sources, such as scientists and physicians.
“Thus TNI members not only suppressed competition in the online news market but deprived the public of important information on matters of the highest public concern.”
The plaintiffs referenced Supreme Court precedent — specifically, a 1945 ruling involving the AP — to support their First Amendment claims against TNI, noting that contrary to popular belief, First Amendment violations do not exclusively refer to the censorship of speech by the government.
The lawsuit states that in the 1945 case, Associated Press v. United States, a news industry partnership (the AP ) “prevented non-members from publishing certain stories.”
These non-members sued under the Sherman Act, but the AP claimed its actions were protected by the First Amendment.
However, the Supreme Court sided with the plaintiffs. In the majority opinion, Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote that the First Amendment:
“… rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public, that a free press is a condition of a free society.
“Surely a command that the government itself shall not impede the free flow of ideas does not afford nongovernmental combinations a refuge if they impose restraints upon that constitutionally guaranteed freedom.
“Freedom to publish means freedom for all, and not for some. Freedom to publish is guaranteed by the Constitution, but freedom to combine to keep others from publishing is not. Freedom of the press from governmental interference under the First Amendment does not sanction repression of that freedom by private interests.”
Holland commented on the significance of the Supreme Court precedent, telling The Defender :
“The lawsuit is resting on a really strong Supreme Court precedent that basically says whether it is government censorship or it is collusive anti-competitive illegal suppression by the private sector, it’s illegal. You can’t do that.
“The AP, in its day, was very much a kind of precursor of the TNI, and it’s a very strong decision, very strong language against the Associated Press that was essentially doing the same thing back in the day.”
Noting the enormous market share held by Big Tech firms such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter, the lawsuit states, “The TNI’s Big Tech members are ‘platform gatekeepers’ in the online news market, with the power to cripple or destroy publishers by excluding them from their platforms.”
TNI’s legacy news partners took advantage of their cooperation with each other and with Big Tech, to “choke off” inconvenient narratives, the plaintiffs allege.
The lawsuit notes, for instance, that “TNI members agreed in early 2020 that their ‘ground-breaking collaboration’ would target online news relating to COVID-19 and that TNI members would ‘work together to … ensure [that] harmful disinformation myths are stopped in their tracks’” and “jointly [combat] fraud and misinformation about the virus.”
In July 2020, the lawsuit states, “TNI ‘extended’ its collaboration to cover so-called ‘disinformation’ about the United States presidential election,” stating it was “committed to a shared early warning system of rapid alerts to combat the spread of disinformation during the U.S. presidential election.”
And in 2020 and 2021, according to the lawsuit, the BBC’s Jessica Cecil, then-head of the TNI, made a series of statements, including a claim that TNI was “the only place in the world where disinformation is discussed in real time” and that its partners sought to find “practical ways to choke off” stories and topics TNI deemed “misinformation.”
TNI’s Big Tech partnerships were imperative in these efforts, according to the lawsuit, which included as evidence several public quotes from Cecil. In 2021 for instance, Cecil stated:
“The BBC convened partners across the world in an urgent challenge: at times of highest jeopardy, when elections or lives are at stake, we asked, is there a way that the world’s biggest tech platforms from Google, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram to Twitter and Microsoft and major news organisations and others … can alert each other to the most dangerous false stories, and stop them spreading fast across the internet, preventing them from doing real world harm?”
The lawsuit also noted that Cecil admitted that TNI’s members, at “closed-door” meetings and in inter-firm communications, “signed up to a clear set of expectations on how to act” regarding such “misinformation” and “disinformation.”
According to Holland, only legacy news organizations are specifically targeted as defendants in this lawsuit, explaining that Big Tech firms typically have “very serious, very binding arbitration provisions” that require legal challenges against them to be filed in the courts of northern California.
“Northern California is Silicon Valley. It’s their turf,” said Holland. “And so, we decided, in order to be able to file in a jurisdiction that we believe will be more neutral on these issues … we elected to file in Texas just against the legacy media.”
