US Guantanamo judge dismisses ‘confession’ obtained by torture
Press TV – August 19, 2023
A US military judge has rejected a “confession” coerced out of a young Guantanamo Bay captive through torture following the September 11, 2001 highly suspicious terror attacks in Washington and New York that led to military invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.
The judge in the military tribunals held for captives still held in the Cuba-based US Guantanamo Bay military prison and torture facility ruled that the “confession” obtained from Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, accused of masterminding the 2000 bombing attack on the USS Cole warship in Yemen that killed 17 American sailors, was tainted by years of abuse and torture inflicted on him at the hands of the CIA and FBI intelligence agents and operatives.
“Exclusion of such evidence is not without societal costs,” wrote the judge, Col. Lanny Acosta, in handing down his ruling.
“However, permitting the admission of evidence obtained by or derived from torture by the same government that seeks to prosecute and execute the accused may have even greater societal costs.” Acosta further emphasized.
Attorneys for both Nashiri and five other suspects — accused of involvement in the September 11 attacks and held captive and tortured for decades without trial or legal representation — have struggled for over 10 years now in the Guantanamo military court to exclude evidence against them that was coerced through torture.
The six were captured separately after the 2001 attacks and shuttled through CIA-run “black sites” in numerous US-allied countries across the globe, such as Thailand and Poland, where they were subjected to intense torture techniques, including waterboarding, physical beatings and sleep deprivation.
Following the arrival of the captives at the Guantanamo military prison, some of them, including Nashiri were again subjected to intense interrogation and torture by FBI agents in early 2007 and other instances.
The judge’s decision comes as obtaining confession from prisoners through torture remains a major violation of international law.
The US military has accused Nashiri of being an al-Qaeda recruiter that plotted various attacks on American interests in the Arabian Peninsula.
US forces captured Nashiri in 2002 and transferred him to the Guantanamo prison in 2006 after he remained for four years in the custody of CIA interrogators and repeatedly tortured.
In September 2011, he was charged by a US military commission on nine counts related to his alleged involvement in planning al-Qaeda attacks.
His military trial showcased by the very entity that captured and tortured him has repeatedly faced delays, due to insistence by his assigned military lawyers that he suffered repeated torture while under detention of the CIA spy agency collaborating with US military forces occupying Afghanistan and Iraq.
The WHO’s Proposed Amendments Will Increase Man-Made Pandemics
By Meryl Nass | Brownstone Institute | August 17, 2023
This report is designed to help readers think about some big topics: how to really prevent pandemics and biological warfare, how to assess proposals by the WHO and its members for preventing and responding to pandemics, and whether we can rely on our health officials to navigate these areas in ways that make sense and will help their populations. We start with a history of biological arms control and rapidly move to the COVID pandemic, eventually arriving at plans to protect the future.
Weapons of Mass Destruction: Chem/Bio
Traditionally, the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) have been labelled Chemical, Biological, Radiologic, and Nuclear (CBRN).
The people of the world don’t want them used on us—for they are cheap ways to kill and maim large numbers of people quickly. And so international treaties were created to try to prevent their development (only in the later treaties) and use (in all the biological arms control treaties). First was the Geneva Protocol of 1925, following the use of poison gases and limited biological weapons in World War I, banning the use of biological and chemical weapons in war. The US and many nations signed it, but it took 50 years for the US to ratify it, and during those 50 years the US asserted it was not bound by the treaty.
The US used both biological and chemical weapons during those 50 years. The US almost certainly used biological weapons in the Korean War (see this, this, this and this) and perhaps used both in Vietnam, which experienced an odd outbreak of plague during the war. The use of napalm, white phosphorus, agent orange (with its dioxin excipient causing massive numbers of birth defects and other tragedies) and probably other chemical weapons like BZ (a hallucinogen/incapacitant) led to much pushback, especially since we had signed the Geneva Protocol and we were supposed to be a civilized nation.
In 1968 and 1969, two important books were published that had a great influence on the American psyche regarding our massive stockpiling and use of these agents. The first book, written by a young Seymour Hersh about the US chemical and biological warfare program, was titled Chemical and Biological Warfare; America’s Hidden Arsenal. In 1969 Congressman Richard D. McCarthy, a former newspaperman from Buffalo, NY wrote the book The Ultimate Folly: War by Pestilence, Asphyxiation and Defoliation about the US production and use of chemical and biological weapons. Prof. Matthew Meselson’s review of the book noted,
Our operation, “Flying Ranch Hand,” has sprayed anti-plant chemicals over an area almost the size of the state of Massachusetts, over 10 per cent of its cropland. “Ranch Hand” no longer has much to do with the official justification of preventing ambush. Rather, it has become a kind of environmental warfare, devastating vast tracts of forest in order to facilitate our aerial reconnaissance. Our use of “super tear gas” (it is also a powerful lung irritant) has escalated from the originally announced purpose of saving lives in “riot control-like situations” to the full-scale combat use of gas artillery shells, gas rockets and gas bombs to enhance the killing power of conventional high explosive and flame weapons. Fourteen million pounds have been used thus far, enough to cover all of Vietnam with a field effective concentration. Many nations, including some of our own allies have expressed the opinion that this kind of gas warfare violates the Geneva Protocol, a view shared by McCarthy.
A Biological Weapons Convention
Amid great pushback over US conduct in Vietnam, and seeking to burnish his presidency, President Nixon announced to the world in November 1969 that the US was going to end its biowarfare program (but not the chemical program). Following pointed reminders that Nixon had not eschewed the use of toxins, in February 1970 Nixon announced we would also get rid of our toxin weapons, which included snake, snail, frog, fish, bacterial, and fungal toxins that could be used for assassinations and other purposes.
It has been claimed that these declarations resulted from careful calculations that the US was far ahead technically of most other nations in its chemical and nuclear weapons. But biological weapons were considered the “poor man’s atomic bomb” and required much less sophistication to produce. Therefore, the US was not far ahead in the biological weapons arena. By banning this class of weapon, the US would gain strategically.
Nixon told the world that the US would initiate an international treaty to prevent the use of these weapons ever again. And we did so: the 1972 Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction, or Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) for short, which entered into force in 1975.
But in 1973 genetic engineering (recombinant DNA) was discovered by Americans Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen, which changed the biological warfare calculus. Now the US had regained a technological advantage for this type of endeavor.
The Biological Weapons Convention established conferences to be held every 5 years to strengthen the treaty. The expectation was that these would add a method to call for ‘challenge inspections’ to prevent nations from cheating and would add sanctions (punishments) if nations failed to comply with the treaty. However, since 1991 the US has consistently blocked the addition of protocols that would have an impact on cheating. By now, everyone accepts that cheating occurs and is likely widespread.
A leak in an anthrax production facility in Sverdlovsk, USSR in 1979 caused the deaths of about 60 people. While the USSR tried a sloppy cover-up, blaming contaminated black market meat, this was a clear BWC violation to all those knowledgeable about anthrax.
US experiments with anthrax production during the Clinton administration, detailed by Judith Miller et al. in the 2001 book Germs, were also thought by experts to have transgressed the BWC.
It has taken over 40 years, but in 2022 all declared stocks of chemical weapons had been destroyed by the USA, by Russia, and the other 193 member nation signatories. The chemical weapons convention does include provisions for surprise inspections and sanctions.
Pandemics and Biological Warfare Receive Funding from Same Stream
It is now 2023, and during the 48 years the Biological Weapons Convention has been in force the wall it was supposed to build against the development, production, and use of biological weapons has been steadily eroded. Meanwhile, especially since the 2001 anthrax letters, nations (with the US at the forefront) have been building up their “biodefense” and “pandemic preparedness” capacities.
Under the guise of preparing their defenses against biowarfare and pandemics, nations have conducted “dual-use” (both offensive and defensive) research and development, which has led to the creation of more deadly and more transmissible microorganisms. And employing new verbiage to shield this effort from scrutiny, biological warfare research was renamed as “gain-of-function” research.
Gain-of-function is a euphemism for biological warfare research aka germ warfare research. It is so risky that funding it was banned by the US government (but only for SARS coronaviruses and avian flu viruses) in 2014 after a public outcry from hundreds of scientists. Then in 2017 Drs. Tony Fauci and Francis Collins lifted the moratorium, with no real safeguards in place. Fauci and Collins even had the temerity to publish their opinion that the risk from this gain-of-function research was ‘worth it.’
What does gain-of-function actually mean? It means that scientists are able to use a variety of techniques to turn ordinary or pathogenic viruses and bacteria into biological weapons. The research is justified by the claim that scientists can get out ahead of nature and predict what might be a future pandemic threat, or what another nation might use as a bioweapon. The functions gained by the viruses or other microorganisms to turn them into biological warfare agents consist of two categories: enhanced transmission or enhanced pathogenicity (illness severity).
1) improved transmissibility may result from:
a) needing fewer viral or bacterial copies to cause infection,
b) causing the generation of higher viral or bacterial titers,
c) a new mode of spread, such as adding airborne transmission to a virus that previously only spread through bodily fluids,
d) expanded range of susceptible organs (aka tissue tropism); for example, not only respiratory secretions but also urine or stool might transmit the virus, which was found in SARS-CoV-2,
e) expanded host range; for example, instead of infecting bats, the virus is passaged through humanized mice and thus acclimated to the human ACE-2 receptor, which was found in SARS-CoV-2,
f) improved cellular entry; for example, by adding a furin cleavage site, which was found in SARS-CoV-2,
2) increased pathogenicity, so instead of causing a milder illness, the pathogen would be made to cause severe illness or death, using various methods. SARS-CoV-2 had unusual homologies (identical short segments) to human tissues and the HIV virus, which may have caused or contributed to the late autoimmune stage of illness, impaired immune response and ‘long COVID.’
Funding for (Natural) Pandemics, Including Yearly Influenza, was Lumped Together with Biological Defense Funding
Perhaps the comingling of funding was designed to make it harder for Congress and the public to understand what was being funded, and how much taxpayer funding was going to gain-of-function work, which might lead them to question why it was being done at all, given its prohibition in the Biological Weapons Convention, and additional questions about its value. Former CDC Director Robert Redfield, a physician and virologist, told Congress in March of 2023 that gain-of-function research had not resulted in a single beneficial drug, vaccine, or therapeutic to his knowledge.
Nonprofits and universities like EcoHealth Alliance and its affiliated University of California, Davis veterinary school were used as intermediaries to obscure the fact that US taxpayers were supporting scientists in dozens of foreign countries, including China, for research that included gain-of-function work on coronaviruses.
Perhaps to keep the lucrative funding going, fears about pandemics have been deliberately amplified over the past several decades. The federal government has been spending huge sums on pandemic preparedness over the past 20 years, routing it through many federal and state agencies. President Biden’s proposed 2024 budget requested “$20 billion in mandatory funding across DHHS for pandemic preparedness” while the DHS, DOD, and the State Department have additional budgets for pandemic preparedness for both domestic and international spending.
Although the 20th century experienced only 3 significant pandemics (the Spanish flu of 1918-19 and 2 influenza pandemics in 1957 and 1968) the mass media have presented us with almost non-stop pandemics during the 21st century: SARS-1 (2002-3), avian flu (2004-on), swine flu (2009-10), Ebola (2014, 2018-19), Zika (2016), COVID (2020-2023), and monkeypox (2022-23). And we are incessantly told that more are coming, and that they are likely to be worse.
We have been assaulted with warnings and threats for over 2 decades to induce a deep fear of infectious diseases. It seems to have worked.
The genomes of both SARS-CoV-2 and the 2022 monkeypox (MPOX) virus lead to suspicion that both were bioengineered pathogens originating in laboratories. The group of virologists assembled by Drs. Fauci and Farrar identified 6 unusual (probably lab-derived) parts of the SARS-CoV-2 genome as early as February 1, 2020 and more have been suggested subsequently.
I do not know if these viruses leaked accidentally or were deliberately released, but I am leaning toward the conclusion that both were deliberately released, based on the locations where they first appeared, the well-orchestrated but faked videos rolled out by the mass media for COVID, and the illogical and harmful official responses to each. In neither case was the public given accurate information about the infections’ severity or treatments, and the responses by Western governments never made scientific sense. Why wouldn’t you treat cases early, the way doctors treat everything else? It seemed that our governments were trading on the fact that few people knew enough about viruses and therapeutics to make independent assessments about the information they were being fed.
