Trudeau announces plans to euthanize “drug addicts” and “mentally ill.”
FRONT NIEUS | October 22, 2023
The Canadian government has announced plans to begin euthanizing “drug addicts” and citizens with a range of mental illnesses.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government plans to relax current “assisted suicide” laws so that more Canadians who have become a burden on taxpayer-funded health care systems can use them, Hunter Fielding reports .
However, critics compare the move to “modern eugenics”.
When Canada’s medically assisted dying (MAID) law changes in March 2024, mental health patients, including those with substance abuse problems, without other physical conditions will be eligible to be legally euthanized by the state.
A special parliamentary committee will re-examine the controversial move ahead of its implementation in coming months, following protests from Trudeau’s opponents in Canada.
Daily Mail reports: More than 10,000 Canadians were euthanized in 2021, a tenfold increase from 2016 when the practice was legalized.
In some cases, people living in poverty have agreed to die.
Currently, people with mental health conditions such as depression and personality disorders without physical conditions are not eligible for assisted suicide.
A framework for assessing people with substance use disorders for MAID is being discussed this week at an annual scientific conference in Canada.
The agenda of the workshop includes teaching participants and medical professionals to “know the difference between suicidality and a motivated desire to die.”
Zoë Dodd, a harm reduction advocate from Toronto, told VICE News that the practice is tantamount to eugenics.
She said: “I just think that MAID, when it has entered the realm of mental health and substance use, is really rooted in eugenics.
“And there are people who are really struggling with substance use and people are actually not getting the support and help that they need.”
Dr. David Martell, chief physician of Addiction Medicine at Nova Scotia Health, who is presenting the framework at the conference, told VICE News :
I don’t think it’s fair, and the government doesn’t think it’s fair, to exclude people from eligibility because their medical condition or their suffering is related to mental illness.
As a subset of these, it is not fair to exclude people from subsidies simply because their mental disorder may be partially or completely a substance use disorder.
It has to do with treating people equally.
The process for an assisted death in Canada starts with downloading a simple form online.
This means that the applicant must answer a number of questions and sign the bottom.
The applicants must then obtain the signatures of witnesses.
This is followed by a phone call and a home visit from a doctor.
If the application is approved by two different doctors, the person must wait 90 days from the time of application.
A doctor can then administer the lethal drug via an injection.
Hollywood director latest sexual predator to find refuge in Israel
MEMO | October 4, 2023
Disgraced Hollywood director Brett Ratner, who stands accused by multiple women of rape and sexual harassment, revealed last week he relocated to Israel just days after being a special guest of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the UN General Assembly in New York.
Ratner has followed in the footsteps of other sexual predators who have fled to Israel in recent years, including another Hollywood director, Bryan Singer, who moved to Israel several years ago after being accused of rape and sexual assault of several minors.
Thanks to lax extradition laws and the so-called “law of return” known as ‘Aliyah’ – which grants citizenship to Jews across the world based on ancestral claims that are two millennia old – Israel has become a sanctuary for Jewish sexual predators as well as countless fraudsters, money launderers, and war criminals.
According to Jewish Community Watch, an organization that tracks accused pedophiles, over 60 US citizens accused of pedophilia have successfully fled to Israel in the past few years.
However, in an interview with Hareetz last year, the head of Magen for Jewish Communities, an Israeli NGO that tracks sexual predators, revealed that “there are about 100 rabbis, teachers, and other figures who have been accused, charged or convicted of sexual abuse overseas and subsequently found refuge in Israel.”
Awareness of Israel’s safe haven status for sex offenders received a boost in recent years due to the case of Israeli-Australian citizen Malka Leifer, the headmistress of an ultra-Orthodox girls’ school in Australia, who fled to Israel in 2008 after allegations surfaced of her sexually abusing female students.
She was finally extradited in 2021 and faces trial in Victoria on 70 charges of child sex abuse.
Another predator who fled to Israel and is finally facing extradition is Mexican diplomat Andres Roemer, who stands accused of rape and sexual harassment by over 60 women. After more than two years of dragging their feet, Israeli authorities arrested Roemer on Monday.
Despite the serious accusations against him, Roemer even had a street named after him in the city of Ramat Gan.
