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Exposed, the multi-billion-dollar illusion of ‘HIV’: Part 4

Readers of TCW will be familiar with Neville Hodgkinson’s critical reporting of the ‘Covid crisis’ since December 2020, notably his expert, science-based informed alarm about the mass ‘vaccine’ rollout, so absent from mainstream coverage. What they may be less aware of is the international storm this former Sunday Times medical and science correspondent created in the 1990s by reporting a scientific challenge to the ‘HIV’ theory of Aids, presaging the hostile response to science critics of Covid today. In this series he details findings that form the substance of his newly updated and expanded book, How HIV/Aids Set the Stage for the Covid Crisis, on the controversy. It is available here. You can read Part 1 of this series here, Part 2 here and Part 3 here. 

By Neville Hodgkinson | TCW Defending Freedom | July 6, 2023

Yesterday I explained how detection of an enzyme called reverse transcriptase (RT), previously thought to prove the presence of a retrovirus but later found to be abundant in cells, lay at the root of the theory that HIV causes Aids. This is one key finding in an 80-page deconstruction of the entire concept of ‘HIV’ posted in July 2017 by a group of scientists based in Perth, Western Australia.

Their work has been ignored, censored and suppressed in much the same way as experienced by critics of the panic-stricken, exploitative, ego-driven, cruel and hugely damaging responses to the Covid pandemic.

The Perth paper is not a loose philosophical challenge to germ theory in general. It is a forensic examination of every detail of the science that has been taken as proof of the HIV/Aids hypothesis.

Misinterpretation over the presence of RT paved the way for further foundational errors, the next of which was the bypassing of a vital step in virus identification known as purification. This entails separating particles of the virus from cell debris, so the particles can be shown to be infectious, and their exact constituents established. HIV pioneers Luc Montagnier and Robert Gallo never fulfilled this requirement, according to the Perth group’s analysis, despite claims to the contrary.

‘Viruses are particles,’ the Perth scientists say. ‘Without proof for the existence of particles there is no proof of the existence of a virus.’

It was not that the Montagnier and Gallo teams did not try. Both regularly attempted to purify particles from cultures of cells taken from Aids patients, or those at risk of Aids. They used a technique known as sucrose density gradient ultracentrifugation. In this, a drop of the culture fluid is passed through a sucrose solution spun in a high-speed centrifuge which separates retrovirus particles at a particular density. This material is then examined with an electron microscope in the hope of demonstrating the particles.

Montagnier’s group cultured cells from a 33-year-old gay man with swollen lymph nodes, who indicated that he had had more than 50 sexual partners a year and had travelled to many countries. He had a history of several episodes of gonorrhoea, and three months previously had been treated for syphilis.

Reverse transcriptase activity was seen and interpreted as meaning a retrovirus was present. RT was also detected in their second experiment, in which cells from the patient were co-cultured with the cells of a healthy blood donor. Despite repeatedly looking, however, Montagnier’s group failed to find evidence of the vital particles in either of these experiments.

In a third experiment, cells from umbilical cord blood, obtained from two placentas, were cultured with fluids from the second experiment; in this case a few particles were seen under the electron microscope. The group took them to be ‘HIV’, although they were not purified, and umbilical cord cell cultures are known to produce such particles independent of any infection. No control experiment was done to see whether the umbilical cells would produce a similar result by themselves.

Particles which simply look as if they might be retroviruses can often be detected in sick people, regardless of Aids, as well as in people who are well. This is why the Perth scientists insist that failure to purify particles, determine what they are made of, and prove they are infectious was such a huge flaw in ‘HIV’ science. Later claims by HIV researchers that they have found other means of determining HIV’s presence are all indirect, like the detection of RT, and equally open to misinterpretation.

In 2008, Montagnier and his co-worker Françoise Barré-Sinoussi were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for having been first to discover HIV. In her biographical details for the prize, Barré-Sinoussi stated that ‘it was important to visualise the retroviral particles, and Charles Dauget (the team’s electron microscopist) provided the first images of the virus in February 1983. The isolation, amplification and characterisation of the virus rapidly ensued’.

However, Montagnier had given a different picture when questioned on this point by Djamel Tahi, a French documentary film maker, in a 1997 interview. Tahi asked why electron microscope photographs ‘published by you come from the culture and not from the purification’. Montagnier replied that when purification was attempted, ‘we saw some particles but they did not have the morphology typical of retroviruses. They were very different’. Of Gallo’s work, he said: ‘I don’t know if he really purified. I don’t believe so.’

Dauget went further, telling Tahi: ‘We have never seen virus particles in the purified virus. What we have seen all the time was cellular debris, not virus particles.’

Cellular debris means broken down pieces of cells used in the cultures. Yet because of the RT activity, Montagnier believed he had found a retrovirus. So when he incubated serum from his patient’s blood with this ‘debris’, he expected to find antibodies which would react with virus proteins. Three proteins did produce a reaction, and Montagnier concluded that one of these was ‘specifically recognised’ as being viral.

There was no scientific justification for this conclusion, the Perth scientists say. Many healthy humans have antibodies which react with this protein, identified as p24 (a molecular weight of 24,000). It is also known that at least one normal cell component is a protein with the same molecular weight. Yet for decades the detection of this protein in blood or culture has been taken to prove the presence of the virus.

In May 1994 Gallo published four papers in Science with many similarities to the French group’s experiments, though he tested samples from more patients and used an immortal (cancer) cell line to obtain large amounts of proteins for diagnosis and research. His claims to have found the virus held no more validity than Montagnier’s because he too failed to observe, purify and characterise actual virus particles.

In 2003 the Perth group emailed Gallo asking if he was aware of Montagnier’s admission that there were no electron microscope pictures of purified virus from the original patient, and whether clinicians had cause for concern about the implications of Montagnier’s answer. Had clinicians spent two decades diagnosing patients with a non-existent virus?

Gallo replied: ‘Montagnier subsequently published pictures of purified HIV as, of course, we did in our first papers. You have no need of worry. The evidence is obvious and overwhelming.’

Gallo’s reassurance has no basis in fact, the Perth scientists maintain. Not a single electron micrograph of purified ‘HIV’ was published by Gallo in 1984, or since. Nor did Montagnier publish any such picture. Fourteen years later, European and US groups who tried to make good this deficiency were still unable to provide clear evidence of the existence of ‘HIV’.

Right until his death in February 2022, Montagnier tried to signal to the world that HIV was not as dangerous as had been thought. I suspect he knew in his heart of hearts that the theory was mistaken, but could not bring himself to admit it after the fame – and wealth – that came his way.

I interviewed Montagnier for the Sunday Times at the Institut Pasteur in Paris in 1992, for an article the paper ran on April 26 under the heading ‘Time to think again on Aids link, claims HIV pioneer’. His thinking on HIV and Aids was already strikingly different from most people’s picture of the disease. He insisted that HIV did not attack cells of the immune system directly, but that in the presence of other infections it could spark a process in which immune cells were self-destructing faster than they could be replaced.

This was a big contrast with the ‘lethal virus’ picture promoted by Gallo. It meant HIV-infected patients could reduce their risk of Aids by reducing their exposure to other microbes. Dietary advice and vitamin supplements were also likely to help, Montagnier indicated, by easing chemical stresses in the body that were known to cause loss of immune cells.

‘We were naïve,’ he said at one point. ‘We thought this one virus had been doing all the destruction. Now we have to understand the other factors in this.’

He tried to make his views on these ‘co-factors’ known in June 1990, at the sixth international Aids conference in San Francisco, but it was not a message the conference wanted to hear. Of 12,000 delegates present, only 200 went to hear his talk. By the time he had finished, almost half had walked out. His concerns were dismissed by leading American Aids scientists and public health officials. Molecular biologist Professor Peter Duesberg, himself ostracised and defunded for challenging Gallo’s ‘deadly virus’ claims, commented: ‘There was Montagnier, the Jesus of HIV, and they threw him out of the temple.’

Molecular biology has moved into such refined areas of understanding that most people outside those directly involved in the field have little chance of detecting false claims. This is also a problem that has bedevilled Covid science. Despite clear evidence from the start that SARS-CoV-2 was genetically engineered, powerful interests consistently threw up clouds of confusion, claiming it was a natural virus that had jumped species and that any other suggestion was conspiratorial. On top of that, big money was piled into promoting a global vaccination campaign, and into discrediting any ideas that could get in the way of that bonanza.

At least with Covid, the internet has made it possible for thousands of doctors and scientists to question official responses to the crisis, even in the face of relentless propaganda by the BBC  and most mainstream media.

The marketing of the HIV theory of Aids was so successful, however, that few people realise there is any flaw in the science. Forty years on, millions of lives are still being blighted by an antibody test for a virus that never was.

Next: The ‘HIV’ test that misled millions

July 7, 2023 Posted by | Book Review, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Now that government COVID malfeasance is exposed, what will the GOP do about it?

By Daniel Horowitz – conservative review – July 6, 2023 

We are now 2+ years into consuming reams of information showing the vaccines were devastating to humanity. What will Republicans do about it other than whine about censorship? Refusing to focus on vaccine injury and the perfidy of the government-vaccine complex is an act of self-censorship.

There is a bizarre dynamic unfolding as it relates to GOP sentiment toward the vaccine. All Republicans recognize and decry the growing evidence of the government’s collaboration with big tech to censor all information about vaccine injury. Yet they seem to be more upset about the censorship of the information than about the information itself. Why is there no push from Republicans to defund the vaccines and fix the regulatory and legal structures that allowed Operation Warp Speed to occur and that continue to gaslight the next iteration of rushed, dangerous vaccines?