Yet by August 2021, there was no corresponding course correction. Instead, the federal government doubled down, imposing vaccine mandates on 100 million Americans in September 2021 in spite of ‘the science.’ There has been no accurate statement yet from any federal agency about the lack of utility of masking for an airborne virus (which is probably why the US government and WHO delayed acknowledging airborne spread by COVID for 18 months), the lack of efficacy of social distancing for an airborne virus, and the risks and poor efficacy of 2 dangerous oral drugs (paxlovid and molnupiravir) purchased by the US government for COVID treatment, even without a doctor’s prescription.
Never have any federal agencies acknowledged the truth about the COVID vaccines’ safety and efficacy. Instead, the CDC turns definitional and statistical cartwheels so it can continue to claim they are “safe and effective.” Even worse, with all that we know, a third generation COVID vaccine is to be rolled out for this fall and the FDA has announced that yearly boosters are planned.
All this goes on, even a year after we learned (with continuing corroborations) that children and working age adults are dying at rates 25 percent or more above the expected averages, and the vascular side effects of vaccination are the only reasonable explanation.
Maiming with Myocarditis
Both of the two US monkeypox/smallpox vaccines (Jynneos and ACAM2000) are known to cause myocarditis, as do all 3 COVID vaccines currently available in the US: the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 mRNA vaccines and the Novavax vaccine. The Novavax vaccine was first associated with myocarditis during its clinical trial, but this was downplayed and it was authorized and rolled out anyway, intended for those who refused the mRNA vaccines due to the use of fetal tissue in their manufacture.
Here is what the FDA’s reviewers wrote about the cardiac side effects noted in the Jynneos clinical trials:
Up to 18.4% of subjects in 2 studies developed post-vaccination elevation of troponin [a cardiac muscle enzyme signifying cardiac damage]. However, all of these troponin elevations were asymptomatic and without a clinically associated event or other sign of myopericarditis. p. 198
The applicant has committed to conduct an observational, post-marketing study as part of their routine PVP. The sponsor will collect data on cardiac events that occur and are assessed as a routine part of medical care. p. 200
In other words, while the only way to cause an elevated troponin level is to break down cardiac muscle cells, the FDA did not require a specific study to evaluate the extent of cardiac damage that might be caused by Jynneos when it issued its 2019 license. How frequently does myocarditis occur after these vaccines? If you use elevated cardiac enzymes as your marker, ACAM2000 caused this in one in thirty people receiving it for the first time. If you use other measures like abnormal cardiac MRI or echo, according to the CDC it occurs in one in 175 vaccinees. I have not seen a study with rates of myocarditis for Jynneos, but there was an unspecified elevation of cardiac enzymes in 10 percent and 18 percent of Jynneos recipients in two unpublished prelicensure studies available on the FDA website. My guess for the mRNA COVID vaccines is that they cause myocarditis in this general range, the vast majority of which remain undiagnosed and probably asymptomatic.
Why would our governments push 5 separate vaccines all known to cause myocarditis on young males who have been at extremely low risk from COVID, and who simply get a few pimples for 1-4 weeks from monkeypox unless they are immunocompromised? It’s an important question. It does not make medical sense. Especially when the vaccine probably does not work—Jynneos didn’t prevent infection in the monkeys in whom it was tested nor did it do well in people. And the CDC has failed to publish its trial of Jynneos vaccine in the ~1,600 Congolese healthcare workers on whom the CDC tested it for efficacy and safety in 2017. The CDC made the mistake of announcing the trial, and posting it to clinicaltrials.gov as required, but has not informed its advisory committee that reviewed the vaccine, nor the public, of the trial’s results.
There can be no question about it: our health agencies are guilty of malfeasance, misrepresentation, and deliberate infliction of harm on their own populations. The health agencies first incited terror with apocalyptic predictions, then demanded patients be medically neglected, and finally enforced vaccinations and treatments that were tantamount to malpractice.
COVID Vaccines: The Chicken or the Egg?
The health authorities could have just been ignorant — that could possibly explain the first few months of the COVID vaccines’ rollout. But once they figured out, and even announced in August 2021 that the vaccines did not prevent catching COVID or transmitting it, why did our health authorities still push COVID vaccines on low-risk populations who were clearly at greater risk from a vaccine side effect than from COVID? Particularly as time went on and newer variants were less and less virulent?
Once you acknowledge these basic facts, you realize that maybe the vaccines were not made for the pandemic, and instead the pandemic was made to roll out the vaccines. While we cannot be certain, we should at least be suspicious. And the fact that the US contracted for 10 doses per person (review purchases here, here, here, here and here) and so did the European Union (here and here) and Canada should make us even more suspicious – there is no justification for agreeing to purchase so many doses for vaccines at a time when the vaccines’ ability to prevent infection and transmission was questionable, and its safety suspect or worrying.
Why would governments want ten doses per person? Three maybe. But ten? Even if yearly boosters were expected, there was no reason to sign contracts for enough vaccine for the next nine years for a rapidly mutating virus. Australia bought 8 doses per person. By December 20, 2020 New Zealand had secured triple the vaccines it needed, and offered to share some with nearby nations. No one has come forward to explain the reason for these excessive purchases.
Furthermore, you don’t need a vaccine passport (aka digital ID, aka a phone app that in Europe included a mechanism for an electronic payments system) unless you are giving out regular boosters. Were the vaccines conceived of as the means for putting our vaccinations, health records, official documents–and most importantly, shifting our financial transactions online, all managed on a phone app? This would be an attack on privacy as well as the enabling step to a social credit system in the West. Interestingly, vaccine passports were already being planned for the European Union by 2018.
A Pandemic Treaty and Amendments: Brought to You by the Same People who Mismanaged the Past 3 Years, to Save us from Themselves?
The same US and other governments and the WHO that imposed draconian measures on citizens to force us to be vaccinated and take dangerous, expensive, experimental drugs, withheld effective treatments, and refused to tell us that most people who required ICU care for COVID were vitamin D-deficient and that taking vitamin D would lessen COVID’s severity–decided in 2021 we suddenly needed an international pandemic treaty. Why? To prevent and ameliorate future pandemics or biological warfare events… so we would not suffer again as we did with the COVID pandemic, they insisted. The WHO would manage it.
To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, the words, “I’m from the WHO, and I’m here to help” should be the most terrifying words in the English language after the COVID fiasco.
What the WHO and our governments conveniently failed to mention is that we suffered so badly because of their medical mismanagement and our governments’ merciless economic shutdowns and mismanagement. According to the World Bank, an additional 70 million people were forced into extreme poverty in 2020 alone. This was due to policies issued by our nations’ rulers, their elite advisers and the World Health Organization, which came out with guidance to shut down economic activity that most nations adopted without question. The WHO is acutely aware of the consequences of economic lockdowns, having published the following:
Malnutrition persisted in all its forms, with children paying a high price: in 2020, over 149 million under-fives are estimated to have been stunted, or too short for their age; more than 45 million – wasted, or too thin for their height…
Starvation may have killed more people than COVID, and they were disproportionately the youngest, rather than the oldest. Yet the WHO prattles on about equity, diversity, and solidarity—having itself caused the worst food crisis in our lifetime, which was not due to nature but was man-made.
How can anyone take seriously claims by the same officials who mishandled COVID that they want to spare us from another medical and economic disaster–by using the same strategies they applied to COVID, after they masterminded the last disaster? And the fact that no governments or health officials have admitted their errors should convince us never to let them manage anything ever again. Why would we let them draw up an international treaty and new amendments to the existing International Health Regulations (IHR) that will bind our governments to obey the WHO’s dictates forever?
Those dictates, by the way, include vaccine development at breakneck speed, the power to enforce which drugs we will be directed to use, and which drugs will be prohibited, and the requirement to monitor media for “misinformation” and impose censorship so that only the WHO’s public health narrative will be conveyed to the public.
The WHO’s Pandemic Treaty Draft Requires the Sharing of Potential Pandemic Pathogens. This is a Euphemism for Bioweapons Proliferation.
Obviously, the best way to spare us from another pandemic is to immediately stop funding gain-of-function (GOF) research and get rid of all existing GOF organisms. Let all nations build huge bonfires and burn up their evil creations at the same time, while allowing other nations to inspect their biological facilities and records.
But the WHO in its June 2023 Bureau Text of the Draft Pandemic Treaty has a plan that is the exact opposite of this. In the WHO’s draft treaty, which most nations’ rulers appear to have bought into, all governments will share all viruses and bacteria they come up with that are determined to have “pandemic potential” — share them with the WHO and other governments, putting their genomic sequences online. No, I am not making this up. (See screenshots from the draft treaty below.) Then the WHO and all the Fauci’s of the world would gain access to all the newly identified dangerous viruses. Would hackers also gain access to the sequences? This pandemic plan should make you feel anything but secure.
Fauci, Tedros, and their ilk at the WHO, and those managing biodefense and biomedical research for nation states are on one side, the side that gains access to ever more potential biological weapons, and the rest of us are on the other, at their mercy.
This poorly conceptualized plan used to be called proliferation of weapons of mass destruction—and it is almost certainly illegal. (For example, see Security Council resolution 1540 adopted in 2004.) But this is the plan of the WHO and of many of our leaders. Governments will all share the weapons.
The Genomic Sequencing Conundrum
And governments are to commit to building biolabs that must include genomic sequencing. No explanation has been forthcoming about why each nation needs to install its own genome sequencing laboratories. Of course, they would sequence the many viruses that will be detected as a result of the pathogen surveillance activities nations must perform, according to the WHO treaty draft. But the same techniques can be used to sequence human genomes. The fact that the EU, UK, and US are currently engaged in projects to sequence about 2 million of their citizens’ genomes provides a hint they may want to collect additional genomes of Africans, Asians, and others.
This might fly as simply sharing state-of-the-art science with our less-developed neighbors. But it is curious that there is so much emphasis on genomics, compared to an absence of discussion about developing repurposed drugs for pandemics in the draft treaty or IHR amendments.
But we can’t forget that virtually all developed nations, in lockstep, restricted the use of safe generic hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and related drugs during the pandemic. In retrospect, the only logical explanation for this unprecedented action was to preserve the market for expensive patentable drugs and vaccines, and possibly to prolong the pandemic.
Genomes offer great potential profits, as well as providing the substrate for transhumanist experiments that could include designer babies.
The latest version (aka the WHO Bureau draft) of the pandemic treaty can be accessed here. I provide screenshots to illustrate additional points.
Draft pages 10 and 11:
The WHO Treaty Draft Incentivizes Gain-of-Function Research
What else is in the Treaty? Gain-of-Function research (designed to make microorganisms more transmissible or more pathogenic) is explicitly incentivized by the treaty. The treaty demands that administrative hurdles to such research must be minimized, while unintended consequences (aka pandemics) should be prevented. But of course, when you perform this type of research, leaks and losses of agents can’t always be prevented. The joint CDC-USDA Federal Select Agent Program (FSAP) which keeps track of research on potential pandemic pathogens collects reports of about 200 accidents or escapes yearly from labs situated in the US. The FSAP annual report for 2021 notes:
“In 2021, FSAP received 8 reports of losses, 177 reports of releases, and no reports of thefts.”
Research on deadly pathogens cannot be performed without risks both to the researchers and the outside world.
Draft page 14:
Vaccines Will be Rolled Out Speedily Under Abbreviated Future Testing Protocols
Vaccines normally take 10-15 years to be developed. In case you thought the COVID vaccines took too long to be rolled out (326 days from availability of the viral sequence to authorization of the first US COVID vaccine) the WHO treaty draft has plans to shorten testing. There will be new clinical trial platforms. Nations must increase clinical trial capacity. (Might that mean mandating people to be human subjects in out-of-the-way places like Africa, for example?) And there will be new “mechanisms to facilitate the rapid interpretation of data from clinical trials” as well as “strategies for managing liability risks.”
