The French sociologist, historian and publicist Emmanuel Todd spoke in an interview with a Swiss weekly magazine about an interim assessment of the current East-West conflict. He also commented in detail on the situation in Germany, whose sovereignty has almost completely disappeared under the tutelage of the US.
Asked for an overall assessment by Weltwoche, Todd first noted that the US was in many respects on the decline, while Russia is doing better than Western media coverage suggested.
According to Todd: “The US withdrew from Afghanistan and Iraq. They could not stop the rise of Iran. Just as little as that of China. The Saudis no longer take the US seriously. In America, mortality is rising and life expectancy is falling. All the newspapers are writing: the West is normal and Putin is insane. The Russians are bloodthirsty monsters. Demographics say otherwise: Russia has become more stable and its society more civilized.”
The Europeans find themselves in a particularly regrettable position in the current conflict – they are practically defenseless and beyond that without orientation: “They have lost their geopolitical thinking. Between the offensive strategy of the Americans and the defensive strategy of the Russians, the Europeans are in a breathtaking state of mental confusion.”
This applies not least to the Germans, who are currently having to awaken from the illusion that they are being protected by the US. In reality, they are the main victims of US geopolitics, according to Todd. Washington has not forgiven Berlin for relying on cheap Russian gas to supply its industry and for striving for a rapprochement with Russia.
“The fight against this rapprochement became a priority of American strategy. The USA had always made it clear that they wanted to torpedo the gas agreement. The expansion of NATO in Eastern Europe was not primarily directed against Russia, but against Germany. Germany, which had entrusted its security to America, became a target for the Americans. I feel a lot of sympathy for Germany”.
Besides, the Germans “know only too well that Nord Stream was destroyed by the Americans. Through a joint military action by the Americans, British and Poles. Against Germany. But they can’t tell.”
Against this background, Todd, who dedicated a much-noticed “obituary” to the USA back in 2002, considered German China policy under Chancellor Scholz to be one of the last domains of an independent German policy: “Scholz traveled to Beijing. Germany refuses to cut the cord off from China.”
Europe as a whole is now coming under increasing American control and is also suffering from its devastating demographics. But even Russia, although it has rejected Western “values”, is not in a better position demographically. “In Ukraine they are at war with each other. If it’s not stopped, everyone will lose,” warned Todd.
The French publicist and scholar graduated from the Institut d’études politiques de Paris and received his PhD in history from Cambridge. From 1977 to 1984 he was literary critic for the French newspaper Le Monde. Since then he has been working at the Institut national d’études démographiques.
Predicting the fall of the US Empire
Todd attracted attention in 1976 when, at age 25, he predicted the fall of the Soviet Union, based on indicators such as increasing infant mortality rates: La chute finale: Essais sur la décomposition de la sphère Soviétique [The Final Fall: An Essay on the Decomposition of the Soviet Sphere].
In a later book After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order (2001), Todd argued that many indices that he had examined (economic, demographic and ideological) showed both that the United States has outlived its status as sole superpower, and that much of the rest of the world is becoming “modern” (declining birth rates etc.) far more rapidly than predicted.
Todd outlined the fundamental weaknesses of the United States to conclude that, contrary to American conventional wisdom, America is fast losing its grip on the world stage in economic, military and ideological terms.
Controversially, he proposed that many US foreign policy moves were designed to mask what he sees as the redundancy of the United States. In his analysis, Putin’s Russia emerges as probably a more trustworthy partner in today’s world than the US.
In late 2002, he believed that the world was about to repeat the same mistake that it had made in regard to the Soviet Union during the 1970s – misinterpreting an expansion in US military activity as a sign of its increasing power, when in fact this aggression masks a decline.
According to him, the United States became an empire not by strategy but by accident, following the sudden collapse of its main adversary, the Soviet Union. With the globalization of investment, it then indulged in the luxury of conspicuous consumption using incoming capital while going deeper and deeper into debt.
In reality America is like a crumbling Roman Empire – overextended with excessive arms spending, inequality and disgruntlement at home. To keep the rest of the world in line, and prevent its creditors calling in their debts, all America needs to do then is to wield a big stick.
“The real America is too weak to take on anyone except military midgets,” Todd believes. This is why there is such hostility to states such as North Korea, Cuba, and Iraq, an underdeveloped country of 24 million exhausted by a decade of sanctions. Such “conflicts that represent little or no military risk” allow a US presence throughout the world.
Further, the “theatrical media coverage… must not blind us to a fundamental reality: the size of the opponent chosen by the US is the true indicator of its current power”. Todd argued that America would be incapable of challenging a more powerful country, and that “only one threat to global stability hangs over the world today – the United States itself, which was once a protector and is now a predator.”
Todd is above all a demographer, and he bases much of his opinion on statistical elements. Therefore, Todd notes some disturbing American trends, such as rising stratification based on educational credentials, and the “obsolescence of irreformable political institutions”.
I share this op-ed for it was prescient at the time and we were writing lots and hammering on the lockdowns and school closures and just the sheer lockdown lunacy. This was when lockdowns were at the peak and causing deaths. Tenenbaum and Parvez Dara and myself were writing yet getting pushed by Oskoui, Risch, and McCullough to write and shape the debate and they helped me shape the content.
I have been told this op-ed, the extent and depth we went to, set the stage for others writing and stepping up. Today I look back and am very happy we lay it in stone back then!
I wanted you to read the words and understand how ahead of the game we were and how cutting we were and we were punishing. I was hammering even when in Trump administration. I would even say that the only folk with us then was Dr. Scott Atlas (really the first anti-lockdowner) and I would say Berenson and Ivor, Kulldorff, Gupta, and Bhattacharya. I cannot omit them. I would say we were hammering from about June 2020. I have been thrilled to know all these people and to have worked with them, especially Ladapo and Urso at that time.
Op-ed begins below (and we shopped this around for months before anyone would take it, cowards!, but not Jeff Tucker though, he had me make revisions for I was brutal and devastating in my writing about the harms especially about the school closures, and he needed things tweaked and tamped down, him and Lucio Eastman, his right hand man):
Start here:
The present Covid-inspired forced lockdowns on business and school closures are and have been counterproductive, not sustainable and are, quite frankly, meritless and unscientific. They have been disastrous and just plain wrong! There has been no good reason for this. These unparalleled public health actions have been enacted for a virus with an infection mortality rate (IFR) roughly similar (or likely lower once all infection data are collected) to seasonal influenza. Stanford’s John P.A. Ioannidis identified 36 studies (43 estimates) along with an additional 7 preliminary national estimates (50 pieces of data) and concluded that among people <70 years old across the world, infection fatality rates ranged from 0.00% to 0.57% with a median of 0.05% across the different global locations (with a corrected median of 0.04%). Let me write this again, 0.05%.
Can one even imagine the implementation of such draconian regulations for the annual flu? Of course not! Not satisfied with the current and well-documented failures of lockdowns, our leaders are inexplicably doubling and tripling down and introducing or even hardening punitive lockdowns and constraints. They are locking us down ‘harder.’ Indeed, an illustration of the spurious need for these ill-informed actions is that they are being done in the face of clear scientific evidence showing that during strict prior societal lockdowns, school lockdowns, mask mandates, and additional societal restrictions, the number of positive cases went up! No one can point to any instance where lockdowns have worked in this Covid pandemic.
It is also noteworthy that these irrational and unreasonable restrictive actions are not limited to any one jurisdiction such as the US, but shockingly have occurred across the globe. It is stupefying as to why governments, whose primary roles are to protect their citizens, are taking these punitive actions despite the compelling evidence that these policies are misdirected and very harmful; causing palpable harm to human welfare on so many levels. It’s tantamount to insanity what governments have done to their populations and largely based on no scientific basis. None! In this, we have lost our civil liberties and essential rights, all based on spurious ‘science’ or worse, opinion, and this erosion of fundamental freedoms and democracy is being championed by government leaders who are disregarding the Constitutional (USA) and Charter (Canada) limits to their right to make and enact policy. These unconstitutional and unprecedented restrictions have taken a staggering toll on our health and well-being and also target the very precepts of democracy; particularly given the fact that this viral pandemic is no different in overall impact on society than any previous pandemics. There is simply no defensible rationale to treat this pandemic any differently.
There is absolutely no reason to lock down, constrain and harm ordinarily healthy, well, and younger or middle-aged members of the population irreparably; the very people who will be expected to help extricate us from this factitious nightmare and to help us survive the damages caused by possibly the greatest self-inflicted public health fiasco ever promulgated on societies. There is no reason to continue this illogical policy that is doing far greater harm than good. Never in human history have we done this and employed such overtly oppressive restrictions with no basis. A fundamental tenet of public health medicine is that those with actual disease or who are at great risk of contracting disease are quarantined, not people with low disease risk; not the well! This seems to have been ignored by an embarrassingly large number of health experts upon whom our politicians rely for advice.
Rather we should be using a more ‘targeted’ (population-specific age and risk) approach in relation to the implementation of public health measures as opposed to the inelegant and shotgun tactics being forced upon us now. Optimally, the key elements for modern public health include refraining from causing societal disruption (or at most, minimally) and to ensure freedom is maintained in the advent of pathogen emergence while concurrently protecting overall health and well-being. We also understand that at the outset of the pandemic there was little to no reliable information regarding SARS CoV-2. Indeed, initial case fatality rate (CFR) reports were staggeringly high and so it made sense, earlier, to impose strict lockdowns and other measures until such a time as the danger passed or we understood more clearly the nature of this virus, the data, and how it might be managed. But why would we continue this way and for so long once the factual characteristics of this virus became evident and as alluded to above, we finally realized that its infection fatality rate (IFR) which is a more accurate and realistic reflection of mortality than CFR, was really no worse than annual influenza?
Governments and medical experts continuing to cite CFR are deeply deceitful and erroneous and meant to scare populations with an exaggerated risk of death. The prevailing opinion of our experts and politicians seems to be to “stop Covid at all costs.” If so, this is a highly destructive, illogical, and unsound policy and flies in the face of all accepted concepts related to modern public health medicine. Unfortunately, it seems that our political leadership is still bound to following the now debunked and discredited models of pandemic progression, the most injurious and impactful model having been released upon the world in the form of the Imperial College Ferguson model that was based on untested fictional projections and assumptions that have been flat wrong. These models used inaccurate input and were fatally flawed.
How Did We Get Here?
