The AMA Said Trust Your Doctor on Smoking
By Kevin Homer | Brownstone Institute | February 10, 2023
The American Medical Association (AMA) urges physicians to promote COVID-19 vaccines and bivalent boosters. The AMA even supplies members with social media talking points and strategies to deal with vaccine detractors. It is not the first time that my profession has endorsed a product that may be hazardous to your health.
For most of the 20th century, the AMA turned a blind eye toward the dangers of tobacco use. During the 1930s, 40s and 50s, tobacco companies paid handsomely to advertise cigarettes in AMA’s journal, JAMA. In a 1948 editorial minimizing the ill effects of smoking and justifying tobacco advertising in its publications, JAMA noted that “cigarette business is a tremendous business,” as if the size of the bottom line can mitigate a conflict for an organization founded for the “betterment of public health.”
The connection between smoking and lung cancer was recognized early in the century. At the same time, the AMA became increasingly dependent on money generated by tobacco sales. Tobacco companies sponsored meetings of medical societies, setting up their booths alongside exhibitions of the latest medical treatments. Free cartons were distributed at physician meetings. Cigarette makers even paid for publication of pseudoscientific reports claiming the health benefits of their products.
Doctors who opposed smoking faced ridicule from their colleagues. Dr. Alton Ochsner, a renowned surgeon and sentinel voice warning of the dangers of tobacco, began publishing on the connection between smoking and lung cancer in the early 1940s. His 1954 book Smoking and Cancer: A Doctor’s Report was negatively reviewed in prominent medical journals, characterized as a medieval model of logic that belongs in the nonscience section of a library. Prior to his appearance on Meet the Press, Dr. Ochsner was told he could not discuss the relationship between smoking and lung cancer on air.
Yet the mounting evidence was hard to ignore. In 1954, JAMA stopped accepting cigarette advertisements and published an editorial rebuking tobacco company advertising practices. But five years later, a JAMA editorial was still skeptical of the evidence linking smoking to cancer, and a 1961 Nebraska State Medical Journal editorial dismissed the evidence as merely “statistical.” Tobacco companies continued to sponsor state medical meetings as late as 1969. By then most people were aware of the dangers of smoking.
In 1964, the Surgeon General concluded that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer and other life-limiting health conditions. The next year, a warning label was required on packages of cigarettes. By 1971, the government banned cigarette advertisements on television and radio. Instead of taking the lead against an obvious threat to public health, the AMA asked for time and money to study the effects of tobacco.
Between 1964 and 1976, the AMA received more than $20 million from the tobacco industry to fund research. Instead of using the money for smoking cessation programs, many of the funded studies focused on ways to make a safer cigarette. To keep money flowing into its Education and Research Foundation the AMA delayed, stating in a confidential 1971 report that, “AMA is not prepared to make any statement regarding termination of the smoking-health research program.” The report went on to complain that tobacco companies are “in arrears on 1970 contributions.” The dependency on tobacco money created a political alliance between doctors and cigarette makers as their lobbyists joined forces in Washington.
The delay benefitted tobacco sales and maintained the AMA’s “research” payments, but it angered Dr. Ochsner, who accused the AMA of being derelict. The AMA called Dr. Ochsner’s position “extreme.” But name-calling could not stall the inevitable conclusion any longer. In 1978 the AMA finally agreed with what most people had already realized: smoking causes lung cancer, and many other health problems. The romance with big tobacco was over.
Or was it?
As late as 1982, JAMA publications were warned to steer clear of “politically sensitive” topics like tobacco use. After most of a century of being on the tobacco dole, the AMA could not make a clean break. The AMA portfolio contained investments in tobacco companies until the late 1990s.
In 1998, the tobacco industry settled lawsuits filed by state governments with a massive Master Settlement Agreement. In exchange for perpetual annual payments and tight regulatory control, the tobacco industry could continue to sell its products protected from future lawsuits brought by participating states and jurisdictions.
But who really benefitted from the Tobacco Settlement? Only 2.6 percent of the money has been used for smoking prevention and cessation programs. Some states have used the tobacco money to fill budget gaps. South Carolina gave money to tobacco farmers affected by a drop in prices. Altria Group, a global tobacco company, is on the US News & World Report 10 best-performing stocks list. Altria, Phillip Morris, and British American Tobacco have all grown annual dividends consecutively since the settlement. According to Dr. Ed Anselm, “The most addictive thing about tobacco is money.”
Tobacco use remains the number one preventable cause of death in the United States. In the first fifty years after the Surgeon General’s 1964 report, more than 20 million Americans died of smoking. How many of these deaths would have been prevented if doctors had not been conflicted by financial entanglements with the tobacco industry?
Money blinds objectivity. When money drives decisions, controverting evidence is ignored, dissenting voices are ridiculed, open debate is suppressed, talking points are distributed, conclusions are delayed, and people die from a product with liability protection.
The New York State Journal of Medicine published a retrospective of tobacco’s relationship to medicine in its December 1983 issue. Flipping through the pages is enlightening. Surrounding the articles describing the greed and politics of Big Tobacco are advertisements from medicine’s new love—Big Pharma. Doctors have exchanged one bedfellow for another.
