A new peer-reviewed study concluded that heavy cellphone use was not associated with an increased risk of developing brain tumors. But some critics questioned the results, citing methodological flaws and bias from industry funding.
The authors of the COSMOS study (Cohort Study on Mobile Phones and Health) promoted it as the world’s largest multinational prospective cohort study on the potential health risks of cellphone use.
They said the study, published in Environmental International, found “no evidence” of increased risk for developing three common brain tumors linked to heavy cellphone use.
“Our findings to date, together with other available scientific evidence,” the authors wrote, “suggest that mobile phone use is not associated with increased risk of developing these tumours.”
Dr. Lennart Hardell, a leading scientist on cancer risks from radiation, told The Defender the study “lacked scientific integrity.”
Hardell, an oncologist and epidemiologist with the Environment and Cancer Research Foundation who has authored more than 350 papers — almost 60 of which address radiofrequency (RF) radiation — said he found multiple shortcomings in its methodology and representation of the scientific literature.
“This is a product defense study, not suitable for a scientific journal claiming to have conducted a credible review of a submission,” Hardell said. “Obviously the referees have not done their proper job or have not been listened to. In the latter case, it casts doubt on the scientific credibility of the very journal.”
What Hardell found “most remarkable” was that the study authors failed to cite or reference important studies documenting an increased incidence of brain tumors among those who heavily used a cellphone, he said.
“It is hard to believe that the study authors are so incompetent and/or perhaps so biased towards the ‘no risk’ paradigm,” he said. “One may rightly ask what results they are hiding — at least a clarification is needed.”
“One must also ask if there is influence by industry,” he added.
Mona Nilsson, co-founder and director of the Swedish Radiation Protection Foundation, said there is reason to suspect that industry influenced the COSMOS study.
In an article critiquing the study, Nilsson said telecommunication companies were the ones who initiated the study and provided some of the study’s initial funding. “They have an interest in showing that mobile phones do not have negative health effects.”
Additionally, the researchers who conducted the study “have a long history of dismissing evidence of health risks,” she said. In her opinion, their results have “low credibility.”
Despite the study’s faults, Nilsson predicted it will be used “as effective evidence for the telecom industry” in lawsuits regarding brain tumors alleged to be caused by mobile phone use.
“The study will also be used in expert opinion reports as an argument that radiation from wireless technology does not cause cancer … So the telecom industry’s investment in the COSMOS study has been successful,” Nilsson told The Defender.
Methodological flaws underestimate risk
The COSMOS study included 250,000-plus participants from Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden and the U.K.
The researchers recruited participants between 2007-2012 and had them complete a detailed questionnaire about their lifetime mobile phone use.
Roughly seven years later, the researchers looked at cancer registries to see if any of the participants had developed one of three kinds of brain tumors: glioma, meningioma or acoustic neuroma.
Through statistical analyses, the researchers examined whether heavy cellphone use was associated with an increased risk of developing a brain tumor.
But the way they conducted their analyses was flawed, Nilsson said.
Rather than compare those who were heavily exposed to RF cellphone radiation with those who weren’t exposed, the study authors compared those who were heavily exposed with those who were just less exposed.
The authors simply split their participants into two groups based on total call time — the 50% who used their cellphones more versus the 50% who used their cellphones less — and compared those two groups.
“This leads to an underestimation of the risk,” Nilsson said, “because the exposed people were not compared with unexposed people but with a group of other exposed people.”
Hardell agreed and noted several other ways in which the analyses may have inaccurately minimized the risk of developing a brain tumor from RF radiation exposure.
For instance, the researchers didn’t analyze which side of the head participants said they held their phone in relation to the site of the brain tumors they later detected in some participants.
“These questions are vital for studying the association between use of wireless phones and brain tumor risk,” Hardell said.
They also didn’t include data on cordless phone use in their analyses, even though they asked the participants detailed questions about their cordless phone use.
“This is scientific misconduct,” Hardell said, “It is a shame to the participating individuals who gave of their time to answer the questionnaire.”
Prior research has shown that RF radiation from both cellphones and cordless phones — which were still very much in use during the study period — can be a risk factor for developing brain tumors, so researchers must look at people’s use of both, Hardell said.
Moreover, the study authors dropped 629 participants from the study because they had brain tumors before the start of the study. This could have further affected the analyses, Hardell said.
The study authors even failed to report “basic information,” including how many people were initially invited to participate and the breakdown of their gender, ages and country of origin, he said. “It is remarkable that the study was published in the current version.”
The COSMOS study is ongoing, meaning the researchers will follow up with the study cohort in the future.
In this first follow-up report on the COSMOS cohort, participants reported using mostly phones on a 2G and/or 3G network.
“Future updates of the COSMOS cohort on cancer outcomes will provide additional information on potential long-term effects of RF-EMF from more recent technology,” the authors wrote.
Telecom industry provided money, input
Three Swedish telecommunications companies — Ericsson, TeliaSonera and Telenor — provided funding for the COSMOS study data collection, according to the authors’ funding statement.
“The study appears to have been initiated by Ericsson and the Swedish scientists at KI,” the Karolinska Institutet, a major medical university in Sweden, Nilsson said.
Ericsson representatives in 2005 contacted Karolinska Institutet researchers Anders Ahlbom and Maria Feychting, she said. “They agreed to collaborate on a research project, with industry paying 50% of the costs.”
A 2012 report by the Swedish weekly magazine, Ny Teknik, revealed that the industry representatives and researchers had discussed arrangements and funding before turning to Vinnova, a Swedish governmental research agency, to draw up an agreement that ostensibly guaranteed COSMOS’ scientific independence from the industry, Nilsson said.
“In 2005,” she continued, “when the researchers and Ericsson started meeting, Ericsson made certain demands on ‘quality criteria’ and had views on the design of the study, according to Christer Törnevik, head of research at Ericsson.”
According to the funding section, the authors who were involved in acquiring funding for the study also contributed to the study concept — meaning that researchers who secured the money made seminal decisions about what the study would look at and what it would not look at.
Moreover, initially COSMOS was supported for five years by the U.K.’s Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research program, jointly funded by the U.K. Department of Health and the mobile telecommunications industry, the funding section said.
Several other telecom industry entities — including Nokia, Elisa and the Mobile Manufacturers’ Forum — also contributed to COSMOS.
The study also received funding from the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare, the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority, the Danish Strategic Research Council, Finland’s National Technology Agency, the Yrjö Jahnsson Foundation, the Kone Foundation, the U.K. Department of Health & Social Care, and the U.K.’s National Institute for Health Research Health Protection Research Unit and The Netherlands Organization for Health Research.
Feychting, the study’s lead author, did not respond when asked by The Defender what she would like to tell people who are concerned that industry influences may have biased the research.
She also did not comment on the allegation that the study’s findings lacked credibility.
Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa.
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.
April 10, 2024
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In so many words—and data—CDC has quietly admitted that all of the indignities of the Covid-19 pandemic management have failed: the masks, the distancing, the lockdowns, the closures, especially the vaccines, all of it failed to control the pandemic. It’s not like we didn’t know that all this was going to fail, because we said so as events unfolded early on in 2020, that the public health management of this respiratory virus was almost completely opposite to principles that had been well established through the influenza period, in 2006. The spread of a new virus with replication factor R0 of about 3, with more than one million cases across the country by April 2020, with no potentially virus-sterilizing vaccine in sight for at least several months, almost certainly made this infection eventually endemic and universal.
Covid-19 starts as an annoying, intense, uncomfortable flu-like illness, and for most people, ends uneventfully two-three weeks later. Thus, management of the Covid-19 pandemic should not have relied upon counts of cases or infections, but on numbers of deaths, numbers of people hospitalized or with serious long-term outcomes of the infection, and of serious health, economic and psychological damages caused by the actions and policies made in response to the pandemic, in that order of decreasing priorities. Even though numbers of Covid cases correlate with these severe manifestations, that is not a justification for case numbers to be used as the actionable measure, because Covid-19 infection mortality is estimated to range below 0.1% in the mean across all ages, and post-infection immunity provides a public good in protecting people from severe reinfection outcomes for the great majority who do not get serious “long-Covid” on first infection.
Nevertheless, once the Covid-19 vaccines were rolled out, with a new large wave of the delta strain spreading across the US in July-August 2021 even after eight months of the vaccines taken by half of Americans, instead of admitting policy error that the Covid vaccines do not much control virus spread, our public health administration doubled down, attempting then to compel vaccination on as many more people as could be threatened by mandates. That didn’t work out too well as seen when the large Omicron wave hit the country during December 2021-January 2022 in spite of some 10% more of the population getting vaccinated from September through December of 2021.
A typical mandate example: in September 2021, Washington Governor Jay Inslee issued Emergency Proclamation 21-14.2, requiring Covid-19 vaccination for various groups of state workers. In the proclamation, the stated goal was, “WHEREAS, COVID-19 vaccines are effective in reducing infection and serious disease, and widespread vaccination is the primary means we have as a state to protect everyone … from COVID-19 infections.” That is, the stated goal was to reduce the number of infections.