Let us start with a core position that just because there is an emergency situation, if we cannot stop it, this does not provide a rationale for instituting strategies that have no effect or are even worse. We have to fight the concept that if there’s truly nothing we can do to alter the course of a situation (e.g., disease), we still have to do something even if it’s ineffective! Moreover, we do not implement a public health policy that is catastrophic and not working, and then continue its implementation knowing it is disastrous. Let us also start with the basic fact that the government bureaucrats and their medical experts deceived the public by failing to explain in the beginning that everyone is not at equal risk of severe outcome if infected. This is a key Covid omission and this omission has been used tacitly and wordlessly to drive hysteria and fear. Indeed, the public still does not understand this critically important distinction. The vast majority of people are at little if any risk of severe illness and yet these very people are needlessly cowering in fear because of misinformation and, sadly, disinformation. Yet, lockdowns did nothing to change the trajectory of this pandemic, anywhere! Indeed, it’s highly probable that if lockdowns did anything at all to change the course of the pandemic, they extended our time of suffering.
What are The Effects of Lockdowns on the General Population?
On the basis of actuarial and real-time data we know that there are tremendous harms caused by these unprecedented lockdowns and school closures. These strategies have devastated the most vulnerable among us – the poor – who are now worse off. It has hit the African-American, Latino, and South Asian communities devastatingly. Lockdowns and especially the extended ones have been deeply destructive. There is absolutely no reason to even quarantine those up to 70 years old. Readily accessible data show there is near 100% probability of survival from Covid for those 70 and under. This is why the young and healthiest among us should be ‘allowed’ to become infected naturally, and spread the virus among themselves. This is not heresy. It is classic biology and modern public health medicine! And yes, we are referring to ‘herd immunity,’ the latter condition which for reasons that are beyond logic is being touted as a dangerous policy despite the fact that herd immunity has protected us from millions of viruses for tens of thousands of years.
Those in the low to no risk categories must live reasonably normal lives with sensible common-sense precautions (while doubling and tripling down with strong protections of the high-risk persons and vulnerable elderly), and they can become a case ‘naturally’ as they are at almost zero risk of subsequent illness or death. This approach could have helped bring the pandemic to an end much more rapidly as noted above, and we also hold that the immunity developed from a natural infection is likely much more robust and stable than anything that could be developed from a vaccine. In following this optimal approach, we will actually protect the highest at risk amongst us.
Where has Common Sense and True Scientific Thought Gone?
There appears to be a surfeit of panic but a paucity of logic and common sense when it comes to advising our politicians and the public in relation to the pandemic. We hear often misleading information from hundreds of individuals who either hold themselves out as being infallible medical experts or are crowned as such by mainstream media. And we are bombarded relentlessly with their ill-informed, often illogical, and unempirical advice on a 24/7 basis. Much of the advice can only be described as being intellectually dishonest, absurd, untethered from reality and devoid of common sense. They exhibit a kind of academic sloppiness and cognitive dissonance that ignores key data or facts, while driving a sense of hopelessness and helplessness among the public. These ‘experts’ seem unable to read the science or simply do not understand the data, or seem blinded by it.
They and our government leaders talk about “following the science” but do not appear to understand the science enough in order to apply the knowledge towards the decision-making process (if there are processes, that is; most political mandates appear random at best and capricious at worst). These experts have lost all credibility. And all this despite the fact that our bureaucrats now have had at their disposal nearly one year of data and experience to inform their decision-making and despite this they continue to listen to the nonsensical advice they receive from people who are not actually experts. Consequently, we are now faced with a self-created medical and societal disaster with losses that might never be reversed.
Sadly, when faced with rational arguments that run counter to the near religiously held beliefs, which hold that lockdowns save lives, bureaucrats and medical experts act as ideological enforcers. They attack anyone who disagrees with them and even use the media as their attack dogs once their fiats are questioned. Even more egregious are the often successful actions aimed at destroying the reputations of anyone holding diverse views related to the Covid pandemic. There is also no interest or debate on the crushing harms on societies caused by decrees made by ideologues. The everyday clinicians and nurses at the forefront of the battle are our real heroes and we must never forget and confuse these Praetorian vanguards with the unempirical and often reckless ‘medical experts.’ We hold that the very essence of science and logical thought includes the ability and in fact the responsibility to challenge (reasonably) currently held dogmas; a philosophy that appears to be anathema to our leaders and their advisors.
Current Data Concerning Lockdown Effects
Let us start with the staggering statement by Germany’s Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development, Gerd Muller, who has openly cautioned that global lockdown measures will result in the killing of more people than Covid itself. A recent Lancet study reported that government strategies to deal with Covid such as lockdowns, physical distancing, and school closures are worsening child malnutrition globally, whereby “strained health systems and interruptions in humanitarian response are eroding access to essential and often life-saving nutrition services.”
What is the actual study-level/report evidence in terms of lockdowns? We present 31 high-quality sources of evidence below for consideration that run the gamut of technical reports to scientific manuscripts (including several under peer-review, but which we have subjected to rigorous review ourselves). We set the table with this, for the evidence emphatically questions the merits of lockdowns, and shows that lockdowns have been an abject failure, do not work to prevent viral spread and in fact cause great harm. This proof includes: evidence from Northern Jutland in Denmark, country level analysis by Chaudhry, evidence from Germany on lockdown validity, UK research evidence, Flaxman research on the European experience, evidence originating from Israel, further European lockdown evidence, Western European evidence published by Meunier, European evidence from Colombo, Northern Ireland and Great British evidence published by Rice, additional Israeli data by Shlomai, evidence from Cohen and Lipsitch, Altman’s research on the negative effects, Djaparidze’s research on SARS-CoV-2 waves across Europe, Bjørnskov’s research on the economics of lockdowns, Atkeson’s global research on nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), Belarusian evidence, British evidence from Forbes on spread from children to adults, Nell’s PANDATA analysis of intercountry mortality and lockdowns, principal component analysis by De Larochelambert, McCann’s research on states with lowest Covid restrictions, Taiwanese research, Levitt’s research, New Zealand’s research, Bhalla’s Covid research on India and the IMF, nonpharmaceutical lockdown interventions (NPIs) research by Ioannidis, effects of lockdowns by Herby, and lockdown groupthink by Joffe. The American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) further outlines prominent public health leaders and agencies’ positions on societal lockdowns, all questioning and arguing against the effectiveness of lockdowns.
A recent pivotal study from Stanford University looking at stay-at-home and business closure lockdown effects on the spread of Covid by Bendavid, Bhattacharya, and Ioannidis examined restrictive versus less restrictive Covid policies in 10 nations (8 countries with harsh lockdowns versus two with light public health restrictions). They concluded that there was no clear benefit of lockdown restrictions on case growth in any of the 10 nations.
Key seminal evidence arguing against lockdowns and societal restrictions emerged from a recent quasi-natural experiment (case-controlled experimental data) that emerged in the Northern Jutland region in Denmark. Seven of the 11 municipalities (similar and comparable) in the region went into extreme lockdown that involved a travel ban across municipal borders, closing schools, the hospitality sector and other settings and venues (in early November 2020) while the four remaining municipalities employed the usual restrictions of the rest of the nation (moderate). Researchers reported that reductions in infection had occurred prior to the lockdowns and also decreased in the four municipalities without lockdowns. Conclusion: surveillance and voluntary compliance make lockdowns essentially meaningless.
Moreover, in a similarly comprehensive analysis of global statistics regarding Covid, carried out by Chaudhry and company involved assessment of the top 50 countries (ranked as having the most cases of Covid) and concluded that “rapid border closures, full lockdowns, and widespread testing were not associated with Covid mortality per million people.” Conclusion: there is no evidence that the restrictive government actions saved lives.
A very recent publication by Duke, Harvard, and Johns Hopkins researchers reported that there could be approximately one million excess deaths over the next two decades in the US due to lockdowns. These researchers employed time series analyses to examine the historical relation between unemployment, life expectancy, and mortality rates. They report in their analysis that the shocks to unemployment are then followed by significant rises (statistically) in mortality rates and reductions in life expectancy. Alarmingly, they approximate that the size of the Covid-19-related unemployment to fall between 2 and 5 times larger than the typical unemployment shock, and this is due to (associated with) race/gender. There is a projected 3.0% rise in the mortality rate and a 0.5% reduction in life expectancy over the next 10 to 15 years for the overall American population and due to the lockdowns. This impact they reported will be disproportionate for minorities e.g. African-Americans and also for women in the short term, and with more severe consequences for white males over the longer term. This will result in an approximate 1 million additional deaths during the next 15 years due to the consequences of lockdown policies. The researchers wrote that the deaths caused by the economic and societal deterioration due to lockdowns may “far exceed those immediately related to the acute Covid-19 critical illness…the recession caused by the pandemic can jeopardize population health for the next two decades.”
Overall, the research evidence alluded to here (including a lucid summary by Ethan Yang of the AIER) suggests that lockdowns and school closures do not lead to lower mortality or case numbers and have not worked as intended. It is clear that lockdowns have not slowed or stopped the spread of Covid. Often, effects are artifactual and superfluous as declines were taking place even before lockdowns came into effect. In fact, in Europe, it was shown that in most cases, mortality rates were already 50% lower than peak rates by the time lockdowns were instituted, thus making claims that lockdowns were effective in reducing mortality spurious at best. Of course, this also means that the presumptive positive effects of lockdowns were and have been exaggerated grossly. Evidence shows that nations and settings that apply less stringent social distancing measures and lockdowns experience the same evolution (e.g. deaths per million) of the epidemic as those that apply far more stringent regulations.
What does this all mean?
As a consequence of their (hopefully) well-intended actions, our governments along with their medical experts have created a disaster for people. It means that the public’s trust has been severely eroded. Lockdowns are not an acceptable long-term strategy, have failed and have severely impacted populations socially, economically, psychologically, and health wise! Future generations would be crippled by these actions. The policies have been poorly thought out and are economically unsustainable and there is a massive cost to it as it is highly destructive. Our children and younger people are going to be shouldered with the indirect but very real harms and costs of lockdowns for a generation to come at least.
What are the real impacts on populations from these disastrous restrictive policies? Well, the poorer among us have been at increased risk from deaths of despair (e.g. suicides, opioid-related overdoses, murder/manslaughter, severe child abuse etc.). Politicians, media, and irrational medical experts must stop lying to the public by only telling stories of the suffering from Covid while ignoring the catastrophic harms caused by their decree actions. Lives are being ruined and lost and businesses are being destroyed forever. Lower-income Americans, Canadians, and other global citizens are much more likely to be compelled to work in unsafe conditions. These are employees with the least bargaining power, tending to be minority, female, and hourly paid employees. Moreover, Covid has revealed itself as a disease of disparity and poverty. This means that black and minority communities are disproportionately affected by the pandemic itself and they take a double hit, being additionally and disproportionately ravaged by the effects of the restrictive policies.