In an extraordinary ruling on Independence Day itself, Louisiana federal Judge Terry Doughty issued a broad injunction against all government agencies on working with social media companies to censor politically unfavored speech. Citing “substantial evidence” of government’s “dystopian” violations of the First Amendment, Judge Doughty prohibited the federal government from “encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.” The injunction not only includes the HHS agencies censoring COVID information, but also the FBI, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the State Department, the DOJ, and the White House censoring all forms of protected speech.

This ruling comes a week after the House Judiciary committee produced a preliminary report showing DHS’ CISA was behind the censorship enterprise. It turns out that CISA funded a nonprofit group to work with social media on a process, known as “switchboarding,” which would “trigger content moderation” to “ensure priority treatment of misinformation reports.”

Republicans seem united in combating this censorship and plan to include provisions in the relevant appropriations bills for fiscal year 2024 to block funding for these surveillance and censorship programs. However, where is the same degree of outrage about the dangers of the vaccines themselves?

We now have over two years of information showing ubiquitous injury stemming from damage to all parts of the body, particularly cardiac and neurological. Whether it’s VAERS, European data, countless independent studies, epidemiological data, excess deaths and “died suddenly” mysteries correlating with the take-up of the vaccines, health insurance data, life insurance data, or disability data – we have enough evidence to convict this shot for murder if it were a human standing for trial. Yet not only have these vaccines not been defunded, the same framework that rushed their approval has already been used for countless other new vaccines.

The government’s new shell game is to concede the existence of these problems, but play semantics with the term “rare” when describing their risk. Science Insider published a piece acknowledging the “rare link between coronavirus vaccines and Long Covid–like illness,” including blood clotting, heart inflammation, and neurological disorders. Even Peter Marks, the man at the center of Operation Warp Speed, admitted, “We can’t rule out rare cases.”

“If a provider has somebody in front of them, they may want to take seriously the concept [of] a vaccine side effect,” admits the director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, two years after emails show he ignored concerns of rushing the vaccine amidst a pileup of adverse event reporting.

However, what is rare? The CDC’s own pharmacovigilance program showed a 7.7% rate of clinical-level injury. Coupled with the underreporting rate in VAERS, there were likely millions of severe and long-term injuries, including several hundred thousand deaths in the U.S. So yes, we can suggest that 92% of people didn’t experience clinical levels of injury and 98%-99% didn’t experience long-term and deadly injuries. In that sense, I guess you can say it’s rare. But how many people are we talking about when 5.5 billion people were given at least one dose? Potentially, millions of deaths and hundreds of millions of injuries! Just consider the fact that 25% of injuries reported to VAERS and about a third reported by the European Medicines Agency are considered serious, well beyond the standard of 15%.

House Republicans can no longer ignore the problem with the vaccines. They must also stop ignoring the endless approvals of monkeypox and RSV shots based on dubious data and the same rushed framework. To that end, Speaker McCarthy should take the following actions.

  • Defund all COVID shots in the HHS, DOD, and FDA funding bills.
  • Create a commission of members of Congress to examine the rationale, safety, and efficacy data of all vaccines, beginning with the new ones recently approved and in the pipeline.
  • Refuse to sign off on the Senate version of the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act unless major reforms are enacted curtailing pandemic authorities.
  • Bar any involvement in a WHO pandemic treaty or expansion of the International Health Regulations.
  • Repeal immunity for vaccine manufacturers, including the provision in the 21st Century Cures Act of 2016 that extends the immunity to vaccines offered to pregnant women.

To this day, we still can’t get Republicans to shake their support for the V-word even in red states. Last week, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, the consummate COVID fascist governor, used his line-item veto to strike a provision from the budget ending vaccine mandates in colleges. “University and college dormitories and student housing are congregate settings where such policy may be of great importance to ensure resident safety,” said DeWine of vaccine mandates in his veto message. It takes a new level of cognitive dissonance to support mandates on those who don’t want the shot out of fear of harming those who did supposedly get the protection that evidently fails to protect unless the other person gets it!

Republicans all agree that our government engaged in an unprecedented operation to cover up the truth about vaccines. How come their curiosity stops at the degree of exposing the cover-up with no interest in delving into what exactly they are trying to cover up? After all, this is the only product that automatically goes into every arm of every baby multiple times after birth with a set schedule mandated by schools. Certainly the COVID shots are proven to be poison, but is there no interest in uncovering the broader truth?

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July 6, 2023 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Lancet Study on Covid Vaccine Autopsies Finds 74% Were Caused by Vaccine – Journal Removes Study Within 24 Hours

BY WILL JONES | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | JULY 6, 2023

A Lancet review of 325 autopsies after Covid vaccination found that 74% of the deaths were caused by the vaccine – but the journal removed the study within 24 hours.

The study, a pre-print that was awaiting peer-review, is written by leading cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough, Yale epidemiologist Dr. Harvey Risch and their colleagues at the Wellness Company and was published online on Wednesday on the pre-print site of the prestigious medical journal.

However, less than 24 hours later, the study was removed and a note appeared stating: “This preprint has been removed by Preprints with the Lancet because the study’s conclusions are not supported by the study methodology.” While the study had not undergone any part of the peer-review process, the note implies it fell foul of “screening criteria”.

The original study abstract can be found in the Internet Archive. It reads (with my emphasis added):

Background: The rapid development and widespread deployment of COVID-19 vaccines, combined with a high number of adverse event reports, have led to concerns over possible mechanisms of injury including systemic lipid nanoparticle (LNP) and mRNA distribution, spike protein-associated tissue damage, thrombogenicity, immune system dysfunction and carcinogenicity. The aim of this systematic review is to investigate possible causal links between COVID-19 vaccine administration and death using autopsies and post-mortem analysis.

Methods: We searched for all published autopsy and necropsy reports relating to COVID-19 vaccination up until May 18th, 2023. We initially identified 678 studies and, after screening for our inclusion criteria, included 44 papers that contained 325 autopsy cases and one necropsy case. Three physicians independently reviewed all deaths and determined whether COVID-19 vaccination was the direct cause or contributed significantly to death.

Findings: The most implicated organ system in COVID-19 vaccine-associated death was the cardiovascular system (53%), followed by the hematological system (17%), the respiratory system (8%) and multiple organ systems (7%). Three or more organ systems were affected in 21 cases. The mean time from vaccination to death was 14.3 days. Most deaths occurred within a week from last vaccine administration. A total of 240 deaths (73.9%) were independently adjudicated as directly due to or significantly contributed to by COVID-19 vaccination.

Interpretation: The consistency seen among cases in this review with known COVID-19 vaccine adverse events, their mechanisms and related excess death, coupled with autopsy confirmation and physician-led death adjudication, suggests there is a high likelihood of a causal link between COVID-19 vaccines and death in most cases. Further urgent investigation is required for the purpose of clarifying our findings.

The full study does not appear to have been saved in the Internet Archive, but can be read here.

Without further detail from the Lancet staff who removed the paper it is hard to know what substance the claim that the conclusions are not supported by the methodology really has. A number of the authors of the paper are at the top of their fields so it is hard to imagine that the methodology of their review was really so poor that it warranted removal at initial screening rather than being subject to full critical appraisal. It smacks instead of raw censorship of a paper that failed to toe the official line. Keep in mind that the CDC has not yet acknowledged a single death being caused by the Covid vaccines. Autopsy evidence demonstrating otherwise is clearly not what the U.S. public health establishment wants to hear.

Dr. Clare Craig, a pathologist and co-Chair of the HART pandemic advisory group, says that in her view the approach taken in the study is sound. She told the Daily Sceptic:

The VAERS system [of vaccine adverse event reporting] is designed to alert to potential harms without necessarily being the best way of measuring the extent of those harms.

Quantifying the impact of deaths can be done by looking at overall mortality rates in a country.

However, this is imperfect as a deficit of deaths would be expected after a period of excess deaths, making the accuracy of any baseline dubious.

An alternative approach of auditing such deaths through autopsy is sound.

There may be a bias [in the study] towards reporting the autopsies of deaths where there was evidence of causation and the likelihood of causation might be exaggerated by that bias. For example, 19 of the 325 deaths were due to vaccine-induced immune thrombocytopenia and thrombosis (VITT) but these reports may be overrepresented because of the regulators’ willingness to acknowledge such deaths.

Nevertheless, it is important that attempts are made to quantify the risk of harm and censorship of these attempts, rather than open scientific critique, does nothing to help reassure people.

July 6, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Biden Administration Files Notice of Appeal Against Social Media Censorship Collusion Ban

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | July 5, 2023

The US Justice Department has formally filed a notice of appeal against a court ruling that prohibits federal agencies and officials from engaging in discussions with social media companies to censor speech on their platforms.

The ruling in favor of free speech, justified by First Amendment rights, has been met with consternation by the Biden Administration, which says it poses a restriction on their efforts to counter the dissemination of what it says is “misinformation.”

The appeal was submitted to the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans this past Wednesday, in response to an injunction imposed by US District Judge Terry Doughty, alongside a lengthy opinion on the case.

Judge Doughty asserted in his detailed ruling that the manner in which federal officials communicated with technology giants such as Twitter and Facebook about the removal or restriction of content – specifically pertaining to Covid the 2020 election likely constituted a violation of First Amendment protections for US citizens.