What the CDC recently reported (see chart below), however, is that by the end of 2023, cumulatively, at least 87% of Americans had anti-nucleocapsid antibodies to and thus had been infected with SARS-CoV-2, this in spite of the mammoth, protracted and booster-repeated vaccination campaign that led to about 90% of Americans taking the shots. My argument is that by making policies based on number of infections a higher priority than ones based on the more serious but less common consequences of both infections and policy damages, the proclaimed goal of the vaccine mandate to reduce spread failed in that 87% of Americans eventually became infected anyway.
In reality, neither vaccine immunity nor post-infection immunity were ever able fully to control the spread of the infection. On August 11, 2022, CDC stated, “Receipt of a primary series alone, in the absence of being up to date with vaccination through receipt of all recommended booster doses, provides minimal protection against infection and transmission (3,6). Being up to date with vaccination provides a transient period of increased protection against infection and transmission after the most recent dose, although protection can wane over time.” Public health pandemic measures that “wane over time” are very unlikely to be useful for control of infection spread, at least without very frequent and impractical revaccinations every few months.
Nevertheless, infection spread per se is not of consequence, because count of infections is not and should not have been the main priority of public health pandemic management. Rather, the consequences of the spread and the negative consequences of the policies invoked should have been the priorities. Our public health agencies chose to prioritize a failed policy of reducing the spread rather than reducing the mortality or the lockdown and school and business closure harms, which led to unnecessary and avoidable damage to millions of lives. We deserved better from our public health institutions.
Harvey A. Risch, MD, PhD
References Cited
1. Inglesby TV, Nuzzo JB, O’Toole T, Henderson DA. Disease mitigation measures in the control of pandemic influenza. Biosecur Bioterror. 2006;4(4):366-75. https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/bsp.2006.4.366
2. Ramirez VB. What Is “R-naught”? Gauging Contagious Infections. Healthline, June 14, 2023. https://www.healthline.com/health/r-naught-reproduction-number
3. Worldometer. United States Coronavirus Cases. March 28, 2024. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
4. Gupta S. Was I wrong about the Covid infection fatality rate?. UnHerd, April 5, 2023. https://unherd.com/newsroom/how-wrong-was-i-on-covid-ifr/
5. Inslee J. PROCLAMATION BY THE GOVERNOR AMENDING PROCLAMATIONS 20-05 and 20-14: 21-14.2. COVID-19 VACCINATION REQUIREMENT. Issued September 27, 2021. https://governor.wa.gov/sites/default/files/proclamations/21-14.2%20-%20COVID-19%20Vax%20Washington%20Amendment%20(tmp).pdf
6. CDC. 2022-2023 Nationwide COVID-19 Infection- and Vaccination-Induced Antibody Seroprevalence (Blood donations). March 22, 2024. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#nationwide-blood-donor-seroprevalence-2022
7. Our World in Data. Total number of people who received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine. Downloaded March 27, 2024. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/people-vaccinated-covid
8. Massetti GM, Jackson BR, Brooks JT, Perrine CG, Reott E, Hall AJ, Lubar D, Williams IT, Ritchey MD, Patel P, Liburd LC, Mahon BE. Summary of Guidance for Minimizing the Impact of COVID-19 on Individual Persons, Communities, and Health Care Systems – United States, August 2022. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep. 2022;71(33):1057-1064. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7133e1.htm
Dr. Harvey A. Risch MD, PhD is a Professor Emeritus of Epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health and a guest contributor for Peter Navarro’s Taking Back Trump’s America
April 10, 2024
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Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
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Startling disclosures from official documents
A colleague in HART has drawn my attention to this article on “TKP”, an Austrian sceptical website. As usual, machine translation does a good enough job to discern the gist for us non-German speakers.
It is reported that in an official government report entitled Virus Epidemiological Information No. 18/20 published in April 2020:
Prof. Judith Aberle reported on evidence of immunity against SARS-CoV-2 through T cells in blood samples from Austria going back to 2018 and in some other countries even as far back as 2015. It would probably have been the duty of the MedUni Vienna to make the public aware of the findings about widespread immunity.
The article goes on to state that Prof. Aberle disclosed that:
… in studies from the USA, Singapore, Germany, the Netherlands and Great Britain, SARS -CoV- 2 specific T -Cells were detected:
“Depending on the study, T cells against SARS-CoV-2 could be detected in 20 to 50 percent of blood donors. In Austria, too, in our previous studies we found T cells against various SARS-CoV-2 proteins in 30 percent of the blood samples from 2018-2019, i.e. before the pandemic.”
The actual reports in question are available here, and the specific one cited above (report 18-20) here.
Sure enough, Google translate confirms the Professor states the following:
Interestingly, T cells against SARS-CoV-2 can also be found in some pPeople who have not yet had contact with the new coronavirus. Show that several international studies from the USA, Singapore, Germany, the Netherlands and Great Britain. Those used for these investigations Blood samples come from healthy people from 2015-2018, i.e. a long time before SARS-CoV-2 first appeared in China. Depending on the study, 20 to 50 percent of blood donors have T cells detected against SARS-CoV-2 become. In our previous studies in Austria we have also found 30 Percent of blood samples from 2018-2019, i.e. before the pandemic, T cells found against various SARS-CoV-2 proteins. We now know about it Studies from the USA and Germany show that it is primarily about memory T cells are involved in infections with those four known Coronaviruses have been formed that cause relatively mild respiratory infections cause. They are called HCoV-OC43, -229E, -HKU1 and -NL63, occur worldwide and cause around 30% of colds However, you can get it back every year.
So, she is basically suggesting that the T cell reactivity comes from previous exposure to other coronaviruses.
However, as the article states:
The other explanation, which is at least as plausible, would be that SARS-CoV-2 spread significantly before 2020.
Whether “the virus” was “novel” or not seems to be an academic question, unless the new virus was causing lots of extra illness or death. But – as would be expected for something for which so many people seemed able to mount an adequate immune defence – it wasn’t.
The article then links to a piece from a few days ago about a recent episode of a TV show held in “Hangar 7” in which various state officials either maintained that covid was a terrible disease or that it couldn’t have been known back in spring 2020 that it wasn’t.
But, as the article points out:
- In an 9 April 2020 edition of the same program John Ioniodis’s data suggesting very low mortality was discussed.
- On April 10th , a TKP article was published in which not only Ionnidis’ findings were presented, but also the French study by Didier Raoult with the telling title ” SARS-CoV-2: fear versus data “, as well as a study from Wuhan with similar infection mortality.
- Even the decidedly mainstream vienna.at on April 7, 2020 reported that: “Analysis shows: Covid-19 victim curve corresponds to “normal” mortality”, concluding: “The Covid-19 victim curve in Austria roughly corresponds to the “normal” mortality for men and women in the individual age groups”.

Translated: Analysis shows: Covid-19 victim curve corresponds to “normal” mortalitySo the article states plainly that:
So the facts were well known, people knew about it.
It goes on to quote Dr Christian Fiala of the Karolinska Institut:
Ultimately, the alleged danger of the virus was only “scaled up” in order to get the mRNA into people. The virus was pretty insignificant and I think the many discussions about its laboratory origin were smoke grenades or media hype to attribute a meaning to the virus that it didn’t even have. It was never about the virus, it was about the mRNA.
This business concept is now obvious.
It will be interesting to see if these revelations result in any more indignation in the Austrian population than we are seeing in other countries – where, considering the scale of the lies and harms caused, voices are extraordinarily muted.
April 10, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine |
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From the archives, a look back and an update
Fundraiser from 2014. We learned from Wikileaks that Tom Steyer, the Center for American Progress, and Michael Mann were behind the curtain. Just $10? Deplatforming me should get at least $15!
This week marks my final spring break as a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. Ten years ago this week, during spring break while on vacation with my family, I was dealing with the consequences of what appeared to be an online mob seeking to get me fired from Nate Silver’s 538 where I had just been hired as a writer.
My first piece for 538 was a summary of recent IPCC report consensus conclusions on disasters and extreme events. The apparent mobbing worked. I soon lost my position as a writer at 538.
Not long after, I was under investigation by a member of Congress. I lost the support of my university and my role in the center I had founded, so I moved across campus to work on sports governance. I have little doubt that I remained employed only thanks to academic tenure. It was quite an experience.
Two years later, in 2016, courtesy of the Wikileaks publication of John Podesta’s emails, it was revealed that the Center for American Progress, funded by billionaire Tom Steyer and in collaboration with the ever-present Michael Mann, had been engaged in a well-funded campaign to delegitimize my research, hurt my career, and to have me removed as a writer at 538.