But while Roemer is finally expected to face justice, Mexico is still seeking the extradition of the former head of the criminal investigation agency, Tomas Zeron, who is wanted in connection to the disappearance of 43 students in southwestern Mexico in 2014.
Zeron is also accused of embezzling over $50 million and torturing suspects.
Despite being wanted by Interpol, Zeron has been living in an upscale apartment building in Tel Aviv since late 2019 due to his ties to the Israeli tech sector, including embattled firm NSO Group — makers of the Pegasus spyware.
Furthermore, western media reports revealed earlier this year that Israeli authorities are “unlikely” to extradite Zeron as “payback” for Mexico’s support of the Palestinian cause and their approval of UN inquiries into Israeli war crimes against Palestinians.
SAN FRANCISCO’S GREEN BUILDING NIGHTMARE
By Randy Shaw | BeyondChron | March 3, 2008
The idea of “green” buildings is a terrific marketing concept. In San Francisco, it has helped grease the political roadway for massive, view-blocking luxury condominiums, implying that building these structures is more environmentally sustaining than leaving land vacant. Few seem to care whether green buildings can be a nightmare for those having to work inside high-rise structures lacking heat or air conditioning. The new Thomas Mayne designed Federal Building at 7th and Mission Streets in San Francisco is a case in point.
Lauded by the New York Times as a building that “may one day be remembered as the crowning achievement of the General Services Administration’s Design Excellence program,” what some believe is the greenest federal building in the nation’s history also likely has the worst work environment. While architects describe the building’s “sense of airiness” as “magical,” employees view working in this heat and air-conditioning free building with the wavy concrete floors and ceilings as a nightmare.
Green but Cold
Thomas Mayne’s new George H.W. Bush Federal Building now looms over midtown San Francisco. While people have sharply divergent reactions to its unique exterior design — I happen to like it — the verdict on the structure’s function as a office space for federal employees is nearly unanimous: it is a disaster.
Not that architectural critics care. Bedazzled by unusual design features and its focus on energy conservation, reviews of Mayne’s latest work seem to ignore whether it fulfills its functional role as a federal office building.
Based on what I have been told, it clearly does not.
The first fact about the building that may cause surprise is its lack of air conditioning or heat. According to Mayne, “a bike rack and air conditioning get you the same point. I’d much rather see BTU and CO2 requirements and let the professional community solve the problem.”
I apparently lack sufficient understanding of green technology, as it does not seem that a bike rack would “get you to the same point” in terms of keeping workers cool. In the real world on the 15th floor of the Federal Building, workers seek to relieve the heat by opening windows, which not only sends papers flying, but, depending on their proximity to the opening, makes creating a stable temperature for all workers near impossible.
When I spoke with a Labor Department worker at the building (who noted that she is encountering the type of bad work conditions that her agency is supposed to enforce against), she confirmed what might have been an urban legend: that some employees must use umbrellas to keep the sun out of their cubicles.
The lack of internal climate controls has left some workers too cold and others too hot. A happy medium has proved elusive. And while the managers’ offices do have heat and air conditioning — a two-tiered approach fitting in a building named for Bush — the “green” design apparently has messed with the effectiveness of these systems, leaving these top staff as physically uncomfortable as the line workers.
Dysfunctional Elevators
According to my source, architect Mayne has stated that federal office workers do not get enough exercise. To address this, he installed elevators in the building that only stop at every third floor. This requires employees to walk up or down one or two flights of metal stairs.
Persons with physical disabilities who cannot use stairs can use a separate elevator that stops at every floor. The foreseeable result is that employees seeking to avoid stairs use the disabled access elevator, leaving this car crammed with people and making the ride to the top extremely slow.
I am told that when the freight elevator is out of service, deliveries must use the disabled access elevator. It seems only a matter of time until a disabled worker sues the General Services Administration for providing inadequate disabled elevator access in the building.
Missing Cafeteria
Mayne’s desire to get workers walking may have impacted his decision to locate the employee cafeteria across the street from the building. Employees are not happy about having to leave the building just to get a sandwich, and were allegedly told that the building would include an on-site café.
But as is clear with every aspect of this testament to green buildings, this project was more a science experiment than a place designed to enhance worker productivity.
No LEED Approval
Green building advocates will no doubt argue that the Federal Building is a bad example, as it failed to secure LEED approval. According to its website, The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System™ encourages and accelerates global adoption of sustainable green building and development practices through the creation and implementation of universally understood and accepted tools and performance criteria.
