Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

House Judiciary Letter to Pfizer CEO Bourla: Turn over Your Content Moderation Contacts and Documents

Representative Jordan Puts Pfizer on Tight Timeline to Produce Evidence of Collusion with Executive Branch and Social Media

By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH | Courageous Discourse | July 20, 2023

The noose is tightening around Pfizer’s European veterinarian CEO Albert Bourla. He has not faced a single hard question on the Hill but finally has received a request from House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) to produce documents and contacts on how the pharmaceutical giant colluded with the Executive Branch and social media companies (Twitter, Gettr, Facebook, Telegram, Instagram etc.) by weaponizing “misinformation” in order to push mRNA vaccines.

Jordan J, House Judiciary Letter to Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla July 18, 2023

I imagine a Pfizer strategy that was anchored to the Trusted News Initiative dating back to December 2020 will emerge.

  1. Overstate the lethality of COVID-19
  2. Suppress any hope of early treatment
  3. Downplay the role of natural immunity
  4. Flood the zone with “safe and effective messaging” on COVID-19 vaccines
  5. All should take the shots over and over every six months with no exceptions, no matter how many times COVID-19 was contracted or how severe the side effects
  6. Squash any “vaccine hesitancy” arising from reports of vaccine injuries, disabilities and death

For sure Jordan is interested in former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb and his influence peddling with Twitter to mute messaging on natural immunity as he was pushing mRNA as a Board member of Pfizer on national television.

Expect Pfizer will distract and delay on this request which has a deadline on August 1, 2023.

July 20, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

What’s in the placebo?

We tried to find out what was in the “placebo pill” of one of the most controversial statin trials ever conducted

BY MARYANNE DEMASI, PHD AND TOM JEFFERSON | JULY 17, 2023

A recent conversation between popular podcaster Joe Rogan and presidential candidate, Robert F Kennedy Jr ignited an international discussion about placebos in clinical trials. Here, we document the difficulty in determining the details (formulation and testing) of the placebo used in a controversial cholesterol-lowering trial of Crestor (rosuvastatin) – adapted from our earlier publication in JAMA Internal Medicine.

The basis for a “placebo” controlled trial is to reliably assess the safety and efficacy of a therapeutic drug or vaccine against a placebo – they can be active or inactive placebos.

An active placebo can be used to mimic the side effects of the intervention, with no therapeutic effects on the condition being treated.  For example, atropine may be used as a placebo in antidepressant trials to mimic the symptoms of “dry mouth” often experienced after using antidepressants, with no therapeutic effect on depression. The aim is to mitigate the risk of unblinding trial participants.

More commonly, placebos are intended to be inactive or inert. Inactive placebos should ‘match’ the sensory and visual aspects of the experimental drug to maintain blinding throughout the trial. In other words, a placebo needs to be equal in shape, size, colour, texture, weight, taste, and smell.

Drug companies keep details a secret

Drug companies will often manufacture their own placebo for use in clinical trials. The technical data and analytical methods used for the placebo are detailed in the certificate of analysis (CoA), which is part of the dossier submitted to the relevant drug regulator as part of a licensing application.

Drug regulators are expected to analyse the CoA to ensure the placebo and the experimental drug are appropriately matched, to eliminate an unknown variable. However, the details relating to the contents of a placebo are often unknown to independent researchers and remains proprietary information of the drug manufacturers.  For example, the in trials of Gardasil (HPV vaccine), the manufacturer often used a placebo containing amorphous aluminium hydroxyphosphate sulfate (AAHS) – an adjuvant to enhance immune response – and has kept the formulation a proprietary secret.

In fact, the exact formulation of a placebo is rarely disclosed in the peer-reviewed publication of a clinical trial.  Further, medical journals do not require authors, nor drug manufacturers, to disclose the contents of a placebo or publish the CoA. Placebos may contain excipients such as chemicals, dyes, or allergens, which might unintentionally cause side effects, raising concerns about the reliability of trial data and the transparency of important information.

In 2017, Robert Shader, physician and editor-in-chief of Clinical Therapeutics, raised concerns when a study on people with multiple sclerosis published in the New England Journal of Medicine, injected one group of people with a monoclonal antibody (ocrelizumab) and the other group with a ‘matching’ placebo. But what was in the placebo?

“Was it saline? Was it the same vehicle in which the monoclonal antibody was dissolved?” asked Shader.

Shortly after, he made the following announcement to prospective authors:

Effective January 1, 2018 (Issue 1, Volume 40), we will require that a full description of any placebo (PBO) or matched control used in a clinical trial be given in the Methods section. It will no longer be sufficient to simply indicate that a PBO was used. This means that color; type (capsule or pill or liquid); contents (eg, lactose), including dyes; taste (if there is any); and packaging (eg, double-dummy) must be noted. For solid PBOs, shape must also be described, as well as whether the PBO is active or inactive. In addition, any efforts to study the success of matching should be included. For example, could subjects/patients or evaluating/rating clinicians guess assignments? Sham procedures must also be described in detail. We are instituting this change as part of our ongoing effort to facilitate replication of findings from trials. All too often this valuable information is omitted from published trial results.

Inappropriately matching a placebo to the experimental drug or vaccine can lead to under-reporting of harms or misleading trial outcomes as well as raising ethical questions about whether patients are properly consenting to participate in trials.

Even when one of us (TJ) found evidence that an ‘active’ ingredient in the placebo of a pivotal HPV vaccine trial had been misreported as ‘inert,’ neither the authors nor the editors acted to correct the error.

Placebo in the JUPITER trial

The JUPITER trial investigated the effects of 20 mg rosuvastatin (Crestor) in ‘healthy people’ at low risk of heart disease. It was a highly controversial study because – despite major criticisms – it underpinned the decision to grant regulatory approval for rosuvastatin for the prevention of “a first cardiovascular event.”

One aspect of the JUPITER trial piqued our interest. While, muscle aches were similar in the statin and placebo groups, the reported rate of muscle aches in the placebo group (taking the ‘inert’ pill) was much higher (15.4%) than in the placebo group of other statin trials (<5%).

Therefore, we sought to obtain the CoA of the placebo pill used in the JUPITER trial, in the hope that it might explain why the ‘healthy subjects’ at low risk of heart disease in the placebo group, experienced an unusually high rate of muscle harms.

