Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Stephen Fry and the climate of hypocrisy

By Philip Patrick | TCW Defending Freedom | December 14, 2022

Stephen Fry has announced that he doesn’t understand ‘climate deniers’, implying that such people are selfish and uncaring. He delivered himself of this opinion in a puff piece for his new travel series, A Year on Planet Earth, due to drop on ITVX on December 22.

The series takes Fry to some of the most exotic and beautiful places in the world where he will emote about the flora and fauna. He hopes we will be sufficiently awestruck to help save the world from the ‘climate crisis’ but won’t be lecturing us, he says. This is a relief. But what exactly does he not understand about ‘climate deniers’?

Let’s take a quick look at the views of those crazy denialists. According to William Happer, one of the world’s most distinguished scientists and former adviser to two US presidents, anthropogenic climate change is real – we do have an impact on the climate, but it is small (nothing like a ‘crisis’) and in many ways beneficial (‘global greening’).

Happer and others argue that CO2 (the stuff of life, let us not forget) is a very minor greenhouse gas, and, due to the saturation effect, there is a limit to how much it can affect climate. He uses the analogy of painting a barn door: there are only so many coats you can apply before there is no further impact. In other words, China can build as many coal-fired power stations as it wants, and that may not be good at a surface level, but beyond a certain, not very scary, level, it won’t make any difference to global temperatures.

Added to this, there is the awkward fact that the world isn’t co-operating in the climate crisis narrative. The Arctic and Antarctic have failed to melt away; the Great Barrier Reef, for which an obituary was written in the Guardian, is flourishing, and those pesky polar bears, penguins and whales, just refuse to do the decent thing and disappear. So, to paraphrase Jim Callaghan, ‘Crisis? What crisis?’

Happer’s arguments, shared by many of the world’s most distinguished scientists, should, along with other sceptical viewpoints, certainly be subject to scrutiny. But they certainly shouldn’t be airily dismissed, particularly by someone who by his own admission knows nothing about science: ‘ . . . anything too scientific leaves me having to clutch at a table, feeling a bit weak and hopeless’.

Fry says he can’t understand the people who hold sceptical views on climate views. Can’t, or won’t? The first step to understanding something is wanting to understand it, and if you don’t want to, you never will. This seems to be Fry’s problem, as with many a climate zealot. It is a dangerous mindset, leading you to close your mind to uncomfortable information and denounce unbelievers as heretics.

Fry says in his article that climate deniers ‘now seem to be diminishing in numbers, thankfully’ suggesting these dreadful people are one species he would be glad to see become extinct. And yet this is manifestly untrue. The WCD (World Climate Declaration) is a campaign group of some 1,400 scientists, engineers and experts led by Nobel laureate Ivar Giaever. Hundreds are signing their declaration every day. These, their key points, even a science ‘illiterate’ should be able to understand:

·       Natural as well as anthropogenic factors cause warming

·       Warming is far slower than predicted

·       Climate policy relies on inadequate models

·       CO2 is plant food, the basis of all life on Earth

·       Global warming has not increased natural disasters

·       Climate policy must respect scientific and economic realities

As for other evidence of scepticism the Swedish government has just scrapped its environment ministry. Huge protests against compulsory farm closures have been happening in Holland. The Sri Lankan government fell after a popular uprising provoked by its climate policies. In the UK, the third highest polling party Reform UK promises a referendum on NetZero (‘Net Stupid’) suggesting considerable scepticism here.

Fry’s most recent project was a three-part spoken word show based on Greek myths: ‘Gods’, ‘Heroes’ and ‘Men’. I suspect he most closely identifies with the first of these. That would explain his Olympian disdain, his effortless superiority, and his seeming imperviousness to accusations of hypocrisy. Like his friend Emma Thompson, Fry apparently sees no contradiction in flying around the world and then claiming to care deeply about climate change. There are, reputedly, 60 locations featured in his new series. Even the title A Year on Planet Earth is revealing, suggesting he has descended from a superterrestrial realm to lead us back on to the path of righteousness.

I’m just about old enough to remember when Fry not only made me laugh but made me think too. Fry was, once, an equal opportunities humorist. If there was a common denominator to his targets it was people who lacked self-awareness, were narrow minded, self-important, and intolerant – like Lord Melchett of Blackadder. If there was a message, it was to engage your intellect and to resist the lure of received ideas.

But that was before this avowed atheist found his religion. Sadly, Fry has gone awry. He is suffering the worst fate that can possibly befall a satirist. He has become an example of the very thing he used to make fun of.

December 14, 2022 Posted by | Film Review, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

And Just Like That… It Was All Gone

Zero Covid is deemed surplus to requirements

Health Advisory & Recovery Team | December 13, 2022

Newsflash from China: the world’s last bastion of Zero Covid has finally given up the pretence. “Covid China cracks”… this is a message that seems to have penetrated even the mainstream media’s coverage.

What is not, however, entirely clear is how brave BBC reporters can travel around the world to capture footage in the Far East, but were blind to peaceful protests closer to home. Those voices of reason who have been ignored for almost three years have found the cognitive dissonance more than a little unnerving. How can it simultaneously be true that lockdown sceptic protests and protestors in UK are bad, selfish and unscientific, while lockdown sceptic protests and protestors in China are brave and pushing back against regime oppression?

Even in their dissonant apostasy, the media cheerleaders still struggle with fundamental misconceptions due to their alignment with the crumbling narrative and blindness to the obvious: “the main challenge is ensuring the inevitable uptick in infections does not lead to mass deaths” claims the BBC. Really? With almost three years of data now to hand, is it now not blindingly obvious that the UK’s Chief Scientific Officer Patrick Vallance was absolutely correct when he stated on 16 March 2020 that “this is a mild disease in most people”?  If these brave reporters want to investigate ‘mass deaths’, how about some hard-hitting investigative reporting on iatrogenesis instead?

This unpalatable (and hard to ignore) charade aside, can we at least hope that this is the end of an era? Can the Zero Covid chapter be closed for good?

Let us hope so. Humanity may – finally – have rid itself of Zero Covid policies, but what of its erstwhile supporters – what new hair-brained schemes are they now supporting? Whether the chaos they were involved in creating was by accident or design is arguably immaterial: how can society protect itself against future periods of collective self-harm?

The precautionary principle “emphasises caution, pausing and review before leaping into new innovations that may prove disastrous”.

Winding back the clock almost three years, it was for this reason that many of us had a principled objection to draconian non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs, i.e. lockdowns) from before they were enacted. While this view is now fashionable, many supported these policies at the time and then did not want to back down from this shibboleth. But why was it ever acceptable to deploy this combination of hand grenades to crack a nut? Why did society go along with a perverse inversion of the anti-precautionary principle: “panic; shout ‘fire’, abandon detailed disaster planning and then implement the precise opposite, botch the implementation, shut down constructive debate and then vilify those that challenge the new orthodoxy”?