By endorsing irrelevant COVID-19 vaccines and poorly tested bivalent boosters, the AMA is pushing a product without concern for its potential negative health effects. Like before, the medical profession lags behind public opinion. According to recent Rasmussen Reports, 7 percent of vaccinated individuals report a major side effect, and nearly half of Americans believe that COVID-19 vaccines have caused unexplained deaths, about the same proportion who believed that smoking caused cancer in the 1960s while the AMA was studying the issue.
A conflicted profession cannot honestly evaluate data. Nowadays, the pharmaceutical business is a tremendous business. An organization benefitting from product sales cannot be trusted to evaluate that product.
If doctors could not recognize the health dangers of tobacco for most of the last century, why should we trust them when they say novel vaccines are safe and effective?
Kevin Homer, MD has practiced anatomic and clinical pathology at a community hospital in Texas since 1994.
Inside an Australian Quarantine Camp
By Bobbie Anne Flower Cox | Brownstone Institute | February 12, 2023
After I won my landmark “quarantine camp” lawsuit against Governor Hochul and her Department of Health a few months ago, people from around the globe started reaching out to me. Some wanted to simply send congratulations on a job well done, and thank me for giving them hope that this tyranny that somehow magically took hold contemporanously in countries around the world, could be defeated.
But many others wanted more than that. They wanted actual help. They wanted to know how they could fight back against the intense tyranny in their countries. So, I started doing interviews and presentations to groups based in the UK, South Africa, Canada, and Australia. I shared with them my legal theory behind my case, the separation of powers argument, and all about my courageous plaintiffs (Senator George Borrello, Assemblyman Chris Tague, Assemblyman [now Congressman] Mike Lawler, and a citizens’ group called Uniting NYS).
I told them about the other wonderful group of NYS Legislators that supported us with an Amicus Brief (Assemblymen Andy Goodell, Will Barclay and Joseph Giglio), and the battles that we fought and won along the way, as the Attorney General tried tactic after tactic to stall, derail and destroy our case. I shared all that I could with them in the hopes that it would assist them in their countries, as they pushed back against their government abuses.
At first I was taken aback by the response from those who reached out to me from abroad. It was hard for me to imagine that all those foreigners were watching our quarantine case so intently. Many told me they’d heard about it through “alternative media” sources, and had been quietly cheering me on and praying for a win. This made me realize that the utter helplessness brought on by the flagrant despotism of so many nations’ governments was eerily simultaneous – and equally frightening to all citizenry, no matter which country one called home.
Our quarantine camp lawsuit win against New York’s governor was almost akin to the proverbial shot heard around the world. Almost. Not quite. One big difference is that my lawsuit was (and still is today) heavily censored. Mainstream media barely covered it when we won, except for an article here and there in the New York Post and my interview on OAN Network. Epoch Times TV did a deep-dive interview with me on their wildly popular show, American Thought Leaders, but still yet, the Epoch Times is not legacy, mainstream media that continuously pours over the airwaves day in and day out.
Local and alternative media were covering it, but not mainstream media. I previously wrote an article about the censorship of my quarantine case which you can read here.
With my exposure to citizens from countries far and away, I was hearing tales of horrific happenings. Things that I simply could not believe governments would do their people, especially in countries that were supposedly “free”. And yet, here they were, telling me stories, sending me news articles or photos or actual video footage of atrocities I could not wrap my head around.
Some of the images are forever burned into my memory, no matter how hard I try to erase them. And at the end of each story that someone recanted, or each video that I watched, I thought to myself, “Thank God we won our quarantine camp lawsuit here in New York.”
I realized that we had not only stopped this complete totalitarianism from taking place in my home state, but we had likely stopped it from spreading across the nation to the point where quarantine camps would become the “new norm” as a way to (supposedly) stop the spread of a disease – or to punish someone the government didn’t like. (Remember, the languange in the reg we got struck down said the government did NOT have to prove you actually had a disease)! For more details on the reg and our lawsuit, go to www.UnitingNYS.com/lawsuit
Through my connection with Brownstone Institute, I was introduced to a wonderful and brave Australian who had spent two weeks in a quarantine camp in northern Australia. Let’s refer to her as “Jane”. I share with you now her first hand account that she shared with me of what happened and what it was like, replete with photographs from inside the camp.
At the time Jane was in the camp, Dan Andrews was (and still is) the Premier in Australia. The country had very strict COVID19 policies, which Jane points out, were constantly changing. Literally, the government would change a policy whilst people were flying mid-air, and upon landing at their destination, they’d be arrested because they now suddenly were in violation of a new COVID policy just issued!
The rule at the time was that no Australian was allowed to leave their state, unless you had a “legitimate reason” to do so, and in order to actually leave, you had to first quarantine for 2 weeks. Not in your home. No, don’t be silly! You had to quarantine in a facility that was run by the government. Some people got to choose which facility, others did not. There was a large camp in the Northern Territory near Darwin, and then there were many quarantine hotels scattered throughout the country.