The process of obtaining the CoA for the placebo used in the trial turned out to be arduous.

The peer-reviewed publication in the New England Journal of Medicine contained no information about the contents of the placebo, nor did the study protocol, which only described it as a ‘matching’ placebo.

We then contacted the lead investigator – Paul Ridker, Professor of Medicine at Harvard University and Brigham and Women’s Hospital – but he did not respond to our emails.

We made enquiries to the European Medicines Agency since it allows access to certain regulatory data. However, the agency informed us that it had not licensed any single statin (only two statin-fibrate combination products) so we turned to the individual member states of the European Union.

The Dutch drug regulator – i.e. Medicines Evaluation Board (MEB) – had licensed rosuvastatin and confirmed that it held the data relating to the JUPITER trial. But after multiple emails over several months requesting access to the CoA, the regulator finally conceded that it did not have that particular document in its possession.

We also lodged a request with the Australian drug regulator – the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) – which informed us that the information we requested was “not publicly available and the TGA would not be in a position to release this information…without the permission of the sponsor (AstraZeneca Pty Ltd)”.

The TGA also stated that we could apply through a formal Freedom of Information (FOI) process, however it would not guarantee the release of any information “if the sponsor raised valid objections” or if the documents were classified as exempt under the FOI Act. The TGA suggested that we approach the drug manufacturer directly, so we did.

After multiple emails and lengthy delays, we finally obtained a response from AstraZeneca stating that we could ‘apply’ for access to the information but that we could not share the data with any third parties without restrictions.  The company stipulated in its conditions that we could not publish the CoA in the peer reviewed literature and that any analysis of the CoA by us, would have to be “pre-reviewed” by the drug company since they were owners of the information.

We refused to abide by AstraZeneca’s conditions of access. This type of oversight, whereby research needs to be vetted by drug companies or where researchers are required sign confidentiality agreements, can stifle open science.

Lack of transparency

Our attempts to independently analyse the formulation of the placebo used in the JUPITER trial to eliminate an unknown variable, was time consuming, convoluted and ultimately, unsuccessful.  Since the contents of the placebo remain unknown, we were not able to elucidate whether the absence of any increase in musculoskeletal harms in the JUPITER trial was a reliable outcome.  Further, we are left with questions over whether this document was properly scrutinised by the drug regulators before making the decision to license the statin.  We are concerned that significant aspects of clinical trials funded by the pharmaceutical industry are kept secret, with drug manufacturers having the final word on the trial outcomes of these widely used public health drugs.

July 18, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Reduced Risk of Cancer Associated with Vitamin D, Omega-3 and Simple Exercise

Long Story Short, Episode 60 | July 7, 2023

In this amazing study, researchers demonstrate the reduction in the risk of cancer in generally healthy individuals aged 70 and older that were placed on regimen of Vitamin D, Omega-3s, and simple exercise. Let’s review.

DrBeen: Medical Education Online
http://www.drbeen.com

July 17, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment

British Government Funds Campaign to Rewrite Climate Science Entries on Wikipedia

BY CHRIS MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | JULY 16, 2023

A major rewriting of the science published on Wikipedia that is sceptical of the ‘settled’ climate narrative is being funded by a number of Governments from Scandinavia and the U.K. The operation is being directed by the green activist group, the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), under a project titled ‘Improving communication of climate knowledge through Wikipedia’.

The operation targets climate change pages that have significant daily page views. The SEI notes that Wikipedia articles usually appear at the top of internet search results, and the site plays a “key role” in helping promote climate change knowledge. “The improvement of the key articles making use of available scientific expertise is necessary,” it says.

The key word of course is “improvement” but, alas, a brief list of the “content experts” does not inspire confidence that rigorous dissemination of all climate science views will prevail. For instance, Kristie L. Ebi from the University of Washington has the curious notion that rising concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are “affecting the nutritional quality of our food”. Poor old CO2 you might feel. It gets a shocking press these days but few doubt its role as the gas of life, whose 60% reduction in the atmosphere would lead to the swift removal of all plant and life forms on Earth.

Elizabeth Gilmore of Carleton University, another of SEI’s “content experts”, runs a class on inspiring young eco-activists. She recently wrote that after Greta Thunberg “admonished” delegates at COP24, “it has become increasingly apparent that university students feel the brunt of multiple and interlinked existential crises of climate change, biodiversity, persistent inequality, inequity and economic precarity”.

The SEI project includes academics who have “scientific and climate change expertise”. In fact the ‘expertise’ seems to tend towards the burgeoning world of eco bureaucracy, consultancy and green activism. All the parties collaborate by revising and cutting text, proposing new content and adding new references. There is also interaction with published experts, “who advise us on necessary content edits”.

The Stockholm Environment Institute was founded in 1989 by the Swedish government to “support decision-making and induce changes towards sustainable development around the world”. It claims to provide this by supplying knowledge that bridges science and policy in the field of environmentalism and development. Its green activism is well supported by governments and many interested parties including Left-wing billionaire foundations. According to figures publicly revealed, it received over £11 million in 2020 from Swedish government interests, and £1.5 million from Norway. The British government even supplied £326,000 of funding it says in its 2022 report.

SEI is closely connected with the United Nations and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Its Chairman, appointed by the Swedish government, is Lennart Bage, the former Co-Chair of the U.N. Green Climate Fund (GCF) that aims to raise $100 billion a year to pay for green boondoggles in the developing world. Signing off his chairmanship of the GCF in 2019, Bage noted that “we have moved from millions to billions but we need to move to trillions”. Some of the content experts for the Wikipedia re-education programme come from the U.N., the IPCC and the Conference of the Parties (COP).

Recently, the U.N. Under-Secretary for Global Communications, Melissa Fleming, told delegates at a World Economic Forum ‘disinformation’ seminar that her organisation had partnered with Google to ensure only U.N.-approved climate search results appear at the top. In chilling tones, she explained: “We are becoming more proactive, we own the science and the world should know it.” In the context of this remark, the disclosure that a concerted attempt is being made to propagandise Wiki pages is unsurprising. Across all media, collectivist-minded operations funded by a wide variety of sources including governments, NGOs, foundations and wealthy individuals are rewriting the climate narrative with the help of mainstream media to suit a drive to Net Zero and economic and societal change. Advertising boycott campaigns face any individual media operation that steps out of line, academic careers are held back, fatuous ‘fact-check’ attacks are launched, school text books are rewritten and massive green scare campaigns are launched on an almost daily basis.