Why would we impose more catastrophic restrictive policies when they have not worked? We even have government leaders now enacting harder and even more draconian lockdowns after admitting that the prior ones have failed. These are the very experts and leaders making societal policies and demands without them having to experience the effects of their policies. There is absolutely no good justification for what was done and continues to be done to societies, when we know of the very low risk of severe illness from Covid for vast portions of societies! We do not need to destroy our societies, the lives of our people, our economies, or our school systems to handle Covid. We cannot stop Covid at all costs!
How is Population Health and Well-being in the US Affected by Current Public Health Measures?
Businesses have closed and many are never to return, jobs have been lost, and lives ruined and more of this is on the way; meanwhile, we have seen an increase in anxiety, depression, hopelessness, dependency, suicidal ideation, financial ruin, and deaths of despair across societies due to the lockdowns. For example, preventive healthcare has been delayed. Life-saving surgeries and tests/biopsies were stopped across the US. All types of deaths escalated and loss of life years increased across the last year. Chemotherapy and hip replacements for Americans were sidelined along with vaccines for vaccine-preventable illness in children (approximately 50%). Thousands may have died who might have otherwise survived an injury or heart ailment or even acute stroke but did not seek clinical or hospital help out of fear of contracting Covid.
Specifically, and based on CDC reporting (and generalizable to global nations), during the month of June in the US, approximately 25% (1 in 4) Americans aged 18-24 considered suicide not due to Covid, but due to the lockdowns and the loss of freedom and control in their lives and lost jobs etc. There were over 81,000 drug overdose deaths in the 12 months ending in May 2020 in the US, the most ever recorded in a 12-month period. In late June 2020, 40% of US adults reported that they were having very difficult times with mental health or substance abuse and linked to the lockdowns. Approximately 11% of adults reported thoughts of suicide in 2020 compared to approximately 4% in 2018. During April to October 2020, emergency room visits linked to mental health for children aged 5-11 increased near 25% and increased 31% for those aged 12-17 years old as compared to 2019. During June 2020, 13% of survey respondents said that they had begun or substantially increased substance use as a means to cope day-to-day with the pandemic and lockdowns. Over 40 states reported rises in opioid-related deaths. Roughly 7 in 10 Gen-Z adults (18-23) reported depressive symptoms from August 4 to 26. There is a projected decrease in life expectancy by near 6 million years of life in US children due to the US primary school closure. These are some of the real harms in the US and we have not even discussed the devastation falling upon other nations. From June to August 2020, homicides increased over 50% and aggravated assaults increased 14% compared to the same period in 2019. Diagnosis for breast cancer declined 52% in 2020 compared to 2018. Pancreatic cancer diagnosis declined 25% in 2020 compared to 2018. The diagnosis for 6 leading cancers e.g. breast, colorectal, lung, pancreatic, gastric, and esophageal declined 47% in 2020 compared to 2018. From March 25 and April 10 in the US, “nearly one-third of adults (31.0 percent) reported that their families could not pay the rent, mortgage, or utility bills, were food insecure, or went without medical care because of the cost.”
Sadly, the very elderly we seek to protect the most are being decimated by the lockdowns and restrictions imposed at the nursing/long-term/assisted-living/care homes they reside in. Just look at the death and disaster New York has endured under Governor Andrew Cuomo with the nursing home deaths and the Department of Health (DOH) Covid reporting. The Attorney General Letitia James deserves credit for her bravery, for it brings to light not only a very dark day in New York’s history with Covid but that of the US on the whole given that New York and the accrued deaths make up such a large proportion of all deaths in the US and nursing homes from Covid-19. Deaths as per James may be at least 50% higher than was reported by Cuomo. Cuomo’s policy to send hospitalized Covid patients back to the nursing homes was catastrophic and caused many deaths. Gut wrenchingly, across the US nursing homes, reports are showing that the restrictions from visitations and normal routines for our seniors in these settings have accelerated the aging process, with many reports of increased falls (often with fatal outcomes) due to declining strength and loss of ability to adequately ambulate. Dementia is escalating as the rhyme and rhythm of daily life is lost for our precious elderly in these nursing homes, long-term care (LTC), and assisted-living homes (AL) and there is a sense of hopelessness and depression with the isolation from restricting the irreplaceable interaction with loved ones.
The truth also is that many children – and particularly those less advantaged – get their main needs met at school, including nutrition, eye tests and glasses, and hearing tests. Importantly, schools often function as a protective system or watchguard for children who are sexually or physically abused and the visibility of it declines with school closures. Due to the lockdowns and the lost jobs, adult parents are very angry and bitter, and the stress and pressure in the home escalates due to lost jobs/income and loss of independence and control over their lives as well as the dysfunctional remote schooling that they often cannot optimally help with. Some tragically are reacting by lashing out at each other and their children. There are even reports that children are being taken to the ER with parents stating that they think they may have killed their child who is unresponsive. In fact, since the Covid lockdowns were initiated in Great Britain as an example, it has been reported that incidence of abusive head trauma in children has risen by almost 1,500%!
In addition, the widespread mass testing of asymptomatic persons in a society is very harmful to public health. The key metric is not the number of new active cases (i.e. positive PCR test results) being reported and misrepresented by the vocal experts and media, but rather what are the hospitalizations that result, the ICU bed use, the ventilation use, and the deaths. We only become concerned with a new ‘case’ if the person becomes ill. If you are a case but do not get ill or at very low risk of getting ill, what does it matter if the high risk and elderly are already properly secured? It is also remarkable that while hospitals had nearly 10-11 months to prepare for the putative second wave of Covid, why do these healthcare institutions claim to be unprepared? Are the lockdowns and the resulting loss of businesses, jobs, homes, lives, and anguish that result, really due to government’s failures? And what are the reasons for the mass hysteria when most data show that whether prepared or not, most hospitals are not experiencing any more strain on their capacity than seen in most normal flu seasons? Why the misleading information to the public? This makes absolutely no sense.
Are we anywhere ahead today? In no way and we are much worse off today. So why not allow people to make common sense decisions, take precautions, and go on with their daily lives? We know that children 0-10 years or so have a near zero risk of death from Covid (with a very small risk of spreading Covid in schools, spreading to adults, or taking it home). We know that persons 0-19 years have an approximate 99.997 percent likelihood of survival, those 20-49 have roughly a 99.98 percent probability of survival, and those 50-69/70 years an approximate 99.5 percent risk of survival. But this ‘good news’ data is never reported by the media and “experts.” Covid is less deadly for young people/children than the annual flu and more deadly for older people than the flu. We must not downplay this virus and it is different to the flu and can be catastrophic for the elderly. However, the vast majority of people (reasonably healthy persons) do not have any substantial risk of dying from Covid. The risk of severe illness and death under 70 years or so is vanishingly small. We do not lock a nation down for such a low death rate for persons under 70 years of age, especially if they are reasonably healthy people. We target the at-risk and allow the rest of society to function with reasonable precautions and we move to safely reopen society and schools immediately. Moreover, and this cannot be overstated, there are available early treatments for Covid that would reduce hospitalization and death by at least 60-80% as we will discuss below.
Early Multidrug Therapy for Covid Reduces Hospitalization and Death
We must take common-sense mitigation precautions as we go on with life. This does not mean we stop life altogether! This does not mean we destroy the society to stop each case of Covid! We must let people get back to normal life. In fact, the most important information that is being withheld, bizarrely, from the US population is that there are safe and effective treatments for Covid! And most importantly we now know how to treat Covid much more successfully than at the outset of the pandemic. This therapeutic nihilism is very troubling given there are therapeutics that while each on their own could not be considered as being a ‘silver bullet,’ they can be used on a multidrug basis or as a ‘cocktail’ approach akin to treatment of AIDS and so many other diseases! This includes responding proactively to higher-risk populations (in private homes or in nursing homes) who test positive for SARS CoV-2 or have symptoms consistent with Covid by intervening much earlier (even offering early outpatient sequenced/combined drug treatment to prevent decline to severe illness while the illness is still self-limiting with mild flu-like illness). Early home treatment (championed by research clinicians such as McCullough, Risch, Zelenko, and Kory) ideally on the first day (including but not limited to anti-infectives such as doxycycline, ivermectin, favipiravir, and hydroxychloroquine, corticosteroids, and anti-platelet drugs that are safe, cheap, and effective) that is sequenced and via a multi-drug approach, have been shown to convincingly reduce hospitalization by 85% and death by 50%.
The key is starting treatment very early (outpatient/ambulatory) in the disease sequelae (ideally on the 1st day of symptoms emergence to within the first 5 days) before the person/resident has worsened. This early treatment approach holds tremendous utility for high-risk elderly residents in our nursing homes and long-term care/assisted-living facilities, including within their private homes, who are often told to ‘wait-and-see’ and all the while they worsen and survival becomes more problematic. We are talking about using drugs that are used in-hospital but we argue must be started much earlier in high-risk persons. This demands that governments and healthcare systems/medical establishments paralyzed with nihilism step back and allow frontline doctors the clinical decision-making and discretion as before in how they treat their Covid-19 high-risk patients. From where we started 9 to 11 months ago in the US (and Canada, Britain, and other nations), between the therapeutics and an early outpatient treatment approach, this is very good news! We must also not discount the potential damage to normally healthy immune systems that have not been locked down like this before but which otherwise could be expected to fight infection effectively in younger individuals at the least. We have to be concerned about the immune systems of our children that are normally healthy and functional and we have no idea how their immune systems will function into the future given these far-reaching restrictions.
Conclusion
In conclusion, given the cogent argument by Dr. Scott Atlas on the failure of lockdowns and school closures globally and the totality of the evidence presented above and AIER’s troubling compilation of the crushing harms of lockdowns, it is way past time to end the lockdowns and get life back to normal for everyone but the higher-risk among us. It is time we target efforts to where they are beneficial. Such targeted measures geared to specific populations can protect the most vulnerable from Covid, while not adversely impacting those not at risk. Why? Because we know better who is at risk and should take sensible and reasonable steps to protect them. Alarmingly, President Biden has already stated that there is nothing that can be done to stop the trajectory of the pandemic, yet fails to recognize that across the US, cases are already falling markedly, even going as far to warn of more deaths. More incredulous is that those in charge and particularly the ‘medical experts’ continue to fail to admit they were very very wrong. They were all wrong in what they advocated and implemented and are trying now to lay the blame on those of us who looked at the data and science and reflected and weighed the benefits as well as harms of the policies. They are blaming those of us who opposed lockdowns and school closures. They are using the tact that since you opposed these illogical and unreasonable restrictions and mandates, then it caused the failures, thus pretending and not admitting that their policies are indeed the reason for the catastrophic societal failures. Not our opposition and arguments against the specious and unsound policies.