I can draw a straight line from those events a decade ago to where I am today. And given where I am today, I wouldn’t change a thing. I have no hard feelings towards Nate — He got played and did what he felt he had to at the time.
Below, I have reproduced my first column at 538 in 2014 that was apparently so threatening to some in the climate advocacy community. I also add a post-script below. How does it hold up?
In the 1980s, the average annual cost of natural disasters worldwide was $50 billion. In 2012, Superstorm Sandy met that mark in two days. As it tore through New York and New Jersey on its journey up the east coast, Sandy became the second-most expensive hurricane in American history, causing in a few hours what just a generation ago would have been a year’s worth of disaster damage.
Sandy’s huge price tag fit a trend: Natural disasters are costing more and more money. See the graph below, which shows the global tally of disaster expenses for the past 24 years. It’s courtesy of Munich Re, one of the world’s largest reinsurance companies, which maintains a widely used global loss data set. (All costs are adjusted for inflation.)
In the last two decades, natural disaster costs worldwide went from about $100 billion per year to almost twice that amount. That’s a huge problem, right? Indicative of more frequent disasters punishing communities worldwide? Perhaps the effects of climate change? Those are the questions that Congress, the World Bank and, of course, the media are asking. But all those questions have the same answer: no.
When you read that the cost of disasters is increasing, it’s tempting to think that it must be because more storms are happening. They’re not. All the apocalyptic “climate porn” in your Facebook feed is solely a function of perception. In reality, the numbers reflect more damage from catastrophes because the world is getting wealthier. We’re seeing ever-larger losses simply because we have more to lose — when an earthquake or flood occurs, more stuff gets damaged. And no matter what President Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron say, recent costly disasters are not part of a trend driven by climate change. The data available so far strongly shows they’re just evidence of human vulnerability in the face of periodic extremes.
To identify changes in extreme weather, it’s best to look at the statistics of extreme weather. Fortunately, scientists have invested a lot of effort into looking at data on extreme weather events, and recently summarized their findings in a major United Nations climate report, the fifth in a series dating back to 1990. That report concluded that there’s little evidence of a spike in the frequency or intensity of floods, droughts, hurricanes and tornadoes. There have been more heat waves and intense precipitation, but these phenomena are not significant drivers of disaster costs. In fact, today’s climate models suggest that future changes in extremes that cause the most damage won’t be detectable in the statistics of weather (or damage) for many decades.
On Earth, extreme events don’t happen in a vacuum. Their costs are rising, sure, but so is overall wealth. When we take that graph above and measure disaster cost relative to global GDP, it changes quite a bit.
Occasionally, big disasters bring outsize costs — especially the Kobe earthquake in 1995, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Honshu earthquake in 2011 — but the overall trend in disaster costs proportional to GDP since 1990 has stayed fairly level. Of course, wealthy countries hold all of the sway in worldwide cost estimates, which tips the scales when we’re looking for a “global” perspective on extreme events. U.S. hurricanes, for example, are responsible for 58 percent of the increase in the property losses in the Munich Re global dataset.
That’s just the property bill. There’s a human toll, too, and the data show an inverse relationship between lives lost and property damage: Modern disasters bring the greatest loss of life in places with the lowest property damage, and the most property damage where there’s the lowest loss of life. Consider that since 1940 in the United States 3,322 people have died in 118 hurricanes that made landfall. Last year in a poor region of the Philippines, a single storm, Typhoon Hayain, killed twice as many people.
We can start to estimate how countries may weather crises differently thanks to a 2005 analysis of historical data on global disasters. That study estimated that a nation with a $2,000 per capita average GDP — about that of Honduras — should expect more than five times the number of disaster deaths as a country like Russia, with a $14,000 per capita average GDP.2 (For comparison, the U.S. has a per capita GDP of about $52,000.)
In the 20th century, the human toll of disasters decreased dramatically, with a 92 percent reduction in deaths from the 1930s to the 2000s worldwide. Yet when the Boxing Day Tsunami struck Southeast Asia in 2004, more than 225,000 people died.
So the frequency of disasters still matters, and especially in countries that are ill-prepared for them. After 41 people died in two volcanic eruptions in Indonesia last month, a government official explained the high stakes: “We have 100 million people living in places that are prone to disasters, including volcanoes, earthquakes and floods. It’s a big challenge for the local and central governments.”
When you next hear someone tell you that worthy and useful efforts to mitigate climate change will lead to fewer natural disasters, remember these numbers and instead focus on what we can control. There is some good news to be found in the ever-mounting toll of disaster losses. As countries become richer, they are better able to deal with disasters — meaning more people are protected and fewer lose their lives. Increased property losses, it turns out, are a price worth paying.
Postscript March 2024
As THB readers well know, I have continued the research that was the subject of the column above. Below is an update to the figures in the column above, adjusted just for inflation and with 11 more years of data.
Inflation adjusted losses, 1990 to 2023.
Below is the second figure showing weather and climate disaster losses as a proportion of global GDP.
Global weather and climate losses as a percent of global GDP, 1990 to 2023.
I’ve published this analysis in the peer-reviewed literature as well:
Pielke, R. (2019). Tracking progress on the economic costs of disasters under the indicators of the sustainable development goals. Environmental Hazards, 18(1), 1-6.
April 9, 2024
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Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | United States |
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Amid controversy over censorship in peer-reviewed journals, the editors of three major science journals last week received invitations to testify before the U.S. House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on the relationship between their publications and the federal government.
Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), chair of the subcommittee, sent the letters to the editors-in-chief of The Lancet, Nature and Science, requesting their testimony for an April 16 hearing titled “Academic Malpractice: Examining the Relationship Between Scientific Journals, the Government, and Peer Review.”
According to Wenstrup’s office, the hearing seeks to examine “whether these journals granted the federal government inappropriate access into the scientific review or publishing process,” noting that the journals had previously communicated with Drs. Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins and other health officials.
Nature Medicine published the now infamous “Proximal Origin” paper in March 2020. The paper, which claimed COVID-19 had zoonotic, or natural, origins was subsequently used in attempts to censor proponents of the “lab-leak theory” of the virus’s origin.
In a press release, Wenstrup said:
“Millions of people worldwide relied on Science, Nature, and The Lancet to provide scientifically accurate and impartial research during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“However, documents show that the federal government may have censored and manipulated the sacred scientific review processes at these journals to progress their preferred narrative about the origins of COVID-19.”
Cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough welcomed the announcement of the hearing. He told The Defender :
“I used the term ‘academic fraud’ in my Nov. 19, 2020, Senate testimony. During the pandemic, for the first time in my career, I saw fraudulent papers published and valid ones retracted after full peer review.
“Publication actions always went in a consistent theme of duality: suppression of early therapeutics for acute COVID-19 and promotion of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines as safe and effective … Manuscripts demonstrating successful home treatment strategies were impeded, and above all, manuscripts disclosing COVID-19 vaccine injuries, disabilities and deaths were swept under the rug.”
Several experts said scientific journals censored non-establishment views but regularly published “fraudulent” papers.
Epidemiologist and public health research scientist M. Nathaniel Mead told The Defender :
“We have faced an unprecedented level of scientific censorship in the past four years, and this has created a climate of fear for the medical-scientific community, compelling many researchers and scholars to practice self-censorship.
“This has fostered a pervasive hesitancy to broach certain topics, even in venues or contexts that are theoretically supportive of free expression. As a result, dissenting viewpoints that could enhance scientific dialogue are stifled.”
According to molecular biologist Richard Ebright, Ph.D., “Science has published two patently unsound and presumably fraudulent papers on the subject of COVID-19 origins, has not retracted these papers, has refused to open inquiries into those papers, and has used its news division to promote the false narrative that science favors a natural origin of COVID-19 and to dismiss contrary evidence and contrary views.”
Mark Blaxill, chief financial officer of the Holland Center, a private autism treatment center, told The Defender, “Policymakers and legislators often defer to scientists, ‘experts’ and the published record. To the extent that the record is corrupted by political forces that lean to one side of legitimate public policy disputes, the journals are tilting the playing field in favor of powerful interests.”
This has resulted in “the increasing politicization of science,” as a result of which “the body of published science is becoming increasingly weaponized,” Blaxill said.
Similarly, journalist Paul D. Thacker, publisher of The Disinformation Chronicle, told The Defender he hopes “Congress has something better planned than just parading the scientists running these journals before the public and berating them for being corrupt, because documents I’ve reported on show these journal editors have no shame.”
Wenstrup: Journal editors ‘seem to want to ignore’ COVID lab-leak theory
Much of the subcommittee’s focus has centered on “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2.” Published on March 17, 2020, in Nature Medicine, the paper concluded that a lab leak was not “plausible.” It soon became “one of the single most impactful and influential scientific papers in history.”
A House investigation and Freedom of Information Act requests later revealed that a month before publication, Fauci and Collins reviewed drafts of the paper. A July 2023 report by the subcommittee found that Fauci, key virologists and government officials used the paper to suppress the COVID-19 lab-leak theory.