It is instructive to observe the flailing attempts by vocal proponents of Zero Covid and its associated policies (school closures, rules of six, masks, vaccine mandates) to post-rationalise and excuse their mistakes.  This is where lessons will be learned (and not, incidentally, from the preposterous attempts by those who piloted the ship onto the rocks to shift blame onto others or to claim that the right decisions were made “based on all the information available at the time”).

We have previously outlined clear evidence of what was common knowledge by mid-March 2020. Chief Scientific Advisor Vallance, quoted above, went on to state: “Epidemics are like a pole vaulter taking flight: the outbreak starts slowly, takes off rapidly, reaches a peak and then comes back down to earth”.  No different to what had happened in previous months on the Diamond Princess, in Wuhan and in Bergamo. This was a known quantity well before the UK launched itself, lemming-like, off the cliffs on 23 March 2020.

From hereon in it was one-way traffic for much of the next two years. Dissent was essentially criminalised, and the full force of far-from-benign authoritarian state machinery was turned against its citizens. Rational discourse was squashed (why would authorities collude with the media to stifle calm voices of reason such as Professor Jay Bhattacharya and instead promote shrill panic-mongers?); the media controlled via carrot (advertising) and stick (OFCOM diktat); dissenters were made an example of. None of this was necessary, and a normally-functioning society and fourth estate could have led us quickly back to balanced rationality, avoiding much of the human cost and unnecessarily-wrought collateral damage of the Coronapanic debacle.

They might prefer us to forget, but we must not. Thankfully, public records exist that will serve as a salutary reminder to future generations of what our own home-grown Zero Covid zealots wanted to perpetrate. For example, in the dark days of February 2021, 47 MPs from Opposition parties tabled an Early Day Motion promoting Net Zero. This Motion – as well as its stated (and implicit) underlying assumptions – has not aged well, the most egregious claim being that harsher draconian measures might avoid “putting huge additional strain on the NHS” – tell that to those on the now-gargantuan waiting lists for essential treatment. Most of the 47 signatories on this Motion are Labour MPs… Labour is currently riding high in the polls. They might well now criticise the UK Government’s handling of the last few years, but it was Labour – and their union paymasters – who were consistently pushing for more and more restrictions. Voters should be careful what they wish for.

So good riddance to Zero Covid, but have we learned any lessons? Unfortunately, there is as yet little evidence to show that society has the strength to resist the siren calls of the next Zero Policy fiasco… for example, could it be that Net Zero is an unholy hysteria rather than a holy grail? We would do well to look a bit more closely before we leap into deindustrialised pauperisation.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and in the interests of protecting all that we hold dear, we can only encourage everyone to keep constructively challenging and critiquing the official narrative.

December 13, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Pandemicism and the Foreknowledge of the Virus Planners

eugyppius: a plague chronicle | December 13, 2022

When I write of the pandemic response as a basically undirected social and institutional contagion, the same question always comes up: What about Event 201, and the 2017 SPARS exercise, and all those other creepy prophetic pandemic wargames? Don’t they indicate some of kind of unified plan? How else to explain the foreknowledge of the planners?

I’ve given partial replies here and there, but I’ve never laid out all of my ideas in one place. I think these strange exercises seem much less bizarre when considered against the broader backdrop of the pandemicists and the beliefs they share. You might call their most central article of faith pandemicism, which is the doctrine that pandemics represent a serious threat to human health, and that they can be prevented or substantially ameliorated with the right scientific interventions.

Aspects of pandemicism are as old as 1918, but the proximate origins of this mind virus are much more recent. Tellingly, they don’t lie with any kind of pandemic at all, but rather with the WHO campaign to eradicate smallpox. This started in 1967, and it took ten years to complete. Any institutionalised enterprise that persists for a full decade will acquire institutional momentum, such that it can’t simply be turned off when the mission is over. Just as the push for trans rights and trans acceptance owes a lot to the institutional forces accumulated by the gay rights movement since the 1970s, pandemicism became the next stage of advocacy for the smallpox eradicators after they had put themselves out of business. All the careers, institutions and grand funding schemes that had been thrown at smallpox needed a second act.

The smallpox eradicators began their transition to a post-smallpox world by fantasising that the virus they had killed off would someday return. Donald Henderson, director of the eradicators, founded the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies in 1998, a key pandemicist think tank that was later rechristened as the Center for Health Security, and that went on to hold a series of notorious and well-publicised pandemic war games. The earliest of these – Dark Winter and Atlantic Storm – were funded by the US Department of Defence and involved elaborate fictional scenarios of smallpox biowarfare. Later on, with the rise of billionaire philanthropy and the ever waning cultural significance of Variola, the Johns Hopkins pandemicists began peddling horror scenarios of other pandemic pathogens. Event 201 was their first major tabletop exercise featuring a pathogen other than smallpox that entered humans via a natural spillover event.

There are, then, two pandemicist eras – an early period, fuelled by Defence funding and devoted primarily to biowarfare scnearios, with curious parallels to the 1995 film Outbreak; and a later period driven by banal third-worldist philanthropy, that is more heavily focused on natural pathogens and reflected in the film Contagion. The Hollywood resonances are no accident; the pandemicists are above all interested in publicity and fundraising, and they try hard to make their mark on popular culture. The earliest wargames were at base morality tales intended to convince the US government to increase its smallpox vaccine stockpiles. The second era of pandemicist thought owes a great deal in turn to the SARS outbreak of 2003. Vaccine development at this stage becomes the central concern, and the pandemicist mission expands with novel projects to predict and preempt the emergence of novel human-infecting viruses. The old roots were still there, and the Defence Department funds were a major part of this new research.

The primary problem of pandemicism, is that there just aren’t very many pandemics, which means that most of the time the pandemicists don’t have anything to do. Wargaming attracts publicity and the interest of fundraisers, and it gets scary viruses into headlines in the absence of any reason for them to be there. Pandemicist wargames feature what we should think of as “fundraising viruses.” These are either fictional pathogens with very high infection fatality rates (often modelled on SARS), or real viruses like Nipah that are extremely deadly but not very contagious. The pandemicists almost never bother to wargame the most common pandemic virus, namely influenza, because nobody finds it particularly scary. As founding pandemicist Larry Brilliant said in 2007:

Last year, six hundred thousand people died and we didn’t notice. That’s a little bit of the reason you find so much hyperbole in the whole question of pandemic flu. Because a lot of public health people are saying, oh goody, we have something that’s going to frighten rich people, let’s use it as a chance to build up the public health system.

