Bill to Allow Whole Milk in Schools Supported by Science, Experts Say
By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 25, 2023
For years, children at public schools have been offered only nonfat and 1% milk — but that may soon change, thanks to a bill that aims to put whole milk back on kids’ lunch trays.
The “Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act of 2023” would override the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) current guidelines on milk by amending the Richard B. Russell National School Lunch Act to allow school cafeterias to offer unflavored and flavored whole milk.
The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce on June 30 advanced the bill, which has been scheduled for a floor vote. The date of the vote is not yet publicly available.
According to the bill’s lead sponsor, Rep. Glenn “GT” Thompson (R-Pa.), “Bad federal policy has kept whole milk out of our school cafeterias for too long. … Milk is the number one source of 13 essential nutrients.”
The bill would bypass the USDA and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services advisory committee, which determine U.S. dietary guidelines — which in turn determines what foods schools can serve.
Whole milk banned in public schools since 2012
In what they said was an effort to curb childhood obesity, lawmakers passed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which revamped the National School Lunch Program to conform to the standing dietary guidelines recommending reduced saturated fat in children’s diets.
The National School Lunch Program provides low-cost or free lunches to roughly 30 million children in nearly 100,000 public and nonprofit private schools, as well as residential childcare institutions.
This led two years later to a ban of 2% and whole milk at participating schools.
Since then, schools have served non-fat and low-fat milk, including sweetened flavored varieties.
This experiment was “clearly a failure,” said Dr. Michelle Perro, “as rates of obesity continued to rise, now affecting 1 in 4 to 1 in 5 children.”
Perro, an integrative pediatrician with more than 38 years of experience, applauded Thompson’s “recognition that food policies can be revisited and changed,” telling The Defender:
“Fat is good for children. It is one of the three macronutrients the body needs for growth, nervous system health, hormone production, prostaglandins, etc. Additionally, fat in the diet helps with the absorbable and key vitamins A, D, E, and K, and are a concentrated energy source.”
The Nutrition Coalition, a nonprofit and nonpartisan group that “aims to improve health in America by ensuring that the public receives evidence-based nutritional advice,” last month sent a letter to Thompson in support of the legislation.
The group noted that whole milk was removed from schools in 2010 “due to longtime fears that saturated fats cause heart disease” — but “those fears are now outdated, as they are not supported by the current science.”
Health writer James Capon tweeted his support for the amendment:
Drinking less milk – particularly less whole milk, has not helped slow increasing rates of obesity and diabesity in the US.
Why still ban its consumption in US schools? Are things about to change? (graph from @bigfatsurprise). pic.twitter.com/Mjfky7LiwP— Fat is our Friend (@fatisourfriend) July 12, 2023
‘We got it wrong on saturated fats’
According to the Nutrition Coalition, an “authoritative 2020 ‘State of the Art Review’” in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology found that there is “no robust evidence that current population-wide arbitrary upper limits on saturated fat consumption in the United States will prevent CVD [cardiovascular disease] or reduce Mortality.’”
“More than 20 other review papers by independent teams of scientists around the world have concluded the same,” the Nutrition Coalition added.
USDA’s 2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA) found that the evidence linking saturated fat to heart disease was “strong.” However, a 2021 peer-reviewed investigation by outside scientists showed 88% of the studies reviewed by the DGA committee did not support that conclusion.
The scientists noted that of the 39 studies the DGA committee reviewed, 25 had null or negative findings — meaning saturated fats were found either to have no effect on cardiovascular disease or coronary heart disease, or were associated with lower risk.
Additionally, the DGA committee looked at 11 studies on saturated fatty acids and stroke. Of those 11 studies, 8 had null findings and 3 reported higher intake of saturated fatty acids was associated with a lower risk of stroke, the scientists pointed out.
Despite those findings, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), an independent consumer advocacy organization, on June 6 issued a statement against bringing whole milk back into schools, calling it “troublesome” that most U.S. children exceed the recommended limits on saturated fat and claiming that “too much saturated fat is linked to raises in LDL (‘bad’) cholesterol, a known cause of heart disease.”
Science journalist, author and founder of the Nutrition Coalition Nina Teicholz on June 12 pushed back against CSPI’s statement, noting that the committee for the current U.S. Dietary Guidelines found that there was “‘insufficient evidence’ to show that restricting saturated fats in childhood could prevent heart-disease or mortality in adulthood.”
Teicholz — who in her 2014 book, “The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet,” reviewed thousands of scientific studies and argued that the saturated fats in animal foods have been unfairly maligned based on weak, inconclusive evidence — said in a recent Substack post:
“Over the past 13 years, nearly 25 systematic reviews and meta-analyses, of both clinical trial and observational data, by independent teams of scientists have been published, and nearly all concluded that we got it wrong on saturated fats.
“The most rigorous clinical trial data show that these fats do not cause cardiovascular mortality or total mortality. Mortality (death) data is definitive. That should be the last word.”
Nonetheless, the USDA and the American Heart Association managed “simply to ignore these findings on mortality,” Teicholz said, “even when presented personally with these data by top scientists in the field … as reported in the BMJ.”
Meanwhile, the CSPI — which says it values “independence, scientific rigor, and transparency” — depicts the fight to get whole milk into schools as being led by “Big Dairy.”
But according to Teicholz, this claim lacks evidence:
“Interestingly, I’ve discovered that dairy behemoths like Danone make more money by skimming the fat off the milk and charging for it in other products, like ice cream, rather than selling the whole milk itself. These multinationals have shown themselves to be dis-interested in promoting whole milk.