Information, whether truthful or not, is not supposed to be in the purview of the government to police. Though, the Biden administration has attempted to defend its engagement with social media companies as a necessary approach to protecting public health and safety.

Conversely, the plaintiffs, who include the Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, contend that the federal government’s communication with these companies amounted to a state-sanctioned censorship campaign.

In the initial ruling, Judge Doughty issued an injunction preventing a wide range of federal entities from engaging in communication with any social media company to urge, encourage, pressure, or induce the removal or suppression of speech.

However, the ruling does provide for certain exceptions. Notably, it permits government engagement with social media companies in instances involving criminal activity (including that which is election-related), national security concerns, or other threats to public security.

The appeal by the Justice Department marks a significant development in an ongoing legal matter that has far-reaching implications for the relationship between the government and social media platforms and the ability of the government to suppress speech.

July 6, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Exposed, the multi-billion-dollar illusion of ‘HIV’: Part 3

Readers of TCW will be familiar with Neville Hodgkinson’s critical reporting of the ‘Covid crisis’ since December 2020, notably his expert, science-based informed alarm about the mass ‘vaccine’ rollout, so absent from mainstream coverage. What they may be less aware of is the international storm this former Sunday Times medical and science correspondent created in the 1990s by reporting a scientific challenge to the ‘HIV’ theory of Aids, presaging the hostile response to science critics of Covid today. In this series he details findings that form the substance of his newly updated and expanded book, How HIV/Aids Set the Stage for the Covid Crisis, on the controversy. It is available here. You can read Part 1 of this series here and Part 2 here. 

By Neville Hodgkinson | TCW Defending Freedom | July 5, 2023

When Covid was first perceived as a threat to public health in 2020, many governments rejected advice that protection should focus on those most at risk. They jeopardised the health and lives of millions through repeated lockdowns and the reckless rollout of experimental mRNA injections. In the panic surrounding the arrival of the genetically engineered SARS-CoV-2, unnecessary deaths occurred as a result of inappropriate forced ventilation, neglect of antibiotic treatment of associated bacterial infections, and the banning of effective medical therapy such as ivermectin.

Awareness of the scientific hubris that brought Covid into being, and of the corruption and abuse of power that turned the virus’s escape into a mega-crisis, has become widespread. The internet made it possible for critics to air data countering the official narratives, despite persistent attempts at censoring so-called ‘misinformation’.

Far fewer people know that a similar medical madness came into being nearly 40 years ago, before the internet was with us.

In the Aids era, a new, lethal, sexually transmitted virus known as HIV was said to be putting us all at risk. ‘Aids does not discriminate’, we were told. A warning leaflet, heralded by a television advertisement featuring a giant tombstone, was delivered to every household in Britain.

It took nearly a quarter of a century before a senior World Health Organization (WHO) official admitted (in 2008) that, outside sub-Saharan Africa, there would be no global heterosexual pandemic.

Despite that admission, an HIV industry continues to thrive. It has proved an endless bonanza for drug companies, special interest groups and the medical research community. At least 100 journals are dedicated to HIV/Aids medicine, including Lancet HIV, and scores of major conferences are held every year. AIDS 2024, the 25th International AIDS Conference, will take place in Munich next July and is expected to bring together some 18,000 participants from around the world.

The band plays on, but has given no time or space for acknowledgement or examination of decades of painstaking work by a small but dedicated group of scientists who maintain that ‘HIV’ is a mythological entity.

As described here yesterday, the group was led by the late Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, a biophysicist based at the Royal Perth Hospital, Western Australia, who critically analysed all aspects of the theory that Aids is caused by a deadly virus. She suffered endless rebuffs and abuse from the mainstream scientific community before her death in March 2022.

In 2017 the group posted on their website a highly referenced 80-page paper setting out their case that despite thousands of claims to the contrary, there is still no proof that such a virus has been isolated from the tissues of Aids patients.

They argue that because the true causes of Aids are not being adequately addressed, millions globally, and especially in poor countries, are being burdened with a false diagnosis of ‘HIV’ infection. Many of those who have tested ‘HIV’-positive, and even who are thought to be at risk of doing so, are being advised to take drugs whose claimed benefits come at the cost of serious toxicities. In Africa, while millions are malnourished, scarce resources are being diverted into fighting an illusory ‘HIV’ epidemic.

The Perth Group presents a case that the real cause of Aids, common to the various groups at risk of the syndrome, is prolonged breach of a chemical homeostatic process (called redox) that enables our body cells to balance energy expenditure with energy replenishment. Oxidising substances bring about the former, and antioxidants the latter. When cells are over-oxidised, this ‘oxidative stress’ depletes energy potential and can damage cell structures. The theory says Aids has this mechanism at its heart, and that the virus theory was questionable from the start because it was already known that over-oxidation leads to the appearance of ‘opportunistic’ infections seen in Aids. It maintains that Aids can be prevented and treated both by reducing exposure to oxidants, and through greater exposure to antioxidants.

The different groups of patients at risk of Aids had in common powerful oxidising stimuli in their lives. These included injected and ingested recreational drugs; nitrite inhalants used for sexual enhancement; repeated infections and many of the medicines used to treat them; blood-clotting agents given to haemophiliacs, previously made from the pooled blood of thousands of donors; and semen from unprotected anal sex.

Antioxidants include vitamins A, C and E and are available naturally in many types of vegetables, fruits, and grains. It was a tragedy for South Africa when President Thabo Mbeki was derided for suggesting more than 20 years ago that there could be dietary solutions to the immune deficiencies widely experienced on the continent.

The roots of the HIV theory, the Perth scientists say, lay in the feverish atmosphere of fear and anxiety that arose in the early years of Aids, when signals arising from disordered cells became misinterpreted as evidence of a new virus. An unvalidated test led to the mistaken belief that millions were infected. Once the global alert was sounded, it became almost impossible for contrary views to be heard.

The group emailed their 2017 deconstruction of ‘HIV’, the fruit of some 40 years of work, to seven top scientific and medical journals. They offered to prepare a concise version if the critique was thought ‘worthy of being brought to the attention of the scientific community’. Three of the journals failed to reply, despite repeated requests. None took up the offer.

I reported aspects of the group’s work myself in the 1990s while employed as science correspondent of the London Sunday Times, and subsequently in The Business and The European.

In recent years I have tried many times to draw their magnum opus to the attention of leading scientists. To help make it more accessible, I wrote a summary of the arguments, now also posted on the Perth Group’s website. This identifies six key pillars of the HIV/Aids paradigm which, according to their analysis, all involved a misinterpretation of what was actually going on biologically.

At the suggestion of a former president of the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of sciences, I wrote to three senior biologists asking for guidance as to how the group’s theory could at least be examined. None replied.

Recently, two experts in the field whom I greatly respect did have the courtesy to respond. One regretted that he was too busy to enter into discussion. The other, a UK pioneer of the search for an HIV vaccine, assured me he had worked with concentrated virus. When I asked him for a reference demonstrating proof that his concentrate was HIV, however, the publications to which he referred me came nowhere near doing that.

Part of the problem lies in the very nature of retroviruses, the family of microbes to which HIV is said to belong. When scientists were developing the HIV theory, it was not realised that the human genome is full of mobile genetic elements, called retrotransposons, that amplify themselves by first being transcribed from DNA to RNA, and then transcribed back into DNA. The second part of this process requires an enzyme called reverse transcriptase (RT), which plays a big role in gene expression.

Detection of RT was wrongly interpreted by the HIV pioneers as meaning a retrovirus was present.

In a 1988 Scientific American article describing the history of the purported discovery of HIV, Robert Gallo and the late Luc Montagnier, the two scientists most identified with the theory, wrote: ‘The specimen [tissue from the swollen lymph node of a gay man at risk of Aids] was minced, put into tissue culture and analysed for reverse transcriptase. After two weeks of culture, reverse-transcriptase activity was detected by the culture medium. A retrovirus was present.’

The mistaken belief that RT activity ‘is truly specific to retroviruses’, as Montagnier still maintained several years later, was central to the case that he was the first to discover HIV, a discovery for which in 2008 he and his co-worker Françoise Barré-Sinoussi received a Nobel prize. Yet it is now known that at least two-fifths of the human genome is made up of retrotransposons. Reverse transcriptase is ubiquitous in cells.

The Perth Group declare: ‘We wish it to be understood that the claim, “The evidence that Aids is caused by HIV-1 or HIV-2 is clear-cut, exhaustive and unambiguous, meeting the highest standards of science”, cannot be substantiated.’

Even today, the group say, despite thousands of claims to the contrary, there is still no proof that ‘HIV’ has been isolated from the tissues of Aids patients.

Might this be why HIV/Aids protagonists become abusive in response to challenges to their beliefs, and how the illusions have been sustained for so long? You can build endless castles in the air on top of a fundamentally flawed idea.

Next: The missing particles

July 6, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Walensky Warns Public to Beware of ‘Misinformation’ and ‘Politicized Science’

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 5, 2023

As she ended her tenure last week as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Dr. Rochelle Walensky warned the American public to be on guard against “misinformation” and the “politicization of science.”

Walensky told The Wall Street Journal she hopes Americans will make health decisions based on “their own risk assessment and their own personal risks, but not through politics,” emphasizing that public health recommendations also shouldn’t be politicized.