What is truly depressing is that the Conservative Party is often to be found at the front of the queue when it comes to handing out taxpayer cash to fund climate and woke campaigns. Providing money to alter Wiki pages is just the latest misuse of taxpayers’ hard earned money. In February, the Daily Sceptic reported that the British Foreign Office was helping to fund the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), which was circulating a ‘blocklist’ of conservative publications including the American Spectator and the New York Post.

As we noted at the time, one of the reasons the GDI posed such a threat to free speech was that its definition of ‘disinformation’ is unusually capacious. It doesn’t just mean information that is false and dissemination by people knowing it’s false. It has broadened the definition to include what it calls “adversarial narratives”.

Just weep for the death of science – “adversarial narratives” no longer required.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

July 16, 2023 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Austrian Biochemical Engineer: “No Energy Production Method Is More Damaging Than Wind Turbines”

By P Gosselin | No Tricks Zone | July 14, 2023

“There is no more harmful way of generating energy than with wind turbines,” Rudolf Hammer tells AUF 1 journalist Sabine Petzl.

As Germany and Austria rush to wean themselves off fossil fuels like coal and natural gas to produce electricity and replace them with weather-dependent wind and solar energy, the countries aim to substantially expand their fleet of wind turbines by 2040. Many would have to be installed near homes and in sensitive wildlife areas. e.g.the 1,000 -year-old Reinhard Forest.

In the AUF 1 interview, Hammer comments on the effectiveness and usefulness of wind power plants and offers a completely different view of what the entrenched politicians claim.

Damaging the local environment

Hammer explains that one problem with wind turbines is that hey extract a massive amount of kinetic energy from the wind, which in turn leads to a windspeed reduction downstream from the wind park and air layers getting mixed. The higher layers of wind end up getting mixed with the layers near the surface. “Colder layers are getting mixed with warmer layers and that is having dramatic effects on the temperature, humidity, and on evaporation,” which leads to “drier conditions and even drought.”

Currently the lion’s share of Germany’s 30,000 installed wind turbines are located across the north, where drought conditions have occurred over the past years.

“Economic nonsense”

When asked about how realistic it would be to quickly go 100% renewable, Hammer characterized the idea as “economic nonsense, saying it would require an additional 19,000 turbines and large swaths of land that just aren’t available in Austria.

July 16, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Greenwald: Ex-Spies Run Censorship Operations for Tech Giants

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 14, 2023

Former security state operatives occupy the highest positions at Big Tech internet platforms, and are responsible for censoring political content and limiting public debate, Glenn Greenwald reported on Tuesday.

Americans have been aware of security state efforts to control media narratives since the 1970s, when the Senate’s Church Committee exposed the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird, Greenwald told listeners of his podcast, “System Update.”

Under that program, CIA agents covertly infiltrated and influenced the nation’s largest news organizations.

Project Mockingbird’s exposure greatly embarrassed the media and the government,  as the CIA is forbidden from targeting the American public, Greenwald said.

Over the past decade, a series of whistleblowers revealed the U.S. security state has again amped up its covert targeting of American citizens, particularly since the start of the post-9/11 War on Terror.

News that intelligence agencies spied on Americans or infiltrated the news media was considered scandalous just over a decade ago.

But today, things have changed, Greenwald said. In fact, it has become common for top news outlets to openly hire former U.S. security state agents to report and comment on the news.

And in the last few months, the Twitter files and the latest Missouri v. Biden decision made clear how aggressive the censorship regime has become.

The U.S. government, in part, dictates what content social media platforms ought to allow on their sites, Greenwald said. But, he added:

“There’s another element, another layer to it, which is they’ve infiltrated these Big Tech companies — these ex-CIA agents have — exactly like they’ve infiltrated corporate news outlets. They’re all over these censorship regimes.”

Greenwald said top positions at the tech firms are now held by people coming directly from intelligence agencies.

For example James Baker, who the Twitter Files revealed was involved in most censorship decisions prior to Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform, worked as general counsel for the FBI before he became deputy counsel for Twitter.

“So the FBI sent its top lawyer to go work in the part of Twitter that censored political content,” Greenwald said. “Do you understand? That’s the FBI controlling our domestic political discourse and the limits of it.”

MintPress News profiled a number of former CIA agents who now manage and develop misinformation policies for Facebook in a July 2022 article that Greenwald shared.

According to the article, the problem isn’t that these people are incompetent. “The problem is that having so many former CIA employees running the world’s most important information and news platforms is only one small step removed from the agency itself deciding what you see and what you do not see online — and all with essentially no public oversight.”

Greenwald said this allows the intelligence agencies to maintain significant influence over news and information flows, while maintaining “some veneer of plausible deniability.”

The U.S. government doesn’t need to tell the platforms what to do because the people making the decisions rose in the ranks of the National Security State first — “meaning their outlooks match those of Washington’s,” Greenwald said, quoting MintPress News.

Greenwald said this is evidence of a multi-pronged effort, where on the one side, former security state operatives propagandize the American people on corporate media and on the other side, they control what can be said on the largest Big Tech platforms.

As a result, he said, the entire range of dissenting views is “simply banned.”

The ‘censorship-industrial complex’

The Twitter account @NameRedacted247 tracks the movement of security state operatives into social media corporations where they work on misinformation and disinformation.

The account provided a thread, which Greenwald’s team confirmed, reporting that as of December 2022, Google employed at least 165 people in high-ranking positions from the intelligence community.

Across the company there were 27 former CIA agents, 52 former FBI agents, 30 people who came from the National Security Agency (NSA), 50 from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and six from the Director of National Intelligence.

Facebook had at least 115 former security state operatives in high-ranking positions — 17 from the CIA, 37 from the FBI, 23 from the NSA and 38 from DHS.

Google’s “trust and safety team,” which manages what content is allowed on the platform, is managed by three former CIA agents who control misinformation and hate speech.

One of them, Nick Rossman, referred to “anti-vaxxers” on Twitter as “Nazis” and “Confederates,” Greenwald said, asking:

“Do you think these people are objective arbiters of misinformation? Or do you think they’re using their censorship power inside Big Tech for this in the same way that people inside corporate media are using it to advance the propaganda games of these agencies against their own citizens?”