Speaking on Fox Business’ “Varney & Co.” last week, Wenstrup said the editors-in-chief to whom he sent letters “should want to weigh in on this because they published articles that seem to want to ignore [the lab-leak theory].”
“When anybody had the hypothesis of it being a lab leak theory … they were scrutinized, they were canceled, they were put down,” Wenstrup added. “A published article doesn’t mean that it’s been peer-reviewed and that it’s been going through the scrutiny that it should take from scientists … Just look at ‘Proximal Origin.’”
During an April 17, 2020, White House Coronavirus Task Force press briefing, Fauci told reporters, in the presence of then-President Donald Trump, “There was a study recently that we can make available to you” which showed that COVID-19 “is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.”
“Fauci helped place the ‘Proximal Origin’ paper and then lied about it right under the nose of the president,” Thacker said. “He was thanked by [virologist] Kristian Andersen for his advice in an email, and then he wants to say he had no role in it.”
Wenstrup made a similar observation on “Varney & Co.”:
“‘Proximal Origin’ basically was written by people that were prompted to write it by Dr. Fauci. And all they really talked about was the possibility [that COVID-19] came from nature. If you read this article, it’s full of assumptions and what-ifs, and it completely ignores the lab leak theory.
“And internally, in their discussions, the same authors are saying, ‘Well, we can’t rule out that this came from a lab. It certainly looks engineered.’ So, there’s a problem with using these scientific journals as a be-all end-all.”
Earlier this year, Fauci sat for two days of closed-door interviews with members of the House, during which he reportedly responded with “I don’t recall” over 100 times.
For Thacker, the focus on the “Proximal Origin” paper ignores two other influential scientific papers that also were used try to discredit the “lab-leak theory.”
“This committee has been overly obsessed with ‘Proximal Origin’ … These virologists conspired to launch three different papers into the academic literature. It wasn’t just one paper. You don’t run a propaganda campaign off of just one paper,” Thacker said.
According to Thacker, on Feb. 19, 2020, EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak and Wellcome Trust’s Jeremy Farrar published a statement in The Lancet that claimed a possible Wuhan lab accident was a “conspiracy theory.”
The statement did not disclose that Daszak was funding research led by Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
On Feb. 26, 2020, scientists working behind the scenes with Zhengli and virologist Ralph Baric, Ph.D., published a commentary in Emerging Microbes & Infections that claimed it was a conspiracy theory to speculate that the pandemic started in a Wuhan lab.
Mead said the pandemic facilitated government intervention in scientific publishing:
“Most of this government influence is happening behind the scenes to avoid the appearance of impropriety. And when a scientific journal such as Nature or Science adopts a rapid publication process for COVID-19-related research … it tends to compromise the quality and reliability of the findings. It also makes it easier for outside influences to dictate the angle or perspective, or overall thrust, of the article in question.
“Beginning in 2020, this collaboration was tightly synchronized so as to allow for rushed authorization of the mRNA vaccines without sufficient risk evaluation and management protocols.”
Mead said this interference limited scientific discourse, adversely impacting the public.
“[During the pandemic] we could not mention the term natural immunity without being castigated or reflexively labeled an ‘anti-vaxxer,’” Mead said. “Early treatment and vaccine safety issues were, of course, also censored.”
Yet, in remarks to The Hill, a spokesperson for subcommittee Democrats accused Republicans of building “an extreme, partisan and conspiratorial narrative against our nation’s public health officials” and have not “revealed a cover-up of the pandemic’s origins nor a suppression of the lab leak theory [by] Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins.”
Journal editors ‘promote favored narratives and suppress dissent’
Blaxill highlighted the increased use of retractions by scientific and medical journals to silence non-establishment narratives on COVID-19 and other topics. He said:
“One worrisome trend I have seen is the use of retractions rather than public debate to manage scientific disagreements. My experience with the retraction of ‘Autism Tsunami’ was instructive. Our 2021 paper sailed through peer review and was among the most heavily downloaded publications of the year.”
But after criticism of the paper reached the editors of the journal that published the paper, the editors informed Blaxill and his co-authors they intended to “re-review” the paper. A few months later, the paper was retracted.
According to Blaxill, “The retraction process itself is what is broken. Instead of allowing debate to play out in public, through letters and responses in the journal, dissenting opinions and unpopular narratives are canceled.”
Brian Hooker, Ph.D., chief scientific officer for Children’s Health Defense, told The Defender, “In the case of having my own scientific paper retracted in 2014, I know the federal government played a strong role in getting the publication removed from print.”
“When the CDC whistleblower story broke … I was immediately put on notice by the journal (Translational Neurodegeneration ) that the paper would be taken down from their website with a notice of concern. At one point, the journal put a notice on my paper that it was a threat to public health,” Hooker said.
McCullough criticized the use of retractions to silence critical papers. “As an editor-in-chief for over 20 years, I never retracted a paper, nor did I receive pressure from the publisher to pull a valid paper. That is because the peer review process and letter-to-the-editor processes work as data are vetted and interpreted,” he said.
“Scientific journals often manage the peer review and publication process to promote favored narratives and suppress dissent,” Blaxill said. “Scientific merit is rarely the priority in their management. Instead, supporting the favored (or ‘consensus’) narrative is the guiding principle more often than not.”
Experts call for investigation into journals’ relationships with Big Pharma
The experts who spoke with The Defender said that Congress needs to examine more than just the three journals whose editors-in-chief have been invited to testify on April 16.
“They should also be questioning these journal editors about their connections with Big Pharma,” Hooker said. “Journals such as JAMA, Pediatrics, etc., have corporate sponsors through their industry organizations which create myriad conflicts of interest.”
According to Thacker, “If you’re going to be a corrupt journal the way Science Magazine has turned itself into a completely corrupt institution, then we need to begin to think about whether or not publicly funded research can be published in these journals.”
“Taxpayers are funding this research, which ends up in these corrupt journals and lines the pockets of people running these corrupt journals. That needs to end. Something needs to be done to ensure that if you’re not going to abide by the basics of ethics and science publishing, then you can’t publish federally funded research,” he added.
Similarly, Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., professor of international law at the University of Illinois and a bioweapons expert who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, told The Defender :
“The real issue here that must be inquired into by Congress is the fact that Big Pharma has bought and paid for almost all science journals of relevance, to promote their pro-drug, pro-vaccine propaganda and disinformation, to the grave detriment of the public health of the American people.”
Thacker, who previously worked as an investigator for the U.S. Senate, said, “What we’ve learned from this process is that these scientists cannot be trusted. They lie all the time. I am not sure that this hearing is going to do anything unless they bring the documents out and they start doing referrals over to the Department of Justice.”
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.
April 8, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, United States |
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February 10, 2021 I gave a short talk on PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) titled Wag The Dog.
In 1983, Kary Mullis invented PCR, which stands for polymerase chain reaction. In 1993 he got the Nobel Prize for PCR. PCR is like a photocopier that can make billions of copies of a single fragment of DNA. Kary and I met through our mutual friend Peter Duesberg, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1997, Peter, Kary, and I were invited to a meeting on AIDS in Colombia, South America. Kary explained why his truly amazing invention PCR cannot detect viruses in people or diagnose infections.
April 7, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video |
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The great statins divide: As go-ahead’s given for one in four adults to be offered heart drug, one doctor says this mass pill-popping is folly…
- NICE has recommended statins be made available to patients with a 10% risk or more of having a heart attack within a decade
- This would see up to 12 million patients taking the drug every day
- Dr Aseem Malhotra believes up to one in five patients suffer side-effects
- He suggests tackling obesity would have a bigger impact on lowering death rates
The man in my consulting room was in his mid-50s and had arrived complaining of severe chest pain. ‘I’ve had it for a while now, doctor,’ he said, grimacing, ‘it won’t go away.’
I glanced at his notes — an angiogram had showed that his heart was fine, while an endoscopy had revealed there was nothing untoward going on in his oesophagus or stomach. Then I asked what drugs he was taking regularly. ‘Well, nothing really?.?.?. just statins.’
That was almost certainly the culprit. I asked him to stop taking them for a fortnight, which, despite protests from his GP, he did and, lo and behold, two weeks later the patient was pain-free.
I recommended he embrace the so-called Mediterranean diet and exercise a little more, and he went away a happy and healthy middle-aged man.
If NICE (the National Institute for Clinical Excellence) gets its way, that scenario could be needlessly played out in GP surgeries and hospital consulting rooms hundreds of thousands of times a year. It would mean 12 million of us taking a little pill before bed, five million more than take statins today.
That’s five million more patients for the NHS to keep an eye on, five million more people who, despite the fact many will be in good health, have been well and truly ‘medicalised’ and face the prospect of spending the rest of their lives on daily medication.
In making its recommendation, NICE seems to be siding firmly with the drug companies and relying on industry- sponsored statistics which consistently under-report — some would even say hide — the risk of side-effects.