“Ironically, this comes after two-and-a-half years of Walensky misinforming the public and politicising the science,” investigative journalist Maryanne Demasi, Ph.D., wrote on her Substack.

Demasi and many others took to Twitter to remind people of Walensky’s false statements and politicized decision-making.

Walensky last week published a farewell op-ed in The New York Times, in which she wrote that public health is critically important in the U.S., and yet she “fear[s] the despair from the pandemic is fading too quickly from our memories.”

She complained that “the agency [CDC] has been sidelined, chastened by early missteps with Covid and battered by persistent scrutiny.”

She also told the WSJ that public health shouldn’t fall along partisan lines.

Yet stark political partisanship defined her time at the CDC. The WSJ reported that a recent KFF poll showed political affiliation was the strongest demographic predictor of COVID-19 vaccination. And about one-quarter of Americans don’t trust the CDC’s health recommendations, according to a 2022 survey published in the journal Health Affairs.

Walensky acknowledged “missteps in communicating” by the CDC, which, she said, “could have done a better job” making it clear to the public that the agency’s message could change during the pandemic.

But, she told the WSJ, the CDC has a plan to regain public trust in the future — by working directly with media organizations to discuss how to best shape public opinion prior to releasing scientific information to the public.

She said the CDC plans to use a method called “prebunking,” where they will communicate directly with media organizations before they release information to let the media know which details about public health might be “misconstrued.”

According to The Associated Press (AP) “prebunking” by public health agencies allows the agencies to define something as “misinformation” before readers have an opportunity to encounter it elsewhere as possibly true.

Then search engines such as Google prioritize “credible websites” like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) or the CDC’s in its searches.

FDA Commissioner Robert Califf, the Virality Project and Google are among those who have promoted prebunking as a way to combat misinformation.

Journalist Kim Iversen proposed a different approach Walensky might take to restoring public trust in the CDC.

She said:

“Well, the way to do it is to apologize, to own up to your lies, to own up to the mistakes that you made and to discuss why you did that, why the agency followed such political partisanship when they should have been following science, why they ignored the science that was right in front of them.”

CDC broadcast a long list of ‘misinformation’ during Walensky’s tenure

Throughout her tenure at the CDC, which began when Biden took office in January 2021, Walensky made a series of public statements that have proven to be false.

Evidence has since emerged that Walensky knew many of these statements were false when she made them.

In March 2021, Walensky famously told Rachel Maddow, that “vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick.”

The CDC was forced to walk back her statements a few days later. But that message was the basis for vaccine mandates imposed later that year by the Biden administration, businesses, universities and public venues throughout the country.

In a mid-June congressional hearing, Walensky defended her March statements, claiming they were true at the time.

But the Washington Examiner reported on June 20 that emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request showed Walensky and Dr. Francis Collins were aware of and discussed “breakthrough cases” of COVID-19 in January 2021 — just before the vaccines became widely available — and yet continued to tell the public the vaccines would prevent transmission.

In that same congressional testimony, Walensky also defended the mask mandates, saying that the summary of Cochrane’s review — which found wearing masks in the community “probably makes little to no difference” in preventing viral transmission — had been “retracted.”

But it was neither retracted nor had the authors of the review changed the language in the summary, Demasi reported.

In June 2021, Walensky told “Good Morning America” that the risk of myocarditis was extremely rare, and there was overwhelming data the vaccines were safe for children — even after hundreds of cases of myocarditis had been reported and the CDC had been aware of a safety signal since February.

Under Walensky, the CDC also gave false information on vaccine safety monitoring, added the COVID-19 vaccines to the childhood vaccine schedule despite known harms, withheld data on boosters from the agency’s own advisers and told pregnant women the vaccine was safe — just days after Pfizer reportedly finalized a report demonstrating it wasn’t.

In a March study by Krohnert and others, researchers compiled instances of errors in data presented by the CDC during the COVID-19 pandemic in publications, press releases, interviews and Twitter. The authors reported 25 instances where the agency under Walensky promoted demonstrably false numbers.

In most (80%) cases, the CDC exaggerated the severity of the pandemic. For example, Walensky gave a briefing on June 23, 2022, during which she claimed COVID-19 was a “top 5 cause of death” in children, which was untrue.

Most recently, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic gave Walensky until July 12 to turn over phone records involving American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten. The House is investigating potential political interference on the part of AFT with the CDC’s school reopening recommendations during the COVID-19 pandemic, The Defender reported.

Walensky warns of ‘future threats’

Walensky warned at the end of her Times op-ed:

“I want to remind America: The question is not if there will be another public health threat, but when. The C.D.C. needs public and congressional support if it is going to be prepared to protect you from future threats.”

To take on these “future threats” the Biden administration nominated Dr. Mandy Cohen, an internal medicine physician and former state health secretary of North Carolina, to replace Walensky.

But critics warn Cohen is “a public health COVID authoritarian” who is “fully entrenched in the ‘bio-pharmaceutical complex.’”

Dr. Peter McCullough told The Defender that during the COVID-19 pandemic, Cohen failed to recognize therapeutics and natural immunity, and supported lockdowns, vaccine mandates and masking.

Cohen comes to the CDC from the private sector, where she is executive vice president of Aledade and CEO of Aledade Care Solutions, whose executive leadership and board of directors includes people with connections to the World Economic Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Walensky congratulated Cohen on her nomination, describing her as “a respected public health leader who helped North Carolina successfully navigate” COVID-19, and whose “unique experience and accomplished tenure in North Carolina … make her perfectly suited to lead CDC as it moves forward by building on the lessons learned from COVID-19 to create an organization poised to meet public health challenges of the future.”

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 5, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

Dr. Paul Offit Lets Us Know ‘the Experts’ Have Officially Lost Their Minds

By Madhava Setty, M.D. | The Defender | July 5, 2023

I don’t have a big presence on Twitter. I don’t find the platform suitable for exploring and critiquing interesting ideas. You can say only so much in 280 characters. It’s great for inciting someone or dropping a witty comeback or link without much context.

At least that’s what I thought. Then I stumbled upon a tweet from Dr. Paul Offit. He’s taught me that you can convey a lot in a few short sentences.

Who is Dr. Paul Offit?

Offit is a big name in vaccines. Beyond what is listed below, he also sat on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and is presently a member of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

He’s had a say in the approval and/or authorization of many biologics, including the COVID-19 mRNA products.

Briefly, Offit is:

  • Director of the Vaccine Education Center and professor of pediatrics in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
  • Maurice R. Hilleman Professor of Vaccinology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
  • An internationally recognized expert in the fields of virology and immunology.
  • A founding advisory board member of the Autism Science Foundation and the Foundation for Vaccine Research.
  • A member of the Institute of Medicine and co-editor of the foremost vaccine text, “Vaccines.”
  • The author or co-author of more than 150 papers in medical and scientific journals in the areas of rotavirus-specific immune responses and vaccine safety.
  • The co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine, RotaTeq®, recommended for universal use in infants by the CDC.
  • A recipient of the Charles Mérieux Award from the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases.

His list of accomplishments goes on.

I don’t pretend to know more about vaccines than he does. I’m just an anesthesiologist and engineer. He must be a very smart person. Which is why this tweet is so baffling:

Why is Offit tweeting about placebos and saltwater right now?

It has to do with a truth bomb Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropped at a town hall event last week.

According to Kennedy, chairman on leave from Children’s Health Defense, he and attorney Aaron Siri sued the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) after HHS refused to meet their demand to produce at least one study comparing the safety of a vaccine on the childhood immunization schedule with a true placebo.

In a written response received more than a year later, the HHS did not cite a single such study, instead claiming:

“Inert placebo controls are not required to understand the safety profile of a new vaccine, and are thus not required.”

This stupefying claim made by Melinda Wharton, M.D., MPH, acting director of the National Vaccine Program Office, should be attacked on podcasts and publications everywhere.

How do you know that a new vaccine is safe if it isn’t tested against an inert placebo, Dr. Wharton?

If you are someone who is willing to abandon basic logic and trust every single word spewed by our public health agencies, ask yourself, why then does the FDA demand that medicines be tested against a placebo to ensure safety prior to licensure?

Twitter lit up around this pivotal topic. The tweet from one of the foremost vaccine experts in the world (Offit) was in response to Siri, who, according to Offit, asserted that virtually all vaccines on the childhood vaccination schedule, including RotaTeq (Offit’s brainchild), were not licensed by the FDA based on a placebo-controlled clinical trial.

Let’s break down Offit’s attack on Siri. Offit states: “The purpose of placebos, which are immunologically inert, is to determine the effect of the vaccine.”

Yes, Dr. Offit, one purpose of a placebo is to determine the effect of the vaccine. In order to prove that it works, it must do better than an immunologically inert substance. In other words, it must exceed the so-called placebo effect.

But that’s not the only purpose placebos serve. With regard to safety, a new vaccine has to be compared to something that has the least possible chance of causing deleterious effects.

To be clear, those who eschew a vaccine do not get in line for a shot of an “immunologically inert substance.” They stay away from the vaccine clinic altogether and take their chances.

This is why the placebo must be a true placebo. The best we can possibly do is use saline, a saltwater solution that reasonably matches the sodium concentration in our plasma. It is what is used to dilute medications and replenish blood volume. It’s what you use to store your contact lenses.

Offit then adds this:

“[Aaron Siri] believes that only water or salt water are placebos because they ‘have no effect on living beings.’ That’s absurd. Drink enough water, and you can cause a seizure. Salt can also be toxic.”