It is very evident to populations that lockdown policies have been extraordinarily harmful. It is way past time to end these lockdowns, these school closures, and these unscientific mask mandates (see State-by-State listing) as they have a very limited benefit but more importantly are causing serious harm with long-term consequences, and especially among those least able to withstand them! Indeed, the Federalist published a very comprehensive description showing how masks do nothing to stop Covid spread. There is no justifiable reason for this and government leaders must stop this now given the severe and long-term implications! Donald A. Henderson, who helped eradicate smallpox, gave us a road map that we have failed to follow here, when he wrote about the 1957-58 Asian Flu pandemic and stated “The pandemic was such a rapidly spreading disease that it became quickly apparent to U.S. health officials that efforts to stop or slow its spread were futile. Thus, no efforts were made to quarantine individuals or groups, and a deliberate decision was made not to cancel or postpone large meetings such as conferences, church gatherings, or athletic events for the purpose of reducing transmission. No attempt was made to limit travel or to otherwise screen travelers. Emphasis was placed on providing medical care to those who were afflicted and on sustaining the continued functioning of community and health services.”
Dr. Henderson along with Dr. Thomas Inglesby also wrote, “Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted. Strong political and public health leadership to provide reassurance and to ensure that needed medical care services are provided are critical elements. If either is seen to be less than optimal, a manageable epidemic could move toward catastrophe.” Overall, they messaged that several options exist for governments of free societies to use to mitigate the spread of pathogens (traditional public health responses which are less intrusive and disturbing) but closing down the society or parts of it is not one of them. These experts never championed or endorsed lockdowns as a strategy when confronting epidemics or pandemics for they knew and articulated the devastation that would fall upon societies that were in many instances potentially irrecoverable.
As Dr. Martin Kulldorff explains, it is critical that the bureaucrats, the public health system, and medical experts listen to the public who are the ones actually living and experiencing the public health consequences of their forced lockdown and other actions. Social isolation due to the lockdowns has devastating effects and cannot be disregarded and government bureaucrats must recognize that shutting down a society leads to suicidal thoughts and behaviour and excess deaths (deaths of despair to name one). I end by perhaps the most cogent phrase by experts (The Great Barrington Declaration): “Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal. Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone.”
1Dr. Paul Alexander (University of Oxford, University of Toronto, McMaster University-Assistant Professor, Health Research Methods (HEI))
Contributing Authors
Paul E Alexander MSc PhD, McMaster University and GUIDE Research Methods Group, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada elias98_99@yahoo.com
Howard C. Tenenbaum DDS, Dip. Perio., PhD, FRCD(C) Centre for Advanced Dental Research and Care, Mount Sinai Hospital, and Faculties of Medicine and Dentistry, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
Ramin Oskoui, MD, CEO, Foxhall Cardiology, PC, Washington, DC oskouimd@gmail.com
Harvey A. Risch, MD, PhD, Yale School of Public Health, New Haven, CT USA harvey.risch@yale.edu
Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH, Baylor University Medical Center, Baylor Heart and Vascular Institute, Baylor Jack and Jane Hamilton Heart and Vascular Hospital, Dallas, TX, USA peteramccullough@gmail.com
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There follows a public statement by a group of five senior Swedish doctors who, in collaboration with Dr. Johan Eddebo, a researcher in digitalisation and human rights, are raising the alert about the Covid vaccines, which they describe as “obviously dangerous”. They say there should be an “immediate halt” to the mass vaccination pending “thorough investigations” of the true incidence and severity of adverse effects.
The true character and scope of the harm caused by the unprecedented mass vaccinations for COVID-19 is just now beginning to become clear. Leading scientific journals have finally begun publishing data corroborating what the underground research community has observed over the last two years, especially in relation to complex problems of immune suppression.
Truly concerning numbers pertaining to both births and mortality are also emerging.
At this moment in time, a new, allegedly super-infectious Omicron variant is all over the headlines. A sub-variant of XXB, this strain is said to possess immune escape capabilities of precisely the type that some independent researchers predicted would follow on the heels of the mass vaccinations’ narrow antigenic fixation.
The WHO maintains that worldwide, 10,000 people still die due to Covid every single day, an implausible death toll more than ten times that of an average flu. It reiterates the urgent need for vaccinations, especially in light of China’s reopening and allegedly falsified data on mortality and infections.
The EU has even called an emergency summit in light of the purported Chinese “Covid chaos” that “calls to mind how everything began in Wuhan, three years ago”.
In Sweden, the Minister for Health and Social Affairs has said he cannot rule out new restrictions, and states that everyone must take “their three doses”, since “only” 85% of the population is ‘fully inoculated’.
That such an extensive vaccine coverage has not yielded better results after nearly two years is a remarkable fact. Even more so in light of some individuals receiving four or more repeated exposures to the same vaccine antigen, yet still contracting the disease they are supposedly immunised against.
At the same time, even more ominous warning signs abound.
One such warning sign is the fact that average mortality in many Western states is still at a remarkably high level, in spite of the direct effects of the coronavirus being marginal for more than a year. Data from EuroMOMO indicate a marked excess mortality in the EU for all of 2022, and the German Bureau of Statistics reports that the country’s mortality in October was more than 19% over the median value of the preceding years.
Is this due to Covid, as the WHO’s ’10 000 per day’ figure would seem to indicate?
Blame is placed at the feet of ‘Long Covid‘ as well as the regular acute infections, but according to the EuroMOMO and Our World in Data stats, the bulk of the excess deaths in Europe during 2022 are actually not due to clinically manifest coronavirus infections.
Moreover, we shouldn’t see continued excess deaths from a respiratory virus of this kind after three years of global exposure due to the inevitable consolidation of natural immunity.
If such a situation persists, the hypothetical connection to a vaccine-related immunity suppression that just now has come into focus becomes pertinent to investigate in detail.
If, as has been argued, the vaccinations, and especially the boosters, alter the immune profile of recipients such that Covid infections get ‘tolerated’ by the immune system, it’s possible that vaccinated individuals will tend towards a situation of long-term, repeat infections that do not get cleared, and do not present with obvious symptoms, while still promoting systemic damage.
The literature now indicates an extensive substitution in the vaccinated of virus-neutralising antibodies for non-inflammatory ones, a ‘class switch’ from antibodies that work towards clearing the virus from our system, to a category of antibodies whose purpose is to desensitise us to irritants and allergens.
The net effect is that the inflammatory response to Covid infection gets down-regulated (reduced). This means that full-blown infections will present with milder symptoms, and that they won’t get cleared as effectively (partly since fever and inflammation are essential to your body getting rid of a pathogen).
That these developments alone aren’t cause for an immediate halt to the mass vaccinations, as well as thorough investigations, is astonishing.
There is of course another, and more well-known, potential partial explanation of the surprising excess mortality. We have indications of clotting disorders connected to the Covid vaccines, evident in a new major Nordic study, while repeated studies evidence a clear correlation between heart disease and Covid vaccination (see Le Vu et al., Karlstad et al. and Patone et al.).
A newly published Thai study moreover indicated that almost a third of the vaccinated youth enrolled exhibited cardiovascular manifestations, and a yet unpublished Swiss study suggests that as many as 3% of everyone vaccinated manifest heart muscle damage.
And as stated above, we also see signals pertaining to fertility disturbances connected to the Covid vaccines.
An Israeli study shows impaired motility and sperm concentrations after both Pfizer and Moderna vaccination. The safety committee of the European Medicines Agency has also affirmed that the vaccines may cause menstrual disturbances, and Pfizer’s own studies indicate that the lipid nanoparticles of the mRNA-vaccines cluster in the reproductive organs.
The hypothesis that COVID-19 vaccinations influence fertility is supported by a significant and unprecedented decline in the Swedish birth rate during the first months of 2022. According to Swedish demographers, the decline is ”surprising”.
There are similar data from many other Western countries, and to continue the mass vaccinations for low-risk groups such as children or pregnant women is utterly irresponsible – especially since the vaccinations do little or nothing to stop the spread as was initially promised, and is often still falsely maintained.
One hopes that the hypothesis of a decline in birth rates due to the vaccinations can be falsified through a thorough and independent investigation as soon as possible. The numbers are truly worrying.
Yet the fact that Pfizer’s data pertaining to fertility disturbances had been hidden away and needed to be discovered through a FOIA request is typical for the entire situation.
There’s almost no independent public debate on these issues, and critical perspectives are actively suppressed by the major digital platforms.
Public watchdogs such as the European Medicines Agency are funded by the pharmaceutical industry and often base their recommendations on Big Pharma’s in-house studies. The independence of our scientific and academic institutions is threatened, and we see a confluence between scientific research, private corporate interests and political and ideological objectives on every level.
To place a digital filter of censorship on top of all of this, where proprietary algorithms micromanage the flow of information and the public debate in accordance with the intentions of their owners, in practice means to abolish the open democratic society and independent scientific research.
Recent disclosures also show that the digital platforms have actively worked towards suppressing critical perspectives on the Covid policies and the mass vaccinations. Twitter has for this purpose developed clandestine censorship strategies and employed so-called ‘shadowbanning’ with the effect of an almost undetectable suppression of the visibility of posts and accounts connected to undesirable perspectives and analyses. Facebook took down more than seven million posts to influence the debate on Covid only during the second quarter of 2020. YouTube has banned publishing of video material that contains critical perspectives on the Covid vaccinations. Such content is designated ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ whether or not it is supported by relevant data.
These kinds of measures have very serious consequences. Digitalisation’s centralised control of the flow of information doesn’t just affect policy on the local and regional level, but also influences the way in which scientific and journalistic work can be designed and carried out. It creates structures that immediately repress heterodox views and silences critical voices through fear and indirect persecution.
Public trust in our common institutions will inevitably be eroded by this development.
The open society now desperately needs a renaissance. The democratic and scientific discourses must be rebuilt from the ground up, and in a way which respects the new and unique risks of our contemporary situation, and which protects and emphasises the responsibility of the individual citizen.
Key to this in our current predicament is to press on with critical questions pertaining to the obviously dangerous mass vaccinations and to investigate the corruption of our political and scientific institutions that the Covid situation has shed light on.
It is critical that we immediately begin to remedy the significant damage that has been rendered to global public health, and to the open society as such.