“From what I can see, whole-milk advocacy seems mainly to be driven by people concerned about child health and farmers from the rapidly diminishing number of dairy farms in the U.S., 95% of which are family-owned.”
Teicholz questioned why CSPI would go to such lengths to keep whole milk out of schools. Part of the answer, she said, likely is that the group for decades has adamantly opposed saturated fats, so they are slow to acknowledge that current science no longer supports their stance:
“CSPI was so much against saturated fats that in the late 1980s, the group ran a major campaign in favor of replacing these harmful fats with trans fats, billed by the group’s newsletter as ‘healthy’ and ‘not a bad bargain’ for combatting heart disease (whoops! trans fats turned out to be even more of a heart-disease threat than saturated fats and were ultimately banned from the food supply).”
Studies ‘build the case for possible benefits’ of dairy fat
The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in November 2019 featured three peer-reviewed studies that called into question the narrative that the saturated fat in whole milk is harmful to people’s health.
The first study examined dairy fat consumption and the onset of diabetes in three cohorts of U.S. health professionals and found that higher dairy fat intake — when compared with calories from carbohydrates intake — was associated with lower diabetes risk in one cohort and not significantly associated with diabetes in the other two cohorts.
In an editorial about the study, Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, dean emeritus and distinguished professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University in Boston, wrote that the findings added to a “growing body of literature which call into question the soundness of conventional dietary recommendations to avoid dairy fat.”
The second study reported reductions in Type 2 diabetes were correlated with yogurt consumption and increases in cheese consumption, but could not form a conclusion on whole milk because few people in their study reported drinking it.
The third study looked at dairy consumption and death from cancer, cardiovascular disease and all causes in Italy.
The researchers found that compared with no milk consumption, moderate milk intake (≤200g or ∼6.5 ounces per day) was associated with around 25% lower mortality overall and 50% lower cardiovascular mortality. However, higher levels of milk consumption — either low-fat or whole milk — were not associated with lower mortality risk.
The three studies together, Mozaffarian said, provide “little support” for the notion that consuming dairy, or dairy fat, is “harmful,” but rather, “They continue to build the case for possible benefits.”
Americans more obese, unhealthy after push for low-fat diets
According to pediatrician Dr. Lawrence Palevsky, “Low-fat diets have been pushed by the health, medical and food industries for many decades.”
He said:
“Fat was demonized as a health hazard, and, as low-fat or non-fat items were pushed into American society, Americans became more overweight, obese and unhealthy. Why?
“Polyunsaturated fats (more inflammatory omega-6 seed, vegetable, corn and soybean oils than healthy anti-inflammatory omega-3 oils) were substituted for saturated fats, and processed bleached white sugars and high fructose corn syrup sugars were added to low-fat and non-fat foods to make them more palatable.
“These changes, all in what we were told were in the best interests of our health, only made Americans sicker and more overweight.”
Perro, too, believes the attack on fat and promotion of carbs stems from industry advocacy. The USDA food pyramid — originally designed by former USDA Director of Dietary Guidance and Nutrition Education Research Luise Light — was “hijacked and thwarted by the wheat and corn industries,” according to Perro.
Palevsky said he is not afraid of saturated fats in the diet. “What I do fear is the consumption of saturated fats from animal sources that are poorly fed with inappropriate and toxic diets, and those animals that are abused and poorly cared for in concentrated animal feed operations.”
These inappropriate diets and toxic exposures and living conditions, he said, make consuming the fat of the animals unhealthy:
“Most people are unaware that toxins are stored in animal fat tissue and that is what makes the saturated fats unhealthy for us when we consume milks and products from these animals.
“When animals are grass-fed and pasture-raised, and allowed to live in the wild, and we choose to cook them in a way that doesn’t destroy the quality of the fat, these saturated fats will generally not harm us. In fact, we may gain many benefits from consuming them.”
Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.
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.
Boiling Ocean Update: Florida Sea Temperature ‘Record’ Drops 15°F in just 48 Hours
BY CHRIS MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | JULY 30, 2023
Last week, the BBC reported that seawater along the tip of Florida had exceeded “hot tub” temperatures of 37.8°C (100°F) in recent days, “making it potentially the hottest ever measured”. The Guardian was in fine alarmist form noting that the Florida recording posed a threat to human food supplies and the livelihoods of those working in the water. Similar hysteria was to be found across most of the mainstream media. Alas, curiously missing from all this excitable coverage was a note that just 48 hours later the temperature plummeted to around 85°F.
The reading was taken from a buoy in Manatee Bay which is managed by the Everglades National Park, and located north of Key Largo. The upper left graph below shows that the temperature moved between 90-101°F on consecutive days, then fell away rapidly to around 85°F.
Examining the ‘record’ on the climate site Watts Up With That?, the former ecology lecturer Jim Steele observed that water temperatures were being driven by dynamics other than rising CO2. Steele noted that the Manatee Bay buoy measuring the water temperature was in a small embayment surrounded by landform, and this forms a natural hot tub. Low winds and a high pressure system further helped heat the bay, while muddy waters darkened the water enhancing solar heating.
Steele noted that the science of solar ponds has shown that when fresh water overlayed saltier water, heat gets trapped, and temperatures can be as much as 60°F hotter than the surface at depths between five and 10 feet.