Offit is saying that by drinking a large amount of water the plasma sodium concentration in a person can abruptly decrease which, in fact, can lower the seizure threshold. He’s not wrong, it does happen in pathological conditions, especially in the critically ill.

Can salt be toxic? Yes. Ingestion of a large amount of salt will stimulate properly functioning kidneys to increase the absorption of free water, thus mitigating the effect of the salt load. This can cause volume overload and put a person at risk for heart failure and pulmonary edema.

So what — if not 0.2 ml of saline — should we use for a placebo, Dr. Offit? A tiny aliquot of adjuvants (that can include elements like aluminum)? Pro-inflammatory lipid nanoparticles? Viral or toxin deactivators like formaldehyde? Preservatives like thimerosal that contain mercury, one of the most potent neurotoxins known (yes, mercury in this form is still in some flu vaccines according to the CDC)?

All of these substances are “immunologically inert.”

But why would you consider using them as a placebo control if not to mask the potential harm of the vaccine in question?

Is that how inventors of vaccines for our children view placebos? Is that how advisory committee members on the FDA view them? What about the other advisory board members of the Autism Science Foundation? Why would anyone trust any vaccine on the childhood immunization schedule after such comments?

You don’t have to be Maurice R. Hilleman Chair of Vaccinology at the Perelman School of Medicine to see that your comments here are misleading, disingenuous and purposefully inciting.

Moreover, they don’t make any sense.

What would other recipients of your long list of awards have to say about your comments on placebos? I don’t think they would approve, sir.

Your public statements also sully the excellent reputation of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and those who were lucky to train there, like me.

Dr. Setty has been a board certified anesthesiologist since 2002 and has held various leadership positions in his clinical practice.

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 5, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

“Orwellian Ministry Of Truth” Busted – Judge Bars Biden Officials, Agencies From Contacting Social Media Companies

By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | July 5, 2023

In an order fittingly issued on Independence Day, a federal judge in Louisiana has forbidden multiple federal agencies and named officials from having any contact with social media companies with the intent to moderate content.

The preliminary injunction arises from a suit filed by the states of Missouri and Louisiana, along with individuals that include two leading critics of the Covid-19 lockdown regime — Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff and Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya — and Jim Hoft, who owns the right-wing website Gateway Pundit.

“If the allegations made by plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history,” wrote US District Judge Terry A. Doughty. “The plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in establishing that the government has used its power to silence the opposition.”

The dozens of people and agencies bound by the injunction include President Biden, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, the Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control, the Treasury Department, State Department, the US Election Assistance Commission, the FBI and entire Justice Department, and the Department of Health and Human Services.

Bhattacharya and Kulldorff, who are among the originators of the Great Barrington Declaration that denounced the lockdown regime, have been victims of social media censorship. For example, the pair says their censorship-triggering statements included assertions that “thinking everyone must be vaccinated is scientifically flawed,” questioning the value of masks, and stating that natural immunity is stronger than vaccine immunity.

While the case is dominated by Covid-19 censorship, it also encompasses the Justice Department’s efforts to suppress reporting about Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” in the run-up to the 2020 election. Doughty gave credence to that accusation.

The injunction represents a major validation of accusations that government officials have colluded with social media platforms to suppress speech that counters official narratives, with the restraints falling almost exclusively on conservative viewpoints.

“The evidence thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario,” wrote Doughty in a 155-page ruling. “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’.”

“The White House defendants made it very clear to social-media companies what they wanted suppressed and what they wanted amplified,” wrote Doughty. “Faced with unrelenting pressure from the most powerful office in the world, the social-media companies apparently complied.”

Doughty quoted communications from administration officials to social media company employees, saying they represent “examples of coercion exercised by the White House defendants.” Here’s a small sampling:

  • “Cannot stress the degree to which this needs to be resolved immediately. Please remove this account immediately.”
  • To Facebook: “Are you guys fucking serious? I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today.”
  • “This is a concern that is shared at the highest (and I mean highest) levels of the WH”
  • “Hey folks, wanted to flag the below tweet and am wondering if we can get moving on the process of having it removed. ASAP”

The judge noted that the badgering came simultaneous with threats of changing the social media regulation scheme, and that those threats had extra credibility since they came as the Democrats controlled the White House and Congress.

The accusation that the social media platforms and government were acting in concert is substantiated by the communication and bureaucracy that surrounded the endeavor. “Many emails between the White House and social-media companies referred to themselves as ‘partners.’ Twitter even sent the White House a ‘Partner Support Portal’ for expedited review of the White House’s requests,” wrote Doughty, a 2017 Trump nominee.

A long list of agencies and people are now barred from contacting social media platforms with “the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.”

“If there is a bedrock principal underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable,” wrote Doughty.

July 5, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Cancer Care and The Role of Repurposed Drugs – Dr. Paul Marik & Dr. Mobeen Syed

FLCCC Weekly Update – June 28, 2023 

Betsy Ashton hosts Dr. Marik and Dr. Mobeen Syed (Dr. Been) to discuss Dr. Marik’s new ‘Cancer Care’ document and look at the role repurposed drugs have in cancer treatment.

Read ‘Challenging the Status Quo: How  learned that much of what he once understood about cancer was wrong:
https://geni.us/FLCCC-Substack-June28

Dr. Marik’s “Cancer Care” doc can e found here:
http://flccc.net/cancer-care

To learn more about our protocols click here:
https://covid19criticalcare.com/covid-19-protocols/

July 5, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment

Exposed, the multi-billion-dollar illusion of ‘HIV’: Part 2

Readers of TCW will be familiar with Neville Hodgkinson’s critical reporting of the ‘Covid crisis’ since December 2020, notably his expert, science-based informed alarm about the mass ‘vaccine’ rollout, so absent from mainstream coverage. What they may be less aware of is the international storm this former Sunday Times medical and science correspondent created in the 1990s by reporting a scientific challenge to the ‘HIV’ theory of Aids, presaging the hostile response to science critics of Covid today. In this series he details findings that form the substance of his newly updated and expanded book, How HIV/Aids Set the Stage for the Covid Crisis, on the controversy. It is available here. You can read the first part of this series here. 

By Neville Hodgkinson | TCW Defending Freedom | July 4, 2023

When an idea is fervently adopted by most of the world’s doctors, scientists and politicians and supported by millions of people, it is a tall order to make the case for a rethink. Such was the experience of biophysicist Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, who 40 years ago developed a detailed theory about Aids that contradicts the generally accepted belief that a deadly virus, HIV, is the cause. Decades of unremitting censorship and rejection preceded her death from heart failure in March 2022, aged 85.

Her story has important, and disturbing, implications for our understanding of what has been happening with the Covid crisis.

Born in Greek Macedonia, she and her brother Dmitris were part of a kinder diaspora sent to Eastern Europe to escape the Greek civil war of 1946-49. She was cared for well, and graduated with a Masters degree in nuclear physics from the University of Bucharest, Romania.

In 1965, at the age of 29, she was reunited with her family in Perth, Western Australia, where they had emigrated. She learned English and joined the staff of the medical physics department at the Royal Perth Hospital, remaining on the books there for more than half a century.

In September 1976 she married Kosta Eleopulos, also a child sent to Romania who eventually found his way to Australia. She blamed herself for his death, five years later, from gastric cancer, believing she should have been able to save him with the knowledge she had acquired.

Her job was to research and improve radiation treatments for cancer patients. The work led her into a deep examination of some fundamentals in biology, in particular how the body’s cells maintain healthy function, and the mechanisms involved when their activity and growth become disordered.

In 1982 the high-prestige Journal of Theoretical Biology published a 21-page paper in which she explored how oxidation causes cell activation and expenditure of energy, while a counterpart process known as reduction enables the cell to absorb and store energy. The processes have a cyclic nature, controlled by a periodic exchange of electrical charge between two proteins, actin and myosin.

Changes in the factors regulating these cycles beyond the point where homoeostatic safety mechanisms are breached can lead to a variety of disorders, including cancer.

When Aids was first reported in 1981, ‘it wasn’t too big a jump to see that oxidative mechanisms had the power to explain much about Aids and perhaps even “HIV” itself,’ says Valendar Turner, an emergency physician at the Royal Perth, one of a small band of doctors and scientists who tried to help Papadopulos’s work become more widely known.

In explaining the seemingly disparate groups of people at risk of Aids, her theory implicated a variety of toxins, all known to be powerful oxidants. These included injected and ingested drugs; nitrite inhalants used for sexual enhancement; repeated infections and many of the agents used to treat them; blood-clotting agents given to haemophiliacs, which in the early days of Aids were made from concentrated extracts of blood from thousands of donors; and anally deposited sperm. Semen in the rectum is separated from blood vessels and the lymph system by a single, easily penetrated layer of cells, whereas the vagina has a thick protective lining.

In this multifactorial theory of Aids, the various contributory factors were unified by their shared ability to put the body’s tissues under a chronic, progressively destructive oxidative assault. This affects all cells in the body, not just immune cells, injuring them to the point of their becoming susceptible to the microbial infections and cancers that underlie the Aids diseases.

Papadopulos also described how this process gave rise to biochemical phenomena which, she maintained, had been misinterpreted as meaning a new virus was present.

She was an immensely dedicated scientist who built up a huge body of work on these lines, citing thousands of studies from the fields of virology, immunology and epidemiology in support of her case. Yet of six papers she wrote from these perspectives during the 1980s, only one was published, and even then only after protracted correspondence countering criticism from referees.