Draft page 14:
Manufacturer and Government Liability for Vaccine Injuries Must be “Managed”
Nations are supposed to use “existing relevant models” as a reference for compensation of injuries due to pandemic vaccines. Of course, most countries do not have vaccine injury compensation schemes, and when they do the benefits are usually minimal.
Is the US government’s program to be a model of what gets implemented internationally?
The US government scheme for injuries due to COVID pandemic products (the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program or CICP) has compensated exactly 4 (yes, four) of the 12,000 claimants for COVID product-related injuries as of August 1, 2023. All pandemic EUA drugs and vaccines convey a liability shield to the government and manufacturers (this includes monoclonal antibodies, pre-licensure remdesivir, paxlovid, molnupiravir, some ventilators and all COVID vaccines) and the only avenue for injury compensation is through this program.
Slightly over 1,000 of the 12,000 claims have been adjudicated while 10,887 are pending review. Twenty claims were deemed eligible and await a benefits review. Benefits are only paid for uncovered medical expenses or lost income. A total of 983 people, or 98 percent of those whose claims have been adjudicated had their claims denied, many because they missed the brief one-year statute of limitations. Below are the latest data from this program:
The treaty draft also demands weakening the strict regulation of medical drugs and vaccines during emergencies, under the rubric of “Regulatory Strengthening.” As announced in the UK last week, where ‘trusted partner’ approvals will be used to speed licensure, this is moving toward a single regulatory agency approval or authorization, to be immediately adopted by other nations (p 25).
Next Up: Vaccines Developed in 100 Days
A plan to develop vaccines in 100 days and have them manufactured in 30 additional days has been widely publicized by the vaccine nonprofit CEPI, founded in 2017 by Sir Dr. Jeremy Farrar, who is now the WHO’s Chief Scientist. The plan has been echoed by the US and UK governments and received some buy-in from the G7 in 2021. This timeframe would only allow for very brief testing in humans, or would, more likely, limit testing to animals. Why would any country sign up for this? Is this what we the people want?
The plan furthermore depends on the vaccines only being tested for their ability to induce antibodies, which is termed immunogenicity, rather than being shown to actually prevent disease, at least for the initial rollout. My understanding of FDA regulation was that antibody levels were not an acceptable surrogate for immunity unless they had been demonstrated to actually correlate with protection. However, the FDA’s recent vaccine decisions have scrapped all that and vaccines are now being approved based on antibody titers alone. The FDA’s vaccine advisory committee has asked it for better indicators of efficacy than this, but the advisers have also voted to approve or authorize vaccines in the absence of any real measures showing that they work. I learned this because I watch the FDA vaccine advisory meetings and provide a live blog of them.
We all know how long it took for the public to become aware that the COVID vaccines failed to prevent transmission and only prevented cases for a period of weeks to months. The US government has still not officially admitted this, even though CDC Director Rochelle Walensky told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer the truth about transmission on August 6, 2021.
It is critical for the public to understand that safety testing can only be accomplished in human beings, as animals react differently to drugs and vaccines than humans do. Therefore, limited testing in animals would mean there was no actual safety testing. But testing vaccines in humans for only short periods is also unacceptable.
Testing vaccines during brief trials in humans (the Pfizer trials only followed a “safety subset” of trial subjects for a median of two months for safety) allowed COVID vaccines to be rolled out without the public being aware they could cause myocarditis and sudden deaths, most commonly in athletic young males in their teens and twenties, or a myriad of other conditions.
Finally, following this rapid manufacturing plan, thorough testing for potential failures in the manufacturing process could not be performed. With the current plan for far-flung, decentralized manufacturing facilities that are said to be necessary to achieve vaccine equity for all, there are nowhere near enough regulators who could inspect and approve them.
Will the WHO Respect Human Rights?
The need to respect “human rights, dignity, and freedom of persons” is embedded in the current International Health Regulations (IHR), as well as other UN treaties. However, the language guaranteeing human rights, dignity, and freedom of persons was peremptorily removed from the proposed IHR Amendments, without explanation. The removal of human rights protections did not go unnoticed, and the WHO has been widely criticized for it.
The WHO apparently is responding to these criticisms, and so the language guaranteeing human rights that was removed from the drafts of the International Health Regulations has been inserted into the newest version of the pandemic treaty.
Conclusions
As long predicted by science fiction, our bio- and cyber-scientific achievements have finally gotten away from us. We can produce vaccines in 100 days and manufacture them in 130 days–but there will be no guarantees that the products will be safe, effective, or adequately manufactured. And we can expect large profits but no consequences for the manufacturers.
Our genes can be decoded, and the fruits of personalized medicine made available to us. Or perhaps our genes will be patented and sold to the highest bidder. We might be able to select for special characteristics in our children, but at the same time, a human underclass could be created.
Our electronic communications can be completely monitored and censored, and uniform messaging can be imposed on everyone. But for whom would this be good?
New biological weapons can be engineered. They can be shared. Maybe that will speed up the development of vaccines and therapeutics. But who really benefits from this scheme? Who pays the price of accidents or deliberate use? Wouldn’t it be better to end so-called gain-of-function research entirely through restrictions on funding and other regulations, rather than encouraging its proliferation?
These are important issues for humanity, and I encourage everyone to become part of the conversation.
Dr. Meryl Nass, MD is an internal medicine specialist in Ellsworth, ME, and has over 42 years of experience in the medical field. She graduated from University of Mississippi School of Medicine in 1980.
U.S. Lawyers Reiterate Claim Ivermectin was never prohibited for treating COVID-19
Attorneys restate claim that FDA merely advised doctors against IVM for dying patients, but did NOT prohibit it.
BY JOHN LEAKE | COURAGEOUS DISCOURSE | AUGUST 14, 2023
Last November, I wrote the following post:
The Epoch Times recently reported an astonishing statement by a U.S. government lawyer in a federal court in Texas, where the FDA is being sued by Dr. Paul Marik of Virginia, Dr. Mary Bowden of Texas, and Dr. Robert Apter of Arizona. The three plaintiffs claim the FDA illegally prohibited them from prescribing the drug to their patients. At a November 1 hearing, U.S. lawyer Isaac Belfer argued for the defendant:
The cited statements were not directives. They were not mandatory. They were recommendations. They said what parties should do. They said, for example, why you should not take ivermectin to treat COVID-19. They did not say you may not do it, you must not do it. They did not say it’s prohibited or it’s unlawful. They also did not say that doctors may not prescribe ivermectin.”
If Belfer’s assertion is true, it raises a very urgent question: On what legal grounds did hospitals all over the United States refuse to administer ivermectin to severely ill COVID-19 patients, even when patients and their family members begged for the drug to be administered?
If ivermectin was not prohibited by the FDA or any other U.S. medical authority for treating COVID-19, why did Dr. Paul Marik’s hospital prohibit him from administering the drug to his dying patients? Why was Dr. Mary Bowden reported to the Texas Medical Board for disciplinary action when she prescribed it? Why did many pharmacists fear losing their licenses if they filled ivermectin prescriptions for treating COVID-19?
In our book, The Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex, Dr. McCullough and I document numerous instances of hospitals flatly refusing to grant the wishes of dying patients and their family members for ivermectin.
All these patients asked for was to be allowed to try the drug (FDA-approved for River Blindness, Elephantiasis, and Scabies) for COVID-19. The patients and their kin gladly indemnified the hospitals and arranged to have their independent primary care doctors deliver and administer the drug. Nevertheless:
- Hospital administrators absolutely refused to grant this wish.
- Hospital attorneys fought tooth and nail against using ivermectin to treat COVID-19 patients, doing everything in their power to challenge patient lawsuits and appeal court orders to administer the drug.
- Even when hospital doctors acknowledged that the patients were dying, they insisted it was better to let the disease take its natural course rather than allow patients to try ivermectin.
- Even when patients’ families succeeded in getting a court orders to administer the drug, many hospitals still refused, even at the risk of being held in contempt of court.
Several readers have told us that our chapters covering this shameful scandal— Chapters 38: Begging for the Wonder Drug and Chapter 40: Graduating into Eternity—are horrifying beyond belief.
Now we hear U.S. government lawyers arguing in court that the FDA never prohibited using ivermectin to treat COVID-19 patients, but merely recommended not using it. This indicates that hospitals had no legal grounds for denying sick patients a drug that could have helped them. How is withholding medicine from a sick man any different from withholding a life ring from a man who has fallen overboard in high seas?
For families who watched their loved ones slip away after being denied the right to try ivermectin, U.S. attorney Isaac Belfer’s statement may be interpreted as declaring open season for lawsuits against hospital administrators and doctors.
After I wrote the above post, I exchanged an e-mail with Dr. Marik in which he expressed profound discouragement about U.S. Judge Jeffrey Vincent Brown’s granting of the government’s Motion to Dismiss the case on the grounds of sovereign immunity.
Nevertheless, Dr. Marik and his co-plaintiffs, Robert L. Apter and Mary Talley Bowden, appealed the dismissal and are now being heard before a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Once again, attorneys for the U.S. government are in the hot seat about their mendacious claims about the FDA’s directive to doctors and hospitals against prescribing or administering Ivermectin, either to outpatients or to patients dying in hospital.
Instead of acknowledging the obvious reality that the FDA did indeed DIRECT doctors and hospitals against administering Ivermectin, U.S. attorneys continue to insist that the FDA’s communiques were mere advice.
This preposterous argument not only overlooks the plain language of the FDA’s communiques, it also overlooks the salient fact that numerous doctors (like Paul Marik) were fired from their jobs for administering ivermectin to their dying patients, and the fact that many State Medical Boards revoked doctors’ licenses for doing the same. If these punitive actions taken against doctors were NOT based on the FDA’s directives, on what grounds were they taken?
As was just reported by Just the News columnist Greg Piper:
The 5th Circuit panel seemed skeptical of Civil Division Appellate Attorney Ashley Honold’s argument that the FDA’s “informational statements” against ivermectin, including its conflation of human and animal dosages, were “merely quips” about reported problems after “self-medicating” rather than “prohibit[ing] anyone” from using ivermectin.
Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod cited the phrase “Stop it” in the agency’s viral “You are not a horse” post on X, then known as Twitter. “If you were in English class, they would say that was a command. … That is different than ‘we’re providing helpful information,'” she told Honold.
Readers of this Substack will probably agree with my sentiment that enough is enough of lying and obfuscating U.S. government agency officials and their mercenary lawyers. It’s time for the grown-up, reasonable citizenry of this country to join Marik, Bowden, et al. in suing the pants off the FDA and other U.S. agencies against whom there is a preponderance of evidence that they have unlawfully interfered with the doctor-patient relationship and committed negligent homicide, fraud, and concealment.
Cry havoc and let slip the plaintiffs’ attorneys! Sue the FDA; sue doctors and hospital administrators; and sue the medical boards. Let them pay for the damages they have inflicted on the families of patients who were denied ivermectin until their last breaths. Let them pay for the massive damage and distress they have caused for courageous doctors like Paul Marik and his colleagues who tried to help their patients.
First ‘confirmed’ cases in America were on U.S. aircraft carrier …
Or this should have been the obvious conclusion from a strangely-ignored antibody study
The USS Theodore Roosevelt left San Diego on January 17, 2020. Some sailors had shore leave at a port of call in Vietnam March 5-9. There seems to have been little interest in the question of how crew members were first infected or when “case zero” on the ship experienced symptoms. In a future article, I’ll point out that an “outbreak of norovirus” occurred on the ship Feb. 2-22. Only 382 of the ship’s 4,800 crew members “voluntarily” participated in the antibody study. At one time, officials said at least 1,000 crew members would participate in the antibody study.
BY BILL RICE, JR. | AUGUST 14, 2023
For a few weeks in early spring 2020, the drama of an outbreak of COVID-19 on the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt was world news.
Inexplicably, however, journalists and Covid researchers missed or ignored several blockbuster findings that could re-write key (and, I believe, false) narratives about this novel virus. In this author’s opinion, this possibly represents an intentional disinformation campaign perpetrated by “trusted” Naval and public health officials.
A later antibody study of a sample of the ship’s crew members produced several eye-opening findings. In my view, two findings qualify as particularly significant:
Information contained in the study strongly suggests that at least two crew members (and most likely several other crew members) had already been infected with the novel coronavirus when the ship sailed from San Diego on January 17, 2020.