Fundraising viruses are a fictional threat. Any viral pathogen adapted to spread widely via direct person-to-person contact in human hosts will cause nothing more than influenza-like illness, with mortality well within the familiar range for seasonal respiratory viruses. This important difference, between what grabs attention and what is actually biologically likely to occur, is one reason I think that most scientists, and the pandemicists in particular, ignore the broader behavioural patterns of viruses and the evolutionary pressures to which they’re subject. Looking too deeply into these questions threatens to turn up evidence that we don’t really need the pandemicists at all.

Formally, it seems that this bland pandemic theatre is supposed to familiarise “stakeholders” and “decision-makers” with the expected mitigationist response. As late as Event 201 in Fall 2019, this response consisted of not doing very much. Before Corona, the pandemicists didn’t like the idea of travel restrictions or lockdowns. These might be used to contain very local outbreaks, but once a virus had achieved pandemic status, closures were considered counterproductive and likely to increase poverty and disease in the developing world. The pandemicists preferred things like travel advisories and fast-tracking vaccine development. The idea of mass containment emerged in the wake of SARS; it was never a part of Western pandemicist doctrine, though brief lockdowns were trialled in Mexico in 2009 against the nothingburger Swine Flu, and again in 2014 against Ebola.(1)

As I never tire of typing, what happened in the West was a hybrid response. Via China and pressure from the WHO, mass containment came to be added at the very last minute to the standard mitigationist playbook that the pandemicists had been peddling for a generation. This is why the messaging shifted so suddenly after February 2020. Until that date, we were in the standard world of Event 201, and authorities talked down the risk of the virus in an effort to prepare us all for the inevitable infections and deaths. Mass containment, adopted with the Italian lockdown in March, required a vastly more hysterical and overblown messaging strategy, in an effort to convince all of us to hide at home.

All that wargaming about how we’d stay open didn’t matter very much in the end, because well-publicised pandemic wargames aren’t actually planning exercises and have very little strategic importance. They’re for fundraising and publicity.

Probably the most obtrusive feature of pandemicist material – and the least discussed – is its extremely low quality. This is above all why I have a hard time buying theories that these events reflect any nefarious plan. They are just so, so stupid, it is actually hard to put into words. While earlier wargames were fairly textured and elaborate, there’s been a steady decline, worsened by the arrival of Big Philanthropy. I strongly advise that you not waste your life watching the extremely insipid Event 201 videos. Far more digestible is the SPARS pandemic exercise, which is often cited as another ominously prophetic document, particularly for its lengthy discussions of anti-vaxxers and pro-vaccine public health messaging. There are some parallels to recent events, but if you read carefully, you’ll see that the whole thing is firmly rooted in vintage 2016 anxieties about social media disinformation. And, again, it’s just really, really dumb. Every chapter concludes with tiresome questions for discussion by “public health risk communicators,” whoever they are. It feels like a weird textbook written for virusphobic primary school children in an alternate reality, where the hot new social media platform is called ZapQ and the big antivaxx disinformationist is a “science blogger” named EpiGirl and public health officials recruit a “hip hop icon” named BZee whose fictional tweets get fewer retweets and likes than mine do (see the figures on p. 25).

Nevertheless, the SPARS scenario and others like them have their moments of foreknowledge. I would never exclude malfeasance outright, but the general explanation for this phenomenon is that we get the virus freakouts we plan for. Virus fantasies like Event 201 and SPARS reflect a prior epidemiological interest in specific pathogens, and they serve to focus the attention of the public health brigade further on specific viral species. Monkeypox and the 2009 Swine Flu show that pandemicist attention alone – in the absence of any serious mortality – is enough to generate widespread hysteria. These are prophecies, but they are mostly self-fulfilling ones. That is also why the laboratory origins of SARS-2 are such a big piece of this puzzle.

What’s missing from all these planning scenarios – what every last one of them fails to predict – is the steely biomedical dictatorship that emerged to ruin all of our lives in 2020. Nobody in any of these wargames is ever locked up in their homes. Public health officials respond to the off-message EpiGirl with press releases, not threats and deplatforming. There are no green passes. The unvaccinated are never deplored or fired. Part of the reason is that, before 2020, lockdowns had never been part of the plan, and they gave public health bureaucrats a chance at overt and direct repression, which they’d never counted on before. But it’s also true that the basic project of pandemicism has authoritarian and repressive elements baked into it, which I think the pandemicists themselves never really noticed. They’re just not the most intelligent or introspective people.

(1) In the years after SARS, some public health bureaucrats and pandemicists played with ever more restrictionist mitigation regimes, contemplating school closures and work-from-home orders, but their focus remained firmly mitigationist. The purpose was only to slow infections to spare the healthcare system. Mass containment, by contrast, is eradicationist in outlook, aiming not to slow infections but to stop the virus altogether.

December 13, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

U.S. Government Has Been Planning to ‘Lockdown and Wait for a Vaccine’ Since 2007

BY WILL JONES | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | DECEMBER 13, 2022

More and more evidence is coming to light that the ‘lockdown and wait for a vaccine’ strategy unleashed in 2020 was being cooked up inside the U.S. Government for decades before COVID-19 appeared and gave too many people an excuse to put the dreadful plan into action.

Recently the role of CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) in producing key lockdown guidance for America in March 2020 came to light.

Now, a pandemic plan from 2007 produced by the National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC) and currently hosted on the CISA website has emerged.

The plan contains the original list of pandemic ‘essential businesses’ that was used by CISA in 2020 to lock down America. The 2007 plan (which was itself based on a Department of Homeland Security plan from the previous year) clearly states the intention to ban large gatherings “indefinitely”, close schools and non-essential businesses, institute work-from-home, and quarantine exposed and not just sick individuals. The aim is simple and clear: to slow the spread to wait for a vaccine.

During a pandemic, the goal will be to slow the virus’ transmission; delaying the spread of the virus will provide more time for vaccine development while reducing the stress on an already burdened healthcare system.

Here’s the relevant section of the 2007 NIAC plan in full.

2006 and 2007 were a turning point in U.S. biodefence planning. Prior to 2006, such planning had been focused on biological attacks, but after that point major mission creep set in and the new draconian ideas were applied wholesale to general pandemic planning. This controversial switch in focus so riled leading U.S. disease expert D.A. Henderson, who had been involved with the project up to that point, that he issued his famous riposte objecting in the strongest terms to the new ideas. He and his fellow dissenters wrote, presciently:

Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted. Strong political and public health leadership to provide reassurance and to ensure that needed medical care services are provided are critical elements. If either is seen to be less than optimal, a manageable epidemic could move toward catastrophe.