Johan Eddebo, Ph.D, researcher in digitalisation and human rights
Sture Blomberg, MD, Ph.D, Associate Professor in Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care and former senior physician
Ragnar Hultborn, Professor Emeritus, specialist in oncology
Sven Román, MD, Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist, since 2015 Consultant Psychiatrist working in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry throughout Sweden
Lilian Weiss, Associate Professor, specialist in surgery
Nils Littorin, resident in psychiatry, MD in clinical microbiology
The authors are members of the bio-medico-legal network of Läkaruppropet. They are organising a conference in Stockholm on January 21st-22nd in conjunction with the Swedish Doctors’ Appeal network. Its main focus will be on the consequences of the global COVID-19 politics and the effects of the Covid vaccines.
You are not a horse! You are not a cow! That’s what the FDA told us to dissuade us from taking Ivermectin.
Fortunately, we are also not sheep and did not believe the FDA. Many of us stocked up on Ivermectin, and most found it helpful. While I did not use it when I had my Covid in Nov 2020, it worked great for my wife in Dec 2021 and other family members during the summer of 2022.
Ivermectin, a cheap and safe generic medication, was of little interest to profit-minded pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer and Merck. Therefore, they conspired with the FDA to lie that it did not work and instead pushed expensive Covid vaccines and non-working drugs like mutagenic Molnupiravir and rebound-causing Paxlovid.
Expensive Patented Version of Ivermectin Proven to Work!
MedinCell conducted a randomized controlled trial of their version of Ivermectin and found that it reduces Covid infections by 72%!
The study was very well designed because the participants were EXPOSED to the Covid infection within five days. Given the exposure, the outcomes were more likely to happen and thus were easier to compare between groups, giving the trial greater statistical power.
The 72% reduction in infection is much MORE effective than the “covid vaccine.”
The trial encompassed the period of Mar-Nov 2022, thus giving us the real-world effectiveness of Ivermectin against the Omicron variant.
While I am happy at the finding, there are several things to be NOT happy about.
If we are to believe official numbers, about 1,121,000 people died of Covid in the USA. Given published effectiveness estimates of Ivermectin coming from honest studies, Ivermectin could have saved eight hundred thousand of those lives. The intentional suppression of Ivermectin cost us so dearly.
Given a 72% reduction in infection, natural immunity with Ivermectin would likely have stopped the pandemic entirely in 2020.
Had Ivermectin been recognized as an effective antiviral, the “Covid vaccines” could not get EUA approval, and thus we would avoid thousands of vaccine victims and destroyed immune systems.
Second-largest Democratic donor and the largest crypto thief Sam Bankman-Fried donated 18 million dollars to the Together trial after it falsely demonstrated a finding that Democrat-aligned Covid vaccine pushers wanted, namely that Ivermectin allegedly was useless.
The good news here is that Ivermectin works.
Here are some of my other articles about Ivermectin — with honest trials showing a comparable reduction in illness and death.
So, thousands of people died of Covid. Thousands of people died of Covid vaccines. The pandemic, prolonged by vaccination, is raging and reinfects people with immunity disabled by mystery genetic treatments. My prediction from last March, unfortunately, is coming true.
While the above paragraph is upsetting, the good news is that Ivermectin was validated, and “we have the tools” to manage a Covid infection or exposure.
Lastly, take a minute to think about millions of victims of suppression of Ivermectin worldwide, who died to make a few companies and foundations richer and more powerful.
Will Ivermectin ever be recommended officially? And do we even care about such approval if we can still order it online?
What Fauci Knew, and When He Knew It: Preparing for and Preventing the Next Public Health Emergency
The House Investigation has been announced. Here are seven things Fauci knew and hid from the public. Witnesses are going to provide key facts that will break the spell over the rest of the public.
The following is a paraphrase of the opening round – the warning shot – by US Rep. Jim Jordan yesterday in which he used his time to outline seven facts that Fauci knew, and, more importantly, what Fauci did, and did NOT do, when he was made aware of these facts.
The video is provided below.
This does not bode well for Mr. Fauci and those involved in the cover-up.
Fauci understood that American tax dollars went to Ecohealth Alliance and that money was then funneled to the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab in China
Fauci knew EcoHealth Alliance was given an exemption from the pause on gain-of-function research
Fauci knew that the security standards at the WIV lab in China were deficient
Fauci knew that EcoHealth Alliance was not in compliance with its grant reporting requirements, and that failed to adhere to the standing terms of the funding contract
Fauci knew that gain-of-function research was in fact being conducted in the WIV lab in China
Fauci knew that the standard PICO interagency review process was not followed in approving the grant to Ecohealth Alliance
Fauci knew that the virus likely came from the lab where US Taxpayer dollars were sent, the same deadly virus outbreak led to six million deaths around the world.
Importantly, what did Fauci do when he had this information?
On February 1st, 2020. what did Fauci do with this information?
Did he tell the president of the United States, Commander-in-Chief, and say hey we’ve got a deadly virus that’s broken out in China in Wuhan where we’ve been sending American tax dollars to a lab that’s not up to code that’s doing gain-of-function?
Did he tell the Chief of Staff?
Did he tell his boss, Secretary Azar?
Did he tell Dr. Redfield? Dr. Burks? Dr. Gerard?
No, he organized a conference call on February 1st, 2020 2 P.PM with Mr. Collins and 11 virologists from around the world to who he had been handing out American tax dollars for years and years and years…
Before that call, a virologist Dr. Gary Christian Anderson said things like “virus looks engineered virus not consistent with evolutionary theory” – on the day of the call Anderson said, “I don’t know how this gets done in nature but it would be easy to do in a lab”.
On this conference call, they get their story straight, and three days later the very people who said this thing came from a lab change their tune and say that anyone who thinks that’s crazy…
In an email from Ecohealth Alliance, Fauci received gratitude: “This is terrific, we are happy to hear that our gain of function research funding pause has been lifted”…
Over the last several years, Fauci told us
it wasn’t our tax dollars
it wasn’t gain of function
it wasn’t a lab leak
the vaccinated can’t get COVID
the vaccinated can’t transmit the virus
there is no such thing as natural immunity when it came to this virus
We can’t trust the people we put in the position of trust; they knew from the start –
If you’ve got a government not giving it to you straight that’s something that you have to make sure we understand so it doesn’t happen again.
Not only we don’t want a terrible virus to happen again we don’t want the government misleading us about a virus…
Starting next month we’ll look into it, we’ll make sure the country gets the facts like they should have had on February 1st, three years ago…
WASHINGTON – US government officials and media outlets promoted conspiracies about Russian bot activity on Twitter despite pushback and evidence to the contrary from the social media company, reporter Matt Taibbi said on Thursday in the latest release of the so-called Twitter Files.
In January 2018, Twitter users began posting the hashtag “ReleaseTheMemo” in support of the declassification of a memorandum by then-Congressman Devin Nunes, which detailed flaws in the FBI’s investigation of alleged collusion between former President Donald Trump and Russia.
In response, Democrats denounced the memorandum, claiming it was boosted by Russian “bots” and not an organic social media movement, even after Twitter informed the lawmakers that they found no signs that the movement was affiliated with Russia.
“Twitter warned politicians and media they not only lacked evidence, but had evidence the accounts weren’t Russian – and were roundly ignored,” Taibbi said. “Execs eventually grew frustrated over what they saw as a circular process – presented with claims of Russian activity, even when denied, led to more claims.”
Nevertheless, Twitter went on to follow a pattern of not challenging the claims regarding Russia on the record, Taibbi said. Consequently, a number of US media outlets continued to push the Russian bots narrative despite a lack of evidence, Taibbi added.
The lawmakers contributed to one of the “greatest outbreaks of mass delusion in US history” by spreading the Russian collusion hoax and attempting to discredit Nunes’ memorandum, the congressman said in a statement. The contents of Nunes’ memorandum were verified in a December 2019 report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz.
The Twitter Files are based on internal information and released in coordination with Twitter CEO Elon Musk, who committed to reforming the social media company after acquiring it last year.
The EU could have availed itself of an opportunity to hold Israel accountable for its violations but, instead it opted for the lesser value of requesting financial reparation for the structures funded by the bloc in the Occupied West Bank and destroyed by the settler-colonial enterprise. Neither is the EU’s request a novelty, since demanding financial compensation from Israel has happened in the past, without any compliance, of course.
Recent focus on Israel’s planned forced displacement of Palestinians living in Masafer Yatta prompted 24 European Parliament members to contact the European Commissioner for Crisis Management, Janez Lenarcic, regarding financial reparation. The bottom line is that, while the EU is within its rights to demand financial compensation, the issue at stake – which is the Palestinian people being forcibly displaced by Israel – is nowhere on the EU’s agenda.
Lenarcic’s response, partially quoted by Haaretz, confirms the EU’s repetitive requests for financial compensation and that “the European Union is continuing to work in this regard through a range of diplomatic and political channels”. Of little to no consequence was Lenarcic’s reminding that EU representatives often visit areas in the Occupied West Bank that are slated for demolition, ostensibly “to warn against”. Yet, besides the opportunistic exploitation, keeping tally of EU-funded destroyed dwellings is more a case in point and futile, too. As Lenarcic stated, “The list of possible steps to ensure compensation from Israel for European financing that went down the drain in demolitions has not yet come up for discussion.”
If holding Israel accountable for something as basic as a financial transaction for damages it caused prompts so much caution in the EU’s official statements, it is safe to say that human rights in the EU’s repertoire, when it comes to Israel, descends into still silence. The EU still has not addressed the fact that, without holding Israel accountable for forcibly displacing Palestinians, its humanitarian projects for Palestinians is also financing Israel’s violations. Yet it is precisely what the humanitarian project which the international community imposed upon Palestinians intended. By investing a fragment of humanitarian aid aimed at alleviating the suffering caused by Israel’s colonial existence and violence, the international community can bypass the actual violations which go against international law.
The EU is no exception to this imposed rule. Advocacy by EU representatives does not work to hold Israel accountable but to extend a permanent contract of silence which, in turn, also silences Palestinians. Despite having political means at their disposal, EU representatives prefer playing the amateur activists when it comes to Palestine. Funds for travelling to the Occupied West Bank, after all, form part of the humanitarian project which Palestinians are forced to fit into. In the same way, EU-funded dwellings play a role in the humanitarian project but fail to sustain Palestinian autonomy. The latest purported concern has nothing to do with Palestinians, and is only marginally related to the EU-funded dwellings that Israel routinely destroys. Detracting from Israel’s settler-colonial expansion and the EU’s role in maintaining it, however, is a major part of what the humanitarian paradigm constitutes.