Entitled Reappraisal of Aids – is the Oxidation Induced by the Risk Factors the Primary Cause? it was written mostly in 1985 and twice rejected by Nature during 1986. It finally saw the light of day in 1988 in the journal Medical Hypotheses, which although a serious scientific publication does not carry the same weight as the mainstream journals.

A breakthrough appeared imminent when in 2010 Medical Hypotheses accepted two more papers. One reviewed evidence that Aids is not an STI – a sexually transmitted infection – although it can be sexually acquired through the mechanisms described above. The other questioned whether HIV had ever been proven to exist. Both papers, with their every assertion supported by detailed references, entered the pipeline for publication.

A prolonged silence followed, in the wake of which Professor Bruce Charlton, the journal’s editor, explained that the journal’s owner Elsevier, a giant Netherlands-based publisher specialising in scientific and medical content, had ‘intercepted’ the papers. When he insisted on keeping them in press, he was fired. His successor pulled them both.

One of the aims of this series is to appeal to the global scientific community to re-examine the HIV theory, not just because of the harm I believe it to be causing, but because of the clues it gives us as to how and why the Covid pandemic also became so badly mishandled. In both instances, misinformation by powerful agencies played a big part. This robbed the public and most media outlets of the ability to judge the situations accurately.

With Covid, once it was realised that SARS-CoV-2 was on the loose, organised efforts were made to hide the laboratory origin of the virus. If the truth were known, future funds would be at risk. The prestige of biomedical science itself was at stake.

Funding agencies, and journals such as Science, Nature and The Lancet which depend heavily on advertisements related to biomedical research, put their weight behind attempts to persuade us that the virus had a natural origin. Anyone who suggested otherwise was labelled a ‘conspiracy theorist’. At the same time, exaggerated fears about the risks involved among those ‘in the know’ about the virus’s genetically engineered status led to the betrayal of long-established principles for pandemic management as well as vaccine safety.

Anthony Fauci, who stood down at the end of 2022 as head of the US Government’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), was central to this cover-up in early 2020, and in the subsequent drive for mass vaccination. He showed a frightening degree of certainty in his leadership abilities (attributed by some to his Jesuit education) declaring in a 2021 interview: ‘Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.’ He condemned as ‘ridiculous’ the Great Barrington Declaration, signed by 60,000 doctors and scientists, opposing lockdowns and urging that protection should be focused on the most vulnerable. He likened it to ‘Aids denialism’, an insult long used by the Aids industry to stifle questioning of the HIV theory.

The US ended up with one of the highest Covid death rates in the world.

Money plays a big part in maintaining the illusions. The drug companies that won the race with the mRNA vaccines earned a $100billion jackpot. Vast sums were spent on advertising and on grants for scientific, medical, consumer and civil rights groups who helped to promote the jab. Largesse of this kind readily distorts judgment. Beneficiaries find it all too easy to close their minds to arguments that might jeopardise the flow of cash.

Most mainstream media went along with the obfuscations, and the many damaging policies that came in their wake, including false predictions of spread, extended lockdowns, neglect of treatment protocols, and an experimental, poorly tested vaccine promoted globally as safe and effective, in the hope of gaining some kind of redemption for science. According to a recent reanalysis of trial data reported in the journal Cell, the mRNA vaccines had no effect on overall mortality.

Fauci set a similar lead on Aids. When the syndrome was first recognised, he was the newly appointed head of NIAID. He supported the ‘deadly virus’ theory of Aids to the hilt, telling the New York Times in 1987, just three years after HIV’s purported discovery, that the evidence it causes Aids ‘is so overwhelming that it almost doesn’t deserve discussion any more’. As with Covid, dissenting voices were not tolerated.

Yet the virus theory reeked of bad science from the start. Callous disregard of the first Aids victims because of their ‘fast-track’ urban gay lifestyle gave way to an urgent search for a less discriminatory explanation for the syndrome, and a front-runner proposal was that a virus might be involved. US Government researcher Robert Gallo, in what he called his ‘passionate’ phase, determined that if that was the case, his team should be the first to identify it.

When the French scientist Luc Montagnier tentatively suggested that genetic material he had drawn from Aids patients’ lymph nodes could mean a virus was present, British and American experts, including Gallo, dismissed the idea. But after finding a way to amplify the material sent to him by Montagnier, Gallo announced at a government-backed press conference that the ‘probable’ cause of Aids had been found. A blood test for what would soon be called the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) was in the pipeline, and a vaccine would be available within two years. Gallo did not acknowledge that he had worked with material sent to him by Montagnier.

Decades later, the search for a vaccine continues, with Africans usually the main test subjects. There have been more than 250 failed trials, costing billions of dollars.

As we shall see, the ‘HIV’ test rushed out on the basis of Gallo’s work did not demonstrate the presence of a specific virus. It had value as a broad screen for blood safety, but was never validated for diagnostic purposes. Nevertheless, it was nodded through for wider use at a World Health Organization meeting in Geneva in April, 1986, after regulators were told it was ‘simply not practical’ to stop this.

As the idea grew that all sexually active people were at risk, the test kits became big earners, and an international row broke out over who should get the credit. Eventually a profit-sharing agreement was brokered by the French and American governments, but in the meantime the high-profile dispute helped to consolidate the theory in most people’s minds. The idea that both Montagnier and Gallo were mistaken in equating an ‘HIV-positive’ test result with risk of Aids became as unthinkable as a religious heresy.

There was one prominent challenger, who met the same fate as scientists questioning Covid orthodoxies. In 1987 US molecular biologist Professor Peter Duesberg, a world expert on retroviruses, of which HIV was supposed to be one, published a long scholarly article in the journal Cancer Research arguing that HIV was a harmless passenger among the many infections picked up by Aids patients, and by those at risk for Aids. Everything he knew about retroviruses told him this could not possibly be the cause of such a devastating illness as Aids.

The alarm this caused was revealed in an internal memo about the paper from the office of the Secretary of Health and Human Services to recipients including the Surgeon General and the White House. Headed MEDIA ALERT, it warned:

‘This obviously has the potential to raise a lot of controversy (If this isn’t the virus, how do we know the blood supply is safe? How do we know anything about transmission? How could you all be so stupid and why should we ever believe you again?) and we need to be prepared to respond.’

The journal’s editor was astonished that he did not receive a single letter in response, though Duesberg learned privately from a number of colleagues that they had been shaken by his analysis.

Like a person hiding some guilty secret, the scientific world was refusing to admit publicly that such a huge mistake could have been made. We are witnessing a similar state of denial today regarding deaths and injuries caused by the Covid vaccines.

On November 17, 1988, the late John Maddox, then editor of Nature, who rejected numerous submissions from Duesberg on HIV and Aids, wrote to him: ‘I am glad you correctly infer from my letter that I am in many ways sympathetic to what you say. I did not ask you to revise the manuscript, however. The danger, as it seems to me, is that the dispute between you and what you call the HIV community will mislead and distress the public in the following way. You point to a number of ways in which the HIV hypothesis may be deficient. It would be a rash person who said that you are wrong, but . . . if we were to publish your paper, we would find ourselves asking people to believe that what has been said so far about the cause of Aids is a pack of lies.’

Well . . . yes! But isn’t error-correction supposed to be science’s great strength?

Duesberg, previously a shining star in the virological world with a $350,000 ‘outstanding investigator’ award from the National Institutes of Health, became persona non grata in the mainstream scientific community. His subsequent research grant applications were rejected. Graduate students were advised to steer clear of him. Fauci and others refused to attend conferences or broadcast debates if he was to contribute. Publication of papers became difficult. His university could not fire him, but while other faculty members dealt with weighty matters such as teaching policies and speaker invitations, he was placed in charge of the annual picnic committee.

In contrast, today Gallo tops a list of National Institutes of Health scientists who shared an estimated $350million in royalties between 2010 and 2020, according to a recent report by Open the Books, a nonprofit government watchdog.

Incomprehension and intolerance of any criticism of ‘HIV’ have continued through the decades. When President Mbeki of South Africa set up a panel in 2000 to look into Aids science,he became the subject of an international campaign of ridicule to bring him down.

When Celia Farber, a brilliant American journalist covering the controversy since the mid-1980s, wrote a major piece about it for Harper’s in 2006, the Columbia Journalism Review condemned her for espousing a ‘crackpot theory’, ‘widely refuted for years’.

When the journal Frontiers in Public Health published a peer-reviewed article in 2014 by Dr Patricia Goodson, a highly respected professor of health education, entitled ‘Questioning the HIV/Aids hypothesis: 30 years of dissent’, there were immediate protests. The article was allowed to stand, but with several invited critical commentaries to go alongside it ‘to ensure that all readers understand that the causal link between HIV and Aids cannot be called into question’.

Five years later, following the appointment of a new editor, Dr Paolo Vineis of Imperial College London, the article was retracted. This was not because of any errors, but because it was reaching too many people. It had received more than 91,800 views, while the commentaries had fewer than 19,000 between them. Announcing the retraction, the Frontiers editorial office said it had been decided that the article ‘presents a public health risk by lending credibility to refuted claims that place doubt on the HIV causation of Aids’.

The claims have not been refuted: they have been suppressed. Leaders of the scientific world have stubbornly refused to discuss them, just as they are refusing now to face the evidence of extensive harm from the mRNA Covid injections.