Reportedly, the quarantine hotels were a total nightmare where you were shut into a room for 2 weeks, no exiting your room, no going outdoors allowed, and some rooms didn’t even have windows! But living in Melbourne, a large city in southest Australia, was just as bad. The government would only let you out of your home for ONE HOUR/day, with a mask on, and you couldn’t stray more than 5 kilometers from your house. You not only couldn’t leave the city, you couldn’t leave the country!
Forget having anyone visit – no guests were allowed in your home. The government set up a hotline so that Australians could call and report any of their neighbors who were disobeying the COVID mandates. The police would often check on the citizens to see if they were complying. They’d phone you, and if you didn’t respond within 15 minutes, they’d come knock on your door! The camp where Jane was quarantined seemed almost like a holiday, comparatively speaking. Well, not really.
So how it worked was that, if you had family or friends or business in another state, you had to first go to a government facility to quarantine for 2 weeks. Again, only if you had what the government deemed to be a legitimate reason. Jane needed to leave Melbourne, so she packed up her bags, booked an absurdly expensive flight to the Northern Territory, and off she went to the quarantine camp in Darwin for 2 weeks. Did she go “voluntarily”, of her own free will? That’s a very fine line of semantics there folks. Yes, she herself booked her flight and packed her bags to go, but it was only because the government told her that was the only way she could leave Melbourne. I don’t consider that free will. I hope you share my view.
The quarantine camp:
The camp had rows of trailer-like buildings that housed the inmates – I mean the there-of-their-own-free-will Australians. Jane was put into a unit that had a bedroom and a bathroom. Each unit had a small front stoop, sort of like a porch (see photo below). You were allowed to sit outside and talk to a neighbor, through a face mask of course, if you could stand the sweltering heat. Police were constantly patroling the camp, walking past the trailers, ensuring everyone was complying with the “social distancing” requirements and the forced masking, etc.
You weren’t allowed to do anything other than sit on your front stoop, or walk “laps” through the camp… as long as you stayed the proper distance from others, wore your mask, and didn’t try to do anything else. There was a swimming pool, but you were only allowed a dip in the pool twice during your 2 week stint there, and that was only if you were going to do some laps… no games allowed!
The food was terrible. No alcohol allowed. Cell phones and internet were allowed, at least when Jane was there. She said one woman tried to escape, but she was caught and then put into solitary confinement.
Now, sit down for this next part. The government restricted you from leaving your town, your state, your country, forced you into quarantine hotels or a camp if you were able to convince them that you had a real reason to cross a state border, treated you like a criminal, and get this – YOU had to pay for it!! And it was not cheap. The price tag was $2,500 for an individual, $5,000 for a family at the camp. The “hotels” apparently were more costly at $3,000 for the 2 weeks.
There were more details that Jane shared with me, but I cannot cover all here. At this point, I’m going to close out this story with a part of my conversation with Jane that really struck me. She could tell that I was flabbergasted by the things she was telling me. She could hear it in my voice, but also in the long pauses in between my questions after she would answer the litany of inquiries I was throwing at her.
My underlying astonishment was obvious… “How could your government do these things to its people?!”
Her response was immediate and direct, “We don’t have your Second Amendment. If we had, our government never would have treated us this way.”
Let that sink in for a minute.
Lawsuit update:
As I mentioned above, we defeated New York’s quarantine camp regulation when we won our lawsuit last July against Governor Hochul and her DOH. The Attorney General filed a notice of appeal, and had 6 months to appeal the win. Elections were November 8th. Not surprisingly, no appeal was filed, until…
The first week of January, just days before their 6 month deadline was up, the Attorney General asked for an additional 2 months to appeal our victory over quarantine camps! Unfortunately, the Court granted the request, despite our objection.
For more information about the case, the timeline, or if you’d like to support our lawsuit against the Governor and her quarantine camp regulation, go to www.UnitingNYS.com/lawsuit
Together, we win this!
Bobbie Anne is an attorney with 25 years experience in the private sector, who continues to practice law but also lectures in her field of expertise – government over-reach and improper regulation and assessments.
The CDC Lied: The mRNA Wasn’t Meant to “Stay in the Arm”
By Robert Kogon | Brownstone Institute | February 10, 2023
The CDC’s information page on Covid-19 vaccines contains the following bullet points on “How mRNA COVID-19 vaccines work:”
First, mRNA COVID-19 vaccines are given in the upper arm muscle or upper thigh, depending on the age of who is getting vaccinated.
After vaccination, the mRNA will enter the muscle cells. Once inside, they use the cells’ machinery to produce a harmless piece of what is called the spike protein…. After the protein piece is made, our cells break down the mRNA and remove it, leaving the body as waste.
Or, in other words, as we have long been told, “it” – the mRNA – “stays in the arm.” And then, after having instructed the muscle cells to produce the spike, is disposed of.