Sanaa – Doctors and medical experts in Yemen believe that Saudi Arabia and its coalition forces are using biological weapons which are believed to be the reason for the increased cancer and birth defect cases in Yemen. Yousef Mawry has the special story.
Sana is dying. She was born just a few days ago, but because of a rare birth malformation, doctors believe she only has a few days to live.
Sana is one of the thousands of Yemeni babies facing similar fate. Here at the Sabeen Hospital in the Yemeni capital Sana’a doctors say they have been receiving birth defect cases at an alarming rate since 2015. That’s when the Saudi-led coalition launched its war on Yemen. Doctors here are convinced that biological weapons were employed by the Saudis.
Cancer cases are also on the rise. The spokesperson for Yemen’s Ministry of Health says the data and statistics recorded since the war started indicate that biological weapons used by the Saudi-led coalition are the main cause of the steady increase in cancer and birth defects.
We visited the registration office at Yemen’s only oncology center. It was packed with people pushing their way to register for cancer treatment.
According to Yemen’s Ministry of Health, the number of cancer patients increased by more than 50% since the war was launched in 2015.
The Yemeni Ministry of Health says it will form a committee to officially investigate the main cause for the increase in birth defects and cancer cases in the areas that have been hit the most by Saudi airstrikes. Even if it’s evident that prohibited weapons were utilized by Saudi Arabia and its coalition forces, it is unlikely they will face prosecution since most of the weapons used in the war are supplied by the American and British governments.
Doctors and medical experts say the increase in cancer and birth defect cases is rooted in the eight-year Saudi-led war that has polluted Yemen’s air, water and food. They blame the Saudi-led coalition’s use of prohibited weapons such as biological weapons, cluster bombs and toxic gases.
Supposedly, we are rapidly on our way toward a zero-carbon, all electric energy future. But has anybody done the arithmetic to see if this adds up?
I’m carving myself out a niche as the guy who does a few simple calculations to check if the grand schemes of our central planners make any sense. So far I’ve taken that approach to the question of energy storage to back up a wind/solar electricity grid, and on that one the schemes of the central planners most definitely do not add up. But the energy storage question, although involving no math beyond basic arithmetic, does have some complexities. How about something somewhat simpler, like: If we convert our entire automobile fleet to all-electric cars, where is the electricity going to come from?
With the big push currently on to get rid of internal combustion vehicles and replace them with electrics, surely someone has done the calculations to be sure that the electricity supply will be ample. Actually, that does not appear to be the case. Once again, the central planners have no idea what they are doing.
A few things in the recent news make this issue highly topical. First, in the days just before Christmas, much of the country experienced a severe cold snap. Severe, that is, but not record-breaking. Almost everywhere that had very cold temperatures during those days had had even colder temperatures in the past, not necessarily every year, but multiple times over the course of decades. Second, several utilities found themselves with insufficient electricity to meet demand, and had to impose rolling blackouts on their customers, even in the face of freezing cold temperatures. Examples of utilities imposing rolling blackouts during the severe cold wave included Duke Energy (covering most of North and South Carolina, and parts of Florida, Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky) and TVA (covering all of Tennessee and parts of Alabama, Mississippi and Kentucky). Both of those utilities, and many others, have spent the last decade and more shuttering reliable coal power plants, and building lots of wind turbines and solar panels, along with some (but obviously not enough) natural gas plants, as replacements.
As of today, electric vehicles are a tiny fraction of all vehicles (less than 1% in the U.S., says Reuters as of February 2022), particularly in these Midwestern and Southern states. Yet even with only the tiniest level of electricity demand coming from electric vehicles, already major utilities are short of electricity when a not-out-of-the-ordinary cold snap hits.
And now, where are things headed in the near future? The Wall Street Journal had a big piece with a January 1 date (it appeared in the print edition on January 3) about the coming rush of electric vehicles, headline “Shift to EVs Triggers Biggest Auto-Factory Building Boom in Decades.” The gist is that the industry is gearing up to build factories at a breakneck pace for the imminent supply of electric cars for all. Excerpt:
The U.S. auto industry is entering one of its biggest factory-building booms in years, a surge of spending largely driven by the shift to electric vehicles and new federal subsidies aimed at boosting U.S. battery manufacturing. Through November, about $33 billion in new auto-factory investment has been pledged in the U.S., including money for the construction of new assembly plants and battery-making facilities, according to the Center for Automotive Research, a nonprofit organization based in Michigan. . . . The capital outlays amount to a collective bet by the car industry that buyers will embrace battery-powered models in numbers large enough to support these investments. The global auto industry plans to spend a collective $526 billion on electric vehicles through 2026, according to consulting firm AlixPartners.
Whew! It’s the total transformation of the industry, from internal combustion engines to battery-electric. And if you look at the websites of the manufacturers themselves, they are almost all saying that they are committed to the rapid conversion to electric vehicles, with all internal-combustion manufacturing banished by some early date. Here is GM on its “path to an all-electric future” (by 2035); and here is Ford’s claim that it will “lead America’s shift to electric vehicles” (50% by 2030!). Numerous other manufacturers are making comparable claims.
OK, then, how much electricity is this going to take? I’ll start with this handy (if somewhat complicated) chart from the U.S. Energy Information Administration showing production (by source) and use (by sector) of all energy in the U.S. for the year 2021 (I do not find a chart for 2022 available as of yet.):
Here are a few key number from this chart:
The total amount of energy consumed in the U.S. in 2021 is given as 73.5 quadrillion Btus.
Of the 73.5 quadrillion Btus consumed, only 12.9 quadrillion Btus was in the form of electricity. That’s only 17.6% of total energy consumption.
Almost all of the electricity was consumed in the household, commercial and industrial sectors, and almost none (less than 1%) in the transportation sector.
The transportation sector consumed 26.9 quadrillion Btus of energy. That’s 37% of total energy consumption — and more than double the entire amount of electricity consumed in all sectors.
OK, but the transportation sector is a lot more than just automobiles. It also includes everything from airplanes to freight trains to ocean shipping. What part of that 26.9 quadrillion Btus of energy in the transportation sector consisted of automobiles and light trucks (like SUVs and pick-ups) which are the things that are supposedly about to get electrified? Looking around, I find something called the Transportation Energy Data Book, put out by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory — another part (like the EIA) of the U.S. Department of Energy. Here are two key facts from the introductory “Quick Facts” section: (1) “Petroleum comprised 90% of U.S. transportation energy use in 2020,” and (2) “Cars and light trucks accounted for 62% of U.S. transportation petroleum use in 2018.”
Assuming that those percentages held approximately true for 2021, then cars and light trucks consumed approximately some 26.9 x 0.9 x 0.62 = 15.0 quadrillion Btus in the form of gasoline or diesel in 2021 — well more than the entire amount of energy consumed in the country in that year in the form of electricity.
So have we now shown that converting all cars and light trucks to electric would require more than doubling the size of our electricity generation system? Unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple. There are a few other factors that need to be taken into account. Unfortunately, these additional factors are not subject to a great deal of precision, and can only be fairly rough approximations:
Electric vehicles have about 85-90% efficiency in translating the stored energy in the battery into movement of the vehicle. That compares to only about 15-25% efficiency of ICE vehicles. That is a large difference.
However, two other factors offset that advantage. One is that the batteries of electric vehicles experience an approximate 15% loss of charge in the turnaround between charge and discharge. The other is that the process of producing electricity in a power plant is in the range of 35-50% efficient, depending on the type of power plant. Some of the latest power plants even claim upwards of 50% efficiency, but note that the EIA chart above shows that the overall efficiency of electricity production in the U.S. is 35% (which also includes losses in transmission).
Put these factors together, and here is the calculation:
For an internal combustion vehicle, if you start with 10 Btus of energy in gasoline, you get about 2 Btus of motion from your car.
For an electric vehicle, if you start with the same 10 Btus of fuel, you get 10 x 0.35 = 3.5 Btus of usable electricity, 3.5 x 0.85 = 3.0 Btus of electricity in your battery after charging losses, and 3.0 x 0.87 = 2.6 Btus of motion from your car.
So overall, and remembering that this is approximate, an all-electric car and light truck fleet can run on about three-quarters (2 divided by 2.6) the number of Btus of energy input as can a comparable internal combustion-powered fleet. Instead of the 15 quadrillion Btus annually that we use for our current ICE vehicles, we could theoretically get it down to 11.25 quadrillion Btus, which would produce 11.25 x .35 = 3.93 quadrillion Btus of electricity to run the vehicles.
Recall that the current amount of electricity produced annually in the U.S., from the chart above, is 12.9 quadrillion Btus. So the additional 3.93 quadrillion Btus of electricity would represent approximately a 30.5% addition to the current capacity of our electricity generation system.
Are there any plans afoot for anything like that? Here’s another chart from EIA showing their projections of growth in U.S. electricity generation capacity out to 2050, from their 2022 Annual Energy Outlook:
Basically, after the current rebound from the 2020-21 Covid-induced decline, they project 1% annual increase in consumption as far as the eye can see. The “high economic growth” and “low economic growth” scenarios do not differ meaningfully from the median “reference” case. This growth includes growing demand for everything, including from growing population and every sort of new electric gizmo that might be invented over the period. And note that this projection, at least for the earlier years, is largely based on the plans of utilities to add capacity — or not. And to the extent anyone is adding capacity, it is likely to be wind and solar, which will be completely useless for charging these vehicles on calm nights and lots of other times.
So where is the surge in generation capacity to support a 30% or so additional need for electricity to electrify all cars? It sure doesn’t look to me like it is there. Could it be that nobody really believes that this conversion to electric cars is actually going to occur? That would be my take.
Trust the Authorities, trust the Experts, and trust the Science, we were told. Public health messaging during the Covid-19 pandemic was only credible if it originated from government health authorities, the World Health Organization, and pharmaceutical companies, as well as scientists who parroted their lines with little critical thinking.
In the name of ‘protecting’ the public, the authorities have gone to great lengths, as described in the recently released Twitter Files (1,2,3,4,5,6,7) that document collusion between the FBI and social media platforms, to create an illusion of consensus about the appropriate response to Covid-19.
They suppressed ‘the truth,’ even when emanating from highly credible scientists, undermining scientific debate and preventing the correction of scientific errors. In fact, an entire bureaucracy of censorship has been created, ostensibly to deal with so-called MDM— misinformation (false information resulting from human error with no intention of harm); disinformation (information intended to mislead and manipulate); malinformation (accurate information intended to harm).
“Whether it’s a threat to our health or a threat to our democracy, there is a human cost to disinformation.” — Tim Davie, Director-General of the BBC
But is it possible that ‘trusted’ institutions could pose a far bigger threat to society by disseminating false information?
Although the problem of spreading false information is usually conceived of as emanating from the public, during the Covid-19 pandemic, governments, corporations, supranational organisations and even scientific journals and academic institutions have contributed to a false narrative.
Falsehoods such as ‘Lockdowns save lives’ and ‘No one is safe until everyone is safe’ have far-reaching costs in livelihoods and lives. Institutional false information during the pandemic was rampant. Below is just a sample by way of illustration.
The health authorities falsely convinced the public that the Covid-19 vaccines stop infection and transmission when the manufacturers never even tested these outcomes. The CDC changed its definition of vaccination to be more ‘inclusive’ of the novel mRNA technology vaccines. Instead of the vaccines being expected to produce immunity, now it was good enough to produce protection.
The authorities also repeated the mantra (at 16:55) of ‘safe and effective’ throughout the pandemic despite emerging evidence of vaccine harm. The FDA refused the full release of documents they had reviewed in 108 days when granting the vaccines emergency use authorisation. Then in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, it attempted to delay their release for up to 75 years. These documents presented evidence of vaccine adverse events. It’s important to note that between 50 and 96 percent of the funding of drug regulatory agencies around the world comes from Big Pharma in the form of grants or user fees. Can we disregard that it’s difficult to bite the hand that feeds you?
The vaccine manufacturers claimed high levels of vaccine efficacy in terms of relative risk reduction (between 67 and 95 percent). They failed, however, to share with the public the more reliable measure of absolute risk reduction that was only around 1 percent, thereby exaggerating the expected benefit of these vaccines.
They also claimed “no serious safety concerns observed” despite their own post-authorisation safety report revealing multiple serious adverse events, some lethal. The manufacturers also failed to publicly address the immune suppression during the two weeks post-vaccination and the rapidly waning vaccine effectiveness that turns negative at 6 months or the increased risk of infection with each additional booster. Lack of transparency about this vital information denied people their right to informed consent.
They also claimed that natural immunity is not protective enough and that hybrid immunity (a combination of natural immunity and vaccination) is required. This false information was necessary to sell remaining stocks of their products in the face of mounting breakthrough cases (infection despite vaccination).
In reality, although natural immunity may not completely prevent future infection with SARS-CoV-2, it is however effective in preventing severe symptoms and deaths. Thus vaccination post-natural infection is not needed.
The WHO also participated in falsely informing the public. It disregarded its own pre-pandemic plans, and denied that lockdowns and masks are ineffective at saving lives and have a net harm on public health. It also promoted mass vaccination in contradiction to the public health principle of ‘interventions based on individual needs.’
It also went as far as excluding natural immunity from its definition of herd immunity and claimed that only vaccines can help reach this end point. This was later reversed under pressure from the scientific community. Again, at least 20 percent of the WHO’s funding comes from Big Pharma and philanthropists invested in pharmaceuticals. Is this a case of he who pays the piper calls the tune?
The Lancet, a respectable medical journal, published a paper claiming that Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) — a repurposed drug used for the treatment of Covid-19 — was associated with a slight increased risk of death. This led the FDA to ban the use of HCQ to treat Covid-19 patients and the NIH to halt the clinical trials on HCQ as a potential Covid-19 treatment. These were drastic measures taken on the basis of a study that was later retracted due to the emergence of evidence showing that the data used was false.
In another instance, the medical journal Current Problems in Cardiologyretracted —without any justification— a paper showing an increased risk of myocarditis in young people following the Covid-19 vaccines, after it was peer-reviewed and published. The authors advocated for the precautionary principle in the vaccination of young people and called for more pharmacovigilance studies to assess the safety of the vaccines. Erasing such findings from the medical literature not only prevents science from taking its natural course, but it also gatekeeps important information from the public.
A similar story took place with Ivermectin, another drug used for the treatment of Covdi-19, this time potentially implicating academia. Andrew Hill stated (at 5:15) that the conclusion of his paper on Ivermectin was influenced by Unitaid which is, coincidentally, the main funder of a new research centre at Hill’s workplace —the University of Liverpool. His meta-analysis showed that Ivermectin reduced mortality with Covid-19 by 75 percent. Instead of supporting Ivermectin use as a Covid-19 treatment, he concluded that further studies were needed.
The suppression of potentially life-saving treatments was instrumental for the emergency use authorization of the Covid-19 vaccines as the absence of a treatment for the disease is a condition for EUA (p.3).
Many media outlets are also guilty of sharing false information. This was in the form of biased reporting, or by accepting to be a platform for public relations (PR) campaigns. PR is an innocuous word for propaganda or the art of sharing information to influence public opinion in the service of special interest groups.
The danger of PR is that it passes for independent journalistic opinion to the untrained eye. PR campaigns aim to sensationalise scientific findings, possibly to increase consumer uptake of a given therapeutic, increase funding for similar research, or to increase stock prices. The pharmaceutical companies spent $6.88 billion on TV advertisements in 2021 in the US alone. Is it possible that this funding influenced media reporting during the Covid-19 pandemic?
Lack of integrity and conflicts of interest have led to an unprecedented institutional false information pandemic. It is up to the public to determine whether the above are instances of mis- or dis-information.
Public trust in the Media has seen its biggest drop over the last five years. Many are also waking up to the widespread institutional false information. The public can no longer trust ‘authoritative’ institutions that were expected to look after their interests. This lesson was learned at great cost. Many lives were lost due to the suppression of early treatment and an unsound vaccination policy; businesses ruined; jobs destroyed; educational achievement regressed; poverty aggravated; and both physical and mental health outcomes worsened. A preventable mass disaster.
We have a choice: either we continue to passively accept institutional false information or we resist. What are the checks and balances that we must put in place to reduce conflicts of interest in public health and research institutions? How can we decentralise the media and academic journals in order to reduce the influence of pharmaceutical advertising on their editorial policy?
As individuals, how can we improve our media literacy to become more critical consumers of information? There is nothing that dispels false narratives better than personal inquiry and critical thinking. So the next time conflicted institutions cry woeful wolf or vicious variant or catastrophic climate, we need to think twice.
Abir Ballan is the co-founder of THiNKTWICE.GLOBAL — Rethink. Reconnect. Reimagine.. She has a Masters in Public Health, a graduate certificate in special needs education and a BA in psychology. She is a children’s author with 27 published books.
Where did the lab leak theory come from? Who first promoted the idea and why? The answer to this question is surprising – and may be the key to unlocking the mystery of the origin of COVID-19.
The first known mention of the idea that the coronavirus may have originated in a Chinese lab appeared on January 9th 2020 in a report by Radio Free Asia (RFA). This was just days after the virus had first entered public consciousness, and at the time, no deaths had yet been reported and few people were worrying about the virus – including, it seems, the Chinese, who were claiming it wasn’t even clear whether it was spreading between humans.
Seemingly unhappy about the lack of alarm, RFA ran a comment from Ren Ruihong, former head of the medical assistance department at the Chinese Red Cross, who said she was confident it was spreading between humans. She also asserted it was a “new type of mutant coronavirus”, and immediately, without pausing for breath, raised the possibility it was a result of a Chinese biological attack on Hong Kong using a virus developed in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Bear in mind this was before a single person had been reported as dying from the virus, and no solid evidence was presented for the claim. It is the first time the WIV and the idea of a lab origin of the virus are mentioned in the media. The report then implies the WIV is hiding its involvement – though the basis for this insinuation is tenuous, to say the least.
Ren said. “They haven’t made public the genetic sequence, because it is highly contagious. From what I can tell, the patients caught it from other people. I have thought that all along.”
She said the lack of fatalities didn’t indicate that the virus was less deadly than SARS, just that antiviral medications have improved in the past 10 years or so.
Ren said she also regarded the relatively high number of infections in Hong Kong with suspicion, given that there had been no reports of cases anywhere in between the two cities, in the southern province of Guangdong, for example.
“Genetic engineering technology has gotten to such a point now, and Wuhan is home to a viral research center that is under the aegis of the China Academy of Sciences, which is the highest level of research facility in China,” she said.
Repeated calls to various numbers listed for the Wuhan Institute of Virology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences rang unanswered.
However, an employee who identified herself as a senior engineer said she knew nothing about the virus.
“Sorry, I… I don’t know about this,” the employee said.
Over the following two weeks RFA pushed hard on the idea of a Chinese biowarfare lab origin, and its reporting was picked up by the Washington Times on January 24th, which quoted Dany Shoham, an “Israeli biological warfare expert”.
The deadly animal virus epidemic spreading globally may have originated in a Wuhan laboratory linked to China’s covert biological weapons programme, according to an Israeli biological warfare expert.
Radio Free Asia this week rebroadcast a local Wuhan television report from 2015 showing China’s most advanced virus research laboratory known [as] the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Radio Free Asia reported.
The laboratory is the only declared site in China capable of working with deadly viruses.
Dany Shoham, a former Israeli military intelligence officer who has studied Chinese biowarfare, said the institute is linked to Beijing’s covert biological weapons programme.
“Certain laboratories in the institute have probably been engaged, in terms of research and development, in Chinese [biological weapons], at least collaterally, yet not as a principal facility of the Chinese [biological weapons] alignment,” Mr. Shoham told the Washington Times.
Why did Radio Free Asia and the Washington Times introduce and promote the idea of Covid as a Chinese bioweapon? RFA appears to have done so in order to counter the Chinese lack of concern about the virus, hence the heading: “Experts Cast Doubts on Chinese Official Claims Around ‘New’ Wuhan Coronavirus.” The Washington Times report indicates at one point it is in response to rumours “circulating on the Chinese Internet claiming the virus is part of a U.S. conspiracy to spread germ weapons”, citing an unnamed “U.S. official”.
One ominous sign, said a U.S. official, is that false rumours since the outbreak began several weeks ago have begun circulating on the Chinese Internet claiming the virus is part of a U.S. conspiracy to spread germ weapons.
That could indicate China is preparing propaganda outlets to counter future charges the new virus escaped from one of Wuhan’s civilian or defence research laboratories.
Why is the report anticipating “future charges” of a lab leak – particularly when it is in the process of making such charges?
The words of the anonymous U.S. official appear to state the Chinese rumours began “several weeks ago”, right back at the beginning of January or end of December; however, oddly, the article was soon updated to delete the words “since the outbreak began several weeks ago”, for reasons that are unclear.
In any case, the really strange thing about these “rumours circulating on the Chinese Internet” is that no evidence of them has ever been produced or found. Indeed, all the places you might expect to mention them do not. For instance, in February 2021 the DFRLab of the Atlantic Council published a lengthy document in conjunction with the Associated Press summarising all the “false rumours” and “hoaxes” regarding the origins of Covid. Its large research team scoured the internet for all rumours connected with Covid origins – yet the section on China doesn’t mention anything about these alleged January rumours of U.S bioweapons.
Another example is Larry Romanoff, an activist who writes on various ‘conspiracy theories’ and who has lived in China for many years. His columns in early 2020 on the Global Research website attacking the American position were tweeted out by senior Chinese figures, but he never mentions anything about these alleged early rumours on the “Chinese Internet”, which he surely would have done.
In addition, the rumours claim has never been repeated by any intelligence sources; this was the only time it was made.
Why then did RFA introduce the lab-engineered virus narrative, even before the first death? Why was it trying to ratchet up alarm? And why did the unnamed U.S. official claim to be responding to Chinese rumours that turned out not to exist?
The plot thickens when you realise that Radio Free Asia is a U.S.-Government-funded media outlet that is essentially a CIA front, once named by the New York Times as a key part in the agency’s “worldwide propaganda network”. As Whitney Webb pointed out right back in January 2020, though RFA is no longer run directly by the CIA, it is managed by the Government-funded Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which answers directly to the Secretary of State – who, at the outset of the pandemic was Mike Pompeo, whose previous job was as CIA Director.
This means we can see that the Covid lab origin narrative originated with the U.S. Government’s security services, and did so very early, prior to the first death, as part of a deliberate effort to increase alarm in China and elsewhere. It was also designed to counter the anticipated claims, which had not yet been made (though the anonymous U.S. official falsely claimed they had been), that the virus was a U.S. biological attack.
That the U.S. Government would be the source of the lab origin theory is no doubt surprising to many people, given that within weeks the same theory would be dismissed by Government officials as a ‘conspiracy theory’ and forcibly suppressed. In its place, official U.S. channels would endorse the wet market natural origin theory and seek to close down further debate and investigation. So what’s going on?
Here’s one possible explanation, which makes sense of all the known facts – though is admittedly highly disturbing. It may not be correct, but I confess I cannot currently think of a better one. Perhaps someone else can.
The explanation is that the Chinese lab origin narrative was put out by U.S. intelligence in early January as a cover story. A cover story for what? For a U.S. biological attack on China. As a cover story for an attack, it serves four key purposes. First, it preempts allegations of a U.S. attack (and indeed the anonymous U.S. official falsely claimed these had already been made). Second, it anticipates the need to explain the non-natural origin of the virus, which would be expected to be discovered, as a natural origin manifests differently to a non-natural origin – a natural origin should have animal reservoirs, early genetic diversity and evidence of adaptation to humans, which are lacking for SARS-CoV-2. Third, it spreads alarm in China – one of the purposes of the attack. And fourth, it justifies the U.S. and other countries activating biodefence protocols to defend themselves from any blowback – which we know is exactly what they did, and that they treated it as a matter of national security, not public health.
The idea that the U.S. might deliberately release a virus in China might seem far-fetched to some. However, it’s well known that the Pentagon intensified its research into bat-borne viruses in the years approaching the pandemic. Though it said this was solely for defensive purposes given the supposed risk of bats being used as “bioweapons”, scientists have previously warned, in the journal Science, that another supposedly defensive Pentagon programme, DARPA’s “Insect Allies” programme, appeared really to be aimed at creating and delivering a “new class of biological weapon” and that it revealed “an intention to develop a means of delivery of HEGAAs for offensive purposes”. In addition, the Iranian Government was so convinced that its early COVID-19 outbreak in February 2020, which killed a significant number of its senior leaders, was due to a U.S. biological attack that it lodged a formal complaint with the UN. Such allegations don’t prove anything of course. But together these concerns do suggest that such an attack is not outside the realm of possibility and should at least be considered as an explanation for the origin of the virus.
But if the lab leak was the intended cover story, why was it shortly afterwards suppressed as a ‘conspiracy theory’? It is a matter of public record that this occurred largely due to the efforts of Anthony Fauci, Jeremy Farrar and other Western scientists, who organised a scientific cover-up of evidence that might implicate their complicity in the gain-of-function research that they suspected may have created the virus. Did they know about the attack? There’s no evidence they did. Which means they would also have been in the dark about the intended cover story. Indeed, one of the conspirators, Christian Drosten, in one of the disclosed emails directly asks the group where the “conspiracy theory” of a lab origin has come from. Farrar and Fauci, for their part, appear to be genuinely exploring the origin questions in their emails (while clearly aiming for a particular answer).
The fears of this group of scientists about being implicated in the creation of the virus led them to organise a highly effective effort to dismiss and suppress the lab origin theory. This intervention greatly complexified the cover story, with the result that the output from the U.S. intelligence community (IC) became confused and inconsistent. In what follows I enumerate the six main interventions of the U.S. intelligence community during the pandemic and suggest what likely lay behind them. They are:
The November 2019 secret intelligence report claiming to show a large respiratory outbreak in Wuhan that was used to brief the U.S. Government, NATO and Israel. Importantly, the alleged evidence for this outbreak has never been produced, and what evidence there is suggests that in reality there was no detectable outbreak in Wuhan in November 2019, meaning the report appears to have been largely a work of fiction.
The January 2020 introduction and promotion of the Chinese lab origin story, as set out above.
The early April 2020 media briefings from unnamed intelligence sources about the November intelligence reports noted in (1) above. These briefings were particularly odd because by that point the main origin story being pushed by official U.S. channels was the wet market theory, which this information contradicted because it implied a large outbreak (an “out of control” epidemic and “cataclysmic event”) well before the wet market outbreak in December.
The late April and early May 2020 public endorsement by the U.S. intelligence community of the wet market natural origin theory. This contradicted both the early April anonymous media briefings in (3) and the lab origin story in (2), while at the same time embarrassing Mike Pompeo and President Trump who were at the time strongly pushing the lab leak theory.
The August 2021 declassified intelligence report on Covid origins, which gave a somewhat mixed picture of how the intelligence community assessed the lab leak theory. What the report was sure to make clear on the first page, however, is that the virus was “not developed as a biological weapon” and it was “not genetically engineered”. The report says that a small number of IC elements thought the virus might have escaped from a lab (though as a natural, not engineered, virus); in particular the National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), which was responsible for the November 2019 secret intelligence report and (presumably) the April 2020 anonymous media briefings, endorsed this theory with “moderate confidence”. Note that by this point the lab leak theory was back in play following the WHO origins investigation in February 2021.
The October 2022 Senate minority report, which for the first time set out the evidence in favour an engineered virus and a lab leak. U.S. biodefence bigwig Robert Kadlec was behind this report and it notably did not mention the November 2019 U.S. intelligence report, which appears to have been entirely ‘forgotten’ (indeed, it has never been officially acknowledged). It also made no reference to the United States’ considerable involvement in bat coronavirus research in the years prior to the pandemic. We should also note that the evidence presented in the report of an alleged safety breach at the WIV in November 2019 was all assembled retrospectively – there is no suggestion that such evidence was known at the time, and the report makes clear that all its information comes from publicly available sources, stating: “This report has reviewed open source, publicly available information relevant to the origins of the virus.”
So here’s what I suggest was really going on with these often curious and clashing IC interventions.
The November 2019 secret intelligence report (1) was intended to forewarn the U.S. Government and its allies of the potential need for epidemic countermeasures given the risk of blowback from the attack. While blowback was probably not expected (after all, SARS and MERS never troubled Europe and America), it was obviously a risk. Note that those responsible for the November 2019 report had to know there wasn’t really any evidence of an outbreak in Wuhan at that time, and thus that their report was based on fabrication. This appears to implicate the NCMI, which produced the report, in the attack.
The early April 2020 anonymous media briefings (3) about the November 2019 intelligence reports were most likely an attempt by the intelligence community (or, rather, the NCMI) to point out that they did try to warn everyone about the virus and the need to prepare. This would explain why they went ahead with the anonymous briefings despite, by that point, those briefings contradicting the new ‘official narrative’ that the virus came from the wet market.
The official endorsement by the intelligence community in late April and early May 2020 of the wet market theory (4) would then have occurred because of a switch amongst most of the intelligence community to the narrative created and endorsed by Anthony Fauci, Jeremy Farrar etc. Those in the IC not involved in the attack (likely the vast majority) had probably figured out what was going on, i.e., the lab leak theory was a cover story put out by reckless colleagues, and would be very aware of the terrible fallout should the truth become known. Hence also the suppression around this time within the U.S. Government of all Covid origins investigations, which a senior Government official said would only “open a can of worms“.
This tension between IC elements then continued with the 2021 declassified intelligence report (5), with most of the IC claiming not to know anything, but the NCMI still believing the lab leak was the best cover story and wanting it back in play.
By the time of the October 2022 Senate report (6) the natural origin theory was clearly collapsing. This report then represents an effort by some within the intelligence community to bring back the lab leak as the cover story, while directing all attention to China and the WIV and away from the U.S.
How plausible is all this? It certainly fits the evidence, though perhaps there is another, more innocent way of explaining it all.
However, those who would like to exclude the possibility of a U.S. biological attack – and indeed, I would like to exclude this – need to answer at least two key questions:
1. Why was the U.S. concerned about and following an outbreak in Wuhan in November 2019 which all the available evidence shows was not detectable at the time? Why did the U.S. falsely claim there was a signal of a large, worrying outbreak and brief allies about it?
2. Why did U.S. security services begin spreading rumours about the virus being engineered in China at the beginning of January, even before the first death had been reported, when they had no evidence of this (at least, they have never explained how they knew it) and no one else was worried about it, and based on the false claim that rumours were already being spread in China about a U.S. bioweapon?
I doubt these professors have anything to fear from a food tax
By Eric Worrall | Watts Up With That? | November 19, 2016
A group of researchers in Oxford University, England have suggested that imposing a massive tax on carbon intensive foods – specifically protein rich foods like meat and dairy – could help combat climate change. […]
This proposal, from a group of people who have probably never missed a meal in their lives, is totally obscene. High income countries often have a lot of poor people who would be hard hit by increases in the price of food.
Needlessly exacerbating the risk poor people don’t get enough to eat, especially children and pregnant mothers, who are especially vulnerable to adverse health impacts from lack of protein in their diet – if this ghastly proposal is ever implemented, future generations will look upon it as a crime against humanity. – Read full article
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