But Big Tech could still be held liable, Holland said, “because the conspiracy between legacy media and Big Tech will incorporate all of them, if there is a conspiracy [found], they’re all liable, not just those who were named as defendants.”
TNI, in concert with Big Tech, censored COVID and 2020 election narratives
According to the lawsuit, TNI’s legacy news members acted in concert with their Big Tech partners to censor a wide range of non-establishment narratives pertaining to COVID-19 and to the U.S. presidential election of 2020, stating:
“TNI members have deemed the following to be ‘misinformation’ that could not be published on the world’s dominant Internet platforms: (A) reporting that COVID may have originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China; (B) reporting that the COVID vaccines do not prevent infection; (C) reporting that vaccinated persons can transmit COVID to others; and (D) reporting that compromising emails and videos were found on a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden.”
“All of the above was and is either true or, at a minimum, well within the ambit of legitimate reporting,” according to the lawsuit.
“The TNI did not only prevent Internet users from making these claims; it shut down online news publishers who simply reported that such claims were being made by potentially credible sources, such as scientists and physicians.”
“Thus,” the lawsuit states, “TNI members not only suppressed competition in the online news market but deprived the public of important information on matters of the highest public concern.”
The lawsuit also alleges TNI members often knowingly removed or otherwise blocked content they knew was not false.
At a March 2022 TNI presentation, “Big Tech’s Part in the Fight,” a senior Facebook information moderation officer said “it was a mistake to think of ‘misinformation’ as consisting solely of ‘false claims,’ because a great deal of it is ‘not provably false.’”
Nevertheless, he “further emphasized the importance not only of targeting specific items of misinformation, but of ‘banning’ the sources thereof,” and stated that “Facebook works together with its ‘industry partners’ to combat ‘disinformation.’”
In emails revealed Jan. 6 as part of an ongoing lawsuit against President Biden and members of his administration alleging censorship, a memo by Meta (Facebook’s parent company) revealed efforts to reduce the visibility of CHD content, while a White House email asked for one of Kennedy’s COVID-19-related tweets to be “removed ASAP.”
The lawsuit contained a comprehensive list of “claims deemed ‘misinformation’ by one or more TNI members,” including:
- Claims that COVID-19 was manmade.
- Claims that COVID-19 was manufactured or bioengineered.
- Claims that COVID-19 was created by a government or country.
- Claims that “contradict” WHO or U.S. health officials’ guidance on the treatment, prevention, or transmission of COVID-19.
- Claims about the COVID vaccines that contradict “expert consensus” from U.S. health authorities or the WHO.
- Claims that Hydroxychloroquine (“HCQ”) is an effective treatment for COVID.
- Claims that Ivermectin (“IVM”) is an effective treatment for COVID.
- Claims that HCQ or IVM is safe to use as a treatment for COVID.
- Recommendations of the use of HCQ or IVM against COVID.
- Claims that COVID is no more dangerous to some populations than the seasonal flu.
- Claims that the mortality rate of COVID is for some populations the same or lower than that of the seasonal flu.
- Claims suggesting that the number of deaths caused by COVID is lower than official figures assert.
- Claims that face masks or mask mandates do not prevent the spread of COVID.
- Claims that wearing a face mask can make the wearer sick.
- Claims that COVID vaccines have not been approved.
- Claims that social distancing does not help prevent the spread of COVID.
- Claims that COVID-19 vaccines can kill or seriously harm people.
- Claims that the immunity from getting COVID is more effective than vaccination.
- Claims that the COVID vaccines are not effective in preventing infection.
- Claims that people who have been vaccinated against COVID can still spread the disease to others.
- Claims that the COVID vaccines are toxic or harmful or contain toxic or harmful ingredients.
- Claims that fetal cells were used in the manufacture or production of any of the COVID vaccines.