I’m told by someone who was involved with the programme in the early days that the original biodefence planning in 2002-2003 assumed a targeted biological weapons attack with smallpox as the viral case and anthrax as the bacterial case – both considered worst case scenarios. It was recognised that the old smallpox vaccine was too risky to try to use on a wider population to protect them if such an attack occurred, thus the effort for a new vaccine. But very quickly, within a year or two (not least due to the SARS outbreak in 2003), there was a massive expansion of the original mission and suddenly every infectious agent, whether dangerous or not, was cast into the web of biodefence.

Outside the U.S. there was more resistance to this kind of totalitarian nonsense. However, even the 2019 World Health Organisation pandemic guidance bears many of its marks. While this guidance commendably did not recommend “in any circumstances” contact tracing, border closures, entry and exit screening and quarantine of exposed individuals, it did make conditional recommendations for use of face masks by the public, school and workplace closures and “avoiding crowding” i.e., social distancing.

The purpose was also the same: to ‘flatten the curve’ to wait for a vaccine, as illustrated in the diagram below. The WHO guidance states: “NPIs are often the most accessible interventions, because of the time it takes to make specific vaccines available”; “specific vaccines may not be available for the first six months”; NPIs are “used to delay the peak of the epidemic… allowing time for vaccines to be distributed”.

These untested ideas, which the WHO’s own guidance rightly admitted had no good quality evidence to support them, have now become a terrible orthodoxy for global pandemic response. This is despite them utterly failing to achieve any of their goals – a point that no one who backs them seems to have noticed.

Somehow, the world must learn the right lessons from this debacle. Yet it keeps threatening to learn all the wrong ones.

December 13, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , , | Leave a comment

STUDY RAISES COVID SHOT CORD BLOOD CONCERNS

The Highwire with Del Bigtree | December 8, 2022

New science, including a study on Covid Shot Cord blood, raises new concerns amid the reported rise in the prevalence of miscarriages, infant mortality, and stillbirth rates.

December 13, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | | Leave a comment

UK government asked Twitter and Facebook to “tweak” algorithms during Covid

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | December 12, 2022

Former United Kingdom Health Secretary Matt Hancock, self-styled as an official who was at the forefront of Britain’s battle against Covid, didn’t seem to feel like he had done enough in 2020 and 2021, so he felt compelled to milk the pandemic cow by writing a book about that “battle.”

But he wasn’t laboring alone, since he had a co-author, Isabel Oakeshott, who reports say is actually opposed to Hancock’s policies and is a lockdown skeptic.

And now, Oakeshott, who had access to official records and Hancock’s notes exchanged with “all the key players in Britain’s Covid-19 story” – as the book’s blurb states – has penned her own “story,” an article based on the collaboration published by the Spectator, whose content draws from the material used for the book.

Oakeshott writes about the “key lessons” that include revelations about the details of UK’s vaccine and mask policies, but also the mechanisms to deal with dissenters, particularly online.

According to the journalist, Hancock genuinely considered those who disagreed with him on how to handle the situation as “mad and dangerous” and more importantly, as persons that “needed to be shut down.”

Judging by the article, his “response” to online skepticism effectively came even before pandemic restrictions themselves. Hancock had no problem revealing that in January 2020, his special adviser was already in conversation with  about the ways to “tweak” the platform’s algorithms.

Another social media giant was co-opted somewhat later, and by Hancock personally, when he got in touch with former British PM and politician Nick Clegg – now president for global affairs at .

Clegg, who was at the time  VP of global affairs and communications, was reportedly “happy to oblige.”

And according to Oakeshott, Hancock’s department together with the Cabinet Office (PM and government), “harnessed the full power of the state to crush individuals and groups whose views were seen as a threat to public acceptance of official messages and policy.”

The Cabinet Office enlisted the help of a unit that previously worked on stifling the influence of Islamic State (ISIS) to now deal with “anti-vaxxers,” she writes, and notes that the policy of zero tolerance did not spare doctors, scientists, and academics, such as those behind the Great Barrington Declaration.

Even then PM Boris Johnson was not as ardent a “dissent suppressor” as Hancock, Oakeshott’s writing suggests.

December 12, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

A KIND OF WITCHCRAFT

December 4, 2022

December 12, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

What are these vaccines doing to the nation’s children and where is the benefit?

Latest approvals from MHRA

Health Advisory & Recovery Team | December 11, 2022

This week over one hundred health professionals wrote to the MHRA regarding Moderna’s application for a conditional marketing authorisation for Spikevax for babies from 6 months upwards. This baby dose has already been approved in the US and added to their routine immunisation schedule, thus removing any distinction between a novel technology gene-based vaccine rushed to market under the pretext of an ‘EMERGENCY’ and standard vaccines. Maintaining this distinction is vitally important, as there are still major unanswered questions about the long-term safety of mRNA products, which HART has discussed recently.

Meanwhile, in the UK, Pfizer’s Cominarty was quietly given full marketing authorisation for 5-11 and 12-adults, an event not announced by the MSM but instead ferreted out by the persistence of Sir Christopher Chope via a parliamentary question. The response to how the conditions had been met was chilling – basically, we’ve already given so many doses that we know it is ‘Safe & Effective’.

But most worrying of all is the fact that the MHRA have now given full authorisation to Pfizer’s 0-4s jab. They state that they have “authorised the vaccine in this new age group after it has been found to meet the UK regulator’s standards of safety, quality and effectiveness, with no new safety concerns identified. This decision has been endorsed by the Commission on Human Medicines, after a careful review of the evidence.” But the Pfizer trial for this age-group was a total shambles. They originally planned for 2 groups; one in which subjects received two 3mcg doses of the vaccine, and the other placebo. However, as with other trials, they very quickly went ahead and offered the vaccines to the placebo recipients.  Thus by the time they realised this low dose was ineffective and they wanted to proceed to a third dose, they had to recruit more children to the placebo group in an attempt to create a valid comparator group. The report is thus very muddled and difficult to read.

The efficacy studies were based largely on so-called ‘immunobridging’ (essentially merely confirming that antibodies are created, without any need for testing clinically relevant endpoints). Even antibody testing, however, showed reduced titres against omicron variants (see table 18). In the only data that has been made public, clinical infections occurred after the third dose in only 10 of 1341 children whether active or placebo, nine of whom had been seronegative at trial entry, the 10th with unknown status (see p37). Thus, there were no clinical infections in children who already had naturally-acquired immunity. Moreover, “Seven cases in participants 2-4 years of age met the criteria for severe COVID-19: 6 in the BNT162b2 group, of which 2 cases occurred post unblinding, and 1 in the placebo group.”

(p38) This hardly suggests efficacy, and it could even represent antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE). Twelve children had multiple episodes: all were vaccinated.  As for safety, “the median duration of blinded follow-up for participants 6-23 months of age after Dose 3 was 35 days”.