Mayne noted that “I wasn’t arrogant, but I was confident — I just assumed we had the platinum rating. All of a sudden we went through LEED and it wasn’t working.”
But the project’s failure to satisfy LEED’s scoring system is not the problem. Rather, it is that the federal government spent millions over budget to create a building that does not provide a minimally satisfactory work environment.
And the project’s huge cost overruns and functional inadequacies have apparently been ignored solely due to excitement over its “Green” stature.
ULEZ – Another Imperial Con
Ulez Expansion Predicted to Cut Air Pollution by Just 1.5%
By Alex Kriel | Thinking Coalition | August 9, 2023
Listening to the discussion over Ulez expansion feels like an action replay of the way in which many were convinced to overreact to Covid, leading to policy responses which caused significantly more harm than good. The Ulez ‘discussion’ has all of the same elements, with modelled health benefits calculated by Imperial College and Mayor Khan’s justification that he is “saving lives”, implying that opponents are wannabe murderers. Of course, this time around, the public is thankfully much more sceptical.
In this short note, we wanted to set out how those ‘lives saved’ numbers are derived and to demonstrate that at best the numbers are seriously misrepresented and at worst completely wrong. In fact, applying the Government and Imperial’s own logic, there is a very strong case to say that the expansion of Ulez will, on balance, harm Londoner’s health when considering the downstream economic consequences of this policy.
The major flaw in Imperial’s model is the one-dimensional nature of its assumption that air pollution drives health and life expectancy. In the real world health is driven by a number of interacting factors with income being the primary driver. There are many assumptions one could dispute that (perhaps unsurprisingly) work towards inflating the claimed health benefits of reducing air pollution, but we focus only on the flaw of largely ignoring policy consequences.
The Imperial team presents several numbers, including: attributable deaths (3,600 to 4,100), improved life expectancy (five to six months) and life-years saved (6.1 million). We wanted to focus on the claimed benefits of the Mayor’s Transport Strategy in terms of life expectancy and life-years saved.
Before leaving attributable deaths, it is important to note that these are not in any sense deaths that can be avoided, nor are they deaths that are subject to reduction by the Transport Strategy. The figure appears to compare current death rates with death rates if all human emissions had been removed for all prior periods. It is a theoretical construct (similar to an unmitigated pandemic) and only a small fraction of this number would be theoretically impacted by road transport (around 15%). Only the going-forward numbers (life-years saved) relate to the Transport Strategy and there the benefits are relatively low at 0.4%. It is important to note that there has only ever been one death, of a young and chronically unwell girl ever recorded in England (56 million population) where the death certificate mentions air pollution. Tragic as this death clearly is, it again highlights the disconnect between the theoretical attribution number and actual deaths recorded; we suggest ignoring the attributable deaths figure.
Looking at the claimed benefits of implementing the Transport Strategy, it is possible for a layman to understand the main assumptions on which these health benefits are based. In summary, it is assumed that reducing 10 µg m-3 achieves roughly a 6% reduction in all cause mortality. Note however 10 µg m-3 is more than all anthropogenic PM 2.5 emissions as estimated for England as a whole, so any benefits are scaled down from 6%. So a 1 µg m-3 reduction generates roughly a 0.6% improvement in life expectancy (i.e., ten times less).
Looking at life-years saved and extended life expectancy, the key assumptions are poorly explained. For those in a hurry, the detail shows that all of the Transport Strategy initiatives to 2050 combined will deliver a projected 0.4% reduction in life-years lost to air pollution using projections to 2154. There is a claimed five to six month extension in life expectancy, so the life expectancy of a London male of around 80 years would be extended to around 80.4 years.
These gains are stated relative to a baseline and for some inexplicable reason the Imperial team has decided to use 2013 pollution levels to establish the baseline and in the process to ignore the available data for 2019. This serves to inflate the baseline.
The acid test is: are the results of modelling compatible with observed reality? And on that basis the Imperial Ulez modelling falls flat. The model covers the impact of the entire Transport Strategy to 2050 which covers many more steps than Ulez. The Imperial document is somewhat vague about what those steps are – they are cryptically referred to as 2025 LES, 2030 LES and 2050 LES. It is enough to note that the goal of Mayor Khan’s 2018 Transport Strategy is to “aim for 80% of all trips in London to be made on foot, by cycle or using public transport by 2041”. So the first thing to clarify is that the claimed 6.1 million saving of life years relates to a significant number of measures, well beyond Ulez expansion. In effect these combined steps will largely eliminate private car traffic.
The chart below is constructed from the Imperial material and shows that PM 2.5 µg m-3 population weighted (PWAC) pollution falls over a number of steps and Ulez on a standalone basis has a near zero impact. Also, you can also see that a fair chunk of gains have already been banked between 2013 and 2019.
The failure of Ulez to achieve any meaningful reduction in pollution is very clearly shown in a separate document prepared by Jacobs which looks at the impacts of Ulez only. The table below shows the impact of Ulez expansion on PM 2.5 µg m-3 concentration, with an estimated improvement of less than 2%.
There is a slightly better outcome for NOx pollutants which are reduced by 5.4% across Greater London. This feeds in to the health impact assessment which unsurprisingly shows near zero benefit from Ulez for PM 2.5 reductions, for most health-related metrics.
Looking at life expectancy, the report does acknowledge that due to the large population (around 8.9 million) and the extraordinary long time period over which these benefits are expected to crystalise (up to 2154) then there are around 1.5 billion life-years involved (years × population). For any stated benefit to be meaningful, it needs to referenced to the base case value. The 6.1 million life-years saved is then within the context of a total of around 1.5 billion life-years; this saving is around 0.4%. Correspondingly, the impact on life expectancy from all of the pollution schemes (not just Ulez) adds up to around 22 to 27 weeks additional life expectancy. In the context of male life expectancy of 80 years (roughly) this would improve to 80.4 years as a consequence of 30 years’ worth of restrictive climate policies (ignoring any economic consequences).
The core flaw in the calculation is the one-dimensional thinking that underpins this (and all similar calculations) in that all reductions in PM 2.5 concentrations lead to a reduction in the mortality rate. This thinking ignores any link between people’s incomes and health outcomes, which is the primary driver of health. This is the same dishonest cop out that Professor Ferguson made in his infamous Covid paper. This facilitates a myopic focus on ‘safety’ and generates solutions that do far more harm than good.
In setting out the methodology that states that health outcomes will improve with a reduction in air pollution on a more or less linear basis, the Government’s own figures show that real world data prove that this assumption is not correct (or at least over-simplified). Its own data for the regions of the U.K. show that (if anything) this relationship is reversed.
Life expectancy in Scotland is much lower despite having far and away the lowest concentration of anthropogenic PM 2.5 pollutants. Many studies with and between countries show this clearly (e.g. life expectancies by national deprivation deciles, England: 2018 to 2020).
In order to get a handle on how much more significant factors other than PM 2.5 can be, we looked at a recent paper that considers the impact of changes in different factors on life expectancy across 29 European countries (the paper also looks at each factor in isolation using multivariate analysis). The chart below shows the life expectancy impact of a 1% change in the listed factors. There are of course some caveats, but you can immediately see that economic activity dominates the outcomes with a 13-month gain in life expectancy for a 1% gain in GDP versus say a 2.7 month gain for a 1% change in PM 10-2.5. Also note there is no statistically significant relationship between CO2 and life expectancy.
In another section of the same paper the author states: “France and Sweden, some of the countries closest to their potential LE (life expectancies), are also amongst those with the highest NOx level.” The real message, though, is that if you dent people’s income by narrowly pursuing PM 2.5 reduction, you will, on balance, shorten life expectancy and not increase it. The Jacobs’ report confirms that there will be multiple negative impacts on business and economic activity. We guess that on balance Ulez will lower life expectancy when factoring in the impacts on business and family incomes, as well as quality of life considerations.
In the post Covid world, we have understood that politicians of all stripes will shamelessly use emotional manipulation in order to get reasonable people to comply with their unreasonable edicts. That is why understanding how reliable, or otherwise, attributable deaths, life-years saved and life expectancy figures are is so important. You can almost guarantee that these estimates will be manipulated and potentially used to rationalise illogical and damaging policies.With opaque models it is relatively easy to produce results to order.