The date is significant as this would be three days before the CDC reported the first “confirmed” Covid case in America. (This case was “confirmed” on January 20, 2020 but the PCR sample was taken on January 18.)
Language in the Roosevelt study definitely “confirms” that at least two sailors, both of whom later tested positive for antibodies, experienced Covid symptoms between Jan. 12-17, 2020.
For more than three years, “official” Covid histories state the first “confirmed” case in America was a man from Washington who’d recently returned from Wuhan, China. As developed below, crew members of the USS Roosevelt could, in fact, be listed as “confirmed” cases and by themselves debunk the narrative that America’s first cases came from travelers returning from Wuhan.
The same antibody results suggest that at least 59.7 percent of the ship’s approximately 4,800 crew members had already been infected by mid to late April 2020. This means approximately 3,000 crew members had contracted the virus by this date.
Sadly, Aviation Ordnanceman Chief Petty Officer Charles Robert Thacker Jr., 41, passed away on April 13, 2020 reportedly from complications of Covid. Officer Thacker tested positive for Covid March 30th and was in isolation in housing on Guam when he was found unresponsive April 9th. According to published reports, Thacker was receiving twice-a-day medical evaluations. He had gone to the Naval hospital in Guam on April 4th, but had been discharged back to his isolation quarters. It’s unclear how his medical condition deteriorated so rapidly without anyone knowing. It’s also unclear if he was staying by himself or with other sailors in isolation. I hope CDC and Navy officials can provide more details in a future interview, which I’ve requested. According to antibody and PCR test results, approximately 3,000 Roosevelt crew members were infected by Covid and Thacker was the only death. As of April 16, six of 4,800 crew members were hospitalized. Many sailors who were hospitalized seemed to have been hospitalized as a precaution, according to various press reports.
According to news reports, only one crew member, age 41, died from “complications of Covid.” (A future article will provide details that make me think the public hasn’t learned the full story of the death of Chief Petty Officer Charles Robert Thacker Jr.).
As the vast majority of Roosevelt crew members were under the age of 40, this one death reveals that the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) for crew members under age 41 was 0.0000 percent.
In my opinion, the second big headline from this antibody study should have been: “Covid poses virtually no mortality risk to anyone middle age or younger … even in the worst and most intense spread environments.”
Instead, the prevailing narrative remained that Covid was a serious threat to “everyone” in the world, even though lessons from the Roosevelt proved this was not the case.
Two other naval vessels had ‘outbreaks’ where antibody tests
The above finding was further reinforced by two other “outbreaks” on military vessels from approximately the same time period.
Sixty percent of crew members on the French air craft carrier The Charles De Gaulle tested positive for antibodies after an outbreak said to have begun in March 2020.
According to this chart, 74.75 percent of crew members of this French aircraft carrier either had “confirmed” or “suspected” cases of Covid (60 percent of de Gaulle crew members tested positive for antibodies, the same percentage as the Roosevelt study)
None of the 1,739 sailors on the de Gaulle died. Also, an outbreak that infected at least 41 percent of the 333 crew members on the guided missile destroyer USS Kidd resulted in no deaths.
This means that Covid outbreaks that spread through three military ships between January – April 2020 – potentially affecting almost 7,000 Navy personnel – resulted in only one (presumed) Covid death.
According to results of antibody and PCR tests administered to crew members of these three Naval vessels, a total of 4,408 sailors were either “confirmed” or “probable/suspect” Covid cases.
As only one crew member died from Covid, the Infection Fatality Rate was 0.022 percent – which is significantly lower than the infection fatality rate for influenza (which is often reported as 0.1 percent).
Most news reports in the early months of the official pandemic said the IFR from Covid was between 1 and 4 percent, meaning that at least 1 in 100 people infected with this virus would later die from complications caused by this new and contagious virus.
However, among Naval personnel believed to have contracted this virus while serving on these three vessels, only 1 of 4,408 likely-infected sailors died from Covid.
Expressed as a fraction, the IFR for flu (0.1 percent) corresponds to 1 death in 1,000 flu cases. From this statistic, one could state that influenza is at least four times more deadly than Covid … at least among healthy young and middle-aged sailors.
It should also be emphasized that sailors on all three vessels lived with the virus in extremely-cramped quarters with the virus circulating for weeks or months. In other words, it’s hard to produce a more virulent environment for virus spread.
In the opinion of this journalist, neither of these two findings have received the attention they warrant. Study findings which should have been Page-1 news around the world have barely been cited by researchers, with most members of the public probably unaware of these two narrative-shifting findings.
See top graph … Figure 3 from the Roosevelt antibody study presents information on the number of sailors who tested positive for antibodies between April 20-24. The two cases on the far right would pre-date the fist confirmed Covid case in America. At least six antibody-positive crew members had symptoms before the ship’s port-of-call in Vietnam (March 5-9, 2020). The study does not address how these sailors – isolated and confined to the ship for many weeks – contracted the virus. Note also that most of the antibody positive sailors either did not test positive with a PCR test or had yet to receive a PCR test, which begs the questions of how and when these crew members contracted the virus their positive antibody tests say they’d definitely contracted. None of the positive sailors were interviewed by CDC or Navy officials.
Roosevelt Antibody Study key findings …
On April 20-24, 382 Roosevelt crew members “voluntarily” donated blood for antibody tests. (Positive results on an antibody tests show/suggest “prior infection.”)
Quick Comments:
- 382 crew members is only 7.9 percent of the crew of approximately 4,800.
- Earlier reports said the Navy and CDC were going to test at least 1,000 crew members for antibodies. I’ve never learned why the study was down-sized dramatically or wasn’t made mandatory, which one thinks might have been the case in time of an alleged medical crisis and world-wide pandemic.
– As I will show in a future article, 98.1 percent of the crew of the Charles de Gaulle were tested for antibodies.
60, 62 or “nearly” 66 percent infected …
All three figures are used in the Roosevelt study, with 60 percent being the most common percentage. From the study:
N = 382 – Survey respondents/participants
N = 228 positive (antibody) ELISA result (59.7 percent)
N = 238 had “previous or current Covid infection (62 percent)
One sentence in the study reads:
“Nearly two thirds of persons in this sample had positive ELISA test results, which indicate previous exposure to SARS-CoV-2.”
In my opinion, these could be labelled as ‘confirmed’ cases …
In several places in the study, authors define a “current or previous infection.” For example:
- “Current or previous SARS-CoV-2 infection is defined as a positive RT-PCR test result or a reactive antibody result determined by testing performed at CDC laboratories on specimens collected during April 20–24, 2020.”
“… (4) Previous or current SARS-CoV-2 infection was defined as a positive real-time RT-PCR result or positive ELISA (antibody) result.”
Quick comments:
Although different semantic interpretations might be offered, in my opinion, the above language says at least two Roosevelt cases should be “confirmed” as “early cases” that happened before the first “confirmed” case in America.
That is, all 228 sailors who tested positive via ELISA antibody tests satisfied the definition of individuals who had “current or previous” Covid infections. This figure would include the two sailors who tested positive and experienced Covid symptoms 98 and 99 days before receiving their antibody tests.
As far as I’m aware, this might be the only CDC study that defines a Covid case as someone who tested positive on an ELISA antibody test.
This language is extremely significant as hundreds of other early cases in the world could/might be “confirmed” if the same definitions used in the Roosevelt study also applied to these likely early cases.
Move the birthday of Covid spread up several months …
If this criteria applied to other likely/possible cases, the timeline of the “start date” of virus spread would be moved up at least three months. The first “confirmed cases” would be November 2019, or October 2019 if not September 2019 … but certainly not January 20, 2020.
For example, I’ve identified many Americans – as well as citizens from France, Italy and the UK – who tested positive via antibody tests (including several/many who tested positive with ELISA antibody tests). These possible/likely cases include many citizens who experienced Covid symptoms in late 2019. None of these citizens have been “confirmed” as Covid cases.
Almost all other studies define or confirm Covid cases as individuals who tested positive via a PCR test. As almost no PCR tests were administered to Americans prior to March 2020, it is literally impossible to “confirm” an early case via the “PCR-positive” confirmation protocol.
Again, modifying the definition of “previously-infected” individuals to include those who tested positive via an antibody test should be viewed as very significant and represents a stark departure from other CDC statements.
Symptoms and symptom onset dates matter …
Significantly, Roosevelt study participants filled out questionnaires, providing information on when sailors experienced Covid/ILI symptoms. Participants reported what symptoms they experienced, how many symptoms and, most significantly, self-reported dates where they first experienced these symptoms. (Most antibody-positive sailors experienced at least four symptoms; many experienced six or more symptoms).
The data that immediately jumped out to me (but apparently no one else) was the two crew members who self-reported symptoms 99 and 98 days before donating blood for this serology test (donation dates were April 20-24, 2020).
Working backward from April 20-24, 2020, the crew member who experienced symptoms 99 days before donating blood would have been symptomatic January 12-16, 2020. The sailor who experienced symptoms 98 days earlier would have been symptomatic January 13-17.
Comments:
Inexplicably, Navy and CDC medical personnel did not interview either of these sailors, both of whom could/would have qualified as “case zero” in America. In fact, no sailor in the survey was questioned about their symptoms.
From study: “… although the date of any symptom onset was collected, information on timing, duration, and severity of individual symptoms was not collected.”
“Symptom onset” typically occurs two to 14 days after infection. This means these two sailors, if they had Covid, were infected even earlier in January. For the sailor who experienced symptoms 99 days earlier, the infection date could have been between December 29, 2019 and January 15, 2020.
While the ship left San Diego January 17, 2020, I’ve yet to learn when sailors began to board the ship. My assumption is sailors boarded the ship at least several days before the ship got underway to prepare for its deployment, which lasted approximately 70 days.
If any crew members were symptomatic or infected with Covid on or before January 17, these crew members would almost certainly have begun to infect any “close contacts” who didn’t already have natural immunity.
(The possibility some crew members might have already been infected as early as November 2019, or perhaps even earlier, does not seem to have been considered by any public health official or journalist. At least to me, The Red Cross antibody study proves that residents of California had been infected by November 2019. If this was the case with some Roosevelt crew members, these crew members would likely have come on board the ship with natural immunity.)
In my opinion, if the CDC and Navy had tested the vast majority of the crew for antibodies, and these crew members had also filled out symptom questionnaires, the number of possible cases pre-dating the first confirmed case in America would have been much larger than two possible American “case zeroes.”
That is, by severely limiting the size of this antibody study, CDC and Navy authors limited the number of other possible early cases the study might have identified.
At least four other crew members who tested positive for antibodies (six in total) self-reported symptoms before the ship arrived at port in Vietnam Mach 5-9.
Twelve crew members who later tested positive for antibodies self-reported symptoms 41 or more days before giving blood for their antibody tests. Again, if the study size was much larger, many more sailors would have likely reported “symptom onset” dates before the ship’s port of call in Vietnam, as well as other crew members who were perhaps infected prior to January 20, 2020.
MORE DISCUSSION …
I can’t say the Navy/CDC “concealed evidence” of early spread because the information that made me suspect this is included in the study. Indeed, the key information is depicted on a graph (“Figure 3”) of the study. Also, text in the study makes this conclusion almost impossible to miss. For example:
“Among 12 participants with positive ELISA results >40 days after symptom onset, eight maintained positive microneutralization test results, including two participants who were tested >3 months after symptom onset.”
The Roosevelt antibody study, which was published online on June 8, was covered by prominent news organizations, including The New York Times and Reuters. The NY Times actually put the key information in its sub-headline:
Headline: “After Outbreak on Carrier Roosevelt, Many Have Antibodies”
Sub-headline: “A C.D.C. study found that some sailors showed protection against the coronavirus three months after the onset of symptoms”
FWIW, the sub-headline is not entirely accurate as 99 and 98 days would be “more than three months” after onset of symptoms. I mention the Times’ headline only to point out that no Times’ journalist or editor seems to have figured out that the first known case in America could have been a member of this ship (although the newspaper’s own headline should have told them this).
The story also quotes the study’s corresponding author Daniel Payne, who highlighted the fact some crew members had apparently had Covid antibodies for several months. (I have requested an interview with Dr. Payne).
“This is a promising indicator of immunity,” said Daniel C. Payne, an epidemiologist and one of the lead authors of the study … “We don’t know how long-lasting, for sure, but it is promising.”
Previous stories mentioned the growing number of “positive cases” on the ship, but none reported anywhere close to 60 percent of the crew being infected. For example, by April 21 (one day after the antibody tests had begun), 678 sailors had tested positive via a PCR test (14.1 percent of the crew).
Reuters’ journalist correctly highlighted the fact the study’s “results could indicate a far higher presence of the coronavirus.”
However, the journalist seems to de-amplify the significance of such a large percentage of positives with this latter text:
“… one of the Navy officials said that may not be the case because of the way the study was carried out … The outbreak investigation did not encompass the entire crew, and the results of this study cannot be generalized to the entire crew,” the official said.
The article later includes this disclaimer: “Medical groups, such as the American Medical Association, have warned that serology tests can lead to false positives.”
Like all journalists who wrote articles about this study, the Reuters reporter never asked why the project didn’t encompass the entire crew nor does this journalist question the assumed predicate (that a larger sample might have produced lower antibody-positive percentages than the study/sample that was performed. As noted, a sample of almost 100 percent of French sailors produced the identical percentage of antibody positives – 60 percent).
Nor do the journalists challenge the AMA’s statement that antibody tests “can” produce “false positives.” The author and the AMA could have noted, accurately, that serology tests “can” also lead to false negatives.
That is, if antibody tests are producing more “false negatives” than “false positives,” serology “prevalence” percentages in many/most antibody studies might be even higher than reported.
Such (requisite?) sentences support my belief that any antibody test that suggests much higher percentages of “early” cases will be routinely maligned or spun as being somehow insignificant.
One of the most disturbing take-aways from my “early spread” research is that, as far as I can tell, 100 percent of mainstream or corporate journalists, are not going to investigate credible evidence of early spread.
I understand why government and public health officials might want to cover-up evidence their “virus-origins” narrative was wrong all along, but I don’t understand why the “skeptical, watchdog” press would participate in what must be a massive conspiracy to conceal the truth.
I’ve harvested too much previously-unreported information from my research into Navy ship antibody studies to include in one article. Future articles will highlight other findings which have received little or no scrutiny to date – findings I believe deserve scrutiny, even if belated.
***
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Anyone with relevant information about the outbreak on the Roosevelt or any Naval vessel can email the author at: wjricejunior@gmail.com.
I would be very interested to hear from any Roosevelt crew members. Confidentiality will be protected.
American Pravda: Why the Media Fears RFK Jr.
Investigating the Sounds of Silence
BY RON UNZ • UNZ REVIEW • AUGUST 14, 2023
Avoiding Kennedy Assassination Conspiracies
Last week the New York Times ran a lengthy front-page hit-piece against Robert F. Kennedy Jr., scion of America’s most famous political family and an underdog challenger to President Joseph Biden in the Democratic Primaries.
Kennedy’s unexpectedly strong campaign had recently stumbled when the novice candidate made some incautious remarks at a private dinner regarding the ethnic skew of Covid vulnerability, and a video clip of his explosive words touched off a media feeding-frenzy. The Times and the rest of the mainstream media are intensely hostile to Kennedy’s effort and the editors may have hoped that this piling-on attack might permanently cripple his fledgling campaign.
- Anguish in Camelot: Kennedy Campaign Roils Storied Political Family
Peter Baker • The New York Times • August 6, 2021 • 2,600 Words
Probably few readers, whether Kennedy supporters or opponents, found anything unexpected in the article authored by Chief White House Correspondent Peter Baker. Near the beginning, we were told that Kennedy “has become a source of deep anguish among his many siblings, cousins, nieces, and nephews.” The candidate was described as a former drug-addict, expelled from his private schools, who had been married three times and whose second wife had committed suicide. Meanwhile, almost any mention of the great accomplishments in his long and successful career as an environmental attorney were left on the cutting-room floor.
The main focus of the piece was Kennedy’s frayed relations with his extended family, die-hard Democrats all, who were bewildered and saddened by the strange and self-destructive political behavior of their errant relative. The text was heavily laced with harshly negative quotes regarding his beliefs—“deplorable and untruthful” according to his sister Kerry Kennedy, “morally and factually wrong” by his brother Joseph P. Kennedy II, while his nephew Joseph P. Kennedy III Tweeted “I unequivocally condemn what he said.” The article opened with a denunciation by the only grandson of President John F. Kennedy, who declared that his “conspiracy-minded” cousin was “tarnishing the legacy of his grandfather and their storied family” with his “vanity project.” I counted a total of 13 different Kennedys cited in the piece, almost all of them providing these sorts of unflattering remarks.
The entire tone of the article was unrelentingly negative and clearly intended to present the dissenting Democratic candidate as someone who held bizarre beliefs or was even unhinged, definitely not an individual to be entrusted with our nation’s future. I’d assume that the Democratic Party’s lavishly-funded corps of opposition researchers have carefully parsed every spoken or written word of Kennedy for the last couple of decades and then gifted the choicest morsels they uncovered to their numerous media allies including the Times.
Thus, we can safely assume that every misstep or bit of dirt about Kennedy would have been discovered by now, allowing us to draw some important inferences from any silence. So as I carefully read the Times article, I focused not so much on what it contained but rather what it strangely omitted.
Over the years, Kennedy has publicly and repeatedly declared that both his father and his uncle had died at the hands of a conspiracy, pointing to the CIA as the most likely culprit. Probably at least a couple of million Americans have read his words or listened to his interviews, clearly establishing him as the most explicit sort of “conspiracy theorist,” a highly pejorative term that the media always eagerly seeks to inflict upon disfavored political candidates.
Yet across the full 2,600 words of the article, most of it heavily focused upon Kennedy family matters, mention of that topic was limited to just a single glancing sentence. Why would the Times have almost entirely avoided such a tempting target, one that seemingly supported its portrayal of Kennedy as holding bizarre and irrational beliefs? I think that the best explanation is that the editors knew perfectly well that Kennedy’s facts were rock-solid on that issue, and that challenging him would merely bring his information to much wider attention, perhaps leading many additional millions of Americans to conclude that their own media had been lying to them for six decades just as Kennedy himself had Tweeted out last year:
Only a week before sending that Tweet, Kennedy had published a long piece in the San Francisco Chronicle presenting the incontrovertible facts of his own father’s killing, and if these came to widespread attention, decades of media lies might begin to unravel.
- Sirhan Sirhan didn’t kill my father. Gov. Newsom should set him free
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. • The San Francisco Chronicle • December 8, 2021 • 1,000 Words
Consider, for example, prominent liberal pundit Bill Maher, someone who would certainly never classify himself as a “conspiracy theorist.” When he interviewed Kennedy a few weeks ago and heard the factual evidence regarding the assassination of the candidate’s father in 1968, he immediately declared himself completely convinced that Kennedy was correct about the existence of a conspiracy.
Moreover, the particular focus of the Times article would have put the newspaper on especially risky ground. With thirteen different members of the Kennedy family mentioned or quoted in the text, any substantial discussion of the 1960s assassinations might reveal that many or most of Kennedy’s relatives fully agreed with the candidate about the existence of a conspiracy, thereby blowing a huge hole in the media’s decades-long blockade of the truth. If the American people discovered that the entire Kennedy family was filled with “Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists,” tens of millions of minds might be changed.
Consider another piece published a couple of months earlier by Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, which had appeared as part of a large barrage of media attacks and insults against the conspiratorial beliefs of Kennedy and his supporters. Although she treated his views on the assassinations as an element of his irrationality, she couldn’t help mentioning that Salon founder David Talbot, her old boss and a highly-regarded national journalist, entirely agreed with Kennedy about those historical facts.
Indeed, I regard Talbot’s 2005 national bestseller Brothers as probably the most important Kennedy assassination book of the last twenty years because it revealed that so many individuals near the top of the American government, including most of the Kennedy family itself, had almost immediately concluded that our 35th President died in a conspiracy. A leading mainstream historian lavishly praised Talbot’s research in the Times itself and suggested that the existence of a conspiracy was obvious. But the editors running the Times news pages have continued to avert their eyes from these facts, perhaps leading their younger colleagues such as Goldberg to remain blissfully unaware.
Totally Ignoring Kennedy’s AIDS Denialism
When hostile journalists seek to destroy a candidate, they naturally direct their coverage where they believe he is most vulnerable and do their best to ignore his greatest strengths. A shrewd campaign might use such biased reporting as a road-map, one that provides the photographic negative of the issues that should be emphasized. So if the Times and other media outlets seek to avoid the Kennedy assassination conspiracies, perhaps those are exactly the right issues to discuss.
But there is another incendiary topic on which the silence surrounding Kennedy’s position has been far more absolute across both the mainstream and the alternative media, so much so that probably only the tiniest sliver of Americans are even aware of Kennedy’s views. Based upon his extremely controversial writings, the candidate would seem so tremendously vulnerable that any such media coverage would immediately destroy his campaign and his reputation. Yet not a single hostile publication has ever reported those facts, suggesting that the true situation is actually quite different from what it appears to be. Perhaps this total silence implies that the Times and other media outlets dread that subject, fearing that it could destroy their entire media establishment if the facts came out and Kennedy were proven correct.
Until late 2021 I’d been only slightly aware of Kennedy, having vaguely heard that he’d become a leading figure in the growing anti-vaxxing movement. My own views on vaccines had always been quite conventional, not too different from those advocated by the Times, but I was persuaded to read his new book in order to get his side of the story.
To my utter amazement I discovered that the main subject of his text was something entirely different than what I had been led to believe. Kennedy had devoted nearly half the length—200 pages—to promoting the theory that AIDS did not exist as a real disease and was instead merely a medical media hoax concocted by Dr. Anthony Fauci and his greedy corporate allies. But not a single one of those describing his book, whether supportive or critical, had ever hinted at this. Indeed, when I mentioned the true subject of Kennedy’s text to a couple of people, they almost seemed to think that I was delusional, considering it impossible that no one would have revealed such a startling fact.
Kennedy’s book quickly became the #1 Amazon bestseller and he soon drew extremely harsh media attacks, including a 4,000 word article produced by a large team of Associated Press journalists. But as I noted, although they denounced him on every other point none of them ever mentioned his explosive AIDS claims.
A great deal of effort had obviously been invested in this attack, and the byline of the named author was shared by five additional AP writers and researchers, underscoring the journalistic resources devoted to demolishing the reputation of an individual who has obviously made such powerful enemies. But in reading the article, the phrase that came to my mind was “the Sounds of Silence” or perhaps the famous Sherlockian clue of “the Dog That Didn’t Bark.”
Almost half of the entire book under attack—around 200 pages—is devoted to presenting and promoting the astonishing claim that everything we have been told about HIV/AIDS for more than 35 years probably amounts to a hoax.
By any reasonable standard, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has now established himself as America’s #1 “HIV/AIDS Denier,” and prior to the Covid outbreak, AIDS had probably spent almost four decades as the world’s highest-profile disease, reportedly absorbing some two trillion dollars in research and treatment costs. So for someone to essentially claim that the disease doesn’t actually exist would seem the height of utter lunacy, on a par with Flat Earthism. Yet not a single word of this astonishing situation appears in the long AP article, that attacks Kennedy on almost all other possible grounds, fair or unfair. Did all six of the AP writers and researchers somehow skip over those 200 pages in Kennedy’s bestseller?
That large team of AP journalists seems to have spent at least ten days working on their lengthy article, mining Kennedy’s record for almost everything controversial they could possibly find, even highlighting a photograph that merely shows him standing next to Trump allies Roger Stone and Michael Flynn.
- How a Kennedy Built an Anti-Vaccine Juggernaut Amid COVID-19
Michelle R. Smith et. al. • The Associated Press • December 15, 2021 • 4,000 Words
I noticed this same total silence about AIDS was maintained in a similar attack the following month by the managing editor of Counterpunch.
- Vaccines, RFK Jr. and The Science of Misinformation
Joshua Frank • Counterpunch • January 14, 2022 • 1,900 Words
With Kennedy’s book passing the million mark in sales and his influence still growing, this pattern of omission continued and became even stranger. In late February, the New York Times launched a blistering front-page attack against him, tarring the author and his book as a font of total irrationality and dangerous misinformation, but the 2,600 words never hinted at his central focus on AIDS.
Moreover, the writer was longtime Times journalist Adam Nagourney, identified as the co-author of a history of the modern Gay Rights movement, and surely the AIDS epidemic must have been a central part of his research for that 2001 volume. But he never mentioned the 200 pages in which Kennedy had made the incendiary claim that AIDS was just a medical media hoax, an omission perhaps suggesting that he feared that Kennedy might well be correct and that certain doors should be kept firmly closed.
- A Kennedy’s Crusade Against Covid Vaccines Anguishes Family and Friends
Adam Nagourney • The New York Times • February 26, 2022 • 2,600 Words
As I later noted, this silence very suspiciously contrasted with the firestorms of media outrage that had once greeted those who raised even mild doubts about the AIDS issue.
Since the 1980s AIDS has been an explosive topic in the public sphere, and anyone—whether scientist or layman—who questioned the orthodox narrative was viciously denounced as having blood on his hands. During the early 2000s South African President Thabo Mbeki had cautiously raised such possibilities and was massively vilified by the international media and the academic community. Yet when Kennedy’s #1 Amazon bestseller went much farther, devoting seven full chapters to making the case that HIV/AIDS was merely a medical hoax, his media antagonists carefully avoided that subject even while they attacked him on all other grounds.
Once again, the only plausible explanation is that the hostile journalists and their editors have recognized that Kennedy’s factual evidence was too strong and any such attacks might prove disastrously counter-productive. As far back as the 1990s, a former Harvard professor had publicly declared that the AIDS hoax was as great a scientific scandal as the notorious Lysenko fraud, and if a substantial portion of the American public concluded that AIDS was indeed a medical phantom that had been promoted for 35 years by our gullible and dishonest media, the credibility of the latter on current vaccination issues might be completely annihilated.
It would have been the easiest thing in the world for the media to accurately blast Kennedy as “a conspiracy theorist whose book claims that AIDS is a hoax,” and that simple, short phrase would have immediately dealt a massive body-blow to his public reputation. But many people would then have begun looking into the facts, and once they did so, the tables might have quickly turned, destroying the credibility of his critics. The total silence of the media suggests that they greatly feared that possibility.
Understanding the Bitter HIV/AIDS Controversy
After reading Kennedy’s book in December 2021, I published a long and favorable review, which attracted a great deal of readership and squarely emphasized his heretical AIDS claims, thereby finally bringing them into the public square. Websites closely allied with Kennedy highlighted my piece so it seems unlikely that any of his media adversaries could have still remained unaware.
As all of us know from the media, AIDS is a deadly auto-immune disease that was first diagnosed in the early 1980s, primarily afflicting gay men and intervenous drug users. Transmitted by bodily fluids, the disease usually spread through sexual activity, blood transfusions, or the sharing of needles, and HIV, the virus responsible, was finally discovered in 1984. Over the years, a variety of medical treatments were developed, mostly ineffective at first, but more recently so successful that although being HIV-positive was once considered a death-sentence, the infection has now become a chronic, controllable condition. The current Wikipedia page on HIV/AIDS runs more than 20,000 words, including over 300 references.
Yet according to the information provided in Kennedy’s #1 Amazon bestseller, this well-known and solidly-established picture, which I had never seriously questioned, is almost entirely false and fraudulent, essentially amounting to a medical media hoax. Instead of being responsible for AIDS, the HIV virus is probably harmless and had nothing to do with the disease. But when individuals were found to be infected with HIV, they were subjected to the early, extremely lucrative AIDS drugs, which were actually lethal and often killed them. The earliest AIDS cases had mostly been caused by very heavy use of particular illegal drugs, and the HIV virus had been misdiagnosed as being responsible. But since Fauci and the profit-hungry drug companies soon built enormous empires upon that misdiagnosis, for more than 35 years they have fought very hard to maintain and protect it, exerting all their influence to suppress the truth in the media while destroying the careers of any honest researchers who challenged that fraud. Meanwhile, AIDS in Africa was something entirely different, probably caused mostly by malnutrition or other local conditions.
I found Kennedy’s account as shocking as anything I have ever encountered.
In 1985 AZT, an existing drug, was found to kill the HIV virus in laboratory tests. Fauci then made tremendous efforts to speed it through clinical trials as an appropriate treatment for healthy, HIV-positive individuals, with FDA approval finally coming in 1987, producing Fauci’s first moment of triumph. Priced at $10,000/year per patient, AZT was one of the most expensive drugs in history, and with the cost covered by health insurance and government subsidies, it produced an unprecedented financial windfall for its manufacturer.
Kennedy devotes an entire chapter to the story of AZT, and the tale he tells is something out of Kafka or perhaps Monty Python. Apparently, Fauci had been under enormous pressure to produce medical breakthroughs justifying his large budget, so he manipulated the AZT trials to conceal the extremely toxic nature of the drug, which rapidly killed many of the patients who received it, with their symptoms being ascribed to AIDS. So following FDA approval in 1987, hundreds of thousands of perfectly healthy individuals found to be infected with HIV were placed on a regimen of AZT, and the large number of resulting deaths was misattributed to the virus rather than to the anti-viral drug. According to the scientific experts cited in the book, the vast majority of post-1987 “AIDS deaths” were actually due to AZT.
Prior to the Covid outbreak, AIDS had spent almost four decades as the world’s highest-profile disease, absorbing perhaps a couple of trillion dollars of funding and becoming the central focus of an army of scientists and medical experts. It simply boggles the mind for someone to suggest that HIV/AIDS might have largely been a hoax, and that the vast majority of deaths were not from the illness but from the drugs taken to treat it.
My science textbooks sometimes mentioned that during the benighted 18th century, leading Western physicians treated all manner of ailments with bleeding, a quack practice that regularly caused the deaths of their patients, with our own George Washington often numbered among the victims. Indeed, some have argued that for several centuries prior to modern times, standard medical treatments inadvertently took far more lives than they saved, and those too poor or backward to consult a doctor probably benefited from that lack. But I had never dreamed that this same situation might have occurred during the most recent decades of our modern scientific age.
From reading the newspapers during the early 1990s, I had been dimly aware of the dispute regarding the true nature of AIDS, but had never paid much attention to the controversy at the time. So when the media coverage faded away, I assumed that the debate had been successfully resolved.
But according to Kennedy’s #1 Amazon bestseller, this was not the case. He claimed that for three decades the entire Western media has been promoting and maintaining a gigantic medical hoax, a conspiracy orchestrated by Dr. Anthony Fauci and his greedy corporate allies that had cost the lives of many hundreds of thousands of Americans.
Such bizarre accusations seemed almost impossible to me, more like the ranting of a deranged lunatic than anything that could happen in the real world. But the case he laid out across his 200 pages of text was a surprisingly persuasive one.
Extraordinary claims obviously require extraordinary evidence. Kennedy’s chapters on AIDS include more than 900 source-references, many of them to academic journal articles or other supposedly authoritative scientific information. But although I have a strong science background, with my original academic training having been in theoretical physics, I am not a medical doctor nor a virologist, let alone someone with specialized expertise in AIDS research, and these articles would mean nothing to me even if I had attempted to read them. So I was forced to seek other indications that Kennedy’s 200 pages on AIDS represented something more than sheerest lunacy.
His book carries glowing praise from a long list of medical doctors and scientists, but their names and backgrounds are completely unknown to me, and with nearly a million practicing physicians in America, a few could surely be found to endorse almost anything. However, the first endorsement on the back cover is from Prof. Luc Montagnier, the medical researcher who won a Nobel Prize for discovering the HIV virus in 1984, and he writes: “Tragically for humanity, there are many, many untruths emanating from Fauci and his minions. RFK Jr. exposes the decades of lies.” Moreover, we are told that as far back as the San Francisco International AIDS Conference of June 1990, Montagnier had publicly declared “the HIV virus is harmless and passive, a benign virus.”
Perhaps this Nobel Laureate endorsed the book for other reasons and perhaps the meaning of his striking 1990 statement has been misconstrued. But surely the opinion of the researcher who won a Nobel Prize for discovering the HIV virus should not be totally ignored in assessing its possible role.
And he was hardly alone. Kennedy explains that the following year, a top Harvard microbiologist organized a group containing some of the world’s most distinguished virologists and immunologists and they issued a public statement, endorsed by three additional science Nobel Laureates, that raised the same questions:
It is widely believed by the general public that a retrovirus called HIV causes a group of diseases called AIDS. Many biomedical scientists now question this hypothesis. We propose a thorough reappraisal of the existing evidence for and against this hypothesis, to be conducted by a suitable independent group. We further propose that the critical epidemiological studies be designed and undertaken.
As Kennedy tells the story, by that point AIDS researchers and the mainstream media were completely in thrall to the ocean of government funding and pharmaceutical advertising controlled by Fauci and his corporate allies, so these calls by eminent scientists were almost entirely ignored and unreported. According to one journalist, some two trillion dollars has been spent on HIV/AIDS research and treatment over the decades, and with so many research careers and personal livelihoods dependent upon what amounts to an “HIV/AIDS industrial-complex,” few have been willing to critically examine the basic foundations of that empire.
Until a couple of weeks ago, I had never given any thought to questioning AIDS orthodoxy. But discovering the longstanding scientific skepticism of so many knowledgeable experts, including four Nobel Laureates, one of them the actual discoverer of the HIV virus, has completely shifted my perspective. I cannot easily ignore or dismiss the theories Kennedy presents, but can only briefly summarize them and leave it to individual readers to investigate further then decide for themselves. And in basic fairness to the author, he himself also repeatedly emphasizes that he can “take no position on the relationship between HIV and AIDS” but is simply disturbed that Fauci has successfully used his government funding and media clout to suppress an ongoing and perfectly legitimate scientific debate. According to Kennedy, his book is intended “to give air and daylight to dissenting voices.”
His narrative of the origins of the HIV/AIDS connection is absolutely stunning and seems well-documented. Dr. Robert Gallo, an NIH researcher in Fauci’s orbit, originally announced HIV as the apparent cause of AIDS at a packed 1984 press conference, which he held before any of his supportive research findings had actually been published and reviewed by his scientific peers. Only long after the theory had become firmly embedded in the national media did it come out that only 26 of the 76 AIDS victims in his seminal study showed any traces of the HIV virus, an extremely slender reed for such a momentous conclusion.
Furthermore, critics eventually noted that many thousands of documented AIDS victims similarly lacked any signs of the HIV virus, while millions of those infected by HIV exhibited absolutely no symptoms of AIDS. Correlation does not imply causality, but in this case, even the correlation seemed a very loose one. According to Kennedy, fully orthodox AIDS researchers grudgingly admit that no scientific study has ever demonstrated that HIV causes AIDS. The widespread accusations of serious scientific misbehavior and outright intellectual theft that long swirled around Gallo’s laboratory research were eventually confirmed by legal proceedings, and that helped explain why his name was not included on the Nobel Prize for the HIV discovery.
AIDS had originally come under the purview of the National Cancer Institute, but once it was blamed on a virus, Fauci’s own infectious disease center managed to gain control. That resulted in an enormous gusher of Congressional funding and media attention for what had previously been a sleepy and obscure corner of the NIH, and Fauci soon established himself as America’s reigning “AIDS Czar.” The HIV-AIDS link may or may not be scientifically valid, but it carried enormous political and financial implications for Fauci’s career.
One of the major scientific heroes in Kennedy’s account is Prof. Peter H. Duesberg of Berkeley. During the 1970s and 1980s, Duesberg had been widely regarded as among the world’s foremost virologists, elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences at age 50, making him one of its youngest members in history. As early as 1987 he began raising serious doubts about the HIV/AIDS hypothesis and highlighting the dangers of AZT, eventually publishing a series of journal articles on the subject that gradually won over many others, including Montagnier. In 1996 he published Inventing the AIDS Virus, a massive 712 page volume setting forth his case, with the Foreword provided by Nobel Laureate Kary Mullis, the renowned inventor of PCR technology and himself another leading public critic of the HIV/AIDS hypothesis. Duesberg even underscored the confidence of his HIV skepticism by offering to be injected with HIV-tainted blood.
But rather than openly debate such a strong scientific opponent, Fauci and his allies blacklisted Duesberg from receiving any government funding, thereby wrecking his research career, while also vilifying him and pressuring others to do the same. According to fellow researchers quoted by Kennedy, Duesberg was destroyed as a warning and an example to others. Meanwhile, Fauci deployed his influence to have his critics banned from the major national media, ensuring that few outside a narrow segment of the scientific community ever even became aware of the continuing controversy.
-
- American Pravda: Vaxxing, Anthony Fauci, and AIDS
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • December 6, 2021 • 6,100 Words
- American Pravda: Vaxxing, Anthony Fauci, and AIDS
Investigating the Duesberg Hypothesis on HIV/AIDS
I subsequently spent several weeks carefully reading the arguments of Duesberg and his scientific allies as well as those of their opponents, and then described the results of my inquiry:
So the theory I needed to investigate amounted to the Duesberg Hypothesis, the long-suppressed challenger to our reigning HIV/AIDS orthodoxy.
Fortunately for my purposes, scientific heresies starved of research funding and blacklisted from leading journals tend to produce a very manageable body of work. The annual billions spent on orthodox AIDS research has spawned well over 100,000 academic journal articles, more than a diligent reader could digest in a dozen lifetimes. But the most recent academic publication I could locate on the other side was a lengthy review article published eighteen years ago by Duesberg and two of his collaborators. Indeed, according to their Epilogue, the authors had spent several years struggling to get their article into print against the unremitting hostility of the reigning AIDS establishment, which had successfully pressured two previous journals into cancelling publication.
- The chemical bases of the various AIDS epidemics: recreational drugs, anti-viral chemotherapy and malnutrition (PDF)
Peter Duesberg, Claus Koehnlein, and David Rasnick • Journal of Bioscience • June 2003 • 24,000 WordsAlthough I have a strong scientific background, I lack the necessary expertise in medicine or microbiology to properly evaluate their paper. But reading it carefully as a layman, I found it solid and persuasive, certainly worthy of publication. And when I passed it along to someone with a professional medical background, he considered it extremely impressive, a convincing exposition of the authors’ revolutionary thesis.
One of Duesberg’s central claims was that the disease known as “AIDS” didn’t actually exist, but was merely the official label attached to a group of more than two dozen different illnesses, all of which had a variety of different causes, with only some of these being infectious agents. Indeed, most of these illnesses had been known and treated for many decades, but they were only designated “AIDS” if the victim was also found to test positive for the HIV virus, which probably had nothing to do with the condition.
In support of their contrary position, the authors noted that the various groups at high risk for “AIDS” only tended to get particular versions of the disease, with the “AIDS” suffered by hemophiliacs usually being very different from the “AIDS” of African villagers and only slightly overlapping with the diseases of gay men or intervenous drug addicts. Indeed, the pattern of “AIDS” in Africa seemed utterly divergent from that in the developed world. But if all these different illnesses were actually caused by a single HIV virus, such completely disparate syndromes would seem puzzling anomalies, difficult to explain from a scientific perspective.
In 2009, a half-dozen years after the publication of that lengthy article, an independent film-maker named Brent Leung produced a 90 minute documentary on AIDS, strongly sympathetic to Duesberg’s thesis, and someone recently brought it to my attention. There is a great paucity of pro-Duesberg material, so although I only rarely find videos useful sources of information, this case was an important exception. The film highlighted the tremendous inconsistencies of the orthodox scientific position, and also included important interviews with Duesberg, Mullis, Fauci, and numerous other key researchers and journalists on all sides of the debate. The entire documentary is conveniently available on Youtube, so those interested can watch it and decide for themselves.
Journalist John Lauritsen had been covering the HIV/AIDS controversy for decades, writing two books on the subject and serving as an important source for Kennedy’s own work. He recently joined one of the discussion-threads on our website, and suggested that I republish his 2018 conference talk, which usefully summarized the history and current state of the issue.
- Making Our Case In the Battle for Truth
Challenging Avaricious Viral Paradigms
John Lauritsen • Vers Pont du Gard Conference • June 16, 2018 • 2,500 WordsAlthough I found all this pro-Duesberg material helpful in fleshing out the arguments, most of it overlapped with the contents of the Kennedy book, and the analysis was necessarily one-sided. Under pressure of the medical establishment and its AIDS lobby, the mainstream media has almost entirely shut its doors to any dissent on the issue and refuses to engage the critics, instead seeming to rely upon the blacklist and the boycott. This suggested the relative weakness of the orthodox case, but lacking the give-and-take of argument and counter-argument, I could not easily weigh the strength of the two sides. Fortunately, I discovered that this situation had been quite different in the past.
I spent most of the early 2000s creating a content-archiving system that includes near-complete collections of a couple of hundred of our leading opinion magazines of the last 150 years, those influential publications that have shaped our understanding of the world. The project was nearly a total failure since very few people have ever used it, but it still comes in handy when I want to investigate something, and I easily located a long list of articles focused on the Duesberg Hypothesis, most of them from the 1990s. During that period, the iron wall of censorship had not yet come down, and the topic had been widely and respectfully treated in major publications.
I carefully read more than a dozen of the most substantial articles, all of which had appeared in fully mainstream and respectable liberal, conservative, and libertarian periodicals. One major surprise was how little the debate seemed to have changed. The evidence and arguments that Duesberg and his scientific allies had been making thirty years ago seemed remarkably similar to what was presented in Kennedy’s book published only just last month.
The Summer 1990 issue of Policy Review, one of America’s most sober and influential conservative policy journals, had offered Duesberg and a co-author a platform for the controversial theory, and their resulting piece ran nearly 9,000 words. According to the editor, this topic provoked more letters and responses—both positive and negative—than anything in the publication’s history, and became one of their most talked-about articles. As a result, the next issue of the quarterly featured some of those reactions as well as the replies of the two authors, with the entire exchange running almost 13,000 words.
- Is the AIDS Virus a Science Fiction? (PDF)
Immunosuppressive Behavior, not HIV, May Be the Cause of AIDS
Peter H. Duesberg and Bryan J. Ellison • Policy Review • Summer 1990 • 8,800 Words- Is HIV the Cause of AIDS? (PDF)
Critics Respond • Policy Review • Fall 1990 • 12,700 WordsSeveral years later, a similar development unfolded at Reason, the glossy flagship publication of America’s libertarian movement. The magazine ran a long cover story endorsing Duesberg’s claims and authored by three of his scientific allies, one of them a former Harvard Medical School professor and another a recent Nobel Laureate. Once again the result was a huge outpouring of both supportive and critical reactions, and the lengthy debate was published in a subsequent issue.
- What Causes AIDS? (PDF)
We still don’t know what causes AIDS
Charles A. Thomas Jr., Kary B. Mullis, and Phillip E. Johnson • Reason • June 1994 • 4,600 Words- What Causes AIDS? The Debate Continues (PDF)
Critics Respond • Reason • December 1994 • 9,100 WordsThe Lancet is one of the world’s leading medical journals and in 1996, the year after he become its chief editor, Richard Horton took to the pages of the intellectually-prestigious New York Review of Books to produce a 10,000 word discussion of Duesberg’s theories, as propounded in three of the researcher’s recent books and collections. Horton was obviously among the most respectable of establishmentarian figures, but although he mostly came down in support of the orthodox HIV/AIDS consensus, he presented Duesberg’s entirely contrary perspective in a fair-minded manner, respectfully though not uncritically.
However, what struck me most about Horton’s account was how appalled he seemed at Duesberg’s treatment by America’s ruling medical-industrial complex, as suggested by his title “Truth and Heresy about AIDS.”
The very first sentence of his long review article mentioned the “vast academic and commercial industry built around…HIV” along with the fundamental challenge Duesberg posed to its scientific basis. As a consequence, the “brilliant virologist” had become “the most vilified scientist alive” and the subject of “excoriating attacks.” The leading professional science journals had displayed an “alarmingly uneven attitude,” and partly as a consequence, other potential dissidents had been dissuaded from pursuing their alternative theories.
According to Horton, financial considerations had become a central element of the scientific process, and he noted with horror that a press conference on research questioning the effectiveness of a particular anti-AIDS drug was actually packed with financial journalists, focused on the efforts of the corporate executives to destroy the credibility of a study that they themselves had helped to design but which had now gone against their own product.
Most importantly, although Horton was generally skeptical of Duesberg’s conclusions, he was absolutely scathing towards the opponents of the dissident virologist.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the dispute between Duesberg and the AIDS establishment is the way in which Duesberg has been denied the opportunity to test his hypothesis. In a discipline governed by empirical claims to truth, experimental evidence would seem the obvious way to confirm or refute Duesberg’s claims. But Duesberg has found the doors of the scientific establishment closed to his frequent calls for tests…
Duesberg deserves to be heard, and the ideological assassination that he has undergone will remain an embarrassing testament to the reactionary tendencies of modern science…At a time when fresh ideas and new paths of investigation are so desperately being sought, how can the AIDS community afford not to fund Duesberg’s research?”
That ringing last sentence closed the entire review, which appeared in a prestigious and influential publication over a quarter-century ago. But as near as I can tell, Horton’s heartfelt criticism fell entirely on deaf ears, and the AIDS establishment simply ignored the entire controversy while gradually pressuring the media to end any coverage. This seems to fully confirm the narrative history provided in Kennedy’s current bestseller.
- Truth and Heresy About AIDS
Richard Horton • The New York Review of Books • May 23, 1996 • 10,100 WordsTaken together, these five articles run more than 45,000 words, the length of a short book, and probably provide as good and even-handed a debate on the Duesberg Hypothesis as can be found anywhere. Individual readers may judge for themselves, but I thought the that Duesberg camp certainly got the better of all those exchanges.
American Pravda: AIDS and the Revival of the Duesberg Hypothesis
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • December 29, 2021 • 4,100 Words
In 1996 Duesberg had published a book setting forth his controversial theories for a general audience, but its length of more than 700 pages initially intimidated me and the used copies on Amazon started at over $600. However, I soon learned that the public-spirited author had simultaneously released a freely downloadable PDF copy on the Internet, and I discovered that academic journal articles and end notes filled almost half the length, reducing the body of the main text to very manageable proportions, considerably shorter than the Kennedy book.
The endorsement and Foreword by Nobel Laureate Mullis persuaded me to try a chapter or two, and I found the material so fascinating I quickly read the entire work. Duesberg very persuasively placed the HIV/AIDS controversy within the broader context of past public health debacles and the massive professional pressures faced by infectious disease researchers. His book had apparently been produced under difficult political circumstances and was ultimately released by the Regnery Company, the leading conservative press, whose publisher provided an unusual explanatory Preface, containing the following paragraphs:
The book you are about to read has been a long time in coming. Why? It is at once enormously controversial and impeccably documented. It comes from a scientist and writer of great ability and courage. It will cause, we believe, a firestorm of yet undetermined proportions in both the scientific and lay communities. And it is, I think I am safe in saying, about the most difficult book that the Regnery Company has published in nearly 50 years in the business.
If Duesberg is right in what he says about AIDS, and we think he is, he documents one of the great science scandals of the century. AIDS is the first political disease, the disease that consumes more government research money, more press time, and indeed probably more heartache—much of it unnecessary—than any other. Duesberg tells us why.
Although the text is easy reading, well-written for a general audience, it contains a huge amount of surprising medical information difficult for the non-specialist to check, and this would normally leave me cautious. However, the Lancet is one of the world’s leading medical journals, and although its editor was a strong supporter of the orthodox HIV/AIDS consensus, his 10,000 word review in the New York Review of Books treated both Duesberg and his book very respectfully, so I doubt the work contains any obvious errors or blatant falsehoods. Although Duesberg’s opus is now a quarter-century old, as far as I can tell, very little has changed since it was written, and the same disputes of the mid-1990s are just as relevant today, so I would urge everyone interested in the subject to read it. Since the original PDF was so enormous, I have broken it up by chapters for the convenience of readers.
-
- Inventing the AIDS Virus
Peter H. Duesberg • Regnery Publishing • 1996 • 712 Pages
- Inventing the AIDS Virus
The story that Duesberg tells is a simple one. After the successful eradication of polio in the 1950s, America’s enormous existing infrastructure of infectious disease professionals lost most of the reason for its existence, and its leaders eventually began searching for some new means of justifying their continued government funding. The War on Cancer begun in the late 1960s proved a dismal failure and the massively-hyped warnings of a deadly Swine Flu epidemic in 1976 became a complete debacle, leading to the ouster of some top officials. So a few years later when the AIDS label was affixed to a group of apparently unrelated illnesses, Anthony Fauci and others had a tremendous incentive to claim that the cause was an infectious agent, and despite the lack of any solid evidence soon fingered the HIV virus as the culprit. Once that original misdiagnosis had spawned an enormous multi-billion-dollar industry, its researchers, administrators, and corporate beneficiaries were committed to protecting it.
Celia Farber was a leading AIDS journalist during the 1990s, who covered Duesberg and the other main figures in the controversy, and just a few days ago she released on Substack a long 2004 article she had originally written for Harpers on the controversial Berkeley researcher, which later became the first chapter of one of her books.
- The Passion of Peter Duesberg
How Anthony Fauci And His AIDS Industry Sacrificed One Of America’s Greatest Cancer Scientists
Celia Farber • Substack • January 2, 2022 • 11,000 WordsDuesberg’s writings provide by far the most comprehensive exposition of his material, but for those who prefer a different format, I would strongly recommend his hour-long Red Ice podcast interview from a decade ago, conveniently available on Youtube.
Youtube videos are widely popular among those less inclined to read, and the same year that Duesberg’s opus was published, Starvision Productions released a two hour documentary entitled “HIV=AIDS: Fact or Fraud,” which very effectively covers much of the same material. The feature includes interviews with the Berkeley researcher and several of his key scientific allies in the controversy, one of whom describes the scandal in American medical science as worse than the notorious Lysenko fraud of the old Soviet Union.
Among the many telling points, the documentary notes that although nearly 90% of those Americans suffering from AIDS are male, HIV tests administered to our new military recruits indicate that the general rate of HIV infection in the population is equal between men and women, a very strange divergence between the illness and its alleged cause. Furthermore, the incidence rates of sexually-transmitted diseases and HIV have sharply diverged over the years, raising serious doubts about whether the virus actually follows that mode of transmission.
Although both Duesberg and most of the other scientists in his camp seemed to be very conventional and even buttoned-down researchers, an important exception was Nobel Laureate Kary Mullis, widely regarded as a brilliant but eccentric and iconoclastic figure. For those interested in his views on the HIV/AIDS debate, I would recommend the following two hour interview by Dr. Gary Null, also released in 1996.
Mullis’s demeanor is extremely informal and almost boyish, and some of the questions he raises have an “Emperor’s New Clothes” feel about them. He notes that substantial numbers of the young military enlistees who annually test positive for HIV grew up in small rural towns that are hardly likely to be AIDS hotbeds, and suggests that their mothers be tested for the virus, which is known to be transmitted to the newborn. If those women also tested positive, that would prove the virus had already been widespread eighteen or twenty years earlier, completely demolishing the established AIDS narrative. Naturally, none of our many thousands of dedicated AIDS researchers showed any interest in implementing this extremely simple research proposal.
-
- American Pravda: Our Public Health Problems
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 10, 2022 • 5,500 Words
- American Pravda: Our Public Health Problems
Interpreting the Sounds of Silence on AIDS Denial
I am not a medical professional let alone an expert virologist, and I’ve spent only a few weeks exploring the complex and longstanding scientific dispute regarding the true nature of AIDS, a subject that has absorbed the efforts of top researchers for decades. The summary material presented above is merely intended to provide an introductory roadmap for those who might wish to investigate the subject in much greater depth.
However, in recent years I have become quite experienced in analyzing the severe distortions and deliberate omissions so often found in our media, a skill that I had honed during the production of my lengthy American Pravda series. And the evidence I see in the total media silence surrounding the astonishing claims about HIV/AIDS advanced by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in his #1 Amazon bestseller seems decisive to me.
As a consequence of the publication of his book and especially since the recent rise of his Presidential campaign, Kennedy has endured an endless barrage of very harsh media criticism, including a couple of front-page stories in the New York Times. These attacks portrayed him as a reckless purveyor of bizarre, irrational, and harmful beliefs, the worst sort of dangerous conspiracy-monger. The controversial ideas presented in his book were often the focus of this relentless vilification.
Yet the largest portion of Kennedy’s book—seven full chapters totaling some 200 pages—promoted the astonishing theory that AIDS doesn’t really exist as a disease but was merely a medical media hoax concocted by Dr. Anthony Fauci and his profit-hungry corporate allies, a hoax that ultimately cost the lives of many hundreds of thousands of Americans. It is difficult to imagine a more outrageous accusation or one so apparently indicative of severe mental illness.
A single sentence uttered by Kennedy’s bitter enemies in the media could have seemingly destroyed him: “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a conspiracy theorist whose book claims that AIDS is a hoax.”
However, our entire media establishment—so eager to attack Kennedy on every other matter—has completely avoided engaging him on that issue. One of the early attacks on his book came from a Times journalist with deep expertise in Gay Rights history, but he completely excluded any mention of Kennedy’s extreme AIDS Denialism. “The Dog That Didn’t Bark.”
The only logical explanation I see for this total reluctance to engage Kennedy on what would seem his greatest vulnerability is that the media fears that he might very well be right. So after consulting trusted medical experts who had carefully reviewed Kennedy’s 200 pages of analysis, all these different editors concluded that discretion was the better part of valor.
If Kennedy is correct, our entire American media has spent the last 35 years promoting and protecting a medical fraud that cost us many hundreds of billions of dollars and many hundreds of thousands of lives. As far back as the 1990s, a former Harvard professor had declared that the AIDS hoax was a worse scientific scandal than the notorious Lysenko fraud. So the media rightly fears that if they engage Kennedy on the issue, they themselves would suffer the total destruction of their reputation.
Some 700,000 Americans died in the AIDS epidemic, but according to Kennedy the overwhelming majority of these victims were perfectly healthy individuals whose agonizing deaths were caused by the lethal but very lucrative AIDS drugs they were prescribed, a public health policy enthusiastically supported by our entire media establishment. More than half of those casualties were gay men, and gay activists are an influential and highly-organized political force. The desperate effort of the media to prevent Kennedy’s accusations from receiving any significant attention is quite understandable.
Ironically enough, I think it was the sheer magnitude of Kennedy’s AIDS heresy that insulated him from any public attack. If his book had contained just a few sentences suggesting such shocking claims, his enemies would have eagerly seized on those statements and denounced him as a deranged AIDS Denier. But his 200 pages of text and 900 end notes made too strong a case so instead they fearfully went into hiding. I’ve become quite familiar with that sort of reaction.
Kennedy should recognize that his true opponent in this 2024 campaign is not the elderly and enfeebled Joseph Biden nor the incompetent and unpopular Vice President Kamala Harris, both of whom were dragged across the 2020 finish line by their establishment backers. Kennedy’s true opponent is the American media, and they should be a primary target of his attacks.
The topics that the media most avoids are the topics that the media most fears, and Kennedy should make those topics a major part of his current political campaign.
If he successfully brought some of these long suppressed truths to widespread public awareness, he will have won a great political victory even if his campaign ultimately falls short of reaching the White House.
Related Reading:
- Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Great Unmentionables
- RFK Jr. vs. I.F. Stone on the Kennedy Assassinations
- American Pravda: Vaxxing, Anthony Fauci, and AIDS
- American Pravda: AIDS and the Revival of the Duesberg Hypothesis
- American Pravda: Anne Frank, Sirhan Sirhan, and AIDS
- RFK Jr. as America’s #1 HIV/AIDS Denier and the Sounds of Media Silence
- American Pravda: Our Public Health Problems
Featured Video
Prof. Ted Postol: Iran Already Achieved Nuclear Deterrence Against Israel
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
How the occupied mentality syndrome works
Saudi Arabia on the American chessboard – Part 3
By B. J. Sabri | American Herald Tribune | June 27, 2016
Read part 2: “The occupied mentality Syndrome“
Previously I argued whether Saudi Arabia’s repeated involvements in U.S. interventions and wars stem from free national will or in response to a specific condition. For starters, in Saudi Arabia there is no national will. In Saudi Arabia, the national will is the will of the Al Saud clan. Still, when a major Arab state allies itself with a superpower that committed unspeakable crimes against humanity in almost every Arab country, then something is wrong. This fact alone should compel us to examine the U.S.-Saudi relation for one exceptional reason. As a result of the U.S.-Saudi wars, hundreds of thousands of people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia have lost their lives. Millions became displaced in their own homelands. And millions more rendered refugees.
Attributing the Saudi policies to the bonds of “partnership” with the U.S. is frivolous. There are no bonds between these two thugs except those of business, military deals, secret plots, and wars. Proving this point, bonds such as these have no space for the American and Saudi peoples to share significant cultural or societal exchanges. If partnership is not the reason for the Saudi contribution to the U.S. strategy of empire and imperialism, then another reason must exist.
This leads to three possibilities. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- NIAID/NIH and USDA Fund Bioengineered Chimeric Influenza Viruses Built Using Pandemic H1N1 Components: Journal ‘Science Advances’
- Hezbollah hits Israeli warship off Lebanon’s coast, sets it aflame
- Iran slams US strikes on B1 bridge, Mahshahr petrochemical plants as ‘blatant acts of state terrorism’
- In letter to UN chief, Araghchi warns of dire consequences of US-Israeli attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities
- Why the CIA conspiracy to invade Iran with Kurdish militias failed
- Why Are Upbeat US Claims About Mission to Rescue Pilot ‘Highly Questionable’?
- Aircraft destroyed during US ‘rescue’ of downed F-15 pilot cost more than $100 million each
- Washington University removes professor who condemned US-Israeli war on Iran
- Russia Warns of Retaliation as UK Authorizes Seizure of Vessels
- Serbia thwarts plot to bomb Russia-Hungary gas pipeline – Vucic
- If Americans Knew
- In Iran, Israel-US take aim at “reason, research, and freedom of thought” – Daily Update
- US loses planes over Iran, Israel downgrades Lebanon war goals – Daily Update
- Israel Is Blocking Palestinians from Easter at Church Where Jesus Resurrected
- Plot to assassinate Palestinian activist follows harassment campaign promoted by Zionist groups and elected officials
- Prominent New York synagogue hosts presentation on why U.S. Jews should support the ethnic cleansing of Gaza
- Tapper vs. Piker: Is the CNN Anchor Auditioning for David Ellison?
- Shouldn’t Democrats Be Able to Condemn Genocide?
- Israel-US kill negotiators, destroy civilian structures, but Iran’s military capabilities still largely intact – Daily Update
- ‘War crime’: Global condemnation as Israeli ministers celebrate death penalty law targeting Palestinian prisoners
- 7 Ways Israel Is Turning Lebanon Into Gaza
- No Tricks Zone
- An Inconvenient Tree: Uncovered In Alps… Europe Much Warmer Than Today 6000 Years Ago
- New Study Reports A 60% Slowdown In Greenland’s Ice Loss Rate In The Last Decade
- Low Intensity Tornado Wrecks Major Solar Farm, Creating A Potential Toxic Dump
- New Study Finds Warming Saves Lives…Cold Temperatures 12 Times More Deadly Than Excess Heat
- German Science Blog Accuses PIK Climate Institute Of Hallucinating Climate Tipping Points
- Devastating Assessment Of Comirnaty Vaccine By Former Senior Pfizer Europe Toxicologist
- New Study: CO2 Is ‘Effectively Negligible’ As An Explanatory Climate Change Factor Since 2000
- Former Pfizer Toxicologist Dr. Helmut Sterz Tells Bundestag Hearing Pfizer Vaccine Should Have Never Been Approved
- Energy Expert: Germany’s Nuclear Phaseout Was A “500 Billion Euro Mistake”
- New Research: South Australia’s Mid-Holocene Sea Surface Temperatures Were 4°C Warmer Than Today
Aletho News 