To maintain the “crisis hoax”, Steele suggests it’s also important to ignore conflicting data. Southern Florida has several buoys, some measuring water temperature, some air, and some both. Just 56 miles to the south-west of Manatee Bay, the VAKF1 buoy measured water temperatures that were 10°F lower than Manatee Bay on those same days, as shown in the lower left graph (above), which then cooled to 86°F. Manatee Bay lacked air temperature data but VAKF1 reported a high air temperature of 91°F (lower right graph) which then cooled to the low 80°Fs, even dipping to 76°F. “These air temperatures don’t even approach being unprecedented,” said Steele.
Jim Steele has a lifetime’s experience in working for environmental educations projects. For 25 years he ran the Sierra Nevada Field Campus for San Francisco State University. As part of one monitoring project, he studied the effect of regional climate change on bird populations in the Sierra Nevada.
Mainstream media is now clearly in the grip of a climate catastrophisation mania where activists scour the world for any unusual weather event or recording. Normal reporting standards seem to have been abandoned in the rush to scare populations to comply with the collectivist Net Zero agenda. Top level politicians encourage widespread panic with Al Gore ranting about “boiling oceans”, while a deranged Antonio Guterres claimed earlier this week that we live in an age of “global boiling”. At a stroke, the UN Secretary General seems to have retired the Guardian’s ‘Global Heating’ invention. Last year’s Nobel Physics Laureate Dr. John Clauser says the climate narrative has corrupted his beloved science. Meanwhile, global boiling is promoted as global surface temperatures are retrospectively adjusted upwards by state-funded bodies, while the accurate satellite record shows a near nine-year pause. In the U.K., the Met Office happily uses corrupted station temperature data that the World Meteorology Organisation states has a error estimate of up to 2°C. The British weather service still seems inordinately proud of its 60-second U.K. heat record last year, despite evidence that three Typhoon jets were landing around the time on the runway next to the measuring devise at RAF Coningsby.
On Wednesday, the BBC’s Georgina Rannard wrote a story asking if the Gulf Stream could collapse by 2025? This is pure Day After Tomorrow sci-fi territory, promoting fears of catastrophic cooling in the northern hemisphere, with widespread impacts across the planet. Again the story was all over the mainstream media with USA Today reporting the Atlantic Ocean currents could soon collapse, adding, “how you may endure dramatic weather changes”.
The story originated from a recently published scientific paper and was pure clickbait for impressionable activists. The claims are based on limited observation evidence producing computer model projections. The authors state “with high confidence” that the change will occur between 2025-2095. However, the paper does contain this massive caveat, which went unreported in any of the media coverage: this prediction is only valid “under the assumption that the model is approximately correct, and we of course, cannot rule out that other mechanisms are at play, and thus, the uncertainty is larger”.
Needless to say, the story went around the world and was reported in blazing headlines. However, it seems eyebrows are starting to be raised about this sort of guff, even in alarmist circles. The climate alarmist’s climate alarmist is Professor Michael ‘Hockey Stick’ Mann of Penn University, but rerunning the Day After Tomorrow script was not wholly to his taste. According to USA Today, he said: “I’m not sure the authors bring much to the table other than a fancy statistical method. History is littered with flawed predictions based on fancy statistical methods; sometimes they’re too fancy for their own good.”
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
The fantasy explanations for excess deaths as panic sets in
By Guy Hatchard | TCW Defending Freedom | July 25, 2023
The writer is in New Zealand
On Saturday the Daily Express headlined a story ‘Experts call for urgent investigation as excess deaths spark “dangerous” theories’. UK excess deaths in 2023 have risen to levels commensurate with 2020 alpha variant deaths during the height of the pandemic, but the article admits that the 2023 excess is not due to Covid. Most concerning is the death toll in the 15-44 age group which exceeds 2020 and prior years, an age group which was mostly mildly affected by Covid.
As here in New Zealand, where our rates of excess death are measurably higher than the UK, the Westminster government is keeping quiet and looking the other way. Dr Charles Levinson, Medical Director of private GP service Doctorcall, said the ‘silence’ from the government was allowing conspiracy theories to flourish, including from anti-vaxxers, and added: ‘A refusal to openly discuss these statistics is an abdication of responsibility from parts of the scientific community [and the government], leading to an irreversible erosion of trust by parts of society.’ We agree.
So we are not conspiracy theorists when we warn that excess deaths are up, mainstream scientists agree with us, but they don’t want the jabs they pushed on people to be revealed as the cause, or even openly discussed – that could be very embarrassing.
Why aren’t governments investigating? It might be a fair guess that governments are well aware of excess deaths and afraid to investigate, because what limited data they have released suggests clearly that those asking questions about vaccine safety are right about the cause.
Excess deaths appear to be clustered around a range of cardiac events scientifically proven and acknowledged to be related to mRNA vaccines, and cancers suspected to be. The Boston Globe for example headlines ‘Rise in cancer among younger people worries and puzzles doctors’. Indian doctor Feruzi Mehta from Mumbai tweets that heart attack deaths among younger people now make up 15-20 per cent of the total, when it was just 1-2 per cent ten years ago.
Doctors like Mehta speaking up are risking de-registration. Therefore most others, faced by rising incidence of illness and death especially among the young, are remaining silent. However, some diehards are doubling down or even succumbing to the irrational.