The political process assumes that the individuals involved are able to understand competing objectives and arrive at a sensible compromise. However, we saw in the case of Covid that many politicians have limited scientific understanding and will tend to pursue unachievable safety, at any cost.
The State seems to be redefining its role with a narrow group of ideologically-driven technocrats setting somewhat arbitrary targets. Achieving those targets requires wholesale changes to people’s lives. Very often economic, mental health and other impacts are barely considered and historically established constitutional boundaries between the State and the citizen are often ignored.
In the case of Ulez expansion, the 59% of respondents to the public consultation who clearly opposed the expansion were simply ignored.
Various sops will no doubt be offered to voters, but is it important that readers realise that there is a direction of travel to these various steps. Finally, remember Albert Camus’s wise warning that, “The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants.”
Alex Kriel is by training a physicist and was an early critic of the Imperial Covid model. He is a founder of the Thinking Coalition, which comprises a group of citizens who are concerned about Government overreach.
BBC Admits to Smearing Anti-Ulez Protesters as ‘Far Right’
BY IAN PRICE | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | AUGUST 4, 2023
The BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit (ECU) has responded to complaints about its news coverage of an anti-Ulez protest in London’s Trafalgar Square on Saturday, April 15th, 2023. BBC London News broadcast at the time that:
Local protestors and mainstream politicians were joined by conspiracy theorists and Far Right groups.
I was among many people to complain at the time, disgusted at the BBC’s smear. I was at the protest myself, the first of any kind that I had attended. Since my previous exposure to similar protests – such as those against the lockdowns over the course of the pandemic – was limited to watching clips on Twitter, I was slightly anxious. Were things likely to kick off? Were the police going to ‘kettle’ us all in a side street off the Strand?
I could not have been more wrong. I was overwhelmed by how many families were there, abundant small children clambering up the bases of Landseer’s lions. There were a handful of Tory politicians some of whom spoke from the platform, but there was no other political presence whatsoever.
When I saw the BBC London news coverage, I was therefore appalled. I wasn’t too concerned about the claim that there were a few conspiracy theorists there – quite a few placard-holders were plainly ‘Team James’ – but “Far Right groups” seemed to me something for which there was no evidence at all. This appeared to be an attempt on the BBC’s part to suppress dissent towards the Ulez expansion by smearing opponents. This struck me as a sinister turn from the national broadcaster and so I complained.
On April 21st, the BBC responded to my complaint as follows:
BBC London had deployed a reporter to the protest and she witnessed, and documented, first hand, motifs on tabards and placards with explicit Nazi references, along with other epithets about world order and democracy.
I walked around the protest for about three hours on April 15th and I must have missed the explicit Nazi references, presumably displayed by the “Far Right groups”. I complained again, asking for evidence.
On May 12th the BBC rejected my additional complaint as follows:
We remain satisfied our BBC London reporter gave an honest account of what she witnessed that day.
At this point, I escalated the complaint to the ECU, one of 44 people to do so on the grounds of both accuracy and impartiality. Today the BBC acknowledged the following:
In relation to “Far Right groups”, we recognised that the [conspiracy theory] groups named above might have Far Right (or indeed Far Left) adherents, but did not consider this to be evidence of the presence of “Far Right groups”. The programme-makers directed our attention to the deployment by some demonstrators of Nazi imagery, symbolism and slogans directed against the Mayor of London which we accepted was consistent with tactics used predominantly by certain Far Right groups, but we saw no grounds for concluding that they were used exclusively by such groups. We also noted the presence of an individual who seemed, from social media postings, very likely to have been associated with the presence of a Far Right group at a previous demonstration, but the evidence fell short of establishing that he was an adherent of that group, and we saw no evidence that other representatives of the group were present. While it was clear from our dealings with the programme-makers that the statement about the presence of Far Right groups was made in good faith, we assessed the evidence differently. In our judgement it was suggestive of the presence of Far Right groups but fell short of establishing that such groups had in fact been represented among the demonstrators. This aspect of the complaint has been upheld.
This shows pretty clearly that the idea of “Far Right groups” being present at the protest was a complete fiction. Feelings are running high about Khan and some placards quite possibly likened his administrative style to infamous dictators of the past but for anyone to have spun this as evidence of “Far Right groups” is a stretch to say the least. As for the “individual who seemed, from social media postings, very likely to have been associated with the presence of a Far Right group at a previous demonstration”, the words ‘straws’ and ‘clutching’ spring to mind.