In both instances, with such extreme sensitivity to any criticism, the question arises: What are they trying to hide?

I have dedicated How HIV/Aids Set the Stage for the Covid Crisis to Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos in the hope that her endeavours will not have been in vain and that finally her work and genius will get the attention and recognition it deserves.

Next: Where ‘HIV’ pioneers first went wrong

July 5, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Exposed, the multi-billion-dollar illusion of ‘HIV’: Part 1

Readers of TCW will be familiar with Neville Hodgkinson’s critical reporting of the ‘Covid crisis’ since December 2020, notably his expert, science-based informed alarm about the mass ‘vaccine’ rollout, so absent from mainstream coverage. What they may be less aware of is the international storm this former Sunday Times medical and science correspondent created in the 1990s by reporting a scientific challenge to the ‘HIV’ theory of Aids, presaging the hostile response to science critics of Covid today. In this series, written exclusively for TCW, he details findings that form the substance of his newly updated and expanded book, How HIV/Aids Set the Stage for the Covid Crisis, on the controversy. It is available here.

By Neville Hodgkinson | TCW Defending Freedom | July 3, 2023

Three years into the Covid crisis, many are now aware of the disastrous advice on which so many governments blindly acted. False predictions of spread, fearmongering propaganda, lockdowns damaging young and old, suppression of cheap treatments to make way for a dangerous, experimental vaccine . . . so much of ‘the science’ turned out to be fiction, hugely profitable for a few but harmful for billions.

These failures have brought back into focus claims that the syndrome known as HIV/Aids was – and still is – being similarly mishandled and exploited by the worlds of medical science, public health and Big Pharma. Robert Kennedy Jr documents this in detail his best-selling 2021 book The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.

What few people know however is that for almost 40 years a small group of scientists has deconstructed almost every aspect of the theory that Aids is caused by a lethal, sexually transmitted virus known as HIV. Their critique goes beyond questioning HIV as the cause of Aids. They say ‘HIV’ has never even been proved to exist. And the reason you have probably never heard of their work is that, like the doctors and scientists who challenged Covid insanities, they have been silenced at every turn.

With Covid, pressure to conform came through government-directed appeals to our higher nature through slogans such as ‘Stay at home. Protect the NHS. Save Lives’ and ‘Every vaccination gives us hope’. The implied claim was that anyone who thought differently was either an idiot or a murderer.

Similarly with Aids, advocates of the deadly virus theory sought to make those who questioned it sound as though they were lacking in compassion, irresponsible or stupid.

I was working as medical correspondent of the London Sunday Times in the 1980s when Aids suddenly became big news after American government scientists claimed to have identified a previously unknown virus as the cause of a mysterious cluster of symptoms related to severely depleted immunity. They included Kaposi’s sarcoma, a cancer affecting the skin and internal organs; severe candidiasis; and pneumonia caused by an out-of-control fungus. The symptoms proved resistant to treatment, and fatal in a number of cases.

The first victims were groups of gay men who were challenging long-standing homophobic attitudes in American society through what came to be known as the ‘fast-track’ gay lifestyle. This involved multiple sex partners and heavy drug use.

The partying was fun, I was later told, but it caused disease microbes to become pooled among participants such that almost every encounter carried a risk of infection. Prophylactic use of antibiotics staved off some illnesses but contributed to an underlying deterioration, and in some cases complete collapse, of the immune system.

The crisis at first met an unsympathetic response from the right-wing Reagan administration. The common histories of the victims led to dismissive descriptions of Aids as a ‘gay plague’. As numbers increased, however, outrage and anger grew. Those involved had often already suffered greatly from discriminatory attitudes and behaviour, and their efforts to end this bigotry through the Gay Lib movement looked to be under threat.

That was the context in which US biomedical researcher Robert Gallo found immediate acceptance when in 1984 he claimed to have identified a deadly virus, new to humanity, as the cause of Aids. The theory took off like wildfire and by the end of 1984 had come to be accepted by virtually everyone. The microbe Gallo said he had found became known as the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, or HIV.

It brought virologists, drug companies and public health experts to centre stage. Taxpayer dollars, eventually reaching hundreds of billions, were poured into Aids research and treatment through the US National Institutes of Health, in particular the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) under the leadership of Dr Anthony Fauci. Well-funded NGOs and activist groups sprang up with the aim of contributing to the fight against the disease.

Religious leaders warmed to the theory because it discouraged sleeping around. Politicians liked it because it put in place a new ‘enemy within’ against which they could claim to offer protection with advertising campaigns such as the UK’s ‘Aids: Don’t Die of Ignorance’ – a precursor of the intense propaganda inflicted on us with the advent of Covid-19.

Media people – including me, I am ashamed to say – vigorously promulgated warnings that the virus put at risk everyone and anyone who had sex. It felt good to be not just selling newspapers, but helping to sound the alert.

Young people were less readily taken in. James Delingpole has recalled how the ad campaign put a dampener on his sex life, though after the initial shock it became increasingly clear to him that the government had been overstating the case.

In fact, as the late Nobel Prize-winning chemist Kary Mullis and other scientists were to point out, there never was a body of scientific evidence demonstrating the validity of the ‘deadly new virus’ idea. That remains the case today, despite hundreds of thousands of papers having been published over the years predicated on the HIV belief system.

Henry Bauer, a retired professor of science studies who has drawn on numerous sources in documenting The Case Against HIV, says: ‘Anyone open to looking at the actual data . . . can find an enormous amount of evidence that the diagnosis of HIV as cause of AIDS is simply wrong.’

One lasting outcome of the theory was that by ‘democratising’ Aids, with the message that the disease did not discriminate and so everyone was at risk, it prevented the feared setbacks for the Gay Lib movement. Lesbian and gay rights became firmly established in American society, and in some other parts of the world.

In many other ways, however, the global hysteria to which the theory gave rise has had disastrous consequences, some of which continue to this day.

A failed cancer drug called AZT, pulled off the shelf by American government researchers because of an apparent anti-HIV effect, killed and injured thousands. It was administered in high doses not just to people with Aids but to gay men, haemophiliacs and others thought to be HIV-infected, earning hundreds of millions of pounds for the US drug company Burroughs Wellcome and its British parent, the Wellcome Foundation (later taken over by Glaxo). American and British government institutions promoted it vigorously as the ‘gold standard’ of Aids treatment. Doctors who stepped publicly out of line were hounded out of the profession.

Although later generations of drugs can genuinely help to support a failing immune system, 40 years of research has failed to bring either a vaccine or cure for the purported ‘HIV’ infection. Taken over long periods, the drugs themselves can kill, contributing significantly to the 800 or so deaths reported annually of ‘people living with HIV’ in the UK.

The most widespread and long-lasting harm, however, has been to the countless people around the world, especially in Africa and of African descent, terrorised with a false belief that they are victims of a sexually transmitted virus which only Western medicine has the means to hold at bay. The World Health Organization (WHO) claims that more than 80million people have been infected, and that about 40million have died from HIV. Three-fifths of purported new HIV infections are said by WHO to be in the African region. African Americans are eight times more likely to be diagnosed with HIV infection compared with the white population.

American taxpayers in particular have been burdened with the huge expense of maintaining an industry that has grown up around HIV/Aids. The US government spends more than $28billion a year on the domestic response, and expenditure globally between 2000 and 2015 totalled more than half a trillion dollars ($562.6billion), according to a University of Washington study. Yet the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), in a never-ending plea for more money, says the pandemic continues to take a life every minute.

In this series of articles I am going to describe the fruits of years of painstaking work by scientists based in Perth, Western Australia, collating evidence challenging almost every aspect of the ‘HIV’ theory. The essence of their case is that there is no ‘HIV’ epidemic, and there never will be a vaccine or cure, because there is no ‘HIV’.

If you find this hard to believe, I am with you entirely in the sense that it took me years to accept fully how wrong I had been in my early reporting on Aids. I documented this painful journey of discovery in my book AIDS: The Failure of Contemporary Science, published in 1996 by Fourth Estate.

If you ask how it could be possible that for 40 years the scientific and medical worlds have failed to correct a belief in a mythological virus, the answer is more sociological than scientific.

Solidarity with the suffering of the gay community played a part – although genuine kindness, such as Louise Hay demonstrated in her early healing work with people with Aids, strongly and successfully challenged the medical view that they were certain to die. An arrogant, but ill-informed, neocolonial drive by countless NGOs to ‘do good’ in poorer parts of the world also contributed. But probably the most powerful and detrimental element in maintaining the deception was the money and influence involved, as governments went into partnership with the hugely profitable pharmaceutical industry. The resources poured into HIV/Aids created thousands of jobs, buying loyal collaboration and stifling dissent.

Highly experienced scientists who spoke out against the theory were ridiculed, defunded, gaslighted, and accused of killing people by weakening the public health message.

I experienced this pressure myself when I began to examine alternative ways of looking at Aids in the early 1990s, when I was  working as Sunday Times science correspondent. Joan Shenton of Meditel, producers of prize-winning but much criticised documentaries on the issue, alerted me to the fact that several distinguished scientists had challenged the idea that HIV could be doing all the damage attributed to it.

Andrew Neil, editor of the Sunday Times, which had serialised Michael Fumento’s 1990 book The Myth of Heterosexual Aids, supported my reports on an ever-deepening scientific challenge to the theory. Over a three-year period, condemnation came from just about every quarter. The deeper the critique went, the shriller the protests became.