These statistics will tell you that perhaps one in 10,000 patients taking statins will suffer severe muscular pain as a side-effect.
In contrast, reliable data from the real world, published recently in the British Medical Journal and backed up by anecdotal evidence from my experience as a cardiac physician, suggests that the real figure for serious side-effects associated with statin use is closer to one in five.
In other words, if NICE succeeds in turning five million middle-aged and predominantly healthy men and women into statin-popping patients, then one million of them will be back — just like my fiftysomething patient — in surgeries and consulting rooms, complaining of side-effects that, as well as muscle pain, include digestive problems, short-term memory loss, erectile dysfunction, sleep disorders, cataracts (mainly in women) and even type 2 diabetes.
The drug companies will tell you how cheap statins are — just 10p a day — but that completely ignores the costs of the follow-up appointments and hospital investigations that patients suffering from such side-effects will require.
With even NICE admitting that 140 people will have to take statins to prevent just one of them having a heart attack or stroke, that’s 139 people taking them for no good reason, running the risk of unpleasant side-effects in the process while all the time taxpayers pick up the ever-growing bill for looking after them.
But NICE also seems to be ignoring serious doubts about how effective statins are.
Yes, they can lower cholesterol levels (they work by inhibiting an enzyme that produces cholesterol in the liver), but real-world data show they have absolutely no effect on either overall death rates or rates of serious illness.
The advocates of statins will point to falling death rates from heart attacks and strokes in recent years but many clinicians — myself included — believe that death rates are falling not because of the increased use of statins, but because of the decrease in smoking (a smoker is 50 per cent more likely to die from a heart attack than a non-smoker who’s had a heart attack) and more effective intervention in Accident and Emergency.
Good medicine involves the right treatment being given to the right patient at the right time, and I’m the first to admit that statins have an important role to play when it comes to the care of patients who have either had heart attacks or have been diagnosed with heart disease.
But giving them to millions of reasonably healthy people is not only medically dubious, it also risks sending out entirely the wrong message to those who, as they approach middle-age, ought to be giving very serious thought to their own diet and lifestyle.
The next big decrease in deaths from heart attacks won’t be brought about by doling out statins but by doing battle with the biggest — and still growing — health problem that we, in common with other Western nations, face: obesity.
Being overweight and having a poor diet causes more serious health problems than alcohol and smoking put together, with obesity associated with such serious conditions as type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, cancer and cardiovascular disease.
My biggest worry about statins is that people will see them as a magic pill that allows them to tuck into three pizzas a night and umpteen hamburgers with impunity. But they aren’t. People who want to take care of their health, need to make changes themselves.
It’s not that difficult. The Mediterranean diet simply involves more olive oil, more nuts, two to three portions of oily fish a week and lots of fruit and vegetables, while cutting out refined sugars and carbohydrates (so no white bread, rice or pasta) and processed foods laden with fats and salt.
As for exercise, I’m not talking about training for a marathon — a brisk 20-minute daily walk will do great things for your cardiac health.
Make those sort of lifestyle changes and — whatever NICE says — you won’t need those statins at all.
April 7, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular |
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A question needs to be asked. Were the novel experimental drug treatments for SARS-CoV-2 viral infections that Anthony Fauci, the CDC and FDA advocated for and funded responsible for worsening the contagion and countless deaths?
However, at that time there were plenty of studies confirming there were pre-existing safe, inexpensive medications known to have highly effective antiviral properties to treat Covid-19 patients. Among these were ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine (HCQ).
There were also specific nutrients such as vitamin D and zinc, known to strengthen the immune system against viral infection and yet there was no recommendation from the government about the benefits of proper nutrition. So why did Fauci along with other federal health officials choose to intentionally ignore the scientific evidence and rather condemn these repurposed drugs? In Fauci’s case, over a year and half into the pandemic, he continued to lie outright on CNN that “there is no clinical evidence whatsoever that [ivermectin] works.”[1] And could millions have been saved if these generic medications were prescribed rather than the feds doing nothing but recommending social isolation and quarantines as the world awaited an experimental Covid-19 vaccine to enter the market?
To date, between ivermectin and HCQ alone, there have been 670 published studies, analyses and papers involving over 9,800 scientists and over 682,000 patients supporting the use of these drugs over and beyond those the FDA has approved under Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) statutes. Despite this, four years later, the FDA continues to fiercely deny ivermectin’s and HCQ’s efficacy and safety under proper administration. Why this blatant cover-up?
Every CDC effort to approve a novel drug treatment for SARS-CoV-2 infections has been a dismal failure. Aside from monoclonal antibody therapy, only three anti-Covid-19 drugs have been approved under an EUA in the United States. None met their promised expectations from either the manufacturer or our federal health agencies. With their poor efficacy rates, safety profiles and a black box warning slapped upon Pfizer’s anti-Covid-19 drug Paxlovid, the CDC is scrambling to find new viable alternatives in the pharmaceutical pipeline. Bloomberg amplifies the fake Covid-19 treatment crisis by lamenting that repurposed drugs such as ivermectin are gaining global popularity as “the world needs effective Covid drugs.”[2]

Shortly after the pandemic was formally announced, the FDA recommended the cheap over the counter anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine but then quickly reversed its decision after Fauci publicly announced the future arrival of Gilead Sciences’ novel intravenous drug Remdesivir. The FDA’s and European Union’s approvals of Remdesivir baffled many scientists, according to the journal Science, who questioned its therapeutic value and kept a close watch on the drug’s clinical reports about a “disproportionally high number of reports of liver and kidney problems.”[3] Even an earlier Chinese study published in The Lancet found that remdesivir had no impact on the coronavirus. The Science article notes that the “FDA never consulted a group of outside experts that it has at the ready to weigh in on complicated antiviral drug issues.”[4] Six months before remdesivir received EUA approval, Anthony Fauci had already hailed the drug as a major breakthrough that would establish a new “standard of care” in Covid-19 treatment.[5]
Today, remdesivir is being increasingly recognized as a debacle in antiviral therapeutic care. Even the WHO released a “conditional recommendation against the use of remdesivir in hospitalized patients, regardless of disease severity, as there is currently no evidence that remdesivir improves survival and other outcomes in these patients.” An Italian study observed a 416 percent increase in hepatocellular injuries among hospitalized Covid-19 patients treated with Remdesivir.[6] And a smaller Taiwanese study of hospitalized unvaccinated patients reported a 185 percent higher mortality during late remdesivir treatment.[7]
Earlier this year, Pfizer’s novel oral Covid-19 medication Paxlovid was given an FDA black box warning for clinically significant adverse reactions that can potentially be fatal. Because the company does not permit independent random-controlled trials to investigate its drug, other than retrospective studies, we only have Pfizer’s own data to rely upon. Nevertheless, The Lancet published a study by a team of Chinese scientists at Shanghai Jiao Tong School of Medicine that managed to look at Paxlovid’s use among critically ill patients hospitalized with Covid-19. The study reported a 27 percent higher risk of the infection progressing, a 67 percent increased risk in requiring ventilation, and 10 percent longer stays in ICU facilities.[8]
Paxlovid is a combination of a novel SARS-CoV-2 protease inhibitor and the HIV protease inhibitor ritonavir. The FDA approved Paxlovid under a EUA with the claim it was safe. However, on the government’s HIV.gov website for ritonavir it is clearly stated that the drug “can cause serious life-threatening side effects. These include inflammation of the pancreas (pancreatitis), heart rhythm problems, severe skin rash and allergic reactions, liver problems and drug interactions.”[9] Perhaps due to the drug’s serious side effects, it is no longer used solely against HIV, but rather is given in smaller doses as a booster for AZT-related drugs. Being highly toxic, ritonavir is also not recommended for pregnant women and has been shown to interfere with hormone-based birth control efficacy.
Paxlovid only received FDA EUA approval in May 2023. At that time, the agency claimed there was no evidence that patients who were treated with the drug rebounded and came down with Covid. However, shortly thereafter this was determined to be untrue.[10] A Harvard analysis found that 21 percent of Paxlovid recipients will remain contagious and likely succumb to a viral rebound compared to only 1.8 percent who did not take the drug.
Merck’s anti-Covid-19 drug molnupiravir (Lagevrio) also has an FDA black box warning for potential fetal harm when administered to pregnant women. Why the drug was ever approved under an EUA seems to be an enigma. The drug’s antiviral activity is based upon a metabolite known as NHC, which for many years has been known to create havoc in an enzyme crucial for viral replication by inserting errors into the virus’ genetic code. The theory is: produce enough errors and the virus kills itself off. However, molnupiravir can cause hundreds of mutations thereby “supercharging” the manufacturing of new Covid-19 viral strains. Moreover, according to a Forbes article, the drug’s mutagenic powers may also interfere with our own body’s enzymes and DNA.[11] Another Forbes article points out that Merck’s clinical trial only enrolled around 1,500 participants, which is far too “small to pick up on rare mutagenic events.”[12]
Molnupiravir has a poor efficacy rate across the board including viral clearance, recovery, and hospitalizations/death (68 percent).[13] One trial, funded by Merck, concluded the drug had no clinical benefit.[14] More worrisome, the drug also has life-threatening adverse effects including mutagenic risks to human DNA and mitochondria, carcinogenic activity and embryonic death.[15]

Each of these drugs have been outrageous cash cows for their manufacturers. Remdesivir is priced at $3,120 per treatment and earned Gilead $5.6 billion in sales for 2021.
Pfizer’s Paxlovid is priced at $1,390 per treatment. Last year, the company’s revenues for its Covid products—Paxlovid and the Comirnaty vaccine—came in at $12.5 billion, and, according to Fierce Pharma, Pfizer wrote off an additional $4.7 billion on its overstocked Paxlovid inventory.[16] Merck’s molnupiravir’s sales for 2022 cashed in almost $5.7 billion. Despite their profits, none of these drugs have been shown convincingly to have measurably lessened the pandemic nor the spread of SARS-CoV-2.
Despite all the attention and medical hype about novel experimental antiviral drugs to treat Covid-19, Anthony Fauci and other federal officials had full knowledge that other FDA-approved drugs existed that could have been quickly repurposed at minimal expense to effectively treat Covid-19 infections. Repurposing existing drugs to treat illness is a common occurrence. The antiparasitic and antiviral drug Ivermectin best stands out. Its effectiveness was observed to be so remarkable and multifaceted that researchers started to investigate its potential.
The mainstream media, including many liberal news sources who pride themselves on their independence, continue to channel the voices of Anthony Fauci, the CDC and FDA to demonize ivermectin and other generic drugs for treating Covid-19 and to reduce hospitalization and deaths. This propaganda campaign, however, has completely ignored the large body of medical literature that shows ivermectin’s statistically significant efficacy against symptomatic and asymptomatic SARS-2 infections.
Originally developed for veterinarian use, in 1987, the FDA approved ivermectin for treating two parasitic diseases, river blindness and stronglyoidiasis, in humans. Since then an enormous body of medical research has grown showing ivermectin’s effectiveness for treating other diseases. Its broad range of antiviral properties has shown efficacy against many RNA viruses such avian influenza, zika, dengue, HIV, West Nile, yellow fever, chikungunya and earlier severe respiratory coronaviruses. It has also been shown to be effective against DNA viruses such as herpes, polyomavirus, and circovirus-2.[17]
Unsurprisingly, ivermectin’s inventors Drs. William Campbell and Satoshi Omura were awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine.
It has been prescribed to hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Given its decades’ long record of in vitro efficacy, it should have been self-evident for Fauci’s NIAID, the CDC and the WHO to rapidly conduct in vivo trials to usher ivermectin as a first line of defense for early stage Covid-19 infections and for use as a safe prophylaxis.
For example, if funding were devoted for the rapid development of a micro-based pulmonary delivery system, mortality rates would have been miniscule and the pandemic would have been lessened greatly.[18] Repurposing ivermectin could have been achieved very quickly at a minor expense.[19] However, despite all the medical evidence confirming ivermectin’s strong antiviral properties and its impeccable safety record when administered properly, we instead witnessed a sophisticated government-orchestrated campaign to declare war against ivermectin and another antiviral drug, hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), in favor of far more expensive and EUA approved experimental drugs. Unlike the US, other nations were eager to find older drugs to repurpose against Covid-19 and protect their populations. A Johns Hopkins University analysis offered the theory that a reason why many African countries had very few to near zero Covid-19 fatalities was because of widespread deployment of ivermectin. In February 2020, the National Health Commission of China, for example, was the first to include hydroxychloroquine in its guidelines for treating mild, moderate and severe SARS-2 cases. Eight Latin American nations distribute home Covid-19 treatment kits that include ivermectin.[20] Why did the US and most European countries swayed by the US and the WHO fail to follow suit?
Early in the pandemic, physicians in other nations where treatment was less restricted, such as Spain and Italy, shared data with American physicians about effective treatments against the SARS-2 virus. In addition, there was a large corpus of medical research indicating that older antiviral drugs could be repurposed. Doctors who started to prescribe drugs such as ivermectin and HCQ, along with Vitamin D and zinc supplementation, observed remarkable results. Unlike the dismal recovery and high mortality rates reported in hospitals and large clinics that relied upon strict isolation, quarantine, and ventilator interventions, this small fringe group of physicians reported very few deaths among their large patient loads. Even reported deaths were more often than not compounded by patients’ comorbidities, poor medical facilities and other anomalies.
Very early into the pandemic, medical papers indicated ivermectin was a highly effective drug to treat SARS-2 infections.
In April 2020, less than a month after the WHO declared Covid-19 as a global pandemic, Australian researchers at the Peter Doherty Institute of Infection and Immunity published a paper demonstrating that a single ivermectin dose can control SARS-CoV-2 viral replication within 24-48 hours.[21] Monash University’s Biomedicine Discovery Institute in Australia had also published an early study that ivermectin destroyed SARS-2 infected cell cultures by 99.8 percent within 48 hours. But no American federal health official paid any attention.
As of March 2024, a database for all studies and trials investigating ivermectin against Covid-19 infections records a total of 248 studies, 195 peer-reviewed, and 102 involving controlled groups reporting an average 61 percent improvement for early infections, a 39 percent success rate in treating late infections, and an 85 percent average success rate for use as a preventative prophylaxis.[22] Moreover, prescribing ivermectin reduced mortality by 49 percent, compared to remdesivir’s 4 percent, Pfizer’s Paxlovid’s 31 percent, and molnupiravir’s 22 percent. Even hydroxychloroquine well outperforms these drugs mortality risk for early treatment at 66 percent.
A noteworthy study conducted in Brazil and published in the Cureus Journal of Medical Science prescribed ivermectin in a citywide prophylaxis program in a town of 223,000 residents. 133,000 took ivermectin. The results for a population of this size are indisputable in concluding that ivermectin is a safe first line of defense to confront the pandemic. Covid mortality was reduced 90 percent. There was also a 67 percent lower risk of hospitalization and a 44 percent decrease in Covid cases. Garcia-Aquilar et al reports a Mexican in vitro analysis showing a definitive interaction between ivermectin and the SAR-CoV-2 spike protein, which would account for its high efficacy in Covid-19 cases.[23]
The All India Institute for Medical Science (AIIMS) and the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), two of India’s most prestigious institutions, acted against the WHO and launched an ivermectin treatment campaign in several states. In Uttar Pradesh there was a 95 percent decrease in morality (a decline from 37,944 to 2,014). The Indian capital of New Delhi witnessed a 97 percent reduction. During the same time period, the state of Tamil Nadu, which followed the WHO’s ban on ivermectin, had a 173 percent increase in deaths (from 10,986 to 30,016 deaths).
There have been many concerted efforts to discredit ivermectin and other repurposed drugs’ effectiveness. Most notable is the large TOGETHER Trial Brazil study published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) that concluded both ivermectin and another repurposed drug fluvoxamine showed no beneficial signs for treating Covid-19 patients. The study was widely reported in the mainstream media. However, a Cato Institute analysis discovered the study in fact showed its benefits and the results were in agreement with 87 percent of other clinical trials investigating ivermectin. The Cato analysis identifies many odd anomalies in how the trial was conducted including an unspecified placebo—although it is suspected it was Vitamin C, which has itself been shown to be mildly effective against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and protocol changes as the study was underway including inclusion/exclusion criteria. By his own admission the TOGETHER Trial’s principal investigator Dr. Ed Mills at McMaster University in Ontario “designs clinical trials, predominantly for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.”[24] In a McMaster University press release, the Gates foundation is listed as a funder for the study to debunk ivermectin and fluvoxamine.[25] Oddly, Gates is nowhere listed among the several funders in the NEJM study’s disclosure. In addition, TOGETHER Trials is owned by the Canadian for profit startup Purpose Life Sciences, founded by Mills; legal documents showed Mills’ PLS is largely funded and controlled by Sam Bankman Fried’s FTX who invested $53 million into the project. Administrators of FTX’s bankruptcy are suing PLS for fraud.[26]
In short, the ivermectin/fluvoxamine TOGETHER Trial was a complete medical sham and intentionally designed for one single purpose: to fuel media disinformation in order to undermine ivermectin’s superior efficacy and safety profile to Big Pharma’s more profitable designer drugs.