But look at the below picture from a recent presentation on mRNA vaccination at the European Parliament. The picture was posted on Twitter by Virginie Joron, a French member of the parliament. The speaker is no less an authority than Özlem Türeci, the Chief Medical Officer of BioNTech: the German biotech company that developed what has come to be known to most of the world as the “Pfizer” Covid-19 vaccine.
Have a closer look at Türeci’s slide, which tells a very different story than that which the CDC has been telling Americans for the last two years.
Far from “staying in the arm” and entering the muscle cells at the injection site, the injection site is only the point of departure for a journey that is supposed to take the mRNA rather to the lymph nodes. The subtitle of the slide is “Bringing mRNA to the right cells at the right places.” The deltoid is not the right place; the lymph nodes are.
Once in the lymph nodes, a specific sort of cell, the dendritic cells, is supposed to manufacture the spike protein: here colorfully described as the “wanted poster” that will help the immune system to identify the SARS-CoV-2 virus in case of subsequent exposure.
A passage from The Vaccine, the book that Türeci and her husband, BioNTech CEO Ugur Sahin, wrote which journalist Joe Miller, explains why BioNTech’s platform specifically targets the lymph nodes:
What Ugur learnt was that the location to which a vaccine delivers its ‘wanted poster’ really mattered. The reason for this, the couple’s team in Mainz later realised, was that not all dendritic cells … were created equal. The ones that resided in lymph nodes – of which the spleen is the largest – were particularly adept at capturing mRNA and making sure the instructions it carried were acted upon. These kidney-bean shaped organs, found under our armpits, in our groins, and at several other outposts in the body, are the information hubs of the immune system. (p. 98)
Indeed, Sahin and Türeci were so determined to get their mRNA into the lymph nodes that they had an earlier mRNA construct injected directly into the patient’s lymph nodes in the groin (p. 104).
Needless to say, such an approach was not likely to obtain wide acceptance as a vaccine! This is why the couple, as explained in their book, needed to package the mRNA in lipid nanoparticles, in order to ensure that mRNA administered by way of an intramuscular injection would, nonetheless, be widely distributed around the body and thus reach the lymph nodes.
This is to say that the wide biodistribution of the mRNA that came to light after rollout was never a bug. It is a feature of BioNTech’s mRNA technology. Having elicited an immune response by way of injection into the groin, Sahin is even said to have wondered, “How substantial could the immune response be if a vaccine got into all lymphatic tissues around the body, and recruited all the resident DCs [dendritic cells] into action?” (p. 105)
So, why has the CDC been lying about this for the last two years and insisting that the mRNA “stays in the arm?” Well, the obvious answer is that the idea of the mRNA staying at the injection site is reassuring, since otherwise we could fear systemic adverse effects of precisely the sort that have emerged since rollout.
It is worth noting, moreover, that in developing its vaccine, as discussed in my earlier article here, BioNTech simply skipped the so-called safety pharmacology studies whose purpose is precisely to test a candidate vaccine for potential systemic adverse effects – and regulators, including the FDA, let the company do it.
Robert Kogon is a pen name for a widely-published financial journalist, a translator, and researcher working in Europe.Follow him at Twitter here. He writes at edv1694.substack.com.
‘Tragic’: CDC Adds Original COVID mRNA Vaccine to Childhood Schedule Despite Known Harms
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | February 10, 2023
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Thursday added COVID-19 vaccination to its routine immunization schedule for children and adults.
Although the CDC does not have the authority to set requirements itself, the agency’s immunization schedule provides formal guidance for state and local public health officials who set the rules for which vaccines are required to attend school.
The schedule also is the basis for vaccine recommendations made by most physicians.
“Given all that we have learned about the dangers and ineffectiveness of COVID-19 shots over the last two years, it is horrifying to see the CDC now recommend this as a routine shot to children,” Mary Holland, Children’s Health Defense (CHD) president and general counsel told The Defender.
“Although it is unsurprising given the agency capture, it is nonetheless tragic,” she added.
Thursday’s move formalized the recommendation by the agency’s vaccine advisory committee, which on Oct. 20, 2022, voted unanimously (15-0) to recommend adding COVID-19 vaccines for children as young as 6 months old to the new Child and Adolescent Immunization Schedule.
Under the new guidelines, the CDC recommends healthy children 6 months to 11 years old receive a primary series of two doses of the mRNA Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech monovalent COVID-19 vaccine, followed by a booster of the bivalent shot.
It recommends that healthy people age 12 and older receive two doses of either the Moderna, Pfizer or Novavax vaccine followed by a bivalent booster.
All COVID-19 vaccines being administered in the U.S. to people under 18 are Emergency Use Authorized (EUA) products. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) did grant full approval to Pfizer’s Comirnaty COVID-19 vaccine for ages 12 and older, however, the Comirnaty vaccine is not available in the U.S. — which means all children who get the Pfizer vaccine are getting an EUA product.
In Wednesday’s congressional hearing on the Biden administration’s response to COVID-19, Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) asked CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, why the CDC broke with its own norms and put an EUA vaccine on the childhood immunization schedule for a disease that poses very little risk to children and for which the vaccine poses many potential side effects without preventing transmission.
Walensky responded:
“The reason that the ACIP [Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices] recommended the CDC put the COVID-19 vaccine on the pediatric schedule was only because it was the only way it could be covered in our ‘Vaccines for Children’ program.
“It was the only way that our under-uninsured children would be able to have access to the vaccines … That was the reason to put it there.”
Data collected by the CDC through its Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and a growing number of other sources indicate serious health risks associated with COVID-19 vaccination for children.
“The COVID vaccines have not been shown to be either effective or safe for children,” CHD argued in an amicus brief filed in Louisiana last year. “The benefits to children are minuscule, while the risks — including the risk of potentially fatal heart damage — are ‘known’ and ‘serious,’ as the FDA itself has acknowledged.”
Other changes to the childhood schedule include adding the PVC15 shot, a pneumococcal conjugate vaccine used to help protect against pneumococcal bacteria and only recently approved for children; updated guidance for the flu and hepatitis B vaccines; and new recommendations for the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) and polio vaccines.
The CDC now recommends an additional dose of the MMR vaccine in places where there is a mumps outbreak. It also recommends an additional poliovirus vaccine for children and adults if new polio cases emerge.
This would mean the childhood vaccination schedule would increase the number of recommended injections from 54 to 72 over the course of a person’s childhood, between the ages of 6 months and 18 years, The Defender reported last year.
CDC schedule protects pharmaceutical companies from liability for vaccine injuries
Vaccine makers are not liable for injuries or deaths associated with EUA vaccines but can be held liable for injuries caused by a fully licensed vaccine — unless that vaccine is added to the CDC’s childhood vaccination schedule.
Parents of children injured by vaccines listed on the childhood schedule can seek compensation through the taxpayer-funded National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP), a no-fault alternative to the traditional legal system for resolving vaccine injury claims.
However, the revisions voted on by the ACIP committee last year explicitly state (slide 24) that the pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccine (PPSV23) and COVID-19 vaccines are not covered under the NVICP.
Instead, the COVID-19 vaccines added to the childhood schedule will remain covered by the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP). To date, only 19 claims related to COVID-19 filed with the CICP have been found eligible for compensation, though no compensation has yet been paid.
Since it was established in 2010, the CICP only compensated 30 of the nearly 12,000 claims filed.
Are we seeing ‘the beginning of the end of Big Pharma’s reign’?
The addition of the COVID-19 vaccine to the immunization schedule “helps ‘normalize’ this vaccine and sends a powerful message to both healthcare providers and the general public that everyone ages 6 months and older should stay up to date with recommended COVID-19 vaccines (including a booster, when eligible), just as they would with any other routinely recommended vaccine,” Dr. Neil Murthy and Dr. A. Patricia Wodi said in a statement reported by CNN.
This “normalization” comes at a time when over 85% of the U.S. population hasn’t been boosted, despite the massive government-sponsored media push.
Nationally, only 12% of children ages 6 months to 4 years have received one dose of the vaccine. Only 58% of children ages 12 to 17 and 32% of children ages 5 to 11 have received two doses of the vaccine. Numbers vary widely across states.
Holland commented on the implications of adding this shot to the schedule:
“The childhood schedule is already unscientific and unjustifiable. Adding this shot may well be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Parents are likely to resist, finally calling the entire childhood vaccine schedule into question.
“That day has been long in coming, but it is now here. I believe we are now watching the beginning of the end of Big Pharma’s reign over the nation’s children.”
At Wednesday’s congressional hearing, lawmakers repeatedly raised concerns about how regulatory agencies’ flawed recommendations led to a lack of confidence in public institutions.
Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) said, “There’s serious distrust today with our public health agencies. [Polling indicates] 40% of the public does not trust our public health agencies to handle the next public health emergency.”
Walensky indicated that vaccination rates for all vaccines on the childhood schedule among kindergarten children declined last year, dropping from 95% to 93% over the last two years, amounting to hundreds of thousands of parents opting not to comply with the childhood vaccination schedule.
The most recent VAERS data on vaccine injuries, updated Feb. 2 for children 6 months to 5 years old who received a COVID-19 vaccine, showed reports of 5,737 adverse events, including 244 cases rated as serious and 14 reported deaths.
For 5- to 11-year-olds, there were 16,910 reports of adverse events, including 805 rated as serious and 33 reported deaths.
VAERS is the primary government-funded system for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S. While reports submitted to VAERS require further investigation before a causal relationship can be confirmed, VAERS historically has been shown to report only 1% of actual vaccine adverse events.
According to Retsef Levi, Ph.D., with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the vaccines “cause unprecedented levels of harm, including the death of young people and children.”
Multiple studies have determined that the vaccines increase the risk of myocarditis and pericarditis, particularly in young men.
An October 2022 study revealed the CDC was aware of the safety signal for these side effects months before it informed the public.
At the recent FDA vaccine advisory committee meeting, several committee members also raised concerns about recommending annual bivalent boosters for children given the lack of data.
Dr. Archana Chatterjee, Ph.D., committee member and dean of the Chicago Medical School and vice president for medical affairs at Rosalind Franklin University said:
“As we look at this question [simplifying the vaccination schedule] for young children, the data is just too few for us to really make scientifically sound decisions regarding this question. The trial data need to be much more robust than we have seen in the past.”
In light of data like this, vaccination for COVID-19 for children and healthy people is losing public and even governmental support in some places.
Under public pressure and facing a series of lawsuits, last week California dropped its plan to mandate COVID-19 vaccination for school children.
As of Feb. 6, 21 states have legislation or executive orders banning student vaccine mandates, according to the National Academy for State Health Policy, a nonpartisan organization of state health policymakers.
Only the District of Columbia currently has a vaccine mandate for school children, although it is not set to go into effect until the 2023-2024 school year.
As of Feb. 12, the U.K. will no longer recommend COVID-19 boosters for healthy people under age 50.
Denmark ended its universal COVID-19 vaccination campaign for healthy individuals in February 2022.
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
US ‘lying’ about Nord Stream expose – Moscow
RT | February 10, 2023
Attempts by the US State Department to brush off Seymour Hersh’s article about the sabotage of Nord Stream pipelines as “nonsense” are overt lies that display shocking ignorance of American history, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told reporters on Friday.
The veteran investigative journalist reported on Wednesday that the US was behind the destruction of the Baltic Sea pipelines in September 2022. American divers planted charges under the cover of a NATO exercise, and a Norwegian airplane detonated them remotely when the time came, Hersh wrote.
“It would not be typical for us to engage allies and partners on something that is utter and complete nonsense,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said on Thursday, answering a question about Hersh’s article.
Zakharova said she was astonished by Price’s audacity to call “nonsense” what US President Joe Biden and Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland openly described as their preferred outcome.
“The US is once again lying live on air, openly mocking journalists who asked fully justified questions,” Zakharova said.
Washington also has a history of targeting civilian petrochemical infrastructure, Zakharova noted, citing the 1983 CIA sabotage of a pipeline in Nicaragua as an example.
“You did this, you do this, and you will do this until you’re stopped,” the spokeswoman added.
As for bringing allies and partners into “nonsense,” Zakharova argued that this was precisely what “trans-Atlantic solidarity” means in practice, referring to the 2003 invasion of Iraq as one example.
“Twenty years ago, Secretary of State Colin Powell brought to the UN Security Council a vial of something, and called [on] allies and partners to invade a sovereign state, without any evidence, over claims that proved to be utter nonsense. Ned, do you know your own department’s history?” Zakharova said. “I have no doubts that at the State Department they are bad with the history of their own country. That’s why we are where we are.”
Explosions that damaged both Nord Stream pipelines near the Danish island of Bornholm cut off the flow of Russian natural gas to Germany. US officials tried to blame Russia for the blasts, while expressing delight at the destruction and calling it an “opportunity” for Europe. The White House has denounced Hersh’s report as “utterly false and complete fiction.”
Zakharova noted that Denmark and Sweden had refused Russian offers to assist with the investigation, while Norway declined to provide aid citing EU sanctions, adding that this shows the three governments were not interested in finding out the truth, but rather covering it up.
Who is Jake Sullivan, the Man Who Reportedly Assembled ‘Dream Team’ to Destroy Nord Stream?
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 09.02.2023
National Security Adviser to President Biden Jake Sullivan played a prominent role in plotting the September 26, 2022, sabotage against the Russo-European Nord Stream pipelines, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh has revealed. So, who is Jake Sullivan: “the cat’s meow,” “once-in-a-generation intellect,” or a reckless hawk?
“I have great respect for Hersh and his reporting and believe that Sullivan could certainly have been instrumental in pushing for and carrying out this deceitful campaign that likely has inflicted monumental damage on citizens worldwide while also sapping America’s remaining national prestige,” Wall Street analyst and investigative journalist Charles Ortel told Sputnik.
In December 2021, Jake Sullivan, acting with Joe Biden’s blessing, convened men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury Departments to come up with a plan on how to destruct Nord Stream 1 and 2 designed to pump Russian natural gas to Europe, according to Seymour Hersh’s recent bombshell.
In early 2022, the CIA told Sullivan that they knew how to blow up the pipelines. The group decided to keep the risky plot on a hush. The US Congress wasn’t informed. The US military and intelligence operatives did their best to conceal Washington’s role in the sabotage. As per the investigative journalist, the team had concerns about the legality of the plot and was well aware that it could quickly morph into a foreign policy nightmare.
After the pipelines had been destroyed, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and, later, Undersecretary for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland openly praised the development.
“When any crime is committed, the immediate question to ask when seeking suspects is ‘to whose benefit?’ Not only did it benefit the US, US officials made comments before and after the pipeline’s destruction virtually confirming their role and the benefits derived,” Brian Berletic, geopolitical analyst and former US marine, told Sputnik.
For his part, Jake Sullivan stated laconically on September 27, 2022, that the US was supporting efforts to investigate the “apparent sabotage” and “will continue [it’s] work to safeguard Europe’s energy security.”
“Hersh’s reporting on the Nord Stream bombing is completely convincing and I know for a fact that he has reliable sources, mostly in the intelligence community, but I would rather regard Sullivan as the implementer of the attack on the pipeline by virtue of his position rather than the driving force behind it,” Philip Giraldi, former CIA station chief, now an executive director of the Council for the National Interest, told Sputnik. “To be sure, Joe Biden would have had to promote and endorse the project.”
Clinton’s Golden Boy
Jake Sullivan, 46, has long been praised as a “golden boy” by the US mainstream media. Having graduated from Yale in 1998 Sullivan became an advisor to then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2008 and later, after Hillary dropped out from the race, he advised Barack Obama during his general election campaign.
Sullivan was just 32 when he was sworn in as Hillary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff for policy at the US State Department. When Clinton left the State Department in early 2013, Obama promoted Sullivan to the position of national security adviser to then-Vice President Joe Biden.
In 2015, Sullivan married Margaret Goodlander, onetime advisor to well-known hawks Senators Joe Lieberman and John McCain, who used to previously work for the Council on Foreign Relations and the Center for a New American Security. (Goodlander is currently Counsel to Attorney General Merrick Garland).
Sullivan is known for being a quiet but prominent member of the Clinton-Obama team. According to the press, he was part of the “exclusive” team working on resuming relations with Cuba and striking the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal. He is also said to be Hillary’s close confidante in the Libya plan, which was developed months before the 2011 NATO invasion of the North African state and brutal killing of its leader Muammar Gaddafi.
Sullivan and his boss, Clinton, adhered to the concept of “smart power,” which encompasses the use of military threat, force, and sanctions and the soft-power levers favored by foreign policy doves, which includes humanitarian aid and negotiations.
The aide was reportedly called “the cat’s meow” and a “potential future president” by Hillary, while Biden lauded him as a “once-in-a-generation intellect.”
In 2015, the sandy-haired Minnesotan joined Hillary on her 2015/2016 election cycle as a foreign policy adviser and eventually returned to the US administration as Joe Biden’s national security adviser in 2021.
Sullivan Lacks True Sense of Right Versus Wrong
However, there’s another side to Sullivan’s stellar career. “Sullivan is clearly drunk on power and lacking a true sense of right versus wrong,” according to Ortel.
“Sullivan is a fiercely partisan globalist who achieved numerous high honors in academic life so he is supremely self-confident and, sadly, often grievously wrong,” Ortel told Sputnik. “One way to get a sense of the way he operates is to look through the State Department and Podesta WikiLeaks files and the FBI Vault files on Hillary Clinton where Sullivan is frequently involved. Like the Clintons, Sullivan thrust himself into contact with powerful Democrats and operated well above his experience level early on. But unlike the Clintons, Obama, and Biden, Sullivan has yet to hold elected office.”
One might wonder why Sullivan rose to prominence so fast even though he had relatively little experience in government affairs. Hillary herself admitted that Jake wasn’t the most experienced diplomat when it came to foreign policy.
“Jake was not the most experienced diplomat at the State Department I could have chosen, but he was discreet and had my absolute confidence,” Clinton wrote in her memoir Hard Choices while describing her decision to tap Sullivan to kick off negotiations with Iran in 2012. “His presence would send a powerful message that I was personally invested in this process.”
According to US media observers, Sullivan’s primary secret is that he mastered himself in delivering on his boss’s wants and needs even when it went contrary to rules and ethics. The US press quoted a senior Obama aide as saying that Sullivan was ready to do “everything” for then-Secretary Clinton.
Unsurprisingly, Sullivan had no scruples about Hillary’s unsecured email server use for classified and top secret government correspondence. He was bullish on Washington’s Libyan and Syrian interventions which spiraled out of control, completely ruining the North Africa state and leaving the Syrian Arab Republic in tatters.
“Under Obama and Biden, Sullivan is connected to train wreck after train wreck, from the Arab “spring”, to Benghazi, ISIS, the Iran ‘deal’ and more. He seems to be a huge fan of secret negotiations that are never subject to oversight,” Ortel noted.
Sullivan got mired in Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi scandal revolving around the former secretary of state’s failure to prevent a brutal slaughter of US Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other US nationals in Libya on September 11, 2012. During the investigation into the matter, the House committee stumbled upon Sullivan’s letter in which the official emphasized that “we need to live in a world of risks,” while touting Washington’s decision to oust Gaddafi which opened the door to chaos in Libya.
Trump-Russia “Collusion” Hoax
“In the 2016 campaign, he had every motive to hide the misdeeds of the Clintons, including corruption and tax fraud involving The Clinton Foundation and many other charities,” said Ortel, who has been conducting a private investigation into the Clinton Foundation’s alleged fraud for several years. “Here it will prove interesting to see what [Special Councel] John Durham has to say about Sullivan, including his likely role pushing the Russian Hoax, for Trump’s impeachment and for electing Joe Biden.”
Sullivan appeared to have no scruples about actively spreading the Trump-Russia collusion narrative and keeping the myth alive even after the allegations about Trump were proven null and void. Later, Durham’s investigation shed light on Clinton campaign operatives’ role in peddling a fake Trump-Alfa Bank story and uncorroborated “dirty dossier” by ex-MI6 agent Christopher Steele.
However, when testifying under oath before the US House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in December 2017, the Clinton confidante denied any knowledge of the plot or people involved in it.
US investigative journalist Paul Sperry alleged that Sullivan was well-aware that the Trump-Alfa Bank story was “cooked-up” and personally spearheaded a “confidential project” to link Trump to the Kremlin.
Sullivan was also the one who personally promoted the Trump-Russia collusion story prior to the 2016 elections. Thus, during the July 2016 Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Philadelphia, Sullivan met with a number of mainstream media producers and anchors to tell a story “that Trump was conspiring with Putin to steal the election.”
Around that time, the CIA intercepted Russian intelligence’s “chatter” about a Clinton “foreign policy adviser” who allegedly proposed a plan to vilify Donald Trump by linking him to the Kremlin in order to distract public opinion from Hillary’s emailgate scandal. Some US observers believe that the foreign policy adviser in question was Jake Sullivan.
According to Ortel, Sullivan could well be aware of many other “dirty” secrets of the US Democratic establishment, including the Clinton’s alleged pay-to-play schemes, Joe and Hunter Biden influence peddling and Team Obama’s efforts to undermine then-sitting President Donald Trump through a string of dodgy investigations and leaks.
“Simply put, Sullivan has no choice but to cover up the disasters connected to Biden, Obama and Clinton and likely cannot accept the grave errors (and high crimes) that seem to have been committed. In this effort, he will believe he is secure because his wife is a close advisor and friend of Attorney General Merrick Garland,” the Wall Street analyst remarked.
Nord Stream Reporting Not Done
When it comes to the Nord Stream sabotage, “in a just process, Sullivan and his co-conspirators would swiftly be charged, convicted and incarcerated if it is proven that he orchestrated an undeclared war against Russia,” argued Ortel.
According to Ortel, by fanning the flames of proxy war against Russia, Team Biden both pursues vested interests and seeks to cover up and obscure political misdeeds involving Biden, Clinton and Obama in Ukraine and other nations from 2009 to date.
Still, it appears that one could soon hear more about the Biden administration’s secretive and risky plot. Hersh indicated to Sputnik that more investigative pieces about the Nord Stream explosion were forthcoming, but declined to provide further details.
Top Russian lawmaker labels US president a ‘terrorist’
RT | February 9, 2023
Speaker of the Russian parliament Vyacheslav Volodin has branded US President Joe Biden a “terrorist” after a report by iconic American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh blamed Washington for sabotaging the Nord Stream pipelines last year.
Volodin said on Thursday that Biden’s State of the Union address, in which he claimed that the US was “a nation that stands as a beacon to the world,” reminded him of “statements by the leaders of the Third Reich.”
The ramifications of this “ideology of exceptionalism” were uncovered in the investigation by Hersh, the Russian MP wrote in a post on Telegram.
The State Duma speaker was referring to a report published by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist on Wednesday, in which he claimed that the US was behind the explosions on the Nord Stream pipelines last September. According to an informed source who talked to Hersh, explosives were planted at the key pipelines in the Baltic Sea back in June 2022 by US Navy divers under the guise of a NATO exercise. They were later detonated remotely.
Nord Stream 1 and 2 had been important routes for the delivery of Russian gas to Europe through Germany.
“If [Harry S.] Truman became a criminal, who used nuclear weapons against civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then Biden became a terrorist, who ordered the destruction of the energy infrastructure of his strategic partners: Germany, France, the Netherlands,” Volodin said.
The sabotage of the pipelines by the Americans was “an act of intimidation of its vassals, who decided to develop their economy in the interests of their own citizens,” he wrote.
The revelations by Hersh should be grounds for an international investigation to “bring Biden and his accomplices to justice,” and to make sure that the nations affected by this “terrorist attack” are paid compensation, Volodin added.
The Biden administration has denied the report by Hersh, with the National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson calling it “utterly false and complete fiction.”
The Russian authorities have for months been pointing to the fact that the only side that benefited from Nord Stream being rendered inoperable was the US, which saw its supplies of liquified natural gas to Europe increase massively following the sabotage.
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Major rabbi says non-Jews are donkeys, created to serve Jews
By Khalid Amayreh, in occupied East Jerusalem | The People’s Voice | October 18, 2010
A major Jewish religious figure in Israel has likened non-Jews to donkeys and beasts of burden, saying the main reason for their very existence is to serve Jews.
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual mentor of the religious fundamentalist party, Shas, which represents Middle Eastern Jews, reportedly said during a Sabbath homily earlier this week that “the sole purpose of non-Jews is to serve Jews.”
Yosef is considered a major religious leader in Israel who enjoys the allegiance of hundreds of thousands of followers. … continue
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