Silence is one thing, but the NZ Prime Minister’s office is actively funding a disinformation project dedicated to discrediting anyone who asks questions about vaccine safety, labelling them violent extremists, paedophiles, satanists, anti-Semites, animal torturers, white supremacists, neo-Nazis and anti-transgender. All these wild and incredible accusations are explicitly made during the first 12 minutes of the first episode of a seven-part podcast series produced by RNZ called Undercurrent in which they interview government-funded disinformation experts. (Twelve minutes of this half-baked smear campaign was enough exposure for me to press the pause button.)
The problem with the RNZ podcast so far (aside from its lengthy episodes and unrelenting madness) is that it doesn’t actually discuss vaccine injuries or unprecedented rates of excess deaths (or even mention that there are such things). RNZ began putting the podcast series together more than ten months ago. Since that time it has become apparent that worrying excess death rates have persisted, but RNZ has apparently decided to avoid mentioning the problem. There is a possible reason for this: once you get into inventing causes of excess deaths you really do begin to sound mad.
For example, the NY Times suggests that extreme heat is causing hundreds of extra deaths. Alex Berenson, award-winning former NYT journalist, responds to this kind of reporting with ‘The New York Times has lost its mind. And by mind, I mean principles and understanding of the First Amendment (the right to free speech).’ In which he says the NYT has walked into the government censorship trap, cancelling those voicing concerns including himself.
A quick survey of other suggested causes of record excess deaths suggested by mainstream media ranges from the just possible marginal effect of lockdowns to the implausible alcohol consumption, loneliness, too much exercise, gardening, vacations, climate change and the really far out: ‘there is too much air’. One News in NZ tweeted that people in Mount Maunganui are dying of air pollution in large numbers, along with a picture of its pristine coastline. You can feel the panic setting in, can’t you? Something terrible is happening, but people are very afraid to face up to it.
Pro-vaccine advocate Professor Peter Hotez is recommending staying at home. He is warning against going to see the blockbuster Barbie or Oppenheimer movies at the cinema because you might bring Covid home with you. Incredibly he joins with RNZ in thinking that concern about vaccine safety is a form of anti-Semitism.
It doesn’t take much thought to realise that the underlying concern here is the increasingly noticeable high rate of excess deaths and the lack of any plausible explanation. All this is happening after mass vaccinations with a novel biotechnology drug. How long are we going to go on without acknowledging the elephant in the room or more especially tabulating how many among those dying are vaccinated or unvaccinated?
Just remember the paragraph with which we started this article. Scientists are now warning us that excess deaths are real and very concerning, not imaginary as our politicians and some uninformed medicos and media hacks are still pressing us to accept, against the evidence.
We are facing a real-life emergency. Our EDs and hospitals are overwhelmed. Young people are dying of conditions that used to mainly affect the elderly, but the media, the government, and the medical establishment want the subject to remain taboo. They are funding efforts to marginalise those asking questions, shooting the messenger rather than acknowledging the problem and searching for solutions. Time to wake up from the fantasy.
1,700+ demand retraction of influential COVID-19 origins paper after emails reveal authors doubted their own conclusions
By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 26, 2023
More than 1,700 people have signed a petition calling for the retraction of the seminal scientific correspondence paper, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” that claimed COVID-19 was “not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”
The paper — sometimes referred to as the “Proximal Origins” paper or the “Nature Medicine paper” — was published March 17, 2020, in Nature Medicine journal.
It was used by former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, former National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, and other federal public health officials in 2020 and beyond to dismiss the possibility of a lab leak.
Biosafety Now — a nongovernmental organization that “advocates for reducing numbers of high-level biocontainment laboratories and for strengthening biosafety, biosecurity, and biorisk management for research on pathogens” — on July 19 launched the petition, stating, “It is imperative that this clearly fraudulent and clearly damaging paper be removed from the scientific literature.”
Biosafety’s leadership team includes 27 experts in biomedicine, mathematics, public health, public policy, public advocacy, law and social science.
Fraudulent paper ‘played an influential role’ in driving official narrative
Bryce Nickels, Ph.D., co-founder of Biosafety Now and professor of genetics at Rutgers University, said the petition seeks “to expose a clear case of scientific fraud and misconduct that has had a major impact on public opinion and policy.”
Nickels told The Defender :
“The removal of ‘Proximal Origins’ from the scientific literature is the first step in a long process needed to repair the damage this paper has caused to public trust in science.”
According to the petition, “This paper played an influential role — indeed, the central role — in communicating the false narrative that science established that SARS-CoV-2 entered humans through natural spillover, and not through research-related spillover.”
The petition continues:
“Email messages and direct messages via the messaging program Slack among authors of the paper obtained under FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] or by the U.S. Congress and publicly released in full in July 2023 … show, incontrovertibly, that the authors did not believe the conclusions of the paper at the time the paper was written, at the time the paper was submitted for publication, and at the time the paper was published.”
The recently-released internal communications show the paper “was, and is, the product of scientific fraud and scientific misconduct,” the petition said.
Commenting on the petition, investigative journalist Paul Thacker said:
“The thing that’s really the most troubling, which is why it should be retracted … [is] the ghostwriting and the undue influence [of federal public health officials on the drafting of the paper], which we know from the emails by Francis Collins, by Anthony Fauci, and from Jeremy Farrar.”
Thacker — who noted that within only a few days the petition had already garnered more than 1,300 signatures and set the hashtag #RetractProximalOrigins trending on Twitter — told The Defender :
“These guys basically ordered up a piece of science — or some sort of publication — that they could then point to, which they all did afterwards, as definitive proof that this thing could not have come from the lab.
“The whole thing was orchestrated for political purposes. It has nothing to do with science.”
Little more than a ‘political piece of propaganda’
Thacker is a former fellow at the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University whose investigative writing has appeared in The New York Times, The BMJ, the Journal of the American Medical Association and The Washington Post.
He explained that weeks prior to the paper’s publication, Kristian Andersen, Ph.D. — one of the co-authors of the “Proximal Origins” paper — emailed Fauci and Collins a draft of the manuscript, thanking them for their “advice and leadership” on the paper.
Andersen also invited Fauci and Collins to comment and offer suggestions about the paper — but neither are mentioned in the acknowledgments section of the final version published by Nature Medicine. According to Thacker:
“Both Collins and Fauci then promoted the Nature Medicine paper as evidence of ‘independent science’ pointing against a possible lab accident — Collins in a post for the NIH Director’s blog that alleged the study left ‘little room’ for argument in favor of a lab accident, and Anthony Fauci in a White House press briefing.
“In both cases, neither Collins nor Fauci disclosed their involvement in orchestrating Andersen’s study. This last March, Congress released further emails showing that Fauci helped to orchestrate the Nature Medicine paper.”
Thacker pointed out that the paper — which “has been called everything from ‘research paper’ to ‘analysis’ to ‘study’” — was “really just correspondence” that was later turned into a “political piece of propaganda that people could then reference, which they did.”
Describing the recent about-face regarding the paper’s importance, Thacker said:
“Now the editor-in-chief of Nature Medicine is saying, ‘Oh, well, it was just a viewpoint … like he’s trying to dismiss what it was when they [federal public officials] used it for completely different purposes. They used it as some definitive piece of scientific research that put to rest any idea this thing could have come from a lab.
“Then we find out internally that none of them who wrote it believed that in the first place. … Quite frankly, from the very beginning, none of the scientific evidence in any direction means anything about how this pandemic started. It’s always been the internal documents and the money that have mattered more.”
Thacker added, “This entire drama and discussion has nothing to do with science. It has everything to do with corruption and a coverup.”
On July 25 Thacker tweeted:
Writers Curtis Schube and Gary Lawkowski in a July 24 op-ed for The Hill pointed out that when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention responded to the FOIA request to release Fauci’s “explosive” email showing his involvement with the Nature Medicine paper, the agency completely redacted the email.
Moreover, Thacker alleged that Andersen submitted false testimony at the July 11 hearing of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, which is investigating the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Andersen’s allegation that Fauci and Collins were provided the paper only after it had been “accepted” and was in “proof” is false, Thacker said. “Emails impeach this portion of Andersen’s testimony,” he added.
Thacker also pointed out that The Intercept last week published newly revealed documents showing Andersen and his co-author — Tulane virologist Robert Garry, Ph.D. — both lied to Congress during the House hearing. The alleged lies covered the fact that both had pending federal grants controlled by Fauci — money that could have been used to influence their positions on the lab-leak theory.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s latest book, “The Wuhan Cover-up: How US Health Officials Conspired with the Chinese Military to Hide the Origins of COVID-19,” is due out in September. The book is available now for preorder. Kennedy is the founder and chairman on leave from Children’s Health Defense.
Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.
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.
Sporadic Reports of Malaria Followed by “Breakthrough” Announcement of mRNA Vaccine
By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH | Courageous Discourse | July 26, 2023
As an internal medicine physician and cardiologist I am in tune to diseases seen and presented at “morning report” at big academic medical centers. I can tell you over the decades each year there are a few cases of malaria. Travel history and contact tracing are never precise enough to declare where it came from. Malaria gives us a chance to talk about the characteristic life cycle of organism (plasmodium species), the mosquito vector, use of diagnostic testing including the blood smear etc.
So I was suspicious a few days ago when I heard about malaria in the U.S. as making a “comeback” and some patients asking me about bug spray. Now I see why there could be a manufactured interest in the age-old illness that is well treated with medications—a mRNA vaccine.
Alexa Cook at NewsHub is reporting: “ A team of researchers from Victoria University of Wellington’s Ferrier Research Institute, the Malaghan Institute and the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity in Australia have developed an mRNA-based vaccine that can effectively target and stimulate protective immune cell responses against the malaria-causing parasite.”
The timing of these events is uncanny. The only reason why a few cases of malaria which are always around would make the news would be an announcement of a new therapy or vaccine. So next time you hear about an old disease making a comeback, look for some new profitable drug or vaccine on the horizon and be suspicious of a false medical scare to juice up investor interest.
‘Health Program or Military Program’? White House Taps Military Official to Lead New Pandemic Policy Office
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 26, 2023
Just weeks after ending the COVID-19 national and public health emergencies and the resignation of COVID-19 Response Coordinator Ashish Jha, the White House launched its Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy (OPPR).
Retired Major General Paul Friedrichs, a military combat surgeon, will lead the office, the White House said.
According to the White House, the OPPR will be “a permanent office in the Executive Office of the President (EOP) charged with leading, coordinating, and implementing actions related to preparedness for, and response to, known and unknown biological threats or pathogens that could lead to a pandemic or to significant public health-related disruptions in the United States.”
The OPPR will take over the duties of President Biden’s COVID-19 and monkeypox response teams, including “ongoing work to address potential public health outbreaks and threats from COVID-19, Mpox, polio, avian and human influenza, and RSV [respiratory syncytial virus],” the announcement stated.
The OPPR also will oversee efforts to “develop, manufacture, and procure the next generation of medical countermeasures, including leveraging emerging technologies and working with HHS [U.S. Department of Health and Human Services] on next generation vaccines and treatments for COVID-19 and other public health threats.”
According to The New York Times, Friedrichs, set to take office Aug. 7, will have the authority to “oversee domestic biosecurity preparedness.” He will work on the development of next-generation vaccines, ensure adequate supplies in the Strategic National Stockpile and “ramp up surveillance to monitor for new biological threats.”
Several medical, biosecurity and civil liberties experts questioned the selection of a career military and biosecurity individual to head a new office charged with pandemic preparedness.
They also told The Defender they saw parallels between the White House’s establishment of the OPPR and ongoing United Nations (U.N.) efforts to draft a global declaration on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response (PPPR).
‘Is OPPR a health program or a military program?’
Friedrichs, a board-certified physician, is currently a special assistant to the president and senior director for Global Health Security and Biodefense at the National Security Council.
He previously served as joint staff surgeon at the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) and as medical adviser to the Pentagon’s COVID-19 task force.
Throughout his career, the White House said, Friedrichs worked closely with federal, state, tribal, local and territorial government partners, as well as industry and academic counterparts.
According to the White House:
“As the United States’ representative to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Committee of Military Medical Chiefs, he worked closely with many of America’s closest allies and partners throughout the pandemic and in developing medical support to the Ukrainian military.”
In his previous roles at the National Security Council and DOD, Friedrichs was a strong proponent of COVID-19 vaccines and countermeasures.
The Times reported that, in a February speech, Friedrichs said, “The military health system became the pinch-hitter that stepped in to help our civilian partners as we collectively struggled to work through that pandemic.”
In a February 2022 podcast, Friedrichs praised the COVID-19 vaccines and also appeared to blame those who were unvaccinated for placing “stress on our system.”
And in remarks shared in January 2022 with the Association of the United States Army, Friedrichs asked military families to continue holding off on gatherings so that service members are “able to do the things that our nation depends on them to do.”
Does Friedrichs’ appointment signal more vaccine mandates?
Describing Friedrichs’ appointment as “a joke and a fraud,” Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., a bioweapons expert and professor of international law at the University of Illinois who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, told The Defender :
“DOD has routinely enforced experimental medical vaccines on U.S. Armed Forces, in gross violation of the Nuremberg Code on Medical Experimentation — that is, a Nuremberg crime against humanity — from today’s COVID-19 ‘vaccines’ and going all the way back in recent history to the ‘vaccines’ that produced Gulf War sickness starting in 1990-1991, when Friedrichs was a U.S. Military medical doctor.
“Of 500,000 U.S. troops inoculated, 11,000 died and 100,000 were disabled. I do not recall that Friedrichs was among the handful of courageous and principled military medical doctors who refused, as a matter of principle, to inflict Nuremberg crimes on our own troops. Did he? That needs to be investigated.”
Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D., author of “Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom,” said the selection of Friedrichs, who supported military vaccine mandates, may signal similar future mandates for the general public.
“We should not forget that the DOD mandated the COVID-19 vaccine for service members,” Rectenwald said. “The OPPR will mandate vaccines for the nation.”
And writing on her blog, Dr. Meryl Nass, an internist, biological warfare epidemiologist and member of the Children’s Health Defense scientific advisory committee, questioned if the OPPR plans “to use the military’s OTA [other transaction] authority again to bypass the FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] and vaccinate us with untested junk that turned out to be poison, like it did for COVID.”
Is OPPR “a health program or a military program?” Nass wrote.
Nass told The Defender that if the main purpose of the OPPR was to respond to pandemics and pandemic threats, an epidemiologist or infectious disease doctor would have been tapped to head the office instead of a military general.
Similarly, Dr. David Bell, a public health physician, biotech consultant and former director of Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund, told The Defender :
“COVID-19 demonstrated that the sort of interventions envisioned by the pandemic preparedness lobby such as lockdowns and coerced mass vaccination, have poor public health outcomes.
“Public health should be concentrated on informing the public to make personal decisions about health, rather than the population-control approaches we saw for COVID-19 that are most profitable to the corporate world. We must hope this new health bureaucracy is more independent of vested interests, and will take an evidence-based approach.”
Nass suggested that Friedrich’s selection belies a broadly encompassing biosecurity agenda, which would include censorship of non-establishment medical information, surveillance and mass, or mandatory, vaccination, tied to U.N. and World Health Organization (WHO) “pandemic preparedness and response” efforts.
A ‘WHO globalist worldwide medical and scientific police state’ here in the U.S.?
Other experts also noted the similarities between the name of the OPPR, the U.N.’s draft PPPR and a similar recent agreement among WHO member states.
Still in “zero draft” form, the PPPR is scheduled to be discussed by the U.N. General Assembly in September 2023. It would also be tied to the WHO’s proposed pandemic treaty and amendments to the International Health Regulations.
Similarly, a June 28 document from the WHO said, “Member States … have agreed to a global process to draft and negotiate a convention, agreement or other international instrument under the Constitution of the World Health Organization to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.”
And a separate but similar set of proposals — part of the U.N.’s “Pact for the Future” and “Our Common Agenda” — would give the U.N. secretary-general unprecedented emergency powers not only for pandemics but seemingly for an unlimited range of other potential crises. The U.N. will discuss these proposals in September 2024.
Boyle told The Defender the OPPR is “obviously being coordinated with the U.N. [and] the Biden administration to establish the effective functioning of a WHO globalist worldwide medical and scientific police state here in the United States.”
“You need the mentality of an unprincipled military medical major general to do that,” Boyle said. “All the trains will run on time.”
Rectenwald drew similar connections, telling The Defender the OPPR and Friedrichs’ selection:
“Signifies the militarization of pandemic responses in the U.S., in line with the ‘global governance’ measures outlined by the U.N.’s Pandemic Preparedness, Prevention and Response declaration.
“This new wing of the executive branch is the means by which this ‘global governance’ (read: one-world totalitarian system) is being introduced to the U.S., using pandemic preparedness as the pretext.”
Notably, proposals for a government “pandemic preparedness” office date at least as far back as October 2020, when the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) issued an extensive set of recommendations calling upon the U.S. government to “adopt a robust strategy for domestic and global pandemic preparedness.”
The report recommended that the U.S. “finally treat pandemics as a serious national security threat, translating its rhetorical support for pandemic preparedness into concrete action.”
According to the CFR, this would entail “bolstering the White House’s leadership role in preparing for and responding to pandemics, improving congressional input into and oversight over executive branch efforts, reforming the CDC so that it can perform more effectively, and clarifying the often confused division of labor across federal, state, and local governments in pandemic preparedness and response.”
“The president should designate a focal point within the White House for global health security, including pandemic preparedness and response,” the report added. “This office would have lead responsibility for coordinating the multiple federal departments and agencies in anticipating, preventing, and responding quickly to major disease outbreaks.”
OPPR reports to Congress required only every 5 years, not annually
The establishment of the OPPR resulted from the passage of the PREVENT Pandemics Act in December 2022.
The bill, introduced by Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and the now-retired Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), passed as part of an omnibus spending bill, contained a requirement for the creation of a White House pandemic preparedness and response office.
Though the bill was passed in December 2022, the White House was unable to immediately establish a pandemic preparedness office and name a director.
A Politico report in May said these efforts were “hindered by concerns over whether [the office] will have the influence within the administration and the financial resources needed to fulfill its broad mission — especially as COVID plummets down the list of political priorities.”
According to the White House announcement, OPPR will “Develop and provide periodic reports to Congress” as required by law, including drafting and delivering to Congress “a biennial Preparedness Review and Report and Preparedness Outlook Report every five years.”
On her blog, Nass wrote, “Instead of the more customary yearly reports, the reporting to Congress is being delayed considerably, perhaps until after many of us have died from the countermeasures — a great way to evade oversight.”
In a separate blog post, Nass also observed that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention requested $20 billion for “pandemic preparedness” in its fiscal year 2024 budget.
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.
The Pandelusion
BY HUGH WILLBOURN | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | JULY 24, 2023
I’ve been recording the audio version of my new book, The Bug in our Thinking. In it I quote Carl Sagan from 1996:
We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science and technology. And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces. Who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don’t know anything about it? …
Science is more than a body of knowledge, it’s a way of thinking. A way of sceptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. If we are not able to ask sceptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be sceptical of those in authority, then we’re up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along.
Sagan was on the money. Every day brings news of more absurdities from charlatans in science, education, politics and media. To quote myself, from the same book: “Never have so many been so wrong about so much.”
Why is this happening?
If I could answer that in a couple of paragraphs I would not have had to write a whole book. Here, I will focus on just one element. Underneath all the dangerous and troubling beliefs about gender, climate, race, migration, medicine and vaccination lies a psychological problem. Too many people believe things that are not true. This is the new normal. Let’s call it the Pandelusion.
The Pandelusion – thinking and doing the ‘right thing’ – is the worldview relentlessly promoted by most of the media and driven by bad science and big money.
This doesn’t require a conspiracy by the way. That is just what the profit motive will do when untrammelled by conscience or virtue. For the controlling minority of society it is extremely lucrative to promote the Pandelusion. For the majority, the result is an expensive, destructive, disempowering rip-off.
It would take an encyclopaedia to itemise and refute each of the delusions one at a time. In fact it already has. On websites and Substacks and in books and scholarly journals millions of words have been written refuting every one of the dominant delusions with rational argument and factual evidence – yet the delusions are still in the ascendant. The encyclopaedia of hard evidence and common sense is ignored by most of the mainstream media and censored or ignored by complicit scientists.
It is extremely depressing to see that the majority of the population remain convinced by the Pandelusion. They are accustomed to being guided by orthodoxy. In good times that is not such a bad strategy. In hard times, and very specifically in these hard times, it does no good at all. All around us are hundreds of thousands of people who have been seriously injured by doing what they were told was ‘the right thing’. It takes time, independence, courage, humility, encouragement and good fortune to build the habit of trusting your own judgement even when all the facts are not available.
Now that lockdowns and the uptake of the staggeringly ‘safe and effective’ vaccines have set the precedent, the next bonanza is the climate emergency and orthodox opinion is being boosted, adjusted and streamlined to serve the interests of those who have positioned their investments to profit from it.
Externalities
Do you remember when environmentalists used to talk about ‘externalities’? Externalities, you may recall, are the costs of a service or product which are not paid by the immediate user but by society at large. The costs of driving a car, for example, are not just purchase, fuel and maintenance. The external costs are exhaust emissions and tyre wear particulates, the motorways, the loss of mediaeval town centres to create road systems and car parks, the loss of market share for public transport, the cost of road traffic accidents, and so on and on.
It is helpful and illuminating to consider externalities when assessing the overall impact of a policy. Recently, however, the term has fallen out of favour amongst governments, environmentalists and the mainstream media. Why might that be?
The externalities of Net Zero are mind-bogglingly vast: environmental, economic, social and, for some, existential. Consider just one small element of the path to Net Zero: electric vehicles. The carbon cost of their manufacture means they have to be driven for nearly 10 years before there is a net carbon benefit. Cobalt mining in the Congo is environmentally destructive and exploitative of the local population. Dependency on manufacture in China creates huge political and economic weaknesses. I could go on, but you already know this and much, much more.
The externalities of lockdown were destructive beyond measure: the emotional abuse of elders dying alone, the sabotage of education in schools and universities, the bankruptcies and destruction of thousands upon thousands of small businesses, the depression, the abuse, the suicides and more.
The externalities of Covid vaccination, as we all know, without a shadow of a doubt, are ‘extremely rare’ because the vaccines are so very, very, very, very safe and effective. Nevertheless the vaccines have a remarkable correlation (not causation! Heaven forfend) with a plague of evil coincidence fairies and uncounted cancers, TIAs, myocarditis, heart disease, Guillain-Barré syndrome, and a huge range of other ailments, injuries and disabilities.
The externalities of catering to a tiny number of transgender activists are expensive, disproportionate and insulting and dangerous to women.
The externalities of woke policies in education include rendering academics too frightened to promote independence of thought. Not a great outcome for education.
I can stop listing externalities now – you can think of plenty of them that follow from every Government policy from migration to taxation.
No wonder the mainstream doesn’t talk about externalities any more. They are not to be mentioned.
The orthodoxy has aligned its messages across different platforms by means of helpful, fact-checking, billionaire-backed NGOs. All the bad science, the abstract thinking, the experts, the absurdities from wokery to environmental zealotry, the emotional incontinence and plain stupidity have become one overarching right think’.
It is all a single dictatorial blob of grandiose self-righteousness. The Pandelusion with its Pharisaic acolytes guides 100% of BBC output and at least 90% of media content throughout the Western world.
The power of the Pandelusion is immense.
That is terrifying and horribly depressing.
Some days I feel utterly defeated as I read, yet again, of more moronic orthodoxy.
And yet, and yet, I see a glimmer of hope.
Here is the weakness. Precisely because the Pandelusion has become a single, overarching, dominant orthodoxy, any flaw or weakness in any part of it can affect the whole thing. One tiny little crack anywhere in the whole monstrous edifice has the possibility of advancing, little by little by little, so that it will all, eventually, fall down.
All is not lost. We don’t need to challenge the whole Pandelusion or the big, embarrassing controversies about climate science confirmation bias or the magnificent safe and effective vaccines (Blessings be upon their profits forever, Amen). Now we can just chip away at one small, apparently insignificant, peripheral belief and open up one little crack. Then we can walk away and let the crack spread throughout the whole belief system – all by itself.
Those undiscussed externalities are impinging on more and more people’s everyday lives and they don’t like it. As people reject heat pumps, sabotage Ulez cameras, refuse smart meters, and electric cars, and protest against LTNs and 15-minute cities, they are discovering that those who claim to ‘know better’ know very little at all, and often, it turns out, are misrepresenting the science and even sometimes are lying. And the more they research the more inconvenient facts they unearth. In Germany a rebellion against dominant orthodoxy has gained power in a district council election. In the Netherlands the Farmer-Citizen movement (the BBB) has become the third-largest political force in the country. In Spain, Sweden and Italy there are flickers of sanity.
Let’s talk
So let’s talk about externalities. Not the big ones, just the little ones. Like, “Oh Net Zero! Yay! but… I’m not totally sure about the cost-effectiveness of heat pumps.” Let’s say “Yay, Electric vehicles! … except how quickly, I wonder, will the authorities be able to upgrade the national grid to cope with charging them?”
Let’s talk about how 15-minute cities could be utterly brilliant – except maybe there might lots of traffic jams on the ring roads when you take your kids to karate. Let’s talk about how marvellous furlough was, it’s just a shame about inflation.
Let’s talk about how puzzled we are about the little white lies from our governments, about the police who have stopped policing, and the strange, inexplicable inaccuracy of predictions that haven’t come true.
Let us keep tap, tap, tapping away at the monolithic Pandelusion until we make the smallest little crack. Then in that crack, plant tiny little seeds of doubt – and walk away. The light of day will nourish those seeds and the seedlings will enlarge the crack and reality will finish the job. The hypnotic trance can be broken.
There has already been too much death, destruction and conflict. There will be more. But perhaps if we all keep talking we might be able to save some people and salvage a society worth living in.
The Bug in our Thinking and the Way to Fix It is available in the U.K. here. For the rest of the world, for the ebook – and in a week or two the audiobook – you can find it on your national Amazon store.
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From the Archives
Infertility: A Diabolical Agenda
Dr. Joseph Mercola | July 9, 2022
“Infertility: A Diabolical Agenda,” is the fourth vaccine-related documentary by Dr. Andrew Wakefield. It tells the story of an intentional infertility vaccine program conducted on African women, without their knowledge or consent.
While it’s been brushed off as a loony conspiracy theory for years, there’s compelling evidence showing it did, in fact, happen, and there’s nothing to prevent it from happening again. … continue
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