Greenwald presented a series of online profiles of people who worked in intelligence for years or decades before recently moving into their new roles in Big Tech.

Matt Taibbi reported that the companies began hiring former intelligence agents after the 2016 election when the FBI established its social media-focused task force, The Foreign Influence Task Force or FITF.

Since then, a massive “censorship-industrial complex” has grown up, Greenwald said, that includes the U.S. state, philanthropic foundations, “fact-checking” organizations, Big Tech, universities, think tanks, nonprofits and private contractors.

The ‘hallmark of totalitarianism’

But the most amazing part of this story, Greewnald said, is the lack of pushback by liberals, who used to be the primary critics of the security state. “Central to left liberal politics was the view that these agencies are nefarious,” he said. But that all changed with the Trump presidency:

“… in 2015, in 2016, the US Security state aligned itself against Donald Trump and devoted itself to sabotaging first the Trump campaign and then the Trump presidency.

“That’s where Russiagate came from. That’s where all of those scams came from, including the lie in 2020 if the Hunter Biden laptop was misinformation.”

And because there are now very few media outlets reporting critically on these agencies, he said, they are at “the peak of their power, more powerful than ever.”

Because of that, he said they are embedded in the biggest corporations that control information and propaganda in the U.S. — corporate media and Big Tech.

Greenwald concluded:

“This is why they’re so obsessed with destroying the few outposts of independent media, the few places they cannot control, because without those, they really do have a fully closed information system.

“And a fully closed information system is the hallmark of totalitarianism. If you can control how people think and prevent them from hearing dissent, you can control all of their actions because their actions are based in what their thoughts are.

“And if you can control their thoughts, you don’t even need to control their actions. And that is the system that is being created.”


Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.

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.

July 14, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Health is being rejiggered into pandemic preparedness: Documents from the EU Commission and US government

Huge expenses and rapid deployment of mRNA vaccines for infections but maybe all other medical conditions

BY MERYL NASS | JULY 13, 2023

Europe and the USA have already bought into the Global Biosecurity Agenda aka Pandemic Preparedness.

Europe issued its report on its Global Health Agenda in March, and it isn’t about health, it is about making health the driver for the WHO/globalist agenda. No surprise I guess. But to see it in print, with lots of pretty pictures, all spelled out: well, I was surprised. Please take a look at it.

But then I stumbled on this 2021 US document, signed by Eric Lander (then the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology) and Jake Sullivan, still the National Security Advisor.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/American-Pandemic-Preparedness-Transforming-Our-Capabilities-Final-For-Web.pdf

They equate the US government’s broad pandemic preparedness initiative with the Apollo (mission to the moon) program. Was that an oops? Because didn’t the Apollo mission suck up a ton of money but wind up in a studio being filmed by Stanley Kubrick instead, to fake out us gullible Americans?

Did Lander and Sullivan (or whoever wrote this report) give us a broad hint that the “biological preparedness” they envision will suck up a lot of money but go nowhere?

I don’t know if we went to the moon or not. But watching the astronauts at their press conference on their return to earth, I was convinced they were ashamed of their performance, rather than triumphant. Watch it.

The funding required in this report for pandemic preparedness is just over $65 Billion. To be spent over 7-10 years. But as I showed you 2 days ago, the President’s budget to Congress asks for $20 Billion next fiscal year for biopreparedness. The price has gone up.

By far the largest line item is vaccines: $24.2 billion.

This is a quote:

The development of mRNA vaccine technology and other ‘programmable platforms’3 — thanks to more than a decade of foresighted investment by the public and private sector — have been game- changing. mRNA vaccines shortened the time needed to design and test vaccines to a record-setting 314 days — far less than previous vaccines, which had taken several years. They have also been surprisingly effective against COVID-19.

Another quote from the report to justify “spending billions to save trillions” which is verbatim from the EU report linked above and from certain US documents:

In addition to protecting American lives, the annual investment is strongly justified from an economic standpoint: If major pandemics similar to COVID-19, costing the U.S. roughly $16 trillion, occur at a frequency of every 20 years, the annualized economic impact on the U.S. would be $800 billion per year. Even for somewhat milder pandemics, the annualized cost would likely exceed $500 billion

Then there is this, a vaccine timetable that is identical to the CEPI plan (Gates-Farrar being the main originators of CEPI) to get vaccines to the populace so fast that there is no time to test them in humans. In 130 days they plan to have enough vaccine for every American. Great, huh? No, it is scary.

Now you know what they are planning. We are only in the second stage of a very big battle for our bodily integrity and many other rights and freedoms, not to mention our property. Forewarned is forearmed!

July 14, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | Leave a comment

Free Speech Upsets Powers that Be

By Sheldon Richman | The Libertarian Institute | July 14, 2023

The Biden administration, along with mainstream politicians and journalists, are really upset that U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty has forbidden the executive branch of the central government from communicating with social-media platforms for the purpose of censoring or otherwise suppressing constitutionally protected speech. Judge Doughty’s action came in an important free-speech lawsuit filed against the government.

He wrote in an accompanying statement:

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’

So-called respectable government officials, journalists, and pundits — the alleged adults in a room — consider the judge’s temporary injunction the worse thing that could possibly happen. The headline in the “progressive” publication The American Prospect screamed in panic: “Trump Judge Effectively Names Himself President.” (That “Trump judge,” by the way, was confirmed by the Senate 98-0.)

Imagine it: agents from the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and other government agencies may not even “suggest” to Facebook, Twitter, etc., that they ought to take down or hide posts that take issue with the government’s official line about … whatever. Of course, when government officials suggest something to a private party, the suggestion may be interpreted as being accompanied by the subtle threat to retaliate legally if the suggestion is ignored. Think of protection racketeer telling a shop owner, “You have a nice place here. It would be a shame if it burned down.” Get the picture?

As we know, the government has been doing stuff like this for years, whether the matter was related to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Hunter Biden laptop, the Russia-Ukraine war, Russia’s alleged collusive 2016 election tampering, and who knows what else. According to a congressional committee, the FBI apparently even collaborated with Ukrainian intelligence to censor Americans’ frowned-on discussion of the Ukraine war on social media.