In addition to upholding the complaint about accuracy, the BBC has also partially upheld the complaint on impartiality which derives from the close resemblance of the BBC’s language in its news report to that of Khan himself at a People’s Town Hall in Ealing in March. When asked about people’s misgivings about the Ulez expansion, he said that its opponents were “in coalition with the Far Right” and “joining hands with some of those outside who are part of a Far Right group”.
The BBC has now acknowledged the “impression of bias” and upheld this part of the complaint, while spinning it as something of an accident, something that “might well have been perceived as lending a degree of corroboration to the Mayor’s comments”.
While it is a step in the right direction for the BBC to uphold two aspect of the complaints, there remain unanswered questions about its broader coverage of Ulez and to what extent its coverage is being unduly influenced by Sadiq Khan.
Consider the article in the Daily Express published on 24th June about a senior producer at the BBC that made contact with Reform U.K. London Mayoral candidate Howard Cox to blow the whistle on the BBC’s suppression of coverage critical of the Ulez expansion. (Cox, by the way, was also in attendance at the April demo but had not at that point declared as a Mayoral candidate):
The leak to Reform U.K. Mayoral candidate Howard Cox… reveals that Mr. Khan had applied pressure on the BBC over reporting the issue. It said that journalists wanting to run stories now needed top level clearance over something that is set to be a major electoral issue in the London Mayor election and general election both next year.
The Express article went on to explain email exchanges that the senior BBC producer had received:
The BBC producer was told in an email to news staff from Dan Fineman, Senior News Editor BBC South East: “If any platforms are doing a story on Ulez charges in the South and Southeast we now need to do a mandatory referral to Jason Horton or Robert Thomson (re) outstanding complaint with the Mayor of London which is very live at the moment.”
Jason Horton is the BBC’s Director of Production for BBC Local Services and Robert Thomson is Head of the BBC in London and the East. This suggests a level of collusion between very senior staff at the BBC and Sadiq Khan with a direct influence over editorial approaches to news coverage of anti-Ulez protests.
It was also reported by the whistleblower that a BBC London investigation into Ulez was now been paused because of the Mayor of London’s pressure on the BBC.
In short, Khan appears to be exercising at the very least some form of influence over the BBC’s coverage of anti-Ulez protests. This is not an “impression of bias” – this more closely resembles a real, undiluted bias against anti-Ulez campaigners on the part of the nation’s publicly-funded broadcaster at the behest of the Labour Mayor of London. The BBC has come up with a partial and grudging apology but I suspect that the truth about its willingness to suppress dissent with “Far Right” smears is more extensive than it’s prepared to admit. I hope that doesn’t make me a “conspiracy theorist”.
Gates Commits $400 Million to Test New TB Vaccine on 26,000 People in Africa and Southeast Asia
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | June 30, 2023
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Wellcome Trust on Wednesday announced plans to fund a phase 3 clinical trial for a tuberculosis (TB) vaccine that will be tested on 26,000 people at 50 sites in Africa and Southeast Asia over the next four to six years.
Gates committed $400 million to the trial and Wellcome — the largest funder of medical research in the U.K. and one of the largest in the world — committed an additional $150 million.
The trials will test the M72/AS01 vaccine, developed by pharmaceutical giant GSK (formerly GlaxoSmithKline) with partial funding from the Gates Foundation.
Experts told The Washington Post the news was “huge.” The Guardian heralded the announcement as “gamechanging,” while STAT called it “promising.”
But Brian Hooker, Ph.D., P.E., senior director of science and research for Children’s Health Defense told The Defender that the planned trials for the TB vaccine raised red flags.
“I’m concerned that they’re planning on conducting the trial in underdeveloped nations,” Hooker said. “It seems almost prototypical that the underserved have to be guinea pigs for the rest of the world.”
He added, “Fifty percent is incredibly low efficacy for such an ‘important’ intervention to go to essentially everyone in the developing world.”
TB more common among poor
GSK developed the vaccine and ran smaller, “proof-of-concept” phase 2b trials on it in 2018, reporting a 54% efficacy rate. But the vaccine maker didn’t move forward with the large-scale trials needed for a license.
Instead, it passed the license to the Gates Medical Research Institute, a nonprofit biotech spinoff of the Gates Foundation dedicated to developing “novel biomedical interventions” to treat global health problems.
The existing vaccine for TB, the BCG (bacille Calmette-Guérin) vaccine, was developed in 1921 and is effective at stopping TB infection among children but has limited efficacy in adults.
Recent estimates suggest up to 25% of the global population carries a latent (asymptomatic) TB infection, which may later become active among 5-15% of latent carriers. People with latent infection cannot spread the disease.
TB kills 1.6 million people per year, primarily in low and middle-income countries. It is treatable and curable with antibiotics. Drug-resistant strains have emerged, but those also are treatable and curable using second-line drugs.
TB is more common among poor people, who are more likely to work in poorly ventilated and overcrowded conditions, suffer from malnutrition and have more limited access to healthcare.
The funded trial will test whether the experimental vaccine can prevent adolescents and adults with latent tuberculosis from developing symptoms.
Maziar Divangahi, Ph.D., associate director of the McGill International TB Centre — a WHO collaborating research center and recipient of large-scale Gates Foundation grants — told STAT the vaccine was “really a big deal.”
But he also cautioned against putting too much faith in the earlier GSK trial. In that trial, 39 people — 26 in the placebo group and 13 in the vaccine group — became sick, so the sample size was “extremely low,” he said. And no one knows how long protection might last, he said.
In the earlier trial, 67% of people in the group that received the drug made unsolicited reports of adverse events within 30 days after injection, compared with 45% in the placebo group.
Gates Foundation funding like working in a ‘cartel’
The Gates Foundation is one of the largest funders of global health initiatives and “its influence on international health policy and the design of global health programmes and initiatives is profound,” The Lancet reported in 2009.
Since then its influence has grown substantially.
According to Anne-Emanuelle Birn, Sc.D., professor and chair of the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto, this is a problem:
“The BMGF [Gates Foundation], emblematic of elite interests in contemporary society, disregards the underlying causes of ill health in the first place, overlooks what role the unprecedented accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few has played therein, and remains fiercely proud (staking a moral high ground) of its generosity and technical savoir-faire, all the while remaining underscrutinized by scientists and the wider public alike.”
Her research outlined how the Gates Foundation’s “profit-making principles as drivers of policy” have given business interests “an enormous and unprecedented role” in driving international policy-making.
“Despite the manifold shortcomings of a technology-focused, disease-by-disease approach to global health, this model prevails at present, abetted by the BMGF’s prime sway at formal global health decision-making bodies,” she wrote.
In a recent article examining the role of the Gates Foundation in global health, University of London professor Gwilym David Blunt, Ph.D., wrote that the foundation has been widely criticized for not following data-driven policies. “Its preference for technology and new vaccines” fails to acknowledge that mortality is often driven by “lack of basic resources such as sanitation, housing and nutrition,” Blunt wrote.
While people may benefit from clinical solutions, he wrote “a public health intervention such as ensuring access to clean water and sanitation may reduce deaths more quickly and with less expense.”
Instead, he wrote, the Gates Foundation’s influence “has helped move global health towards high-tech, vaccine-focused initiatives.”
In debates over how to approach global health at GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, he reported Bill Gates was “vehemently insisting that not ‘one cent’ of his money should go into public systems.”
Arata Kochi, Ph.D., former head of the WHO’s malaria program, compared the Gates Foundation’s funding to working in a “cartel,” with researchers locked into the agenda of a foundation with “a closed internal process, and as far as can be seen accountable to none other than itself.”
Even The Lancet published a similar critique of Gates back in 2009.
“Important health programmes are being distorted by large grants from the Gates Foundation,” Dr. Richard Horton, editor-in-chief wrote in an editorial.
Linsey McGoey, Ph.D., professor of sociology at the University of Essex and author of a book examining Gates’ philanthropy has written that diseases like HIV, tuberculosis and malaria — key focuses for the Gates Foundation — clearly need urgent attention.
But, she said in an interview with Current Affairs, “In reality, you need to build up the public health capacity and the universal healthcare capacity of developing regions, not introduce more market actors who have incentives to drive up the costs of different medicines and interventions.”
Proponents of the TB vaccine concede that the global roll-out will “require a lot of resources” and are encouraging governments “to substantially increase investments in the TB vaccine pipeline.”
Wellcome Trust and the Gates Foundation hope to secure a commercial partner for their new vaccine within 12 months, The Economist reported.
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.
Another Climate-Savior Alarmist Jetsets To South America – For Two Months Of Vacation!
Climate activist hypocrite of the month
By P Gosselin | No Tricks Zone | June 30, 2023
Skipping classes, getting up at 11 a.m., gluing oneself to the asphalt and blocking streets with your mates all day to save the planet is a really tough and important job, climate activists believe. And so exempting themselves from the rules they want imposed on the rest of society is understandable. After all, they are more important than the rest.
So important, in fact, that activists like Max Voegtli of Renovate Switzerland believes flying to Central America by jet plane for a couple of months of R & R is totally okay. The working class, however, should not fly at all and freeze in the wintertime.
Dealing with the climate crisis is urgent, insists Swiss radical climate activist just before hopping on a jet plane to fly to Central America for 2 months of vacation. Image cropped here.
Last Tuesday, Swiss climate activist Voegtli appeared on TalkTäglich at TeleZüri, and passionately explained how urgent it is to deal with the “climate crisis” and demanded that the planet be saved.
Off to Mexico and Central America
Then, already on Thursday, he was photographed at Zurich airport, preparing to board a plane bound for Paris. But climate rescuer Voegtli’s flying would not end in Paris, reports AUF 1 : “Paris was not the activist’s destination, but there he only took the connecting flight to Mexico and Central America, where he wants to travel around for two months.”
A two-month vacation is a total fantasy for the rest of the working world, who struggle to make ends meet each month. And this traffic blocker goes unhindered for 2 months?
Climate Emergency Fund
So where does an unemployed activist like Voegtli get the money for such a holiday extravaganza? AUF 1 writes: “It is well known that some of the asphalt gluers receive a regular salary. Organization Renovate Switzerland is no stranger to lavish money: “The organization itself admits that it is financed by the Climate Emergency Fund of oil magnate heiress Aileen Getty.”
Activists cry they are being harassed!
Now that Voegtli’s hypocrisy has been exposed, the embarrassed activists justify all their globe-trotting by claiming they travel as “private persons” and so no one should be photographing them.
AUF 1 : “Spokesperson Cécile Bessire castigated the ‘media hounding against the climate movement and the people who campaign for it. I find it incomprehensible that citizens are following our activists and taking photos. These are private individuals.’”
At Twitter, the thin-skinned Voegtli defended himself: “Shows again how the @CH_Media cares more about feeding the hate media cycle further instead of talking about the crisis.”
Voegtli’s Renovate Switzerland group added: “Getting politically involved against the climate crisis often goes hand in hand with changing one’s own life. However, it is not a prerequisite to do so. […] No matter if you separate your rubbish, if your house is renovated, if you work for a bank, if you eat meat or if you fly. All you should do is wish for a livable future and get involved in the climate movement.”
AUF 1 summarizes the infantile behavior of the activists such as Voegtli: “It means the climate activists can demand anything from citizens without having to do it themselves.”
In a nutshell, according to the climate activists: it’s “incomprehensible” that citizens would take photos of activists at airports, yet it’s perfectly fine for activists to block major roadways and to harass people who are trying to make a living. That’s how they want it.
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China and India have ‘low intellectual potential’ – top Zelensky aide
RT | September 13, 2023
The people leading India and China lack the ability to predict the long-term consequences of their policies, a senior aide to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has claimed.
Mikhail Podoliak pointed to what he called “the problem of the modern world,” singling out India and China, in an interview with Ukrainian media on Tuesday.
“The problem with these countries is that they do not analyze the consequences of their own moves. These countries, unfortunately, have low intellectual potential,” he said.
Podoliak suggested that even though India has a lunar exploration program, it “does not mean that this nation understands what the modern world precisely is.”
The dismissive remarks were in the context of Beijing and New Delhi’s refusal to support Kiev in its conflict with Moscow. Podoliak complained that India, China and Türkiye were “profiting” from the war by maintaining trade with Russia.
“Technically, it is in their national interests,” he acknowledged, before presenting his view of what would benefit China in the long-run.
“China should be interested in Russia disappearing, because it is an archaic nation that drags China into unnecessary conflicts,” he claimed. … continue
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