In 2004, the US Congress passed an amendment to the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act known as Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). This piece of legislature legalized an anti-regulatory pathway to allow experimental medical interventions to be expedited and bypass standard FDA safety evaluations in the event of bioterrorist threats and national health emergencies such as pandemics. At the time, passage of the EUA amendment made sense because it was partially in response to the 2001 anthrax attacks and the US’s entry into an age of international terrorism. However, the amendment raises some serious considerations. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, EUAs had only been authorized on four occasions: the 2005 avian H5N1 and 2009 H1N1 swine flu threats, the 2014 Ebola and the 2016 Zikra viruses. Each of these pathogen scares proved to be false alarms that posed no threat of pandemic proportions to Americans. The fifth time EUAs were invoked was in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic, which at the time seemed far more plausible.
Before the government can authorize an EUA to deploy an experimental diagnostic product, drug or vaccine, certain requirements must be fulfilled. First, the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) must have sufficient proof that the nation is being confronted with a serious life-threatening health emergency. Second, the drug(s) and/or vaccine(s) under consideration must have sufficient scientific evidence to suggest they will likely be effective against the medical threat. The evidence must at least include preclinical and observational data showing the product targets the organism, disease or condition. Third, although the drug or vaccine does not undergo a rigorous evaluation, it must at least show that its potential and known benefits outweigh its potential and known risks. In addition, the product must be manufactured in complete accordance with standard quality control and safety assurances.
When we look back at the government’s many debacles during the Covid-19 pandemic, other EUA requirements warrant the spotlight. On the one hand, an EUA cannot be authorized for any product or intervention if there is an FDA alternative approved product already available, unless the experimental product is clearly proven to have a significant advantage. Moreover, and perhaps more important, EUAs demand informed consent. Every individual who receives the drug or vaccine must be thoroughly informed about its experimental status and its potential risks and benefits. Recipients must also be properly informed about the alternatives to the experimental product and nobody should be forced to take it.
Finally, an EUA requires robust safety monitoring and reporting of adverse events, injuries and deaths potentially due to the drug or vaccine. This is the responsibility not only of the private pharmaceutical manufacturers but also the FDA, physicians, hospitals, clinics and other healthcare professionals.
Obviously important cautions must be considered after approving a medical intervention under the EUA requirements. Foremost are the inherent health risks of any rapid response of experimental medical interventions, especially novel drugs and vaccines. As we observed during the FDA approval process and roll out of Pfizer’s and Moderna’s mRNA Covid-19 jabs, no long-term human trials were conducted to even estimate a reliable baseline of their relative efficacy and safety. The American public has blindly placed its trust in our federal health authorities decision-making. It is expected that under a national health emergency, the authorities would be completely transparent and act only by the highest ethical standards. However our institutions betrayed public trust and either ignored or transgressed cautions underlying EUA approved medical interventions in every conceivable way. Moreover, conflicts of interests have been discovered to have plagued the entire EUA review process.
Although the EUA amendment provides some protections to authorized drug and vaccine manufacturers, it was the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP) in 2005 that expanded liability protections. In addition to protecting private corporations, PREP also shields company executives and employees from claims of personal injury or death resulting from the administration of authorized countermeasures. The only exceptions for liability are if the company or its executive offices are proven to have engaged in intentional and/or criminal misconduct with conscious disregard for the rights and safety of those taking their drugs and vaccines.
During the pandemic, the FDA issued widespread EUAs with liability immunity for the PCR diagnostic kits for SARS-2, the mRNA vaccines and the anti-Covid-19 drugs. Curiously, the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services invoked the PREP Act on February 4, 2020 giving liability protections; this was over a month before the pandemic was officially announced, which raises serious questions about prior-planning before the viral outbreak in Wuhan, China.
From the pandemic’s outset, Fauci embarked on the media circuit to promise Americans that federal health agencies were doing everything within their means to get a vaccine on the market because there was no available drug to clear the SARS-2 virus. As we have seen with respect to ivermectin alone, this was patently false. Rather the government placed an overriding emphasis on vaccination with a near total disregard for implementing very simple preventative measures to inhibit viral progression. Once mass vaccinations were underway, we were promised that the SARS-2 virus would be defeated and life would return to normal. In retrospect, we can look back and state with a degree of certainty that American health authorities and these products’ corporate manufacturers may have violated almost every EUA requirement. Everything that went wrong with the PCR kits, the experimental mRNA vaccines and novel drugs could have been avoided if the government had diligently repurposed effective and safe measures as pandemic countermeasures. Very likely, hundreds of thousands of lives, perhaps millions, would have been saved.
Similarly the FDA issued a warning statement against the use of ivermectin. Even ivermectin’s manufacturer Merck discredited its own product. Shortly after ridiculing its drug, the Alliance for Natural Health reported, “Merck announced positive results from a clinical trial on a new drug called molnupiravir in eliminating the virus in infected patients.”[27]
And still the FDA considers these novel patented drugs to be superior to ivermectin. Favoring a vaccine regime and government-controlled surveillance measures to track every American’s movements, American health officials blatantly neglected their own pandemic policies’ severe health consequences. Ineffective lockdowns, masks, social isolation, unsound critical care interventions such as relying upon ventilators, and the sole EUA approvals of the costly and insufficiently effective drugs brought about nightmares for tens of millions of adults and children. This was all undertaken under Fauci’s watch and the heads of the US health agencies in direct violation of the EUA requirements to only authorize drugs and medical interventions when no other safe and effective alternative is available. Alternatives were available.
The 4-year history of the pandemic highlights a sharp distinction between dependable medical research and pseudoscientific fraud. The CDC adopted a common Soviet era practice to redefine the very definition of a vaccine and the parameters of vaccine efficacy in order to fit economic and ideological agendas. This explains Washington’s aggressive public relations endeavors to silence medical opponents. According to cardiologist Dr. Michael Goodkin’s private investigations, several of the most cited studies discrediting ivermectin’s antiviral benefits were intentionally manipulated in order to produce “fake” results.[28] These studies were then widely distributed to the AMA, American College of Physicians and across mainstream media to author “hit pieces” to demonize ivermectin and other repurposed drugs. The government’s belligerent and reactive diatribes, brazenly or casually advocating for censorship, were direct violations of scientific and medical integrity and contributed nothing towards developing constructive policies for handling a pandemic with a minimal cost to life. The consequence has been a less informed and grossly naïve public, which was gaslighted into believing lies.
The FDA’s EUAs for the Covid-19 vaccines and novel experimental drugs were in fact an attack on the amendments and PREP directives. Neither the vaccines nor drugs warranted emergency authorization because effective and safe alternatives were readily available. No doubt a Congressional investigation would uncover criminal misconduct and conscious fraud. Moreover, these violations of the PREP Act may have the potential to lead directly into medical crimes against humanity as outlined in the Nuremberg Code.
Although the Nuremberg Code has not been officially adopted in its entirety as law by any nation or major medical association, other international treaties, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki (which is not legally binding), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical Research on Human Subjects incorporate some of Nuremberg’s main principles that aim to protect people from unethical and forced medical research. Although the US signed the ICCPR as an intentional party, the US Senate never ratified it. The ICCPR’s Article 7 clearly states, “No one shall be subject to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” which can legally be interpreted to include forced medical experimentation implied as cruel, inhuman treatment. Other ICCPR articles, 6 and 17, are also applicable to medical experimentation to ensure ethical conduct, obtaining proper informed consent and the right to life and privacy. For a moment, consider the numerous senior citizens in nursing homes and hospitals who were simply administered experimental Covid-19 vaccines without full knowledge about what they were receiving. And now how many children are being coerced by the pseudoscience of health officials’ lies to be vaccinated without any knowledge of these mRNA products’ risk-benefit ratio?
The US is also a signatory to the Helsinki Declaration, which, although not directly aligned with Nuremberg, shares much in common. The Declaration shares some common features with the EUA amendment and PREP Act. These include voluntary informed consent—which is universally accepted, adequate risk and benefit information about medical interventions, and an emphasis on the principle of medical beneficence (promoting well-being and the Hippocratic rule of doing no harm). It also guarantees protections for vulnerable groups, especially pregnant women and children, which the US government and vaccine makers directly violated by conducting trials on these groups with full knowledge about these vaccines’ adverse events in adults. In addition, weighing the scientific evidence to assess the risk-benefit ratios between prescribing ivermectin and HCQ over the new generation of novel experimental drugs conclusively favors the former. This alone directly violates the ethical medical principles noted above.
However, the failure to repurpose life-saving drugs is less criminal than the questionable unethical motivations to usher a new generation of genetically engineered vaccines that have never before been adequately researched in human trials for long term safety. This mass experimentation, which continues to threaten the health and well-being of millions of people, is global and can legally be interpreted as a genocidal attack on humanity.
If the emerging data for increasing injuries and deaths due to the Covid-19 vaccines is reliable—and we believe it is—the handling of the pandemic can be regarded as the largest medical crime in human history. In time, and with shifting political allegiances and public demands to hold our leaders in government and private industry accountable, the architects of this medical war against civilization will be brought to justice.
*
Richard Gale is the Executive Producer of the Progressive Radio Network and a former Senior Research Analyst in the biotechnology and genomic industries.
Dr. Gary Null is host of the nation’s longest running public radio program on alternative and nutritional health and a multi-award-winning documentary film director, including his recent Last Call to Tomorrow.
Notes
[1] https://www.cnn.com/videos/health/2021/08/29/dr-anthony-fauci-ivermectin-covid-19-sotu-vpx.cnn
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-01-24/the-world-needs-effective-covid-drugs-as-ivermectin-persists
[3] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/10/very-very-bad-look-remdesivir-first-fda-approved-covid-19-drug
[4] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31022-9/fulltext
[5] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/29/dr-anthony-fauci-says-data-from-remdesivir-coronavirus-drug-trial-shows-quite-good-news.html
[6] https://www.dldjournalonline.com/article/S1590-8658(21)00923-3/fulltext
[7] https://journals.lww.com/md-journal/fulltext/2023/12290/the_association_between_covid_19_vaccination_and.45.aspx
[8] https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S2666-6065%25252823%25252900012-3
[9] https://clinicalinfo.hiv.gov/en/drugs/ritonavir/patient
[10] https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/13-things-to-know-paxlovid-covid-19
[11] https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2021/11/01/supercharging-new-viral-variants-the-dangers-of-molnupiravir-part-1/
[12] https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2021/11/02/harming-those-who-receive-it-the-dangers-of-molnupiravir-part-2
[13] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.01.20.23284849v1.full.pdf
[14] https://evidence.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/EVIDoa2100044
[15] https://c19early.org/waters.html
[16] https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/pfizer-gets-walloped-56b-write-down-covid-sales-continue-disappoint
[17] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7290143/
[18] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7539925/
[19] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7564151/
[20] https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2023/8-latin-american-governments-distributed-ivermectin-sans-evidence-to-treat-covid
[21] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7129059/
[22] https://c19ivermectin.com
[23] https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/24/22/16392
[24] https://empendium.com/mcmtextbook/interviews/perspective/236226,covid-19-to-treat-or-not-to-treat-platform-trials
[25] https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/855535
[26] https://c19ivm.org/tallaksen.html
[27] https://anh-usa.org/fda-ensures-pharma-profits-on-covid/
[28] https://www.trialsitenews.com/a/are-major-ivermectin-studies-designed-for-failure
April 6, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Anthony Fauci, CDC, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, European Union, FDA, United States |
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Failed drug cost U.S. taxpayers $12.6 billion
Pfizer first scammed the world with its “100% safe and effective” Covid mRNA vaccines, and as it turns out, that was just the opening salvo from a pharmaceutical cartel that is inundated with corruption and deceit.
I wanted to turn your attention to two significant recent studies on Paxlovid, the Covid-19 oral pill that the U.S. government spent $12.6 billion taxpayer dollars on subsidizing for Pfizer.
The first study, which is brought to you by Pfizer funds (though they noticeably don’t use the brand name Paxlovid in the study), finds that Paxlovid does not actually work. They’ve known this since July, 2022, but for reasons unknown, waited two years to publish the results.
“The time to sustained alleviation of all signs and symptoms of Covid-19 did not differ significantly between participants who received nirmatrelvir–ritonavir (Paxlovid) and those who received placebo,” the authors write in this New England Journal of Medicine study, which was published on April 3rd.
That’s right. It doesn’t work at all.
In rolling out Paxlovid, Pfizer claimed in a press release that its preliminary data showed an 89% reduction in hospitalization and death for patients who took the pill.
Curiously, the Pfizer-funded study concluded in July 2022, just months after Paxlovid became available, but this seems to be the first time that results have been public.

Now, hundreds of millions of manufactured doses later, the most sophisticated apples to apples comparison shows that it isn’t effective whatsoever.
But it gets worse.
Remember “Paxlovid rebound”?
That’s short for people’s symptoms coming back after taking a course of Paxlovid.
When Paxlovid first hit pharmacy shelves, Pfizer claimed that Paxlovid rebound was inconsequential, amounting to 1 or 2 percent of patients who were prescribed the drug.
But a late March study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found that about 1 in 4 patients on Paxlovid suffered from “Paxlovid rebound.” This study didn’t just analyze the presence of viral fragments. It found that 24.5 percent of enrolled patients on Paxlovid suffered from *symptomatic* rebound.

Now it makes sense why so many high profile figures, such as Joe Biden and Anthony Fauci, had bouts of “Paxlovid rebound.” It isn’t rare whatsoever.
Now imagine if Pfizer told the truth about its failed Covid-19 drug from the beginning. That truth would’ve resulted in Pfizer taking a massive financial hit, given that they relied on Paxlovid to sustain their multi billion dollar profit margins.

Meanwhile, Pfizer’s market value has continued to crash over the past year. Fewer and fewer people are buying what Pfizer is selling.
Now who will be held accountable for the greatest pharmaceutical fraud and swindle operation of all time?
April 6, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science |
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Minutes of Robert Koch Institute crisis meetings reveal undue influence of “external actor”
As a conspiracy theorist, I am batting .400. Over the last four years, I have examined many official representations of reality and posited the theory that they are the fraudulent misrepresentations of two or more persons in positions of power or undue influence. By definition, two or more persons committing an act of fraud are participating in a criminal conspiracy.
At the risk of sounding boastful, ALL of my conspiracy theories have been confirmed by the subsequent discovery of factual evidence to be actual conspiracies.
Back in 2020, as I watched with dismay as many of my old German friends lost their minds under the pressure of daily propaganda, I posited the theory that the Robert Koch Institute—Germany’s official infectious disease institute—had been hijacked by political interests.
My hunch was that IF unbiased scientific assessments were being conducted at the Robert Koch Institute, these were being distorted or ignored by the German government.
Now comes the news that the German independent magazine, Multipolar, has successfully sued the Robert Koch Institute to release the minutes of its Covid Crisis deliberations in 2020. Though heavily redacted, the documents reveal that pressure was indeed exerted on the Institute’s scientists to go along with public policies not supported by scientific research. For example, the Institute expressed the opinion that masking and lockdowns were of doubtful value.
Of special note was the following revelation:
As Multipolar has already reported based on the previously secret papers, the tightening of the risk assessment from “moderate” to “high” announced by the RKI in March 2020 – based on all lockdown measures and court rulings on them – was, contrary to what has previously been claimed, not based on a professional assessment of the institute, but on the political instructions of an external actor – whose name is blacked out in the minutes.
April 5, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | Germany |
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“Bird flu pandemic could be ‘100 times worse’ than COVID, scientists warn.” That is the headline at the New York Post for one of many media reports out Thursday spreading the latest pandemic scare.
Note the “100 times worse” comparison. Why not “nearly as bad,” “as bad,” or even “twice as bad” as coronavirus? The answer is that the fearmongers know that most people are on to the coronavirus hoax whereby a run-of-the-mill health threat was exaggerated to justify tyrannical measures including forcing termination of a vast amount of in-person interaction, mandating mask wearing, and even pushing and mandating experimental “vaccine” shots marketed as safe and effective despite being both dangerous and ineffective. All the while, good early treatment options were suppressed, resulting in greater sickness and death as well as expansive use of dangerous medical procedures and pharmaceuticals for people whose serious illness could have been prevented.
The world could be turned upside down over coronavirus because of a concerted effort of government and media to paint coronavirus as both extremely dangerous to everyone and something for which there were not already available good medical countermeasures. Both of those assertions were false. But, at the time, many people bought into the charade and trusted that “the science” propounded by the government and media selected “experts” required radical changes in human behavior, widespread participation on novel medical experimentation, and extreme restraints on liberty.
But now it is a new day. Looking back on the coronavirus scare, increasingly people realize, including some who are ashamed to discuss the matter, that they were duped. And they don’t want to be duped again. “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me,” the saying goes.
Yet, trickery is a go-to tactic for expanding power. The government and its business allies in medical and other fields aren’t about to give up on that tactic that reaped such huge gains during the coronavirus scare. Thus the ploy of tacitly admitting what has become common knowledge — that coronavirus was way overblown — so that the repression and profit process can be repeated anew to deal with a threat that, trust us, is this time really, really, really bad.
And what scientist does the New York Post article quote to support the claim that scientists say the bird flu is “100 times worse than COVID” declared in the article’s title? His name is John Fulton, described in the article as “a pharmaceutical industry consultant for vaccines.”
Oh brother: Here we go again. Or do we? If enough people stand up and say “no you don’t this time,” this new dangerous charade can be stopped in its tracks.
April 5, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
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It is now openly acknowledged in Germany that COVID-19 did not exist and declared from the beginning: the Corona measures had nothing to do with health.
It was a government and intelligence operation to enslave the people, a run-up to dictatorship under a ‘one world government’
Reports here: https://www.stefan-homburg.de/images/Corona%20Facts.pdf
April 3, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Germany, Human rights |
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