The posts that government agencies wanted suppressed included not only statements that were perhaps provably wrong  — incorrect speech per se is constitutionally protected, incidentally — but also accurate information that the government simply found inconvenient, like posts and links that might make people hesitate to get the COVID-19 vaccine, wear masks, accept totalitarian social lockdowns, or trust that the coronavirus came from a Chinese market rather than a U.S.-funded lab in Wuhan, China.

Let’s remember that much of the challenge to the government’s take on the pandemic and other matters — criticism belittled as “tin-foil” conspiracy-mongering — turned out to be true. Contrary to the government’s position, the search for the truth requires the freedom to openly disagree and debate. That search abhors centralization, coercion, and the exclusion of anyone but the politically anointed “experts.” The right to free speech is a practical necessity if we are to pursue our well-being. Any step toward the paternalistic centralization of research and control of communication is not only immoral (by whatever standard you like) but also inimical to health, wealth, and other aspects of a fully human way of life.

In other words, as the judge acknowledged, the central government has gone to extraordinary lengths to control what the public can read and say on social media. It’s as if free speech were not a pillar of liberal philosophy and tradition — liberal in the older and best sense of a presumption of individual liberty in all spheres. Further, it’s as if the first restriction on government power in the Bill of Rights was not the absolute prohibition on the infringement of free speech and press. It’s a well-established principle of American law that the government may not pressure private parties to do what it itself may not constitutionally do. Yet that’s exactly what happened — repeatedly. It’s a disgrace. How can the government be trusted? It never could be.

Since the Biden administration, urged on by the power elite and the insecure establishment media, does not like being told that it may not violate our freedom of speech, it asked Judge Doughty to suspend his temporary injunction while the Justice Department appeals it. Judge Doughty said no. So the action moved to the appellate court. The Washington Post said that “The Justice Department’s filing signaled that it could seek the intervention of the Supreme Court, saying that at a minimum, the 5th Circuit should put the order on pause for 10 days to give the nation’s highest court time to consider an application for a stay.”

I sense desperation. The judge must have done something right. Remember that the injunction, alas, does not bar all government contact with social-media companies: he listed exceptions for actual criminality and national security. Only interference with constitutionally protected expression was included. I don’t remind readers of these exceptions to comfort them — the government will likely abuse the exceptions. I remind readers only to show that the order contains those exceptions. So what is the government so worried about? It says that the judge’s order is hopelessly vague and doesn’t address every possible eventuality. The answer is easy: if the choice is between vagueness in restricting government power and violating individual liberty, I know which I prefer. This is supposed to be America, isn’t it? Rights precede government.

Good people have enough to be concerned about when it comes to social media restricting their expression. Yes, they are private companies, and it’s easy to think of people who are so obnoxious that one wouldn’t want to encounter them online.

On the other hand, no one has reason to be confident that Twitter, Facebook, YouTube (Google), etc., will use that right judiciously. That you have a right to do something does not mean you should do it. Can does not imply ought. YouTube reportedly deleted Jordan Peterson’s interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. because it contains what it regards as — and well may be — misinformation about vaccines. Kennedy is challenging Joe Biden for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination. One need not agree with Kennedy on vaccines (I’m inclined not to) to be uneasy about YouTube’s decision. We also can’t rule out that YouTube acted in anticipation of the government’s disapproval. Government casts a shadow over everything.

We mustn’t call on the government to manage social media through antitrust or regulation. We should favor real competition. But we should insist on a prohibition of government action, direct and indirect, to suppress speech on those platforms or anywhere else. Judge Doughty understands that. Let’s hope other judges do too.

July 14, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

BRAVE PHYSICIAN LOST HIS PRACTICE

July 8, 2023

Dr. Michael Huang was a brave physician in California who treated vaccine-injured patients and wrote vaccine exemptions. Please watch this heartbreaking 3 minute video that Dr. Huang just sent to Steve Kirsch. This is the CA medical system at work. No mainstream doctors will speak out in support. — Mirror mirror: https://twitter.com/stkirsch/status/1677099016415477760 —

July 14, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

Santa Clara University Students Must Take Covid Vaccines or Withdraw

By Lucia Sinatra | Brownstone Institute | July 11, 2023

College COVID vaccine mandates remain some of the most coercive mandates ever declared. While most colleges have now rescinded their mandates, some colleges refuse to let go, and Santa Clara University in California is one of the most oppressive.

In late April 2021, after most incoming freshmen had committed, SCU announced that all students were required to get COVID vaccines for fall enrollment or after full approval, whichever was later.

Then by mid-summer, SCU announced that students would be required to receive the vaccine even if it remained authorized only for emergency (EUA) and despite the fact that the CA Health and Safety Code codifies the Nuremberg Code. Section 24172 states

“(t)here is, and will continue to be, a growing need for protection for citizens of the state from unauthorized, needless, hazardous, or negligently performed medical experiments on human beings. It is, therefore, the intent of the Legislature, in the enacting of this chapter, to provide minimum statutory protection for the citizens of this state with regard to human experimentation and to provide penalties for those who violate such provisions.”

SCU (and many other CA colleges and universities) are in direct violation of this Code for removing informed consent by mandating EUA medical treatments.

Despite lack of efficacy or adequate safety data for this overwhelmingly healthy young adult population, in December 2021, SCU mandated the booster, midway through the academic year when students would have no choice but to comply or leave tens of thousands of dollars behind. SCU’s three-dose requirement remained through the 2022-23 school year.

In complete disregard for the end of the emergency declarations, in early April 2023, when most universities like nearby Stanford were announcing the end of their COVID vaccine mandates, SCU updated its requirement for incoming freshmen.

On May 8th, one week after the fall 2023 enrollment deadline, SCU quietly updated its COVID vaccine policy to require one bivalent dose for incoming freshmen (but not returning students) regardless of how many COVD vaccines they had previously taken. SCU backdated this announcement to May 1st thinking no one would take notice, but in private emails from incoming students we learned that some were furious. We encouraged them to withdraw and accept another offer.

On May 31st, SCU updated its policy again. They now require either three previously taken monovalent doses or one bivalent dose for all community members. As with the University’s previous mandates, SCU offers no religious exemptions and limited medical exemptions for students even in the most extreme of circumstances as explained below. Faculty and staff, however, are permitted to request exemptions.