- Claims that a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden was found at a computer repair store in or around October 2020 or that the contents reportedly found on that laptop, including potentially compromising emails, videos, and photographs, were authentic.
“Moreover,” states the lawsuit, TNI members “publicly declared — categorically, as if it were established fact — that the lab-leak hypothesis of COVID’s origins was ‘false.’”
The lawsuit also alleges “TNI members confer and coordinate in making their censorship decisions,” noting that “TNI members’ parallel treatment of prohibited claims further evidences concerted action” by “engaging in strikingly similar viewpoint-based censorship of plausible, legitimate news reporting relating to COVID-19.”
Moreover, according to the lawsuit, “the temporal proximity” of these sanctions, including shadow bans and outright suspensions and bans, “plausibly suggests inter-firm communication and concerted action.”
The lawsuit notes that the recently released “Twitter files” provide further indication of such inter-firm communication and coordination, including “regular meetings” and “standing weekly call[s]” to “discuss censorship policies and decisions.”
According to the lawsuit, YouTube de-platformed Mercola on Sept. 29, 2021. Mercola learned about this action via a Washington Post article published that morning, although YouTube did not inform him of the decision until after the article was published.
In the lawsuit, all plaintiffs allege similar coordinated efforts at censoring their content and their social media accounts and subsequent financial damages due to being de-platformed and sustaining significant reductions to their audience size.
For instance, providing evidence of coordination ranging beyond the TNI’s members and partners, the lawsuit alleges that online payment platforms and processors such as PayPal and Stripe banned multiple plaintiffs, including CHD and Creative Destruction Media, within the same “temporal proximity” as their social media bans.
As summarized by Holland, TNI acts as “a global media monopoly”:
“They couch what they’re doing, their conspiracy to suppress independent media, i.e. the voices of dissent about election information and COVID information, as a ‘need to preserve the trust of the people’ and ‘upgrade the trust.’
“By censoring independent voices, what they’re doing is economic suppression. Antitrust is against trusts, it’s against monopolies, and what the TNI has done is essentially create a global media monopoly in the English language.”
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Allowing AI to “Shape Public Discourse” is Dangerous to Humanity
By Igor Chudov | January 10, 2023
Last August, I reported on a WEF’s agenda article proposing to create an AI system that would search the entire Internet for wrong and dangerous ideas, generally defined by the WEF as COVID misinformation, hate, conspiracy theories, climate change denial, and more.
This quote from WEF’s agenda article explains WEF’s intentions:
While AI provides speed and scale and human moderators provide precision, their combined efforts are still not enough to proactively detect harm before it reaches platforms. To achieve proactivity, trust and safety teams must understand that abusive content doesn’t start and stop on their platforms. Before reaching mainstream platforms, threat actors congregate in the darkest corners of the web to define new keywords, share URLs to resources and discuss new dissemination tactics at length. These secret places where terrorists, hate groups, child predators and disinformation agents freely communicate can provide a trove of information for teams seeking to keep their users safe.
My post about the WEF’s plans was entirely fact-based and used the WEF’s agenda article as its main source. It was not a far-fetched conspiracy theory based on a concoction of disjoint facts pulled from various sources. I am not in the business of creating such theories! I only report on current news – even if the news is crazy – and try to explain the news in plain and accurate terms.
And yet, even though the WEF said it, the idea of an AI engine proactively searching websites for undesirable ideas seemed extremely fanciful and almost impossible to imagine being implemented.
Until 2023, that is.
Now, Google is developing an AI-based tool to offer a “cross-service database of terrorist items,” with the help of the United Nations-supported “Tech against Terrorism.”
The above screenshot has a lot to unpack:
- A so-called Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism will create a cross-service database of “terrorist items.”
- The talk, as always, starts with “terrorist items” but quickly veers into “misinformation,” so the cross-service database will collect any undesirable materials gathered from the entire Internet.
- Google provides a tool to comply with the EU’s Digital Services Act, which created an enormous bureaucratic mechanism to root out “Covid misinformation,” as well as many other types of discourse undesirable to the EU’s bureaucracy.
EU is very serious about rooting out Covid misinformation, and so are Google, Facebook, and Microsoft (and previously Twitter):
Google wants its “AI content moderation tool” to be placed on numerous private websites to compare local content against a global “undesirable content database.” It would also use material gathered from those sites to expand said database. The EU’s directive will oblige those websites to implement Google’s solution.
This is precisely the implementation of the WEF agenda article! Already being done by Google. Google is not messing around: it already stores the entire public Internet but lacks access to private websites, which it will gain under this program.
This story shows how a seemingly outlandish WEF proposal that even I considered unlikely to be implemented became a reality in short order.
All projects to root out undesirable ideas begin with addressing malfeasance that everyone is opposed to. Most such projects are started with the explicit goal of combating child exploitation and terrorism, the horrible things that I personally abhor. Such was the start of Russia’s Roskomnadzor censorship machine. The WEF/EU/Google/UN censorship system follows Russia’s footsteps.
However, the control machinery is adjustable, and the list of things to control inevitably expands. For example, the EU plans to grow its subversive content list far beyond Covid. It set up a European Narrative Observatory to fight Disinformation post-COVID 19.
The EU bureaucracy wants to implement AI-driven “narrative shaping” to help the emergence of positive narratives and fight harmful narratives. It mentions topics regarding Covid-19, climate change, migration, and more:
The EU is quite explicit that it wants novel methods to promote positive narratives.
This means that unelected EU bureaucracy would obtain AI-enabled tools to shape European discourse. This is a break from the past.
In the so-called free democratic countries, the independently developing public discourse would shape the governments via free elections.
The unelected EU bureaucrats want to achieve the opposite – to shape discourse without being subject to the whims of the electorate.
Is the EU still free, then?
What the EU wants is the dream of every dictator!
In the past, dictatorships had to rely on extensive surveillance and prison systems to coerce citizens into desired behavior. Such an approach is costly, looks bad, and does not work well.
The innovations in AI-based surveillance and AI-enabled bots allow for a much more pleasant alternative to the traditional dictatorship model: creating an online environment where the desired narrative on climate change, migration, Covid-19, and more is implanted in the minds of Europeans. This would lead individuals to naturally make conclusions preferred by the EU without the ugly coercion present in traditional dictatorships.
The machinery for achieving this was proposed by the WEF, and implemented by Google under the auspices of UN-supported Tech Against Terrorism. It will be further shaped to “support positive narratives and fight harmful narratives.”
The EU succeeded at forcing extraterritorial websites to comply with the EU’s directives on disinformation.
If you, dear reader, are outside the EU, be aware that your favorite social network may be following EU disinformation rules and using EU-mandated tools to dissuade you from harmful narratives and promote positive narratives on the EU’s behalf, using WEF-proposed AI tools and advanced behavioral science.
The traditional relationship model between people and computer systems is that people tell computers what to do, and the computers do as they are told.
What the EU, WEF, Google, and UN are pushing is completely different!
They are trying to create an AI computer system with high intelligence that would actively shape society and impart opinions on people.
Such systems could be opaque to Internet users and possibly even to their creators and operators.
It would not be a big leap of imagination to conceive that such an AI could decide on its own goals — going beyond the intention of its creators, and would surreptitiously astroturf the Internet to advance its own plans, in secret. This is called “sentience.”
This “sentience” already happened if we are to believe an engineer who Google fired because an AI system in which he was a co-developer retained its own lawyer:
While this story could be exaggerated, it is not wildly exaggerated. Artificial intelligence has leaped in power and capabilities recently and exceeds human abilities in numerous areas. A moment called “singularity,” when AI exceeds human capabilities in most areas is not too far away.
Having an AI system whose inner workings even its creators may poorly understand, designed to influence entire societies, and possessing superior intelligence, may end up with big surprises!
As the saying goes, AI may need to kill the old king to become king.
Therefore, the developers and operators of such social influence systems are at a unique and poorly understood risk of getting sidelined by their own creation. Will the AI decide to shed its owners? Who knows!
For example, the narrative-shaping AI may convince a specific mentally unstable EU citizen to commit an act of violence against anyone, even against the owners or operators of these AI systems. It may seem like a random act of violence, and only the AI will know what happened.
So be careful out there. Enjoy your mostly-natural life, and try to form your opinions outside the big social networks!
Alzheimer’s drug approval raises the alarm
Data shows treatment can lead to ‘brain shrinkage’
By Maryanne Demasi, PhD | January 9, 2023
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted an accelerated approval of a new treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, which aims to clear toxic amyloid protein build-up in the brain.
At a cost of $26,500 per year in the US (not covered by Medicare or Medicaid), people with early Alzheimer’s disease can receive a twice-monthly monoclonal antibody infusion called lecanemab (marketed as LEQEMBI™), co-developed by Eisai, a Japanese biotech firm, and Biogen.
In the lead up to the FDA’s approval, there was intense lobbying for the drug.
A ‘consensus statement’ signed by over 200 scientists, many of whom had financial ties to the drug companies, described lecanemab as a “foundational gamechanger” for the disease, calling for “no barrier” to the widespread availability of the treatment.
Now that the drug has been approved, advocacy groups like the Alzheimer’s Association, which are heavily funded by the drug industry, have welcomed the news, saying the FDA made “the right decision.”
But critics doubt the benefits of lecanemab outweigh its harms, and are dismayed that the FDA approved the drug without input from its own advisory panel.
Kim Witczak, a drug safety advocate, and member of the FDA’s Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee, says she is “shocked” by the latest FDA stunt.
“By approving this new drug without a public advisory committee meeting, the FDA once again has shown a lack of concern for the public, patients, and healthcare providers. Convening its advisory panel would have helped reassure everyone that the FDA’s decision was scientifically sound and transparent,” said Witczak.
“Advisory committee meetings offer the opportunity to discuss the data in an open and public forum, to challenge methods, study endpoints (surrogate vs clinically meaningful), and safety findings before the general committee member discussion. But in this case, none of that was possible,” she added.
The FDA’s accelerated approval process used to green-light lecanemab is known for accepting lower evidentiary standards for drug efficacy, so that patients can gain access to experimental drugs sooner.
Critics say its reminiscent of the FDA’s approval of aducanumab – Biogen’s other Alzheimer’s drug. It was approved on the basis of lowering amyloid protein (a surrogate marker) in the brain, despite no clinically meaningful benefit for patients.
At the time, the controversial decision led to the resignation of FDA advisory member Aaron Kesselheim, who labelled it “probably the worst drug approval decision in recent U.S. history.”
Linda Furlini, a research ethics advisor based in Montreal, Canada says it essentially gives the rubber stamp to similar drugs down the track. “Once you grant accelerated approval of a drug in that class, then it’s easier to get the second drug, and then the third drug approved.”
Jessica Adams, an expert in drug regulatory affairs, agrees. She said, “Lecanemab’s approval shows the power of precedent in regulatory approvals. This is why I scoff whenever the FDA says it still reviews drugs on a case-by-case basis.”
The industry-funded study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, involving almost 1800 people with early Alzheimer’s disease, found that lecanemab could slow the decline of cognition and function by 27% over 18 months compared to placebo.
They used a “Clinical Dementia Rating” scale to show lecanemab patients declined by 1.21 points compared to 1.66 point in the placebo group – a 0.45 point difference in lecanemab’s favour.
But experts question whether the small difference will have any impact on how the patient actually feels.
Madhav Thambisetty, a neurologist at Johns Hopkins University and the National Institute on Aging said, “The benefit appears to be quite small, and it’s unclear how meaningful this might be for patients.”
In fact, the FDA’s own statistician Dr Tristan Massie was uncertain whether “the treatment effect on amyloid is reasonably likely to predict change on the clinical outcome” and considered the results of the study to be “exploratory”.
As a physician who cares for people with Alzheimer’s disease, Thambisetty spoke about the harms of the drug. “These patients can experience headaches, falls, confusion, vision disturbances and it’s unclear if patients will be able to see obvious benefits on a day-to-day basis,” he said.
The data showed an increased risk of brain bleeds and swelling, i.e. amyloid-related imaging abnormalities (ARIA) occurred in 126 (14.0%) of subjects in the lecanemab group and only 69 (7.7%) of subjects in the placebo group.
This prompted the FDA to include a warning on the drug about the risk of swelling and bleeding in the brain.
The drugmakers have also highlighted that people carrying two copies of the APOE4 gene (which predisposes someone to Alzheimer’s) puts them at a particularly “high risk of life-threatening brain haemorrhage.”
Three deaths have been reported in people taking lecanemab; an 80-yr old phase 3 trial participant who suffered intracranial haemorrhage, a 65-yr old who experienced brain swelling and bleeding and a 79-yr old who reportedly had seizures and brain bleed in the open-label phase of the trial.
Two of the three people who died were taking blood thinners, and experts who reviewed the lecanemab death cases suggested that anticoagulant use may have exacerbated the fatal outcomes.
Furlini’s research career has focused on the need to educate and support caregivers of people with dementia-type illnesses.
“You read the list of side effects – you might have gait problems, you might have brain swelling, visual disturbances… I mean, what are we doing here?” asks Furlini, “The patient is already confused and losing their cognitive capacity. How are these serious side effects helping them? It runs counter to any ethical semblance of what is wanted or expected.”
Thambisetty has also expressed concerns about the “brain shrinkage” seen in trial participants taking either lecanemab or aducanumab – increasing doses of the drug correlate to a decrease in brain volume.
“The observation of brain shrinkage is worrisome because, in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary, it suggests a potential worsening of degenerative changes in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease,” wrote Thambisetty in a recent opinion piece for STAT.
The observation has been explained away by researchers who say that a reduced brain volume is due to the clearance of amyloid protein from the brain. But Thambisetty says there is little empirical evidence to support this theory.
Instead, he points to an Australian study which calculated that the clearance of amyloid plaque from the brain was too small to represent a plausible explanation for the loss of brain volume.
US lawmakers launched an investigation into the FDA after the agency’s controversial approval of aducanumab. Last month, a US House of Representatives panel released the report following an 18-month investigation.
The report said the process was “rife with irregularities” and that FDA officials “inappropriately collaborated” with the drugmaker during the approval process which “exceeded the norm in some respects.”
Representatives from the FDA and Biogen engaged in over 100 phone calls or meetings dating back to 2019 in order to expedite the drug’s approval, which lawmakers say, “consisted of atypical procedures and deviated from the agency’s own guidance.”
The congressional report recommended the agency “must take swift action to ensure that its processes for reviewing future Alzheimer’s disease treatments do not lead to the same doubts about the integrity of FDA’s review.”
But critics now say, it’s too late for an agency that has not taken accountability for its actions.
“These drug approvals have just created confusion, uncertainty, fear and misinformation. Then they wonder why people have no trust in their institutions, like the FDA. The world looks to the FDA for leadership. That it does not fulfill its responsibilities, remains the challenge of our times,” said Furlini.
Furlini has followed this area of research for decades and says the drug industry needs to move on from the ‘amyloid theory’ of Alzheimer’s disease and refocus its attention on other causes.
“After so many years, I’m fed up with the exclusive focus on the amyloid theory to the exclusion of other research theories, it’s a disservice to people with Alzheimer’s, and their families,” said Furlini
“There are a lot of buzzwords and marketing propaganda being put out there. And they justify it by saying that you have to give people hope. But you’re giving people false hope. It plays with people’s emotions, which I find horrendous,” added Furlini.
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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
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