In 1993, with the HIV/Aids industry still pointing to Africa as proof of how millions could become infected, Neil told me to go there to find out what was happening. Over six weeks, travelling through Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Tanzania, it became increasingly plain to me that the entire pandemic was an illusion arising from diseases of poverty being reclassified as ‘HIV/Aids’.

My reports to this effect proved too much for the scientific establishment, and Nature – supposedly one of the top scientific journals in the world – declared that we must be stopped. Having decided that picketing our offices would be impractical, the magazine mounted a campaign of ridicule. The UK’s Health Education Authority started an Aids journalism award specifically in my dishonour. They said it was to counter the newspaper’s dangerously misleading coverage. There was incomprehension and abuse from all three main political parties, as well as from scientific and medical chiefs.

But we also heard from many doctors, health workers, gay men, and specialists on Africa, thanking the newspaper for its challenging coverage. An ‘HIV’ diagnosis at that time could still have the power of a witch-doctor’s hex, and people who had tested positive wrote to say that our reports were like a breath of fresh air.

Andrew Neil was undeterred by the hostile bluster, while insisting the paper was ready to publish any evidence that countered the dissident case we were presenting. In 1994 he left the paper for New York, and I left too after his successor John Witherow made it plain that he did not want me to continue this line of reporting. The literary agent David Godwin had been in touch, suggesting a book on the controversy, and this took shape over the following year.

When Fourth Estate published it in 1996, however, it became an early victim of ‘cancel culture’.  The late American gay activist Larry Kramer, at first a bitter critic of Fauci but later his friend and ally, was in the UK at the time of publication to address a conference on Aids. He picked up a copy at a pre-conference gathering, tore several pages, and spat in it, telling his audience: ‘Do the same if you come across this book. They will soon stop stocking it.’ It quickly disappeared from view, subsequently topping a list of ‘Books You’re Not Supposed to Read’ in a work on political incorrectness in science.

(From The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, by Tom Bethell, Regnery, 2005)

I am republishing it now, with additional material including a summary of where the science of ‘HIV’ went wrong, because the story is so redolent of the misunderstandings, mishandling and downright lies surrounding Covid-19. As with Aids, huge grants from Big Pharma and ‘philanthropic’ foundations to researchers, medical associations, consumer groups, and civil rights organisations fuelled the Covid illusions.

There is one important difference. At first I thought the Covid fearmongering was as ill-conceived as that over ‘HIV’ and Aids. It soon became clear, however, that unlike ‘HIV’ this was a genuine pathogen. A disgracefully suppressed paper by the UK’s Professor Angus Dalgleish, working with Norwegian colleagues including a biowarfare expert, demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt the genetically-engineered nature of SARS-CoV-2 (see here and here).

Panic measures to try to hide its laboratory origin confirm that view. These were led by the Chinese, from whose Wuhan laboratory the virus almost certainly escaped, and by Fauci, whose NIAID had part-funded the work. Sir Jeremy Farrar, then director of the UK’s Wellcome Trust and now WHO chief scientist, also played a leading role in the cover-up.

Many are now aware of the adverse social, economic and health consequences of the Covid hysteria into which Fauci and others led us. Billions of people meekly accepted and even welcomed unprecedented lockdowns and other fearmongering measures, along with mass administration of the mRNA gene products. TCW Defending Freedom has been one of few voices constantly critical of the mishandling of Covid over the past three years, despite high-level, far-reaching efforts to silence and defund the site.

Much less widely understood is the way Aids became subject to similar mismanagement 40 years ago, with adverse consequences lasting until today.

July 3, 2023 Posted by | Book Review, Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

The character assassination of Robert F Kennedy Jr

By Niall McCrae | TCW Defending Freedom | July 3, 2023

Will there be another dead Kennedy? I hope not to tempt fate, but as a Democrat nomination candidate for the US presidential election next year, Robert F Kennedy Jr is making himself a target. He rejects the official narrative on Covid-19 and Ukraine, and he rails against Big Pharma, corrupt federal authorities and militaristic foreign policy. The Democratic Party wants to keep the octogenarian and cognitively suspect incumbent Joe Biden, whom many people see as a puppet of the Deep State, struggling to read from an autocue.

Already being RFK is being attacked, albeit by the pen rather than the sword. Liberal-progressive media are troubled by his rise in the polls. First they ignored him; then they ridiculed him; now they are desperately denouncing him as a harmful interference in ‘democracy’ (a term that means something different to the elite than to you and me). Among the latest hit jobs, the Washington Post argued that RFK should be running as a Republican, as that’s where the anti-vaccine constituency lies. A Daily Mail column described him as a serial misogynist (journalists are less concerned with the sitting president’s proclivity for fondling little girls and sniffing their hair).

A recent diatribe in the Los Angeles Times by Michael Hiltzik is so bad that it’s good. RFK had appeared on a 90-minute ‘town hall’ programme on the cable channel News Nation on June 27. Hiltzik wondered why. A similar format featuring Donald Trump on CNN was supposed to be taken by broadcasters as a clear message that nothing can be gained from giving a platform to bombasts and conspiracy theorists. Trump had played to the gallery and taken control of the debate, interrupting and haranguing the weak presenter. Fact-checking ‘quackery’ on a live show is futile.

Although RFK is up to around 20 per cent in polling as a challenger to Biden, Hiltzik belittled him as ‘a fringe candidate for the Democratic Party nomination’. He suggested ulterior motives: ‘perhaps News Nation is trying to assume the mantle of Fox News as a dispenser of right-wing twaddle, or (to be more charitable) of CNN as a sober neutral voice’.  To regard (actually, to disregard) CNN as a fair, unbiased medium shows how once-trusted organs such as the Los Angeles Times have become polarised.

RFK performed in a controlled setting, before a small audience in Chicago, but Hiltzik complained that moderator Elizabeth Vargas was ‘ill-equipped to counter Kennedy’s elaborate web of misinformation about vaccines’. Actually, Vargas did not raise the topic of vaccines until near the end of the debate. This should have come first, Hiltzik averred, ‘because Kennedy’s anti-vaccination stance is a major element of his presidential campaign . . . that’s what makes him a public health hazard’.

As a business editor, Hiltzik is unlikely to have a fraction of the knowledge gained by RFK on vaccines over decades of research. But he felt qualified to rebut the claims of the Democrat pretender. After denying that he is ‘anti-vaccine’, Kennedy asserted that vaccines should be tested like other medicines, but ‘of 72 vaccine doses mandated for American children, not one has ever been subjected to a prelicensing placebo-controlled trial’. ‘Yes, they have,’ Vargas responded. But Hiltzik was exasperated by the host’s failure to ‘catch Kennedy’s deceptive sleight of hand’.  RFK is wrong, according to Hiltzik, as a placebo such as an inert saline injection would be unethical; instead, a new product needs only to perform better than an existing vaccine, not by depriving study participants of potentially life-saving immunisation. Naïve to this Big Pharma stitch-up, Hiltzik believes the propaganda that vaccines have ‘all gone through phased trials mandated by the Food and Drug Administration to determine their safety and gauge their efficacy.’

Quite reasonably, RFK told the New Nation audience that vaccines should be properly tested for long-term risks. Hiltzik scoffed: ‘Does he mean one year? Five years? Thirty years? Some diseases take that long after exposure to manifest themselves. Is 30 years an appropriate period to wait?’

Kennedy focused on two specific vaccines. There is considerable evidence of the chickenpox vaccine, mandated for children in every state of the US, causing outbreaks of shingles in adulthood. Googling it, Hiltzik found the predictable array of pro-vaccine medical authorities denying any link between the vaccine and this painful rash.

The second vaccine of concern was for hepatitis B, a disease transmitted through sexual contact or bodily fluids. RFK asked why this is mandated for young children, but Hiltzik glibly explained that a mother of unknown infection could pass the virus to her newborn.  There will always be a reason to jab kids against every known pathogen.

As Hiltzik explained, ‘while speaking deceptively, he [Kennedy] comes off as earnest — a skill that Donald Trump hasn’t mastered’. The lesson that the media must learn is that ‘there’s no way that even a determined interviewer can fight back against deception and deceit when it’s dispensed by the torrent’. Doing their duty for the establishment, influential broadcasters and newspapers are demanding censorship of presidential candidates: in a functioning democracy this would be so intolerable as to justify removal of their licences. When the establishment threw everything but the kitchen sink at Trump, this proved to his supporters that the system is rigged.

Although best known for his views on vaccines, RFK is causing most trouble through his opposition to the military-industrial complex, a term coined by Dwight Eisenhower in a warning to the American people three days before leaving the White House in 1961. His successor John F Kennedy (RFK’s uncle) delivered his ‘Peace Speech’ in June 1963, conveying his intent to end the arms race and build peaceful stability with Russia. Such outspoken resistance to the generals and CIA may have been the final straw that led to his assassination five months later in Dallas. The US and Nato empire have been waging wars ever since.

Hiltzik had little to say about Kennedy’s contrary views on Ukraine. It is hard to discredit pacifism as ‘disinformation’, never mind ‘dangerous’. But as shown by the ferocity of establishment attacks on Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump, the one topic that is definitely out of bounds is military interventionism. RFK is an imperfect but compassionate and conscientious man. It is grossly insensitive for journalists to describe the son of a murdered father and nephew of a murdered uncle as a mortal hazard.

July 2, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Militarism, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

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