SCU’s policy is determined by its opaque “COVID-19 team,” believed to be led by campus physician Dr. Lewis Osofsky, who also holds several positions at Santa Clara County Medical Association (SCCMA). SCCMA partners with the Santa Clara County Public Health Department (SCCPH) to maximize COVID-19 vaccinations. Santa Clara County is one of the most vaccinated counties in the country, with more than a third having received the bivalent booster, twice the national average, and 88.5 percent having received the primary series.

Osofsky’s positions in the SCCMA include chair of the Professional Standards and Conduct committee, tasked with promoting high ethical standards for physicians and investigating disputes involving unethical conduct. This is ironic, as Osofsky is believed to be a driving force behind SCU’s ethically-indefensible mandate. Medical ethics would require, at a minimum, both transmission prevention and a proven benefit for students. An antibody increase from vaccines, with no established antibody level correlate of protection, wanes in mere weeks, and cannot support the ethics of a mandate. In fact, a recent study demonstrated that the “greater the number of vaccine doses previously received the higher the risk of COVID-19.”

It is alleged that Osofsky has improperly denied student medical exemptions. In a March 2022 lawsuit filed against SCU, Harlow Glenn, one of the student plaintiffs, claims that she had serious adverse reactions to her primary series COVID vaccines, including an emergency room visit due to leg paralysis and abnormal bleeding. According to the complaint, Osofsky refused to grant her a medical exemption for the required booster and actively interfered with her doctor-patient relationship by contacting her private doctors to persuade them to retract their medical exemption documentation.

Such aggressive tactics are nothing new for Osofsky, as he apparently employs them against patients in his private pediatric practice. Parents have complained in online reviews that Osofsky’s office forced vaccines and didn’t listen to their concerns. As it turns out, Blue Cross Blue Shield pays pediatricians in private practice a $40,000 bonus for every 100 patients under the age of 2 that they fully vaccinate, if at least 63 percent of the patients are fully vaccinated (including the annual flu vaccine).

Osofsky’s roles with SCCMA, which is in partnership with the SCCPH whose goal is to maximize COVID vaccination, as well as his aggressive private practice approach to vaccination, have likely played a large role in SCU’s continued COVID vaccine mandates.

On June 14, 2023, attorneys for the plaintiffs filed their opening brief against SCU in the Sixth Appellate District in California. It is expected that SCU will oppose the appeal and insist on its right to demand that students submit to EUA boosters to “protect the campus community.” Protect the community? That justification went out the window long ago when CDC Director Rochelle Walensky admitted that the COVID vaccine did not prevent infection or transmission. Recently released documents confirmed that Walensky actually knew this information in January of 2021, well before colleges announced COVID vaccination requirements.

Given that the emergency is officially over, and the shots have proven to be both ineffective and in some cases harmful, now more than ever, SCU must defend the science and ethics behind their refusal to drop them.

In the absence of such transparency, we are left to assume that Osofsky, along with SCCMA and SCCPH, must be using SCU students as mere pawns to achieve their unscientific and authoritarian vaccination goals and quotas.

Lucia is a recovering corporate securities attorney. After becoming a mother, Lucia turned her attention to fighting inequities in public schools in California for students with learning disabilities. She co-founded NoCollegeMandates.com to help fight college vaccine mandates.

July 13, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Democrats, Republicans Face Off During U.S. House Hearing on COVID Origins and Possible Cover-Up

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 12, 2023

Two coauthors of the March 2020 Nature Medicine paper that asserted, just months into the pandemic, that COVID-19’s origins were “clearly” natural rather than lab-made faced questioning Tuesday during a hearing of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus pandemic.

The hearing investigated “whether government officials, regardless of who they are, unfairly and perhaps biasedly tipped the scales toward a preferred origin theory,” Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), committee chair, said in opening remarks.

“We are examining whether scientific integrity was disregarded in favor of political expediency, maybe to conceal or diminish the government’s relationship with the Wuhan Institute of Virology or perhaps its funding of risky gain-of-function coronavirus research,” he said.

Tulane virologist Robert Garry, Ph.D., and Scripps Research evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen, Ph.D., denied the allegations in written testimony submitted prior to the hearing as “absurd and false.” And in more than three hours of questioning Tuesday by committee members, they insisted their conclusions in the paper were based solely on the “scientific process.”

Republicans’ questioning focused on demonstrating the Nature Medicine paper was coordinated and unduly influenced by government officials.

Lawmakers laid out evidence that all of the authors initially expressed serious concerns the virus may have leaked from a lab and of how that position changed just a few days later after a Feb. 1, 2020, teleconference with Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Francis Collins and Jeremy Farrar, Ph.D.

The scientists drafted their paper “The Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2” within a few days of the call and published it the following month. The early drafts were shared with Farrar, Collins and Fauci, Paul Thacker reported.

Prior to yesterday’ hearing, the panel’s Republican majority issued a report, “The Proximal Origin of a Cover-up,” asserting a coordinated effort by Fauci and others to downplay the lab-leak hypothesis and suppress scientific discourse.

The report was based on 25 hours of testimony by the authors of the Proximal Origins paper and a review of 8,000 pages of documents, including subpoenaed emails and slack messages that had not yet been revealed publicly.

The evidence showed that in conversations with one another, the Proximal Origin authors expressed a lack of certainty about their singular conclusion but feared the political fallout of giving credence to the lab origin hypothesis.

Democrats vehemently countered the Republican assertions, insisting Fauci and Collins had no role in the findings. They produced their own report — “They Played No Role” — drawing on the same evidence to conclude that “that there was no cover-up of the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and no suppression of the lab leak theory on the parts of Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins.”

In the highly partisan hearing, the Democrats used their time to accuse Republicans of having a “vendetta,” of “weaponizing” the origin discussion, using “extreme rhetoric” and of making “baseless allegations” that they claimed were responsible for the public’s loss of faith in public institutions.

Ranking Democrat Dr. Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.) repeatedly accused the Republicans of “confirmation bias” in their assertion that the lab leak is the more probable origin of the virus and of making “conspiratorial accusations without proof,” rather than “pursuing an objective analysis of the virus’s origins that is free from political interference.”

The ‘Proximal Origins’ fallout

The paper in question, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” played a key early role in shutting down debate about the origin of the virus.

Top public health officials used the paper as “independent science” to influence public discussion of the topic. Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) posted the findings on the agency website. And in an April 17, 2020, press briefing at the White House, when asked whether COVID-19 had come from the Wuhan lab, Fauci cited the paper’s conclusions as definitive.

The paper had a major impact in the scientific community and the popular press, spurring thousands of articles declaring the lab-leak theory to be implausible or a conspiracy theory.

But communications obtained via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by U.S. Right to Know, and a memo released in March by the congressional subcommittee have since showed that Collins, Fauci and Farrar of the Wellcome Trust played a key, previously undisclosed role in persuading the scientists to write the paper.

The FOIA requests also revealed that all of the paper’s authors had privately expressed suspicions that the virus was engineered or about the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s store of novel coronaviruses and work on them at low biosafety levels, US Right to Know reported.

‘Proximal origin of a cover-up’ vs. ‘they played no role’

Republicans questioned the scientists on their rapid shift from thinking that the virus was likely lab-made to their certainty, professed in both drafts and final versions of the paper, about its natural origins in a matter of days.

Representative Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) quoted a communication from Garry where he said:

“I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario where you get from, from the bat virus or one very similar to it to, uh, COVID-19 where you insert exactly four amino acids, 12 nucleotides and all have to be added at the exact same time to gain this function.

“I just can’t figure out how this all gets accomplished in nature.”

She said, “So then within a matter of days, something changed, and that’s what this committee is trying to get to the bottom of, what happened within that three day period between the conference call and the paper that all of a sudden you did a 180.”

In response to repeated questioning on this topic, Andersen and Garry insisted their change in thinking was based on “the scientific process.”

They said new evidence emerged that changed their thinking, that their shift in thinking “evolved over time from early hypotheses to later conclusions published in the paper.” And that their shift had nothing to do with pressure from Fauci, Collins or Farrar.

Rather, Andersen said their paper presented “an agnostic view of what the evidence actually does tell us.”

Garry testified that Collins and Fauci had very little input at the Feb. 1 teleconference and he thought they were just on the call “to gather information” from the experts.

Andersen and Garry along with several of the Democratic committee members repeatedly emphasized that Farrar — not Fauci or Collins — coordinated the call and provided the authors with significant guidance on the paper. Andersen said, “I describe him as a father figure” for the paper, Andersen said, “because I think that captures it.”

Ruiz and Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) both suggested Farrar’s role in organizing the call exonerated Fauci and Collins, effectively disproving the idea that there was political interference in the findings.

But, Farrar — former director of the Wellcome Trust and currently chief scientist at the World Health Organization — has been a central figure in dismissing the lab leak theory as a “conspiracy theory,” Sam Husseini reported.

In February 2020, along with Peter Daszak, 25 other scientists signed a letter in The Lancet that dismissed the possibility of a lab origin of COVID-19.

“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” the letter said.

Rep. David Joyce (R-Ohio) questioned whether this continued certainty about natural origins today made sense given that it contradicted the testimony by former director of the National Intelligence Agency, John Ratcliffe.

Ratcliffe told the committee that, “If our intelligence and evidence supporting a lab leak theory was placed side by side with our intelligence and evidence pointing to a naturally occurring spillover theory, the lab leak side of the ledger would be long and overwhelming while the spillover side would be nearly empty, nearly empty.”

Ruiz claimed that most government agencies — four of them — deny the lab leak theory with low confidence. But the FBI and the Department of Energy have also determined with moderate confidence that the virus most likely originated in a lab.

Democratic members alleged the Republicans’ effort to investigate the politicization of the investigation of the origins of the pandemic inhibited the work of preparing for “the next pandemic.”

Ruiz said the Republicans’ actions had also led to “threats against scientists and public health officials.” Anderson agreed, saying “the misinformation, dis and conspiracy theories around the paper have resulted in significant harassment and threats” similar to those undergone by Peter Hotez, and alleged that he is on a “kill list.”

Rep. Jill Tokuda (D-Hawaii) said that such investigations “are actually creating a very chilling effect on the scientific process,” which hinders the ability of scientists and public health officials to thoroughly investigate and study future disease outbreaks.

She suggested that in the future the researchers should “double think what they put on their slack messages and channels and their emails and their text threads.”

But just last week the House subcommittee began investigating Dr. David M. Morens, a 25-year veteran of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), after it was revealed he used his personal email address to evade FOIA requests for communications related to the origins of COVID-19, The Defender reported.

Wenstrom broke the news in the meeting that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) was also involved in the investigation.

Near the end of the hearing, both Garry and Andersen confirmed that they had been consulted by the CIA and FBI about the origins of COVID-19.

Wenstrup concluded by saying,“We’re exploring a potential coverup. That is what we are doing.”

He added, “You receive federal dollars, we appropriate those. Congress appropriates those federal dollars. We have a responsibility of oversight on behalf of our constituents and the very taxpayers that pay you. Sorry about that. But it’s our job whether you like it or not. And I take it seriously.”


Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.

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.

July 13, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

The Lies We Were Told

How long does it take to conclude some authority is lying? We don’t know this answer yet … apparently many years.

BY BILL RICE, JR. | JULY 11, 2023

I recently discovered an excellent Substack Newsletter authored by a registered nurse (Dee Dee) who has treated many (alleged) Covid patients. This nurse finally had enough and decided to share her stories and thoughts via her own Substack, which she started May 25th.

From reading a couple of her pithy posts, my take-away is Nurse Dee must feel like the main character in Joseph Heller’s classic novel Catch 22. 

In that novel the experiences and observations of a fictional WW II bombardier tell readers the guidance and logic used by his superiors is complete madness.

Dee’s observations prompted my own question: When do citizens or employees finally realize that every supposedly-true thing they’ve been told is, in fact, a brazen lie?

For most people, at least with Covid proclamations, the answer seems to be “never.”

In other words, for many people, being lied to over and over doesn’t matter.

To put it mildly, such a revelation is a tad disconcerting.

One message – and it wasn’t subtle …

Dee Dee’s observations from a June 2nd dispatch might show readers why I thought of “Catch-22,” where the message to bomber crews was “just do what you are told;” don’t try to figure out the logic.

With Covid, Nurse Dee identifies the goal of all orders. Instead of just “fly the dangerous mission,” the key message is: “Just take the shot.”

The logic surrounding COVID-19 was circular. Every dictated premise, required blind faith and the goal was always the same; to take the shot.

“… You could not question the narrative and remain a good citizen …The mantra erupted, this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated.

“No argument could be interjected in the logic. It didn’t matter if you had not seen a new illness with unique symptoms … It didn’t matter if the science didn’t make sense. It didn’t matter if the measures were opposite to all your previous medical training.

… It didn’t matter that the vaccine did not stop transmission, and it didn’t matter if you had natural immunity.  Essentially, we were told to accept every claim without evidence or reason. The orders had been given, just take the shot.

What one nurse was told …

In a recent dispatchDee listed about 30 truisms she (and all of us) were told. A few examples:

We were told the vaccine wouldn’t be mandatory.

We were told there would be two shots.

We were (then) told a booster was needed.

We were (then) told another booster was needed.

We were told there had been clinical trails conducted by the pharmaceutical companies that proved safe and effective.

We were told the vaccine would prevent the COVID-19 illness.

We were then told the vaccine would prevent serious illness.

We were told if everyone would just take the shot, it would be over.

We were (then) told there were breakthrough cases, where the vaccinated person became sick with COVID-19.

We were told even if you weren’t sick, you could give the disease to grandma.

We were told the unvaccinated are spreading the virus and creating mutations.

We were told, this is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.”

We were told vaccine passports were the new normal and would be required.

We were told the vaccine was mandatory for employment.

We were told nurses who refused the shot were stupid …”  

But in our daily lives, a different standard applies

Back to me: Forget the pronouncements of the CDC experts, of Dr. Fauci, or of Nurse Dee’s hospital supervisors  … just think about people you’ve interacted with in your own life.

At some point, when someone has told you one falsehood after another, do you stop believing them?

For most people, three big lies and you’re out.

“Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me …”

At some point, villagers did stop listening to the little boy who kept screaming, “A wolf is coming!”

Even politicians can take lying too far.

Here I recall John Edwards, a former U.S. Senator who was almost elected vice president of the United States.

Edwards lied repeatedly about an affair and then about fathering a baby with his mistress. Even when he “came clean” in a TV interview, his “confession” was replete with more lies.

I don’t know what John Edwards is doing with his life today, but I know he’s not running for political office. If he did, he’d be laughed off the podium. Everyone now gets that they can’t trust John Edwards.

The question I’m grappling with today is how many lies does someone have to tell before people conclude they’re listening to a serial liar? Is there a quota for one-lie-too-many, or a lie cut-off point?

In every-day normal life, it only takes a couple big whoppers before a friend becomes a “former friend,” a person to be avoided at all costs.

But not with our Covid liars. Apparently, there’s no limit to how many lies “trusted authorities” can tell … and still be considered “trusted” authorities.

In her very fist post, Nurse Dee wrote:

Thrust upon our population was a labyrinth of lies. There were new daily mandates offering no explanation, making little if any, medical sense.

“… The medical interventions … coupled with preposterous statements from our leading experts, led me to personally, question everything. One question led to many questions until one day, I came to the realization, there were no answers.

“My questions met a variety of responses that included silence, laughter, and hostility.  This was my first experience of being discouraged from asking questions.”

Serious question …

How does a person continue to function – as a sane human being – in a world that’s apparently insane?

Somehow, Nurse Dee (and me and you) … are still here, but we’ve had to adopt a new survival mechanism and are now functioning in a surreal new matrix where we know we have to live with insane notions; where we realize a never-ending cascade of “accepted” lies is our New Normal.

And this question …

After reading Dee’s “Catch-22” anecdotes, I also had this question: How do serial liars keep telling all these lies? How do they get away with it?

This answer seems clear. Except for people like Dee, very few people call them out on their lies. (Thank you, mainstream media “watchdog” journalists).

Once you start lying, you can’t stop …

Also, as I learned from a big story making the rounds today, the lying officials just keep doubling down on their lies.

An organization called the International Coalition of Medicine Regulatory Authorities (ICMRA)  just issued a big press release telling everyone that the vaccines are still safe and effective and, just like we’ve all been told a million times … everyone  should keep getting their next rounds of shots.

It’s clear to me that the purpose of this document is to counter the growing “spread” of world citizens who might, finally, be starting to question the pronouncements of trusted health authorities.

A few of the “Key messages from this group, which “brings together 38 medicines regulatory authorities from every region in the world, with the WHO as an observer” (In other words, a centralized, clearinghouse of expert liars):

* “False and misleading information about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines on social media often exaggerates the frequency and severity of side effects. Misinformation also wrongly attributes unrelated medical events to the vaccines.”

“There is no evidence that COVID-19 vaccines have contributed to excess mortality during the pandemic …”

* Under the header, “Benefits of COVID-19 Vaccination,” the public is told that

Millions of lives are estimated to have been saved by COVID-19 vaccination …”

I learned of this document from colleagues at the Brownstone Institute’s writer group.

A fellow Substacker added the link with this note: “A meticulous and immaculately supported take-down of this statement is needed. It’s been all over MSM today.”

I read the propaganda and immediately posted this reply:

“You could debunk/challenge every sentence …”

Two seconds before I made my post, another colleague posted this:

“Wow. Every single bullet point is a lie.”

There’s now too many lies to easily debunk …

Key take-away: The lies Nurse Dee was told every day – or almost immediately figured out on her own – are still being told today.

The damn liars have simply worn us down. I could debunk every one of those bullet points, but I’m growing tired of writing the same rebuttals over and over.

And as Dee observes, what’s the point? Even if someone does debunk all of these whoppers, these people are just going to keep lying … and keep telling us what to do.

The only conclusion I can make is that – especially regarding topics that might involve  “life and death” – people, for some surreal reason, simply want to keep believing the liars.

Most people in the world must feel “safer” believing lies, lies that have killed and injured millions of their fellow citizens, including family members, friends and neighbors.

In our “Catch-22” world, the bigger the lies – and the more often serial lies prevaricate, the better.

For the liars, the benefits of lying are impressive. For the world’s skeptics, the costs of calling out liars are quite unpleasant.

Anyway, the lies aren’t going to stop.

July 11, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment