Media censorship is directed to nearly every important issue facing society – and has been for a long, long time

BY PIERRE KORY, MD, MPA | JUNE 14, 2023
I wrote a surprisingly popular tweet about censorship a couple of weeks ago that I thought I would expand upon here. I wrote it one night after I had made the mistake of reading some newspapers on-line and watching CNN clips, (something I do for opposition research, not to discover any truth or real news – that I get from Rumble, independant journalists, TikTok, Twitter, and most importantly books).
Then I read Rav Arora’s post on his excellent Substack “The Illusion of Consensus” with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (please subscribe to their Substack as I want to support one of the few journalists whose integrity forced them to stop working for corporate controlled media).
One line of Rav’s was a particularly powerful and concise articulation of what I (and all of us) have been living through in Covid in regards to the media;
“Notably, journalism — the filter through which ordinary people living busy lives come to understand the complex matrix of power, money, and influence — has also been exposed for its bizarre servility to public health decrees and pharmaceutical companies.”
Although I was saddened to hear of the treatment and financial loss Rav suffered from not being able to publish deeply researched pieces questioning vaccine policy, I was shocked at the near identicalness (if that’s a word) and absurdity of the wording of the rejections from numerous editors he included in his post. Although servility to Pharma paymasters might partly explain their rejections, I instead felt they revealed that a “collective psychosis” had taken hold – these editors exhibited a sudden unquestioning, pervasive (and sincere!) belief in the infallibility of the health agencies and the trustworthiness of their data supporting a number of blatantly illogical health and vaccine policies.
The replies betrayed a shocking, willful ignorance of the epidemiologic data not supporting jab policies, like mandating them for healthy young people and those with natural immunity (for starters). These news editors were both drowning in and failing to question the selective and/or manipulated data supporting the jabs. And they did so with a complete ignorance of the massive amount of conflicting and contradictory data (that Rav was trying to discuss in his article). I almost laughed at the realization that these editors were victims of their own censorship! Their deeply erroneous and harmful beliefs were self-inflicted by their censoring actions.
But knowledge of the aggressive censorship around every single Covid issue is not new, nor unknown to anyone who reads my posts. What is really freaking me out now is the extent of censorship and propaganda that I am seeing on almost every single non-Covid topic (which I will go into in my 2nd post on censorship). Anyway, the night of my tweet, I was getting disturbed watching the synchronized, coordinated, repetitive media narratives around Ukraine, climate change, the Bidens, Trump and many other topics. I started to wonder, “how long and how bad has it been like this?”
Answer: a long long time.
A friend and FLCCC supporter named Gavin De Becker (of Joe Rogan podcast interview fame), sent en email to a group of us a year ago and I saved it because of how much it impacted me. He included a chapter of Upton Sinclair’s book called “The Brass Check.”
First, know that Sinclair was one of the greatest “truth-tellers” in modern history. From our “friends” at Wikipedia:
Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. (September 20, 1878 – November 25, 1968) was an American writer, muckraker, political activist and the 1934 Democratic Party nominee for governor of California who wrote nearly 100 books and other works in several genres. Sinclair’s work was well known and popular in the first half of the 20th century, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943.
In 1906, Sinclair acquired particular fame for his classic muck-raking novel, The Jungle, which exposed labor and sanitary conditions in the U.S. meatpacking industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act.[1] In 1919, he published The Brass Check, a muck-raking exposé of American journalism that publicized the issue of yellow journalism and the limitations of the “free press” in the United States. Four years after publication of The Brass Check, the first code of ethics for journalists was created.[2] Time magazine called him “a man with every gift except humor and silence”.[3] He is also well remembered for the quote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.“[4]
Further, know that the Associated Press was formed in May 1846 by five daily newspapers in New York City to share the cost of transmitting news of the Mexican–American War.
Note from Gavin: “This is interesting because Upton Sinclair describes several newspaper barons who had invested heavily in land in Mexico, and how they dearly wanted the US to declare war on Mexico:”
By methods such as these Otis Chandler grew wealthy, and later on he purchased six hundred and fifty thousand acres of land in Northern Mexico. When the Diaz regime was overthrown, Otis had trouble in getting his cattle out, so he wanted a counter-revolution in Mexico, and for years the whole policy of his paper has been directed to bringing on intervention and conquest of that country. At one time the Federal authorities indicted Harry Chandler, son-in-law of Otis, and his successor in control of the “Times,” for conspiracy to ship arms into Mexico. Mr. Chandler was acquitted.
Mr. Hearst also owns enormous stretches of land in Mexico, and Mr. Hearst also understands that if Mexico were conquered and annexed by the United States, the value of his lands would be increased many times over. Therefore for fifteen years the Hearst newspapers have been used as a means of forcing war with Mexico. Mr. Hearst admits and is proud of the fact that it was he who made the Spanish-American war. He sent Frederick Remington to Cuba to make pictures of the war, and Remington was afraid there wasn’t going to be any war, and so cabled Mr. Hearst. Mr. Hearst answered:
“You make the pictures and I’ll make the war.”
Hmm. Doesn’t the above make you think of the Ukraine war today?
Anyway, know that The Brass Check was published in 1919. In one chapter he does a deep dive into the Associated Press (AP) :
About nine hundred daily newspapers in the United States, comprising the great majority of the journals of influence and circulation, receive and print the news dispatches of the Associated Press. This means that concerning any event of importance an identical dispatch is printed about fifteen million times and may be read by thirty million persons.
According to the construction and wording of that dispatch, so will be the impression these thirty million persons will receive, and the opinion they will form and pass along to others. Here is the most tremendous engine for Power that ever existed in this world. If you can conceive all that Power ever wielded by the great autocrats of history, by the Alexanders, Caesars, Tamburlaines, Kubla Khans and Napoleons, to be massed together into one vast unit of Power, even this would be less than the Power now wielded by the Associated Press.
Thought is the ultimate force in the world and here you have an engine that causes thirty million minds to have the same thought at the same moment, and nothing on earth can equal the force thus generated.
Well-informed men know that the great Controlling Interests have secured most of the Other sources and engines of Power. They own or control most of the newspapers, most of the magazines, most of the pulpits, all of the politicians and most of the public men. We are asked to believe that they do not own or control the Associated Press, by far the most desirable and potent of these engines. We are asked to believe that the character and wording of the dispatches upon which depends so much public opinion is never influenced in behalf of the Controlling Interests. We are asked to believe that Interests that have absorbed all other such agencies for their benefit have overlooked this, the most useful and valuable of all. We are even asked to believe that, although the Associated Press is a mutual concern, owned by the newspapers, and although these newspapers that own it are in turn owned by the Controlling Interests, the Controlling Interests do not own, control or influence the Associated Press, which goes its immaculate way, furnishing impartial and unbiased news to the partial and biased journals that own it.
That is to say that when you buy a house you “do not buy its foundations.”
Note from Gavin: Who controls the AP today? Steven R. Swartz is the Chairman, and oh yeah, he’s also President and CEO of Hearst. The AP website describes itself as “an independent, not-for-profit news cooperative, our U.S. newspaper members elect a board of directors to provide corporate direction according to AP bylaws.”
The key phrase in the above is: “our U.S. newspaper members elect a board of directors to provide corporate direction according to AP bylaws.”
Now, if the “impartiality” of the AP is to be believed, then the Board must be made up of a large cast of newspaper editors with diverse backgrounds in terms of race, sex, wealth, ethnicity, and religion right?
Dream on. Will Irwin, writing in Harper’s Weekly in 1914, described a “ring of old, Tory, forty-one vote papers in control” of the Associated Press (meaning the small subset of newspaper editors with voting control of AP policies). Note that, at the time, 700 newspapers used the AP, but a subset of only 41 held a near majority of the voting power to elect the Board of Directors.
Sinclair then recounts how each has attacked him and his truth-telling colleagues at the time:
The “Los Angeles Times” is here, and de Young’s “San Francisco Chronicle,” and the “San Francisco Bulletin,” of the itching palm, and the “San Francisco Examiner,” which sent out my Shredded Wheat story, and the “Sacramento Union,” which was sold to the Calkins syndicate. Here is the “Pueblo Chieftain,” which circulated the foul slanders about Judge Lindsey and the miners’ wives. Here is the “Baltimore News” of Munsey, the stock-gambler. Here is the “Washington Post,” which, as I shall narrate, had a typewritten copy of a speech by Albert Williams, and deliberately made up false quotations. Here is the “Chicago Tribune,” which slandered Henry Ford, and the “Chicago Daily News,” which, with the “Tribune,” robs the Chicago school-children. Here is the “Cincinnati Times-Star,” which set out to fight Boss Cox, and didn’t. Here is the “Boston Herald,” which, I shall show you, refused President Wilson’s speech as an advertisement, and the “Boston Traveller,” which lied about my magazine. Here is the “Kansas City Star,” which hounded Mrs. Stokes to jail, and the “St. Paul Dispatch,” whose misdeeds I have just listed. Here is the “Oil City Derrick” owned by Standard Oil, and the “Seattle Post-Intelligencer,” whose bonds were found in the vaults of the Great Northern Railroad. Here is the “Portland Oregonian,” which exists for large-scale capital, and the “Milwaukee Sentinel,” owned by Pfister, who owns most of Milwaukee. Here is the “New York Herald,” which suppressed my Packingtown story, and paid me damages for the Tarrytown libel. Here is the “New York Evening Post,” which failed to expose the Associated Press, and the “New York World,” which favors twenty-cent meals for department-store girls; here is the “New York Tribune,” which lied about the Socialist state legislators, and the “New York Times,” which has lied about me so many times that I can’t count them.
In 1909, it was discovered that the AP had fifteen directors. They were all publishers of large newspapers and just one was a “liberal” who died shortly after. The other fourteen were classified as “conservative or ultra-conservative” and were “huge commercial ventures, connected by advertising and in other ways with banks, trust companies, railway and city utility companies, department-stores and manufacturing enterprises. They reflect the system which supports them.”
Know that back in 1945, the US Supreme Court found that the Associated Press had been violating the Sherman anti-trust Act by prohibiting member newspapers from selling or providing news to nonmember organizations as well as making it very difficult for nonmember newspapers to join the AP.
Again from The Brass Check:
The Associated Press is probably the most iron-clad monopoly in America. It was organized originally as a corporation under the laws of Illinois, but the Illinois courts declared it a monopoly, so it moved out of Illinois, and reorganized itself as a “membership corporation,” thus evading the law. The members of the Associated Press have what is called “the right of protest”—that is, they can object to new franchises being issued; and this power they use ruthlessly to maintain their monopoly.
Like I will do in my next post, here Sinclair lists examples of other censoring actions of that time period:
When Kansas, in 1908, rejected a conservative and elected a progressive United States Senator, the general public at a distance from that state did not know the real issue involved. For more than two years, there has been a strong movement in California against the rule of that state by special and corrupt interests, but that fact, merely as news, has never reached the general public in the East. The prosecution of offenders in San Francisco has only been a part of the wider movement in California. The strong movement in New Hampshire, headed by Winston Churchill, to free that state from the grasp of the Boston and Maine Railway Company and the movement in New Jersey led by Everett Colby, which resulted in the defeat of Senator Dryden, the president of the Prudential Insurance Company, have not been given to the people adequately as matters of news. In my story of the Colorado coal-strike, I showed you the “A. P.” suppressing news, and the newspapers of the country, without one single exception, keeping silence about it. I showed you one bold managing editor promising to tell the truth, and then suddenly stricken dumb, and not carrying out his promise.
Now, I will include an excerpt from my own book where I describe what happened with the Associated Press in the immediate wake of my “viral” ivermectin testimony in Senator Ron Johnson’s historic Covid-19 Homeland Security hearing:
A day later, I received a request for an interview by the Associated Press, self-described as “the largest news gathering organization in the world.” This was huge—the global media home run we’d been waiting for!
The AP dispatched a former fashion reporter named Beatrice Dupuy to interview me. I spent twenty minutes detailing the countless data points which consistently showed massive benefits with ivermectin treatment. The interview was cordial and Beatrice appeared genuinely interested in and intrigued by the information I presented.
Shortly afterward, the AP ran their piece. This was the headline:
The article itself isn’t fit for a birdcage. Beatrice deliberately omitted all the data I provided and chose instead to share the story of an Arizona couple who’d ingested a fish tank cleaning additive (chloroquine phosphate), which is an ingredient in hydroxychloroquine.
“The woman became gravely ill and the man died,” Beatrice wrote breathlessly (I imagined).
Don Henley said it best: “It’s interesting when people die; give us dirty laundry.”
At the bottom of surely very stylish Beatrice’s piece was this interesting disclaimer:
“This is part of The Associated Press’ ongoing effort to fact-check misinformation that is shared widely online, including work with Facebook to identify and reduce the circulation of false stories on the platform.”
The FLCCC immediately filed an ethics complaint with the AP. Thanks to an errant “reply all” on their part, we were able to see an email thread between the CEO, ethics chief, and president discussing a plan to delay their response so they could “buy some time” to figure out what to do. It’s hilarious looking back at the naivete we possessed by filing an ethics complaint against an erstwhile fashion reporter. We actually believed that a moral code existed that we could rely on to force journalistic integrity.
Two weeks later we received a letter stating that the AP had investigated the complaint and found no ethical concerns with the piece. As if they were actually going to side with us? Talk about the fox guarding the henhouse. We had a lot to learn, but our ignorance is amusing in hindsight.
To summarize it differently: within two days of my ivermectin testimony, the AP contracted a media hit job on me, the FLCCC, and ivermectin. I wonder who commissioned that one (Gilly Bates and Pfizer are at the top of my list).
Anyway, this is from Will Irwin, a writer from Harper’s Weekly at the time of Sinclair’s book:
“The subordinates have drifted inevitably toward the point of view held by their masters.” And again, of the average Associated Press correspondent: “A movement in stocks is to him news—big news. Wide-spread industrial misery in a mining camp is scarcely news at all.” At a conference at the University of Wisconsin, the editor of the “Madison Democrat” stated that he had been a correspondent of the Associated Press for many years, and had never been asked “to suppress news or to color news in any way whatever.”
He counters the above with a quote from Editor A. M. Simons: “I have had many reporters working under me, and every one knows that you will not have a reporter on your paper who cannot ‘catch policy‘ in 2 weeks [in modern terms, I would say an employee who has “not gotten the memo.”]
From Will Irwin: To the best of my knowledge, only two or three new franchises [to the AP ] have ever been granted over the right of protest—and those after a terrible fight. Few, indeed, have had the hardihood to apply. When such an application comes up in the annual meeting, the members shake with laughter as they shout out a unanimous “No!” Abolish the exclusive feature, throw the Association open to all, and you wipe out these values. The publishers are taking no chances with a precedent so dangerous.
Also the Associated Press, being a membership corporation or club, possesses the legal right to expel and to discipline its members. They can expel a member “for any conduct on his part, or on the part of anyone in his employ or connected with his newspaper, which in its absolute discretion it shall deem of such a character as to be prejudicial to the welfare and interest of the corporation and its members, or to justify such expulsion. The action of the members of the corporation in such regard shall be final, and there shall be no right of appeal or review of such action.”
This, you perceive, is power to destroy any newspaper overnight. Not merely may a franchise worth two hundred thousand dollars be wiped out at the whim of the little controlling oligarchy; the entire value of the newspaper may be destroyed ; for of course a big morning newspaper cannot exist without its franchise. The masters of the “A. P.” hold this whip over the head of every member.
Now, know that as of 2019, AP had more than 240 bureaus globally with 1,400 U.S. newspaper members as well as broadcasters, international subscribers, and online customers.
How about this little factoid: The AP is the only organization that collects and verifies election results in every city and county across the United States, including races for the U.S. president, the Senate and House of Representatives, governor as well as other statewide offices. Major news outlets rely on the polling data and results provided by the Associated Press before declaring a winner in major political races, particularly the presidential election. In declaring the winners, the AP has historically relied on a robust network of local reporters with first-hand knowledge of assigned territories who also have long-standing relationships with county clerks as well as other local officials. Moreover, the AP monitors and gathers data from county websites and electronic feeds provided by states. The research team further verifies the results by considering demographics, number of absentee ballots, and other political issues that may have an effect on the final results.
Whoa. Thankfully, we haven’t had any concerns with election integrity lately.