The most extraordinary quote (remember this has been licenced!) on page 59 is :

“The uncertainties associated with benefits of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine when used in children 6 months through 4 years of age include the following:

  • Duration of vaccine effectiveness: the blinded, placebo-controlled evaluation period for descriptive efficacy analyses was limited, and waning of protection following a primary series has been observed in older age groups.
  • Need for a booster dose: based on experience with adults, it is likely that a booster dose will be needed in addition to the three-dose primary series to increase robustness, breadth, and duration of protection 
  • Benefits in individuals previously infected with SARS-CoV-2: descriptive post-Dose 3 efficacy analyses do not include cases in previously infected participants
  • Effectiveness in preventing post-acute sequelae of COVID-19: available data are not conclusive
  • Future vaccine effectiveness as influenced by characteristics of the pandemic, including emergence of new variants
  • Vaccine effectiveness against asymptomatic infection and transmission…Available data also do not indicate high-level or durable effectiveness against transmission.

So what exactly is the purpose of this vaccine? An email has been sent to all members of the JCVI to ask them exactly that.

“It is hard to believe how far we have come from your deliberations in July 2021 when you said the benefit risk balance was too close for a vaccine for healthy under 18s.  We are now in a situation where 99% of preschoolers have been infected, omicron variants are clearly much milder, the vaccine efficacy is poor and more and more evidence is coming to light about potential harms.

On behalf of myself and the 100 plus health professionals who have signed this letter, I beseech all of you to read our letter with an open mind and ask yourselves if this is what is needed for the children of the UK.”

Read the full letter here and please share it widely.

An initial reply has been received

“Thank you for your email and the copy of the letter that you sent to MHRA.

Following the emergence of Omicron in November 2021, population immunity has increased markedly across many age groups. As you observe, the vast majority of children have now had experience of SARS-CoV-2 infection.

JCVI will be taking these factors into account in any advice provided in relation to children aged 6 months to 4 years.

Best wishes,  JCVI Secretariat”

Will the JCVI for once do the right thing and refuse to endorse vaccination of infants and toddlers? And how does the statement above fit with the ongoing vaccination of any healthy children?  Maybe the toddler here has the right idea and may even make you smile!

December 11, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

World Health Organization’s Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response Treaty

These proposals are a major threat to our sovereignty and democracy

Health Advisory & Recovery Team | December 11, 2022

The WHO has been flexing its muscles for several years but Covid-19 has provided a huge opportunity for mission creep. The latest in its quest for  ever-increasing power is the proposed legally binding Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response Treaty.  Without even waiting for the dust to settle and for countries to undertake their own inquiries into what went well and what mistakes were made, there is a clear intention to force every nation into a straight-jacket of centralised pandemic management with the WHO at its heart. No Anders Tegnell or Ron de Santis to instil a modicum of common sense or proportionality, we would all be hurtling into masks and testing at the first hint or droplet of ‘concern’, and doubtless another rushed mRNA vaccine.

In March 2021, Boris Johnson was centre stage in publishing an article laying out the route to this new international treaty. By December 2021, an intergovernmental negotiating body was established and a Zero Draft report was published in May 2022. It was a number of African nations who called a halt. But undaunted, the WHO this week held another 3-day session and issued the following news release.

 “Member States of the World Health Organization today agreed to develop the first draft of a legally binding agreement designed to protect the world from future pandemics. This “zero draft” of the pandemic accord, rooted in the WHO Constitution, will be discussed by Member States in February 2023.”

‘Zero draft’ is worryingly reminiscent of ‘Zero-Covid’, a policy which has been causing havoc in China. There is also an extraordinary degree of mission creep evident, with a newly established subgroup, the One Health High-Level Expert Panel (OHHLEP), which:

“will also have a role in investigating the impact of human activity on the environment and wildlife habitats, and how this drives disease threats. Critical areas include food production, urbanization and infrastructure development, international travel and trade, activities that lead to biodiversity loss and climate change, and those that put increased pressure on the natural resource base — all of which can lead to the emergence of zoonotic diseases.”

Shiraz Akram, of the Thinking Coalition, drafted an extremely detailed analysis of the proposals and a number of like-minded groups have endorsed his open letter. Thinking Coalition, the Freedom Alliance, HART, Not Our Future, Time for Recovery and the Together Declaration have all submitted this letter to members of the House of Lords International Agreements Committee, the House of Lords Constitution Committee and the Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee.

It is vital that our Parliamentarians take a serious interest in this. Both the Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee and the Constitution Committee have previously reported on the numerous problems related to the way in which treaties are ratified in the UK, with the latter stating that “the powers available to Parliament to scrutinise Ministers’ actions are anachronistic and inadequate”.

These committees have only a few weeks to scrutinise the proposals and prevent a lurch into a legally binding agreement at the diktat of the totally unelected WHO.

December 11, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Billionaire-Funded Green ‘Churnalism’

BY CHRIS MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | DECEMBER 11, 2022

Last Tuesday, I reported on the Mirror story that much of London could disappear beneath the water within 80 years. One might suppose that a crack team of investigative reporters had sifted through hundreds of years of meteorological records and consulted numerous scientific authorities to come up with a eureka revelation that Nelson’s Column will disappear beneath the waves before the century is out. Of course, that didn’t happen. The newspaper was simply publishing custom-produced catastrophe copy from a heavily-funded green agitprop operation called Climate Central. Similar climate catastrophe stories are ubiquitous throughout mainstream media, and there are of course serious doubts about many of them, not least because they are designed to promote the Net Zero political agenda.

New Jersey-based Climate Central is open about its mission. Starting in 2008, it notes that it has grown from working with just a handful of media organisations “to collaborating with hundreds and making a mark on thousands”. It boasts of creating “fully produced” stories that “support” countless storytellers and stake holders in media, social media, government, business and NGOs. It specialises in targeting both national and local media with the pictures to tell a climate disaster story – “all for free”. Although it seems to operate mainly in the U.S., a number of local U.K. newspapers have run improbable flood stories suggesting area landmarks will soon vanish.

The operation is well funded and is supported by numerous left-wing foundations, including the Schmidt Family, the Grantham Foundation (active in the U.K. with three university Institutes) and the Hewlett Fund. (A fuller list can be found here.) Eric Schmidt ran Google until recently, and Wendy Schmidt is listed as a founding board member.

It is not just legacy media that’s being targeted. Climate Central runs a unit called Climate Matters that has established close links with American TV weather presenters over the last decade. It is now common for American weather forecasts to include references to climate change. In the U.K., of course, the Met Office needs little help in ramping up fear by directly linking single weather events and trends to long term changes in the climate. But America has many local broadcasting stations all supplying weather information. Climate Matters aims to bring climate change into weathercasting “via local voices highly trusted by Americans everywhere”.

A recent article in the Washingtonian highlighted the work of Professor Ed Maibach in creating a propaganda strategy aimed at U.S. weathercasters. Over a decade, it is reported, he has produced a “weather underground” said to be “a coast-to-coast network of TV weathercasters who believe that educating their audiences about global warming is as crucial as telling them when to bring an umbrella”.

The magazine notes that local news consumers across the country don’t know that behind that telegenic meteorologist is a social scientist and a team of academic researchers, data crunchers and ex-weathercasters, i.e., the staff of Climate Matters. “To a lot of our viewers, it’s lost on them how much Climate [Matters] really is doing,” says Kaitlyn McGrath, a meteorologist at WUSA9. “But it is so far from lost on us.”

Of course, we could ask why newspapers and American TV stations are employing lazy people who just sub the press release, and spout on air pre-prepared green agitiprop (the green equivalent of churnalism). Communicators who fail to investigate the science behind climate change and just accept the unproven hypothesis that humans are solely responsible for any recent warming of the atmosphere are making a very easy living.

The Westminster University economist Dr. Deborah Ancell noted recently in the Conservative Woman that national broadcasters are staffed with journalist advocates, whose exhortations lead to money being wasted “chasing rainbows, pixies and unicorns in fairy dells”. In Dr. Ancell’s opinion, the impact of lazy journalism has contributed to wrecking economies. “The damage includes reducing energy capacity; over-hyping electric vehicles; restricting agricultural production; taxing aviation emissions; operating fraudulent CO2 offset schemes; abandoning fossil fuels and pursuing unachievable Net Zero,” she explained.

Many legacy media brands are dying on their feet, a fate that in time might affect complacent state broadcasters such as the BBC. Needless to say, this state of affairs has not escaped the attention of billionaires looking for suitable recipients of vast quantities of free cash. Just one source, the Gates Foundation, has provided hundreds of millions of dollars to media operations over the last decade.

Last year, the investigative publication Mint Press News (whose account has been closed by PayPal), put the Gates spend on media projects at around $300 million, but noted the amount could be much higher once sub-grants are taken into account. Among the broadcasters receiving money were the BBC ($3.67 million), CNN ($3.6m) and NBC Universal ($4.37m). In the U.K., the Guardian collected $12.95m, while the less well known green, woke blog The Conversation was granted $6.66m. The Telegraph collected £3.45m, but that doesn’t include a recent $2.43m grant for “global policy and advocacy”. In Europe, Der Spiegel ($5.44m), El Pais ($3.97m) and Le Monde ($4m) all received money. Gates has also given money to charities run by media operations, with a massive $53m provided for BBC Media Action. Large grants are also provided for journalistic training purposes. The full list is available here.

Mint Press News looked at 30,000 individual grants and concluded that the Gates Foundation was underwriting a “significant chunk” of the media eco-system. It argued that this caused serious problems with objectivity when it comes to covering subjects close to Bill Gates’s heart, adding that the money spent by billionaires “allows them to set the public agenda, giving them enormous power over society”.

For some inexplicable reason, the Daily Sceptic is not on the Gates handout list. Curiously, the large bung from Big Oil, which many of our social media commentators routinely accuse us of taking, is also notable for its absence.

December 11, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

The Real Agenda Behind American Academy of Pediatrics: Weaponizing Children’s Mental Health and Vaccines for Profit

The Defender | December 8, 2022

As of 2019, roughly 72,000 physicians were actively working in pediatrics or pediatric subspecialties in the U.S., many of them members of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).

Nominally, the AAP is a professional medical association (PMA), but more often than not, it functions as a corporate and government mouthpiece, including issuing policy guidance to its members stating that it is an “acceptable option to pediatric care clinicians to dismiss families who refuse vaccines.”

With total “revenue, gains and other support” amounting in 2022 to nearly $127 million — supporting a staff of 475 and a self-described role as the “#1 publisher of pediatric titles in the world” — the deep-pocketed AAP’s ability to broadcast policies desired by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and tout the wares of drug, vaccine and formula manufacturers is significant.

That the AAP’s megaphone is one-sided has long attracted the notice of critics, who point to the organization’s “preference for fashionable political positions over evidence-based medicine” and its pattern of “play[ing] both sides of the street” — with its “‘trusted’ medical advice” issued in the context of generous funding from agenda-setting foundations, corporations and government agencies.

Even in a study that the AAP itself published, which examined pediatric PMA transparency and compliance with best practice guidelines, the AAP got middling marks for both, despite benefiting from “a significantly higher average budget” compared to sister organizations that earned better scores.

Currently, the AAP is using its bully pulpit to hammer home messages about vaccination — especially COVID-19 shots — and about an AAP-fashioned children’s mental health crisis.

Plainly, both issues have the potential to be highly profitable for the drug companies that festoon the AAP’s list of top-tier donors. But the organization also appears to be on board with a more subterranean aim — weaponizing vaccination and mental health to achieve more “brave new world” control over children’s bodies and minds.

Presidential grandstanding

Throughout 2022, the AAP’s soon-to-be-outgoing president, UCLA professor Dr. Moira Szilagyi, Ph.D., was an obedient foot soldier on both the vaccination and mental health fronts.

Szilagyi was voted the AAP’s 2022 president-elect in June 2020, and throughout the pandemic, she shamelessly brandished her status as a grandmother to peddle pediatric COVID-19 shots.

In October 2021 — not long before stepping into the AAP presidency — Szilagyi opined in a CNN piece titled “Pediatrician: What I want this Covid vaccine to do for my grandchildren” that the data from the vaccine clinical trials in younger children were “very reassuring.”

But, she confessed, she felt an “undercurrent of anxiety” over the fact that her masked grandchildren, at ages 5 and 8, did not yet have access to “the best protection of all: vaccination.”

Barely a month later, the CDC’s advisors overrode concerns about Pfizer’s clinical data to unanimously endorse the jab for Szilagyi’s grandchildren and others in their age group.

In June 2022, under Szilagyi’s stewardship, the AAP issued an enthusiastic press release applauding the CDC’s recommendation of “safe, effective COVID-19 vaccines” for babies as young as 6 months old.

In October, Szilagyi even wrote to White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Ashish Jha to plead for reducing “the burdens of administering COVID-19 vaccines” to children, stating, “The nation’s pediatricians need to be supported as we attempt to vaccinate our nation’s youngest citizens against COVID-19.”

In that letter, Szilagyi — seemingly oblivious to the thousands of injuries and dozens of deaths already reported in children and adolescents who received COVID-19 jabs — expressed gratitude for babies’ and toddlers’ “access” to the shots and celebrated the imminent authorization of bivalent booster shots for kids.

In November, Szilagyi again took to CNN — this time trotting out her “heartbroken” feelings about crowded pediatric hospital wards and offering parents “reassurance” and the “advice” to get the whole family vaccinated for both influenza and COVID-19, “including boosters.”