What is even more disturbing than the history, control, and destructive censoring actions of the AP, is that they then joined the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), whose members include a few minor influencers like BBC, Facebook, Google/YouTube, Twitter, Microsoft, Agence France Press, Reuters, European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Hindu, CBC/Radio-Canada, First Draft, and Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
Although originally formed to control information around elections, in 2020, partner members of the TNI agreed, in the words of Director-General Tim Davie, “to work together to ensure legitimate concerns about future vaccinations are heard whilst harmful disinformation myths are stopped in their tracks.”
Now you know why Covid was an absolute nightmare – the globally pervasive censoring of both the efficacy of early treatments (like HCQ and IVM among many others like Vitamin D) and of the toxicity, lethality, and inefficacy of the vaccines. These actions caused millions of unnecessary deaths while adding even more millions to the ranks of the disabled. History must remember this but, more important than History… is the Future.
Censorship, in practice, is now literally a principle of major media journalism in my opinion. We no longer have a “4th Estate” to check the power of the branches of government and it’s controlling corporations. We are in a world war without an army to defend ourselves. They captured our most effective weapon, long ago, but the control they exert over it is now so complete, that army has now been turned against us. Traitors.
But here’s the hope: independant media, the internet, and books – as long as the internet is running, books can be marketed and sold, and we can be discerning, there are excellent, transparent, objective sources of information and data to help us understand the many, often complex issues our society is facing. We must flee to those. It’s our only hope.
In my next post I plan to explore and detail numerous examples of censorship being applied to nearly every non-Covid issue we face (which is a bit of a departure for Medical Musings).
New German initiative to combat heat wave deaths: phone old people, remind them to drink water
eugyppius: a plague chronicle | June 14, 2023
“We have to admit that we’re not well prepared to prevent heat deaths in Germany,” former virus pest and enduring political clown Karl Lauterbach declared yesterday. The German Health Minister has announced he will develop a plan to combat summer heat deaths in consultation with various healthcare experts. Envisioned is a system whereby summer temperature spikes trigger protective measures depending on their severity. “For example” – and I swear this is a real line in the linked Tagesschau article and not something I am just making up – “elderly people would be called and warned of the heat and reminded to drink regularly.” As if to further emphasise the poverty of his ideas, Lauterbach says he’ll also consider opening “cold rooms” and “free water dispensers,” as well as funding an app to provide nebulous “information.”
The Corona parallels here are clear, and they go much deeper than the failed 223-Million Euro boondoggle known as the Corona-Warn-App. The truth is that the world lost its mind over a not-very-dangerous virus, and to justify the disproportionate response, our policymakers and the gatekeepers of our public discourse responded not by backing off, but by dialling acceptable standards of risk downwards. They’ve now brought them so low, that even hay fever is sufficient to trigger official mask recommendations.
Hot summer weather, an unremarkable fact of life before 2020, kills primarily the extremely old and sick. These aren’t people who have forgotten to drink water. At any given moment, thousands and thousands are near death, and an increase in environmental stress will push some of them over the edge. Nobody who dies in a heatwave has a long, prosperous life ahead of himself, and vanishingly few of these deaths are even ascribed to the heat by their doctors. They’re determined retrospectively, in excess mortality tabulations.
The familiar rhetorical strategies, honed in the great virus panic of 2020, are back for Lauterbach’s latest circus. First is the reliance upon seemingly appalling yet isolated numbers. “Last year alone there were more than 4,500 deaths” from summer heat, Tagesschau reports, and “In the three summers between 2018 and 2020, more than 19,000 Germans died.” I despair of the media ever reporting death numbers correctly. In 2022, for example, an average of over 2,900 people died in Germany every day. A few thousand excess heat deaths, in this context, is a pretty small number.
Then there’s the attempt to take a quite confined and localised risk and generalise it as widely as possible. “Heat waves don’t only endanger the elderly,” says Tagesschau with very little basis. “Pregnant women, newborns and small children” and “people who work outdoors” are also threatened. Tagesschau naturally can’t be bothered to quantify how many children die of the heat or cite any specific statistics at all; as in the pandemic, risks can be exaggerated freely, but to delimit them you need studies.
WHO Member Says Agency Needs To “Nullify The Conspiracies” About Covid Vaccines
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | June 13, 2023
In 2020, as people challenged the “expert guidance” on Covid during the first few months of the pandemic, the use of the term “misinformation” in news articles almost doubled. This rapid increase in the use of the term by legacy media outlets was followed by an equally rapid rollout of new Big Tech misinformation rules which targeted content that questioned the Covid guidance being pushed by authorities.
Fast forward to 2023 and the first signs of this censorship pattern are starting to play out again.
The WHO, an unelected global health agency, is less than a year away from finalizing an international pandemic treaty/accord and amendments to the International Health Regulations (2005). These two instruments will collectively give the World Health Organization vast new powers to target misinformation and increase its surveillance powers.
And as this WHO power grab faces mounting criticism and pushback, several representatives of this unelected global health agency decided to use the recent seventy-sixth World Health Assembly (WHA) (the annual meeting of the WHO’s decision-making body) to claim that dissent is misinformation and call for more action against dissenting voices.
During a WHA committee meeting, the WHO representative for the Bahamas said “dissenting voices can clutter the airwaves and derail the public health good with disinformation and misinformation.” She added that “more is needed to nullify the conspiracies.”
Professor Peter Piot, a former Director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and a Handa Professor of Global Health, urged the WHO to do more to combat so-called “fake news” during the opening of the seventy-sixth WHA. Specifically, he said the declining trust in science, technology, and the actions of public health groups is “very damaging for health of the people” and called for the WHO to “invest with the same energy as those who are spreading the fake news and are undermining all these efforts.”
And during the closing of the seventy-sixth WHA, the WHO’s Director-General, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said:
“We must work hard to counter the mis and dis-information about the accord that’s circulating in many member states. We cannot mince words. The idea that this accord will cede authority to WHO is simply fake news.
This is an accord by member states, for member states, and will be implemented in member states in accordance with their own laws.”
Although the pandemic treaty won’t “cede authority to WHO,” it does recognize “the central role of WHO, as the directing and coordinating authority on international health work, in pandemic prevention, preparedness, response and recovery of health systems.”
While these WHO members are railing against what they deem to be misinformation, the WHO itself is infamous for pushing misleading information during the early stages of the Covid pandemic. In a January 2020 tweet, the global health agency amplified a claim from Chinese authorities that there was “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission” of the coronavirus.
Despite repeating these misleading claims from China, the WHO has gained major power over online speech since 2020 via partnerships with YouTube, Facebook, and Wikipedia. On YouTube alone, over 800,000 videos were deleted for contradicting the WHO. Many of the deleted videos shared perspectives that health officials have now admitted to be true. And Google recently renewed its partnership with the WHO.
But the WHO doesn’t appear to be satisfied with the increased influence it has gained in just a few short years and hopes that the pandemic treaty and amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) will give it more powers to target speech.
If these instruments are finalized, WHO member states will be instructed to “tackle false, misleading, misinformation or disinformation, including through promotion of international cooperation” and combat “infodemic[s]” (infodemic is a WHO buzzword that describes “too much information including false or misleading information in digital and physical environments during a disease outbreak”).
The WHO hopes to finalize both instruments by May 2024 and both will be legally binding under international law. The instruments have the full support of the US, Canada, and France.
No inquiry would be better than this inquiry
It doesn’t look good for balance or evidence when the Covid-19 inquiry is asking for lateral flow tests and masks
BY LAURA DODSWORTH | JUNE 13, 2023
The first Covid-19 inquiry public hearing will be held today, following the preliminary hearings which began in February. The inquiry will call witnesses to give evidence under oath and they will then be questioned by barristers and the chair, Baroness Hallett.
There is no deadline for the inquiry’s conclusion. It is an eye-wateringly expensive investigation, currently estimated to cost £114 million, but it will potentially run to more than the Bloody Sunday inquiry which was nearly £200 million. 63 lawyers are working directly for the inquiry and a further 100 are named as representatives. MP Graham Stringer has commented that this is a ‘very expensive and very bloated’ inquiry and it may be used to ‘kick things into [the] very long grass’.
It is important not to pre-judge the outcome of the inquiry, but it has been increasingly difficult to be hopeful for the inquiry’s fairness and value for money. After the imbalance of the modules and core participants, the first serious dark cloud to descend was the lamentable list of 150 questions put by Baroness Hallett to Boris Johnson. Now, they are only questions and we don’t have the answers yet, but to give you an idea, question 45 was particularly chilling:
45. To what extent did the UK Government have regard during the period January to March 2020 to the response of other countries to Covid-19? Did you consider taking more stringent measures in response to Covid-19 such as those seen in, for example, Taiwan, Singapore, New Zealand etc? What, if any, assumptions were made about how such measures would (or would not) work in the UK?
Why not Sweden? It did not impose strict lockdowns, or close schools for under 16s and currently has the one of the world’s lowest excess mortality figures. This inquiry appears to favour stringency above existing pandemic planning, minimum economic and social disruption, and low excess deaths.
But there was worse to come. If you thought that the curtain had closed on Covid safety pantomime, think again. Broadcaster Julia Hartley-Brewer has tweeted that the Covid-19 inquiry policy is for staff and visitors to take weekly lateral flow tests if they attend daily, and test in advance for individual days. The inquiry’s Covid policy goes further than government recommendations, asking those who test positive to stay away. The largely pointless face masks are welcome. The air will be purified, sanitising stations available and a ‘disinfectant fogging treatment will be used on the surfaces in the hearing room, viewing room and other rooms each evening’.
While some of the attendees who have lost loved ones to Covid may appreciate these gestures, they are nevertheless gestures. The Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry, for instance, does not publish such a ‘thorough’ Covid policy.
Psychologists found lockdown in itself was a primary reason why so many people were willing to abide by the rules from the start – believing the threat must be very severe if the government was willing to impose such drastic measures. In other words, ‘if the government is doing this, it must be really bad’. This supposition was reinforced by a concerted behavioural psychology campaign, a blitzkrieg of advertising, Downing Street briefings, unbalanced media coverage, the Covid death data dashboard, the most punitive laws and fines since the Dark Ages and the ongoing restrictions, tiers, rules and isolating lockdowns.
And now the people running the inquiry think we need more lateral flow tests and masks. The country has been institutionalised by Covid fear-mongering and the inmates are now running the asylum inquiry.
After dressing up in masks, taking weekly lateral flow tests for years and processing the answers to biased questions, the inmates at the inquiry will simply deduce that the walls were not ‘funny’ enough, not built early or high enough. Next time there is a pandemic, people will be able to say ‘Baroness Hallett’s report stated that the UK government didn’t lock down fast – or hard – enough. We won’t make that mistake again!’ There will be no redemption, just a long, hard sentence, swiftly imposed. Once again, lives will be ruined, not saved.
It would be better to have no inquiry than this inquiry.
Dr. McCullough Testifies in the Pennsylvania Senate
Four Domains of COVID-19 Vaccine Injury Syndromes Revealed
By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH | Courageous Discourse | June 9, 2023
On Friday June 9, 2023, I returned to the Pennsylvania Senate on request by former military officer and American hero, Senator Doug Mastriano (R-33). The session was co-chaired by Senator Cris Dush (R-25). Co-presenters included Steve Kirsch, Founder of the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation, and attorney Tom Renz. I organized my comments along the lines of this outline:
- Update on the US design and blueprint of SARS-CoV-2 from Baric et al at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, funding by the NIH and outsourcing of the research plans via the EcoHealth Alliance to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in Wuhan, China.
- COVID-19 vaccine injury syndromes
- Cardiovascular
- Neurological
- Thrombotic
- Immunological
- Questions from Senators and Representatives answered
- Shedding
- Risk benefit analysis of COVID-19 vaccines
- Failure of vaccine efficacy
- Reason why SARS-CoV-2 was created
- Global results of mass indiscriminate COVID-19 vaccination—winners and losers
Shadowy UK Unit Surveilled Telegram Posts, Had Hourly Contact With Social Platforms
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | June 12, 2023
The Counter Disinformation Unit (CDU), an enigmatic arm of the UK government that monitors misinformation, was relentlessly liaising with social media platforms during the COVID-19 pandemic, sometimes on an hourly basis. This revelation came from the unit’s leader, Sarah Connolly, who spilled the beans on the operation in front of MPs.
Zooming in: Connolly depicted the unit as primarily tasked with “passing information over” to social media companies to persuade them to pull the plug on certain posts. She claimed that the unit was in cahoots with “almost all” platforms, engaging in discussions “daily, sometimes hourly,” The Telegraph reported.
The decision-making process was swift. Connolly detailed, “If somebody from the cell says: ‘We are worried about this,’ that goes immediately to the top of the pile. Whoever it is in whatever company.”
The CDU’s flagging efforts weren’t for naught, as 90% of content flagged by the CDU was either annihilated or its diffusion curtailed.
Another hat: Connolly was pulling double duty as she also chaired the Counter-Disinformation Policy Forum, a group tracking misinformation for six months during the pandemic. This forum was essentially designed to take the baton for the CDU’s “sometimes hourly” contact with social media firms.
What counts as disinformation?: Connolly’s disclosures indicate that the CDU isn’t frugal with labeling content as disinformation. She cited vaccine skeptic discussions surrounding side effects and claims of hasty development as the most concerning content.
Voices of dissent: MP David Davis isn’t onboard with the CDU’s modus operandi. He urged for the unit’s dissolution and a subsequent investigation by a parliamentary committee. Davis lambasted the unit, saying the “most paranoid wing of Government is interfering in the democratic process” and called for an investigation backed by the “biggest combination of power, access and speed.” Davis has spoken out against such practices in the past.
Opaque operations: The government is tight-lipped when it comes to divulging specifics about the CDU, such as staff count and budget.
Official word: A government spokesperson chimed in, stating, “As we have repeatedly made clear, the primary purpose of the unit was to track narratives, not individuals. It does not have, and has never had, the power to remove online content – on occasions where it encountered content considered to be in breach of social media platforms’ own terms of service, it was referred to them for consideration. When referrals were made during Covid, over 90 per cent of them were ultimately found to be in breach of terms of service. It is important to remember that this engagement with social media platforms was undertaken at the height of an unprecedented pandemic when the government’s overriding concern was to protect public health.”
Telegram: Though it was not one of the platforms the government had hourly contact with, the CDU also monitored Telegram posts, including ones related to Prof. Carl Heneghan, a prominent epidemiologist and a critic of lockdown measures. The information is sourced from documents released by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and obtained by The Telegraph.
The App: Telegram, the messaging app in question, is WhatsApp’s lesser-known cousin, with a bent on free speech. It has end-to-end encryption for confidential chatter and features public channels, where posts are on display for all.
The Data Trail: The documents reveal “sample Telegram posts” concerning Prof. Heneghan’s sharp critiques on the utility of face masks in stopping the coronavirus. It’s worth noting that the CDU’s data cache traces public channels on Telegram, not private conversations.
Official Stance: Sources within say that gathering these posts was aimed to “better understand how to analyze narratives on social media.” They deny any ulterior motives, asserting that the CDU did not see it as “an attempt to identify disinformation.”
Smoke and Mirrors? Despite assurances that the CDU “has never tracked the activity of individuals” and that Prof. Heneghan was “never monitored,” the extent of data collected by the unit remains shrouded in mystery. This discovery is turning heads.
Shadow Play: The plot thickens with whispers of intelligence agencies possibly colluding with the CDU. The government, tight-lipped and citing national security, has only added fuel to the conspiracy fire.
Prof. Heneghan Weighs In: The professor himself isn’t mincing words. He told The Telegraph, “The effect of these tactics is chilling.” He added, “The Counter-Disinformation Unit’s tactics included looking at posts from ‘popular channels’ on Telegram, a platform we didn’t use. It’s likely these were groups, but it’s not clear to us how they were identified or how they gathered the material.”
‘Reckless in the Extreme’: FDA Panel Recommends New RSV Shot for Use in Healthy Infants

By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | June 9, 2023
Advisors to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Thursday recommended approval of AstraZeneca’s new monoclonal antibody, which the drugmaker said is designed to protect infants and toddlers up to age 2 from respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).
The drug, nirsevimab, would be delivered to newborns in a single shot at birth or “just before the start of a baby’s first RSV season, or as a larger dose in a second RSV season in children who are highly vulnerable,” CNN reported.
Members of the independent committee, which includes several pediatricians, “were enthusiastic about the potential” of the antibody, STAT reported, as was Thomas Triomphe, executive vice president of vaccines at Sanofi, which will market the drug in the U.S.
In a statement, Triomphe said:
“Most babies hospitalized with RSV are born at term and healthy, which is why interventions specifically designed to protect all infants are likely to result in the greatest impact.
“We are encouraged by the advisory committee’s positive vote based on the compelling clinical development program supporting nirsevimab and its breakthrough potential to reduce the magnitude of annual RSV burden.”
But medical experts interviewed by The Defender raised a number of concerns, including what they said was inadequate safety testing.
“It’s preposterous to give this drug prophylactically, especially without adequate safety testing,” said Brian Hooker, Ph.D., P.E., senior director of science and research for Children’s Health Defense (CHD).
AstraZeneca reported only 48% efficacy for the drug. And Hooker noted that the “circulating half-life of the antibodies is probably less than one month so the protection would be minimal at best.”
Hooker also commented on the fact that 12 infant deaths were recorded during the clinical trial, which the FDA committee claimed were “unrelated” to the antibody:
“It appears that this vote was meant to bolster uptake and popularity of the RSV vaccines that are now approved for maternal use. The very low rate of effectiveness for such a therapy is troubling as the conservative estimate is below 50%, which is usually a hard metric for drug approval.
“Also, it seems odd that four infants in the trial would die of cardiac arrest — with no information given, it leaves one to wonder why these children would die in such a way. Also, there should be further investigation into the two SIDS [sudden infant death syndrome] deaths that occurred during the trial.”
Dr. Meryl Nass, an internist, biological warfare epidemiologist and member of CHD’s scientific advisory committee, told The Defender,“It is reckless in the extreme to inject very young babies with an inadequately tested monoclonal antibody drug to prevent a condition that for most of them will be no more than a cold.”
Cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough told The Defender that while monoclonal antibodies are “generally safe” for children, he questioned the benefit of such a treatment for what he called a “mild” infection. He said:
“Monoclonal antibodies are generally safe in children and adults; however, I am concerned broad infant population uptake may disrupt normal thymus and immune system development that easily handle infections such as RSV, influenza, rhinovirus, adenovirus and SARS-CoV-2.
“RSV is a characteristically mild infantile infection easily resolved with conventional nebulizers. I believe nirsevimab would not be clinical-indicated for all infants and likely would be utilized in high-risk babies with congenital heart or lung disease, such as cystic fibrosis, or those with prior thoracotomies for heart surgery, where respiratory mechanics would be compromised.”
The FDA committee’s positive recommendation for nirsevimab, also known as Beyfortus, comes just weeks after the agency approved GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals’ Arexvy, the first-ever RSV vaccine for older adults, and recommended Abrysvo, Pfizer’s RSV vaccine for pregnant women.
According to CNBC, the FDA is expected to make a final decision on nirsevimab in the third quarter of this year.
Nass told The Defender that while the FDA is not obligated to follow the panel’s advice, “it almost always does so.”
FDA: Infant deaths during clinical trial ‘unrelated’ to the treatment
CNBC reported that the FDA review identified no safety concerns with nirsevimab, but also reported that 12 infants died during the trials.
According to CNBC:
“Four died from cardiac disease, two died from gastroenteritis, two died from unknown causes but were likely cases [of] sudden infant death syndrome, one died from a tumor, one died from COVID, one died from a skull fracture, and one died of pneumonia.”
Dr. Melissa Baylor, who according to CNBC is “an FDA official,” said, “Most deaths were due to an underlying disease. None of the deaths appeared to be related to nirsevimab.”
But according to STAT, “There are questions that remain to be answered” about nirsevimab that require “further study.”
For instance, no data are available “about whether giving nirsevimab to a baby whose mother was vaccinated against RSV during pregnancy would give the infant more protection or would be a waste of the product.”
STAT noted that several members of the FDA committee “worried that the dose given in the first year of life might be too small to benefit a baby who was 8 months or older when receiving the injection, depending on the size of the baby.”
Baylor also expressed concerns about how nirsevimab would interact with vaccines in development — such as Pfizer’s Abrysvo — that confer protective antibodies to the fetus by administering the shot to the mother.
CNBC reported that “Other monoclonal antibodies have been associated with serious allergic reactions, skin rashes and other hypersensitivity reactions.”
According to Baylor, the FDA did not identify “any cases of serious allergic reactions in the nirsevimab trials,” while “cases of skin rash and hypersensitivity reactions were low in infants who received the antibody.” She added that cases of such side effects are expected to be observed if the treatment receives FDA approval.
Manish Shroff, AstraZeneca’s head of patient safety, said, “Safety is of utmost importance” to the drugmaker and that it will “keep a close eye” on the safety of nirsevimab via a “global monitoring system,” CNBC reported.
According to Endpoints News, nirsevimab has already received regulatory approval in the EU, U.K. and Canada, but “it has not yet launched in any of those markets.”
According to CNBC, “Nirsevimab is administered as a single injection with the dose depending on the infant’s weight.”
Infants weighing less than 5 kilograms will receive a 50 mg dose for their first RSV season, while those over 5 kilograms will receive a 100 mg injection. Children under age 2 who “remain at risk for severe RSV” in their second season would then receive an additional 200 mg injection of the antibody.
Nirsevimab is not the first monoclonal antibody for RSV. According to STAT, AstraZeneca’s Synagis (palivizumab) is approved in the U.S. and EU, and “protects against infection in high-risk infants.”
According to CNBC, it is intended “only for preterm infants and those with lung and congenital heart conditions that are [at] high risk of severe disease” and is administered monthly, whereas nirsevimab “would be administered to healthy infants.”
Endpoints News reported that “AstraZeneca leads all development and manufacturing activities” for nirsevimab, “while Sanofi is responsible for marketing activities and revenue recognition” — for which the drugmaker paid $129 million “to be part of the collaboration.”
Is RSV really a danger for most infants?
CNBC previously reported that the U.S. “suffered an unusually severe RSV season” this past winter. The New York Times reported on a “tripledemic” involving RSV, flu and COVID-19, “that swamped children’s hospitals and some I.C.U. wards.”
One U.S. county — Orange County, California — declared a local health emergency and issued a proclamation of local emergency in November 2022, citing rising RSV cases among children in the region, and the Biden administration subsequently declared a public health emergency that month.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), nearly all children are infected with RSV before the age of 2.
While CNBC characterized RSV as a “public health threat” that “kills nearly 100 babies in the United States every year,” Nass questioned the danger it poses to most infants.
In May, Nass wrote that the CDC published a paper on RSV deaths in infants between 2009 and 2021, which found “were only a total of 300 deaths in children less than one year over the 12 years, or 25 on average per year.”
Nass added that the number of injuries that may be caused by vaccines or other treatments during pregnancy “is almost certainly going to outweigh the loss of 25 babies a year from RSV.”
In her remarks to The Defender, Nass drew comparisons with the hepatitis B vaccine for children, saying that adverse effects from the treatment may appear later in childhood and are not likely to be connected to the drug:
“The hepatitis B vaccine, recommended for all children at birth in the US, and received by about 75%, was never tested for babies’ safety — over more than a few days — before the program started, or since.
“Because no one can know what a very young baby will become at birth, it is impossible to attribute a lower IQ, hyperactivity, less nimble limbs or any other problem that shows up later, to an injected drug given shortly after birth. So those connections, if any, are unlikely to be identified.”
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.
Beware of Studies Concluding Autism is Not Associated with Childhood Vaccination
By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH | Courageous Discourse | June 3, 2023
As an epidemiologist, I can tell you it takes considerable training and scholarship to determine whether or not a study is valid and to determine if the conclusions are supported by the data. When it comes to childhood vaccines, the world is becoming skeptical of the vaccine industry since the CDC ACIP panel has added the EUA unsafe, ineffective mRNA COVID-19 vaccines for infants starting at 6 months of age.
With the ever expanding ACIP schedule of vaccine quantity and intensity of injections there has been a skyrocketing rate of autism. This has triggered scientists to go back and look at the studies published at the time to reassure parents that routine vaccines did not cause autism. Because so many shots are given at once, it is probably not any individual product that is the culprit, rather “hyper-vaccination” of a bundle of vaccine products that invokes a neurotropic, cytokine mediated inflammatory reaction that in some causes febrile seizures, autism, and immediate death. There are factors related to susceptibility including older parents and siblings with autism, but it remains that hyper-vaccination is a likely provocateur.
Madsen et al used Danish automated health data to evaluate the association of the MMR at age 15 months and autism. Only 40/422 had charts reviewed to verify the diagnosis of autism. Because it is an important diagnosis, all 422 cases should have been adjudicated by two blinded expert child psychiatrists. This study was unlikely to find an association from the outset since not all the vaccines where considered as a “bundle” and compared to children who went “natural” meaning completely unvaccinated with any product.

Madsen KM, Hviid A, Vestergaard M, Schendel D, Wohlfahrt J, Thorsen P, Olsen J, Melbye M. A population-based study of measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination and autism. N Engl J Med. 2002 Nov 7;347(19):1477-82. doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa021134. PMID: 12421889.
To make matters worse, the authors found 18% had missed the MMR at 15 months. That proportion seemed high to me so I checked another source. In 2015-2016 Holt et al performed a chart review and found that 55% of those MMR “unvaccinated” in the Danish system were indeed received the MMR documented in the medical record. Hence the Madsen analysis is invalid since both groups had largely received the MMR shot at age 15 months and there was no reporting of the true control group of interest—completely unvaccinated children.

Holt N, Mygind A, Bro F. Danish MMR vaccination coverage is considerably higher than reported. Dan Med J. 2017 Feb;64(2):A5345. PMID: 28157059.
In studies that are using unadjudicated, automated sources of data, misclassification often biases the results to the null hypothesis making a Type II error, that is, failing to find an association when indeed it is present.
Here is a summary of why Madsen does not rule out MMR or hyper-vaccination as a cause of autism:
- non-randomized study with no true placebo group
- all 442 cases of autism were not adjudicated by at least two independent child psychiatrists to confirm the diagnosis
- Danish automated data due no capture all the MMR vaccinations; some (~55%) of the “unvaccinated” had received the MMR vaccine
- MMR was not considered as part of the multi-injection bundle of hyper-vaccinated children compared to completely natural unvaccinated kids, which is the real control group of interest for autism
A similar paper using the same data sources, nearly identical study design, and equally flawed analysis was published similarly in Annals of Internal Medicine in 2019 (Hviid et al). In summary, we cannot rely on the Madsen or Hviid studies to rule out the MMR as a partial determinant of autism. Moreover, studies that make strong conclusions with such faulty data are suspect for investigator bias—meaning the authors intentionally wanted to rule out the association perhaps to advance the vaccine agenda, appease their institutions or research sponsors, or otherwise wished to be willfully blind to the possibility that childhood hyper-vaccination is a determinant of autism.