Her actions over the past year also illustrated the AAP’s servile and co-dependent relationship with the CDC in other ways.

In 2017, BMJ editor Peter Doshi reported that the CDC is one of the AAP’s “steady funders”; from 2009 through 2016, the CDC shoveled $20 million in the AAP’s direction.

Returning the favor, Szilagyi testified in May 2022 before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies, making a case for more than $746 million in new CDC and Health Resources and Services Administration funding for the AAP’s pet causes — not all of which even concern American children.

For example, lamenting “pandemic-related disruptions” to routine childhood vaccination overseas, Szilagyi called for nearly half (48%) of the proposed funding ($356 million) to be routed to the CDC’s Global Immunization division.

Szilagyi lobbied for another hefty $205 million (28%) for the CDC’s National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities (NCBDDD), the center that is supposed to be “search[ing] for the causes of autism” but which consistently denies any vaccine-autism connection.

CDC’s current NCBDDD director, Karen Remley, was a recent AAP CEO (2015-2018). Her predecessor at the NCBDDD’s helm (until retiring in January 2020) was Coleen Boyle, known for her early-career cover-up of Agent Orange and dioxin toxicity and later, for helping cement the fiction that vaccines have nothing to do with developmental disabilities.

Also on Szilagyi’s funding priorities list was a smaller request ($12 million) to study “sudden unexpected” infant and childhood deaths, another outcome with a probable — though AAP- and CDC-denied — link to vaccination.

The mental health dragnet

Szilagyi has a lengthy history of engagement with “vulnerable children” in the U.S.’s corrupt and dysfunctional foster care system and likes to reference those credentials.

In June, after the AAP called for mental health screening for all children from birth through age 21, medical reporter Martha Rosenberg noted in The Defender that children in foster care (and other marginalized kids) are precisely the youth most at risk of overmedication with “lucrative and dangerous psychiatric drugs — some of which can cause suicide, especially in children.”

Additional risks of across-the-board depression screening, pointed out by psychiatric experts quoted by Rosenberg, include overdiagnosis, medicalization of the “normal” and “carelessly applied labels” that, once entered into databases, become impossible to shed.

Other critics, skeptical of the “supposed” mental health crisis in young people, agree on the need to “take care in widening the net of psychiatric surveillance” and argue for the promotion of resilience rather than the celebration of vulnerability.

They also point out how the “language of harm and trauma” can be harnessed for “political motives,” including using it to censor “undesirable ideas.”

Spelling out psychiatry’s long history of “acting as an instrument for psychological, social and political control,” psychiatrist Peter Breggin has noted:

“The contemporary widespread diagnosing of children is a subtler form of social control that suppresses children rather than providing them with what they need to fulfill their basic needs in the home, school and family. Instead of reforming our educational system and improving family life, we drug our children into more docile states.”

Mental health is lucrative, however. For example, in September, the AAP earned a cool $2 million from the mental health branch of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to develop resources focused on “social media and mental wellness.”

And in October, the AAP joined 100-plus other organizations in writing to the Biden administration to urge a “National Emergency Declaration in children’s mental health,” no doubt hoping for more millions to be sent their way to address the “emergency.”

In July, Szilagyi and co-authors laid some of the conceptual groundwork for a mental health dragnet in a paper published in the influential journal Health Affairs, titled “Combating A Crisis By Integrating Mental Health Services And Primary Care.”

Cloaking their arguments in the veneer of “whole-person care,” the authors made a case for more integration of “behavioral health” into primary care — claiming that up to half of “behavioral health disorders begin by age 14.”

Describing barriers to this approach, they noted the current difficulty of sharing patient information “across integrated care team members,” criticizing “overly restrictive interpretations of federal laws and regulations.”

Perhaps that is why the AAP’s president-elect for 2023 is a health informatics expert.

Dr. Sandy Chung, like Szilagyi, is bullish on mental health, framing it as a “long-simmering” problem that the pandemic merely helped catapult into the spotlight.

Chung’s curriculum vitae and professional biographies list her work in the areas of mental health, electronic health records, “data integration” and the creation of “a national registry of child health data” as some of her primary achievements, suggesting that she is on board for the type of pervasive mental health tracking and surveillance that is giving other child health experts the heebie-jeebies.

Unfilled positions and unfulfilled pediatricians

A June 2021 article in the AAP’s own journal Pediatrics outlined a somewhat dire outlook for the pediatric profession, noting, ironically, large vacancies in “developmental and behavioral pediatrics and adolescent and child psychiatry” as well as child neurology.

The author also noted fewer applicants and more unfilled pediatric residency positions, suggesting that “strategies to strengthen the pediatric applicant pool must include … understanding factors that impact the career decisions of trainees.”

Although a large proportion of pediatricians currently in practice appears to be generally copacetic with AAP policy positions — with half of pediatric offices reporting “a policy of dismissing families who won’t vaccinate their children” — that still leaves others whose opinion differs.

In fact, in a December 2020 article in Pediatrics, apparently published to let off a little steam, a trio of university-based authors scolded the AAP and its adherents for their stance on this issue, noting, “it is wrong for clinicians not to accept vaccine refusers because they want only compliant families” and characterizing this approach as “excessively paternalistic and inconsistent with patient- and family-centered care.”

A decade ago — cited by journalist Richard Gale in CounterPunch — pediatrician Ken Stoller described the CDC’s and AAP’s all-too-effective “propagandizing” on the topic of thimerosal in vaccines:

“Now we have a generation of pediatricians … who actually need to be deprogrammed to understand what the true nature of all the neuro-behavioral problems are that they confront without any understanding of etiology or potential interventions.”

Unfortunately, ominous trends like California’s recent legislation to take away the licenses of doctors who don’t toe the party line, and similar witch hunts against independent-thinking doctors in other states, do not bode well for future medical independence.

Nor can children and their parents hope for any help from the AAP, beholden as it is not just to Big Pharma and next-generation biopharmaceutical and “gene therapy” companies, but also to population-control-oriented foundations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the David & Lucile Packard Foundation, infant formula companies like the disgraced Abbott Nutrition and National Security Agency surveillance partner AT&T.

Gale’s 2012 conclusion still holds: The AAP “has failed to protect children from their greatest enemy — the pharmaceutical and chemical industrial complex. … [W]hen addressing the prevention of diseases that directly affect the medical industry, the AAP’s record is dismal.”

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.

December 10, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Emails show Wuhan lab collaborator played central role in shutting down COVID lab-leak theory

By Emily Kopp and Karolina Corin | U.S. Right to Know | December 8, 2022

EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, who worked closely with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, helped steer the media and scientific community away from questions about whether COVID-19 could have originated in a lab, emails released under the North Carolina Public Records Act show.

Emails between Daszak and University of North Carolina virologist Ralph Baric, another collaborator of the laboratory at the pandemic’s epicenter, offer new behind-the-scenes insights into Daszak’s influence. Baric’s experiments with the Wuhan lab included gain-of-function experiments to make viruses more transmissible or virulent.

The White House was dissuaded from investigating the possibility of a lab origin of COVID-19 in part by discussions that included both Daszak and Baric, according to a March 2020 email written by Daszak.

And in a separate May 2020 email, Daszak told Baric that he used talking points intended to discourage reporters from asking questions about potential gain-of-function work on coronaviruses.

Daszak has been a vocal proponent of a natural origin of COVID-19. EcoHealth Alliance has worked closely with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and received millions in government funding to discover and study animal viruses.

Though the public does not have a complete picture of the pre-pandemic work underway, none of the viruses published by EHA or the WIV could have directly sparked the COVID-19 pandemic.

These new revelations add to the evidence of Daszak’s central role in shaping public perceptions about COVID-19’s origins. He secretly organized a statement in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet deeming a lab origin a “conspiracy theory.” He served as the U.S. representative on the 2021 World Health Organization origins investigation in China, which dismissed a lab origin as “extremely unlikely.” He also formerly chaired a Lancet Commission probe into the origins of COVID-19 which was disbanded after Daszak declined to share his grant reports.

No lab release hypotheses ‘anytime soon’

Daszak told Baric in March 2020 that a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) discussion they participated in helped sway the Trump White House away from examining a possible lab origin of COVID-19.

Daszak and Baric both participated in the task force convened by the National Academies to inform the White House’s science office about information required to determine the origin of the pandemic.

In a February 3 call, the experts discussed the possibility of a lab origin of COVID-19 dismissively, other emails obtained under FOIA show.

National security staff were on the call, Daszak told Baric. This suggests that biothreat experts guiding the government’s response heard the scientists’ message.

The resulting letter to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in 2020 assumed a natural origin. The possibility of a lab-related incident was not mentioned.

Both Daszak and Baric were consulted as experts for the letter.

Daszak seemed to think that this letter he influenced – together with a letter in the journal Nature Medicine beset by conflicts-of-interest – were strong enough to sway White House opinion and prevent NASEM committees from delving into possible lab origins.

“I don’t think this committee will be getting into the lab release or bioengineering hypothesis again any time soon — White House seems to be satisfied with the earlier meeting, paper in Nature and general comments within [the] scientific community,” Daszak told Baric.

After more evidence in favor of a lab origin emerged, including Daszak and Baric’s undisclosed conflicts of interest, the National Academies issued a new statement in 2021 acknowledging that the origin of the pandemic is unknown, and that a lab-related incident is a possibility.

‘I practice lines like that’

In the May 2020 email, Daszak coaches Baric on how to deflect a reporter’s questions on COVID-19’s origins and gain-of-function research.

“I practice lines like that,” Daszak said before suggesting ideas to change the topic, such as vaccines or the risks of natural spillover.

“They [reporters] will eventually move on to that topic. I will from now on make everything extremely clear to reporters about the way this all happens,” he said.

He first recommends saying that gain-of-function research issues have already been resolved by the NIH.

“That’s already been debated extensively and decided on by NIH,” Daszak suggests telling reporters.

(NIH hosted a debate among scientists about the limits of gain-of-function research in the years before the pandemic. New oversight mechanisms were developed in 2017, but many scientists believe these remain too weak and opaque.)

Daszak then recommends citing the 2020 National Academies letter and the Nature Medicine article.

These efforts “clearly show the virus has a natural origin, no evidence of manipulation,” Daszak claimed.

However, neither source proved a natural origin for the pandemic.

Though the National Academies letter did not mention the possibility of a lab leak, discussions that led to the letter mentioned that a novel feature of the SARS-CoV-2 genome called the furin cleavage site could have arisen in a lab.

An early draft of the letter also mentioned the possibility of a lab origin, but the final draft did not.

The Nature Medicine paper, titled “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” was a correspondence rather than a scientific journal article presenting novel experimental results. Though it had an enormous impact, the paper was fraught with undisclosed conflicts of interest.

Keeping discussions ‘comfortable’

Daszak’s emails to Baric renew conflict-of-interest concerns about Daszak since he didn’t disclose to reporters the role he may have played in the National Academy proceedings he claimed proved a natural origin.

Elected as a member to the National Academies in 2018, Daszak was involved in many early discussions that may have influenced the research agenda of the COVID-19 task force advising the federal government.

Daszak also served on this National Academies task force and chaired a separate forum on microbial threats.

Following his nomination to the standing committee, Daszak offered to recuse himself from discussions concerning the origins of Covid-19.

“I got some questions from NAM (National Academies of Medicine) about my relationship to the Wuhan lab, but I explained that it’s purely academic (no funds from China to me), and I offered to recuse myself from any discussions about the conspiracy theories re. lab release or bioengineering,” wrote Daszak to Baric on March 17, 2020.

However, the extent of his recusal is unclear.

Documents written in April 2020 show Daszak on two NAM working groups, one whose goal was to examine “viral genetics, origin, and evolution of SARS-CoV-2.”

Notes in the document suggest their research focused on analyzing how the SARS-CoV-2 genome changed over time and in different countries. This information was needed for the “development of diagnostics and therapeutics” rather than determining how the pandemic began.

Yet in October 2020, Daszak appears to steer National Academy discussions with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) toward “natural history” hypotheses for the comfort of their Chinese colleagues.

“We discussed ways we could frame a future topic that would allow us to talk about some important issues around the ‘natural history’ of SARS-CoV-2, that might also be comfortable for our Chinese colleagues,” wrote Daszak.

Benjamin Rusek, a senior program officer at the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), appears to adopt or agree with Daszak’s suggestion.

“More discussion on the origin or “natural history” of the virus focused on preventing future outbreaks (since George Gao seems to be open to it) might be possible as well,” wrote Rusek about potential NAS-CAS dialogues.

In an earlier email dated May 7, 2020, Rusek suggests that there are “issues we should probably avoid” during US-China dialogues on COVID-19.

Rusek and Daszak’s sentiments may reflect a desire to maintain scientific collaboration on public health issues of mutual interest amid rising political tensions between China and the U.S. Indeed, joint NAS-CAS meetings focused on Covid-19 public health responses, understanding of the disease, “vaccine development and delivery”, and “immunity, testing, and diagnostics.”

Daszak didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The documents reported on in this article were obtained from the University of North Carolina through litigation under the North Carolina Public Records Act. Documents obtained by U.S. Right to Know about COVID-19 origins and risky virological research can be found here.

Emily Kopp is an investigative reporter with U.S. Right to Know.

Karolina Corin, Ph.D., is a staff scientist with backgrounds in both engineering and biology.

December 10, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »