Medical ethics is a large field of study. The Covid pandemic certainly brought many medical ethics issues to the forefront and produced rather amazing “ethicist” gems, such as this:
Be aware that “bioethics” has moved on to proposals that might seem crazy to you but are considered seriously and published in Bill Gates-funded publications and scientific journals. Important studies on this subject are conducted under the auspices of the World Economic Forum.
Forcibly giving people collectivism-promoting “Morality Pills” (archive link) is a popular suggestion among bioethicists. It was published in Bill Gates-funded The Conversation and is discussed widely in scientific literature. (The Conversation received 7 million dollars from Bill Gates but pretends to be an independent journalism publication)
What are these morality pills? You might think that morality, to them, means being a good husband or wife, an honest businessperson, fulfilling promises, and so on. Why not enhance that? What’s the problem?
The problem is that this is NOT how they define morality! To them, morality is a collectivist mindset, lack of critical thinking, and compliance. The article explains that some people lack “moral qualities” and refuse to wear masks or take Covid vaccines, or even deny climate change:
My research in bioethics focuses on questions like how to induce those who are noncooperative to get on board with doing what’s best for the public good. To me, it seems the problem of coronavirus defectors could be solved by moral enhancement: like receiving a vaccine to beef up your immune system, people could take a substance to boost their cooperative, pro-social behavior. Could a psychoactive pill be the solution to the pandemic?
They propose giving people pills to enhance “morality” and explain the climate change angle relevance:
But a strategy like this one could be a way out of this pandemic, a future outbreak or the suffering associated with climate change. That’s why we should be thinking of it now.
The proposed solution to give people morality pills is more than idle thinking. Several candidate psychoactive substances are identified and considered seriously: psilocybin and oxytocin, for example.
The obvious objection to all this morality pill talk is that skeptics would not take them! I would not take such a pill to enhance my collectivist mindset. At the risk of being presumptuous, I would say that you, my dear subscriber, would refuse them also. Right?
The ethicists have a solution: administer collectivist morality pills by force or surreptitiously.
As some have argued, a solution would be to make moral enhancement compulsory or administer it secretly, perhaps via the water supply. These actions require weighing other values. Does the good of covertly dosing the public with a drug that would change people’s behavior outweigh individuals’ autonomy to choose whether to participate? Does the good associated with wearing a mask outweigh an individual’s autonomy to not wear one?
Serious articles discuss how to do it:
A covert psychoactive substance administration to the masses must not be discussed publicly before its implementation, right? So the ethicists desire to bypass any democratic process or prior public discussion and scrutiny. These ethicists refuse to see an ethical problem with that!
World Economic Forum Sponsored Research into “Collectivist Bioenhancement”
Some of you, my dear readers, might think this is so batshit crazy that it is simply useless musings of fringe philosophers, not worth discussing.
Quite to the contrary, the famous and influential organization called the World Economic Forum sponsors such bioenhancement research.
Linda Fried, mentioned above, is the aunt of Sam Bankman-Fried. Sam stole billions of dollars from crypto-investors (in my opinion) and used that money to become the second largest Democratic party donor. So, Linda Fried is not exactly a nobody languishing in obscurity. By the way, a friend of this blog El Gato wrote a great post discussing Sam — check it out.
Linda explains in her article that her goal is “collective welfarism,” and she is part of the group convened by the World Economic Forum:
A stronger ethical approach, though, would be to abide by the principle, termed ‘collective easy rescue’, whereby small individual losses are justified in the name of collective well-being. Mass vaccination is a well-documented example of collective easy rescue.
Human “enhancement” to force mass vaccination? Sounds familiar?
Those “medical ethicists,” “world changers,” and “disinformation fighters” are so self-absorbed and self-righteous that they think their way of thinking is the only right way. They consider any deviation from their mindset to be antisocial, divisive, and subversive.
To them, freedom is dangerous. Truth is misinformation. Pursuing personal happiness and liberty instead of welfarism is selfish and immoral and needs to be dealt with through covert bioenhancement pills. Their opponents need to be silenced as “disinformation agents” or influenced via secretly applied substances to enhance compliance and lower critical thinking.
My post, discussing outlandish agenda developed under the auspices of the World Economic Forum, may sound like the perfect conspiracy theory. If someone approached me and told me that the WEF is sponsoring “bioenhancement research,” whose goal is to develop substances to impose “collective welfarism” and achieve compliance with mass vaccination, I would not take that person seriously!
Such is the problem with describing many WEF proposals. Some of their ideas are so crazy that they are difficult to accept as genuine when retold. Official papers, proposals, peer-reviewed studies, and agenda articles describe plans that are extremely strange to the uninitiated — and yet are pursued seriously. Other authors, such as Tessa Lena, also mentioned how difficult it is to describe these tendencies.
I have explained my difficulties with describing crazy but real proposals by world-leading unelected organizations such as the WEF.
I Do Not Spread Conspiracy Theories – I Report on Actual News
Their proposals, when understood properly, are highly disturbing and seem unreal — except that they are very serious.
WEF Uses CODED LANGUAGE to Communicate Unthinkable Plans
The difficulty with their plans is that regular people cannot believe they are real. That happens for a good reason: nobody would expect such insanity to be seriously promulgated by important men and women. Even I have difficulty reconciling the plain text and the simple meaning of their anti-human theories with my idea of what our leaders should act like.
And yet, here we are — the welfarist pills are promulgated under the auspices of the WEF by no one but Linda Fried, the aunt of the second-largest Democrat donor and crypto thief (in my opinion) Sam Bankman-Fried.
In the future, you may need to be careful with your drinking water or the compulsory mystery “health enhancement pill” you must take for an unexplained reason!
Would you take such a welfarism bioenhancement pill?
November 22, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | Human rights, WEF |
Leave a comment
Pfizer’s quest for blockbusters by hook or by crook
Author’s Note: The following post is an excerpt from The Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex, by John Leake and Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH. Please note that a special and very handsome hardcover edition, published by Skyhorse with a forward by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., will be released tomorrow (November 22).
Long before COVID-19 arrived, I was a close observer of the pharmaceutical industry. My great grandparents believed that pharmaceutical labs were at the forefront of progress, relieving suffering and extending life, and for the most part they were right. My paternal great grandfather owned a large chain of drugstores and was a benefactor of UT Southwestern Medical School. At the time of my birth, my maternal great grandmother gave me a generous gift of Pfizer stock. She had been impressed by Pfizer’s key role in discovering how to mass produce penicillin during World War II (in which her son was killed in action). Eighteen years later her gift paid for my university education. And then, in 1998, Pfizer received FDA approval to sell Viagra.
Pfizer initially developed the drug to treat high blood pressure and angina pectoris. However, as Pfizer’s researchers discovered in clinical trials, the drug was better at inducing erections than managing angina. And so, the company repurposed the drug for erectile dysfunction and launched a massive, global PR and marketing campaign—including seeking moral approval from Pope John Paul II and contracting the war hero and 1996 presidential candidate Bob Dole to be the brand’s poster gentleman—that succeeded in making Viagra a blockbuster. Fortunately for me, I still owned a large chunk of Pfizer stock. The price spiked in late 1998 and reached an all-time high in April of 1999. I sold my entire remaining position, which financed my early years as a freelance author, before my first book was published.
So, I learned firsthand why pharmaceutical companies seek to develop blockbuster drugs with fanatical zeal. Formulating a safe and effective new medicine to address a large, unmet need is very difficult and expensive. Performing clinical trials and obtaining FDA-approval is an arduous process that normally takes several years. Thus, if an opportunity for a new blockbuster presents itself, a big drug company like Pfizer will go to extreme lengths to seize it.
Three years after the release of Viagra, I learned that Pfizer was not the entirely respectable company my great grandmother had believed it to be. I arrived at this realization through my interest in British spy novels. In 2001 I lived in Vienna, around the corner from the Burgkino (Burg Cinema) which still played the 1949 film noir classic The Third Man on its big screen every weekend. I spent many a dreary winter Sunday afternoon watching the film. Based on the novella and screenplay by Graham Greene, The Third Man is a crime story about Harry Lime—an American running a medical charity in Vienna, who makes a killing selling penicillin on the bombed out, impoverished city’s black market. To increase his profits, he cuts the drug with other substances, thereby destroying its efficacy and causing the patients (including children) to die horribly from their infections.
In the film’s most iconic scene, the good guy (played by Joseph Cotton) meets his old friend Harry Lime (played by Orson Welles) on the Giant Ferris wheel in the Vienna Prater amusement park and tries to appeal to his conscience. At the wheel’s apex, the charismatic Harry opens the door, points down to people walking on the ground below, and says:
Look down there. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax. … Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t, why should we? They talk about the people and the proletariat; I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It’s the same thing. They have their five-year plans, and so have I.
I sensed that Graham Greene might have based the story on something he’d witnessed or heard about. Doing some research, I learned that Harry Lime was probably based on the British spy Harold “Kim” Philby, with whom Greene worked in British intelligence during World War II. Greene, it seems, discovered that Philby was a Soviet double agent long before he was exposed as such in 1963. Instead of ratting out his friend, he kept it to himself and left the intelligence service in 1944. Several pieces of evidence suggest that when he wrote The Third Man a few years later, he based it on his conflicted friendship with Philby.
John le Carré was also fascinated by Graham Greene and Kim Philby, and his thriller Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy—one of my all-time favorites—was inspired by the Philby story. His novel The Constant Gardener was published in 2001, and I read it with great interest. The story wasn’t set in Cold War Europe, but in Kenya, where a British diplomat’s wife is brutally raped and murdered. Upon closer examination, the diplomat realizes that she was about to reveal a horrifying crime committed by a pharmaceutical company, which murdered her in order to prevent the exposure.
The novel’s plot was reminiscent of a controversial drug trial performed by Pfizer in Kano, Nigeria in 1996 during a meningococcal outbreak. For the trial of its new antibiotic, trovafloxacin, Pfizer gave 100 children this new drug. The control group of 100 other children received the standard anti-meningitis treatment at the time—a drug called ceftriaxone. However, for the control group, Pfizer administered a substantially lower dose of ceftriaxone than the drug’s FDA-approved standard.
When the reduced dosing in the control group was discovered, it raised the suspicion that Pfizer did this in order to skew the trial in favor of its new drug. Five of the children who received trovafloxacin died, while six who received the reduced dose of ceftriaxone died. Other children apparently suffered grave injuries from the administration of the experimental antibiotic without their informed consent. The investigation and litigation that ensued was the stuff of a thriller, involving private investigators, bribery, blackmail attempts, and disappearing records. Thirteen years later, in 2009, Pfizer settled out of court with the plaintiffs.
In his author’s note, le Carré claimed that nobody and no corporation in the novel was based on an actual person or corporation in the real world.
But I can tell you this. As my journey through the pharmaceutical jungle progressed, I came to realize that, by comparison with the reality, my story was as tame as a holiday postcard.
In 2009, the same year that Pfizer settled with the trovafloxacin plaintiffs, the New York Times reported that a U.S. federal judge assessed Pfizer with the “largest health care fraud settlement and the largest criminal fine of any kind ever” for its illegal marketing of Bextra and three other drugs. The U.S. Department of Justice was unequivocal in characterizing Pfizer’s officers as guilty of grave criminal conduct at the expense of the American public.
November 21, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Corruption, Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | FDA, Pfizer |
Leave a comment
‘Censorship kills’ is the rally cry for a global medical community under unfathomable pressure from big tech and government to stifle the Covid debate. Fortunately, legislators and the greater public are seeing through the authoritarian behavior and taking action.
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | November 17, 2022
Real Housewives Star and business mogul, Bethenny Frankel, made waves on social media when she went off on how taboo it’s become to even question the possibility of suffering an adverse reaction from Covid-19 vaccines.
November 21, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Covid-19, Human rights, United States |
Leave a comment
Readers will recall the ban on singing of all kinds during the lockdowns and even after they were lifted because singing was supposedly a ‘transmission risk’. Turns out, this typical piece of Covid hysteria was based on a flawed study. The Church Times has more.
The ban arose out of reports in the United States in March 2020 that 52 of 61 singers who attended a rehearsal of the Skagit Valley Chorale, in Mount Vernon, Washington, had subsequently contracted Covid. The source was judged to have been a chorister at the practice who later tested positive for the virus, and was considered the super-spreader.
The Los Angeles Times carried the headline: “A choir decided to go ahead with rehearsal. Now dozens of members have COVID-19 and two are dead.” An investigation by the county’s public-health officials was referred to in other scientific papers and widely disseminated, and, with a growing consensus that airborne droplets were spreading the virus, all indoor singing was banned.
It dealt a serious blow to many choirs, both professional and amateur. Scientific study accelerated. Two lay vicars from Salisbury Cathedral took part in rigorous trials at Porton Down, the MOD’s Science and Technology laboratory, to test how far airborne droplets could travel. These, and other studies commissioned by the Department for Digital, Media, Culture and Sport, were reported eventually to have given the Government confidence to reconsider appropriate mitigations.
Now a review of the Skagit case by scientists at Nottingham Trent University (NTU), Brunel University, and Brighton and Sussex Medical School, has concluded that many of the choristers’ symptoms had started too early to have been caused by the rehearsal.
In a paper entitled “The Skagit County Choir COVID-19 Outbreak: Have we got it wrong?” they review and analyse the original outbreak data in relation to published data on incubation. They conclude that it was “vanishingly unlikely that this was a single point source outbreak as has been widely claimed and on which modelling has been based”.
An unexamined assumption led to “erroneous policy conclusions about the risks of singing, and indoor spaces more generally, and the benefits of increased levels of ventilation”, the paper says.
“Although never publicly identified, one individual bears a moral burden of knowing what health outcomes have been attributed to their actions. We call for these claims to be re-examined and for greater ethical responsibility in the assumption of a point source in outbreak investigations.”
One of the co-authors, Professor Robert Dingwall, of NTU, said on Wednesday that the speed with which the choristers were being infected and displaying symptoms was implausible, and did not fit the epidemic curve.
“All the ‘mights’ got turned into definite findings by the people who quoted [the original study],” he said. “We looked at it and saw the distribution of days on which the symptoms appeared, and realised they just couldn’t all have been affected at that rehearsal – the symptoms were just appearing too quickly.”
Worth reading in full.
November 19, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Human rights, United States |
Leave a comment
The other day we saw a UN report which claimed that “billions live in regions that have already experienced warming greater than the global average.”
They didn’t say where those regions were, a strange lacuna for such a large number of souls. I thought this an interesting question, so I looked it up, searching with terms like “warming faster than rest of the world” and the like. I used the Regime-approved search engine Google.
Here are the regions of the world which Regime-approved government and media sources—I would never quote from conspiracy-believing denier sites!—think are warming faster than the rest of the world. I believe all of these links are from the last year or two. I did not cheat and use anything from the 2000s or earlier.
- The Arctic: The Arctic is warming four times faster than the global average
- Europe: “Europe hotting up more than twice global average“.
- The Mediterranean: “The Mediterranean region is warming 20% faster than the global average.“
- The Middle East: “Middle East region heating up twice as fast as rest of globe.“
- Africa: “Africa’s climate has warmed more than the global average since pre-industrial times“; “Africa warming faster than rest of world: IPCC Sixth Assessment Report“.
- Russia: “Russia warming ‘2.5 times quicker’ than global average: ministry“.
- China: “China warming up faster than rest of the world: Report“.
- West Asia: “Countries in the eastern Mediterranean and West Asia are warming twice as fast as the global average”.
- Singapore: “Why Singapore is heating up twice as fast as the rest of the world“.
- Japan: “Tokyo’s mean annual temperature has risen by 2.86C since 1900, about three times as fast as the world average of 0.96C“.
- India: “Global warming to hit India the worst in Asia by 2070.“
- Pakistan: “Temperature increase in the region is at 0.42°C per decade, warming twice as fast as the rest of the world“.
- Indian Ocean: “Indian Ocean warming at higher rate than other oceans, says IPCC report.“
- Australia: “Australia is Warming Faster than Global Average“.
- New Zealand: “In the past two decades, it increased 0.0387 C per year, slightly higher than the world average.”
- South-West Pacific: “South-West Pacific region, ocean heat content has increased more than three times faster than the global average rate.“
- Antarctica: “South pole warmed ‘three times faster’ than global average over past 30 years.“
- Earth’s Lakes: “Earth’s lakes are warming faster than its air“.
- Canada: Canada is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world.
- Latin America and the Caribbean: “Latin America and the Caribbean warming faster than global average“.
- Mexico: “Mexico is warming faster than the rest of the planet, they say“.
- Central and South America: “IPCC: Mean temperatures have very likely increased in all sub-regions and will continue to increase at rates greater than the global average (high confidence).“
- The Atlantic Ocean: “The Atlantic Ocean is warming the fastest“.
- Ladies & Gentlemen, I bring you the seat of the Regime, The Once United States of America: “Over the past 50 years, the U.S. has warmed 68 percent faster than the planet as a whole.“
- Every State Also Heating Up Faster Than Every State
- New England: “New England is warming faster than the rest of the planet, new study finds.“
- Northeast: “Northeast region of the U.S. is warming faster than the rest of the country.“
- California: “California Warming More than U.S. Average as CO2 Climbs“.
- Great Lakes Basin: “Great Lakes Basin warming faster than other parts of country, new study finds“.
- Southwest and upper Midwest: “THE SOUTHWEST (ARIZONA, NEW MEXICO, AND TEXAS), IS THE FASTEST- WARMING REGION IN THE NATION: Michigan, Wisconsin and northern-tier states round out the Top 10“.
- Utah: “Climate Analysis Finds Utah Temperatures Rose Fifth Fastest In The Country“.
Have I left anywhere out? I grew bored with the task after thirty minutes, especially when I started to do each individual state. I invite to try your own search and fill in those geographic areas (if any) that I missed.
We all live in Lake Woeonus, where it’s always worse than we thought, there are always five years left to SAVE THE PLANET!, and all the temperatures are rising faster than average.
I’ll save the larger, and more important, conclusion that models, and those that create them, cannot be trusted for another day.
I was scooped on this by at least three years. Here’s a guy who found that same “twice as high” goofiness three years ago.
November 19, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | United Nations |
Leave a comment
As the saga surrounding the arrival of a Ukrainian S-300 surface-to-air missile on the soil of Poland, tragically taking the lives of two Polish civilians, unfolds, several narratives emerge. First is the hair-trigger Pavlovian response on the part of certain NATO nations (Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and the Czech Republic) to jump to conclusions, announcing that this incident was a clear-cut case of Russian aggression against a NATO member requiring a NATO response inclusive of extending air defense coverage into Ukraine, as well as the establishment of a no-fly zone over parts of Ukraine. The second is the confusion that reigned at the highest levels in Ukraine regarding this incident, up to and including the refusal on the part of the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, to acknowledge that the missile in question was of Ukrainian origin.
It appears that those NATO nations calling for the invocation of Article 4 of the NATO charter in the aftermath of the missile incident were primed to do so ahead of the fact. It also appears as if the actual launch of the missile was done without the knowledge and authority of the Ukrainian high command, including Zelensky and his top military advisors.
This could lead one to assess that Ukraine’s northern European NATO allies are simply looking for a fight with Russia with the kind of focused intensity of a lemming running toward a cliff, jumping on any story line which can be twisted and distorted in a manner designed to make NATO intervention in Ukraine viable to other, less enthusiastic member states.
Such an assessment would square with the notion, currently in favor amongst most NATO members and their compliant western media stenographers, that the Ukrainian S-300 missile impact in Poland was a tragic accident, with the missile in question being launched in response to a Russian missile barrage before suffering some sort of malfunction which sent it flying off course, toward its tragic destiny in a Polish farmer’s field.
From an analysis of the basic geometry of the Ukrainian air defense battlefield, this narrative does not withstand scrutiny. Incoming Russian missiles approach Ukraine from roughly an east-to-west trajectory. As such, Ukrainian air defense is layered to protect from a west-to-east perspective, with detection radars set up to pick up incoming targets as far out as possible, allowing tracking radars to be cued as needed to guide the surface-to-air missiles to their designated targets. Any S-300 missile fired against an incoming Russian target would be fired from a roughly west to east direction, following the radar beam toward its target. In short—a Ukrainian S-300 would be launched in a direction which is pretty much 180 degrees away from the path flown by the missile that hit Poland.
Generally speaking, if a missile malfunctions or loses radar track, it will continue to fly roughly in the same direction of launch. Any major deviation from this rule would mean that the control surfaces of the missile were malfunctioning or damaged, which means the missile would not be able to sustain a consistent trajectory and would as such tumble out of control. For the Ukrainian S-300 missile to have reached Poland, it would have required a fully functioning aerodynamic control system. In short, the missile did not malfunction.
Air defense missiles have, over history, had an inherent surface-to-surface capability. The nuclear-capable Nike-Hercules missile could be used in a surface-to-surface role. The Iraqis used Soviet-made SA-2 and SA-3 missiles as surface-to-surface missiles. And the SM-6 missile used by the US Navy and Army can strike targets both in the air and on the ground. While the S-300 was purposely designed as an air defense weapon (its warhead is a relatively small one, between 100 and 143 kilograms of high explosive), it could be used in a surface-to-surface mode simply by using its tracking radar to orient a beam in the desired direction, at an altitude which would permit a ballistic trajectory to be obtained once the missile expends its fuel. The missile would fly in the direction of the beam, and then fall to the ground in the desired arc.
In order to do this, however, a tracking radar beam would have had to have been employed in a manner which oriented it in the exact opposite direction of the incoming Russian targets, toward Poland.
In short, the Ukrainian S-300 which landed on Poland was not the result of an accident, but rather a deliberate action designed to have the missile impact Polish soil.
The Polish are investigating the circumstances surrounding the deaths of their two citizens. If, as it logically appears, the launch of the S-300 missile was a deliberate act, then Poland must view the Ukrainians as the perpetrators of a crime. As such, Poland should be demanding that the launcher and associated radars be removed from service and all records and data associated with the launch in question treated as evidence and turned over to the appropriate Polish prosecution authority. Likewise, all personnel involved in the launch of this missile must be detained and subjected to interrogation by trained criminal investigators.
Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, denies that Ukraine launched the missile in question, basing his belief on information provided by his senior air force and military commanders. If Zelensky is telling the truth, then there is a conspiracy within the Ukrainian military establishment to instigate a false flag incident designed to draw NATO into the conflict. Any investigation into the command-and-control procedures used in the launching of the missile that struck Poland should be able to determine how high up the chain of command this conspiracy existed.
Likewise, the hair-trigger-like response of Poland and the Baltic states in jumping to conclusions that blamed Russia for the attack on Poland despite their respective militaries knowing that the missile in question was Ukrainian, suggests a certain level of prior coordination between the perpetrators of the attack and those who immediately pointed an accusatory finger at Russia.
Let there be no doubt—any direct NATO-Russian military confrontation over Poland has the real potential to devolve into a general nuclear exchange between the US and Russia. Anyone in Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltics who are involved in a conspiracy to drag NATO into the Ukraine conflict by promoting a false-flag attack represents a direct threat against every human being on the planet.
The US and its more responsible NATO partners need to get to the bottom of what transpired regarding the Ukrainian S-300 attack on Poland. Any failure to identify this false-flag conspiracy, if it in fact exists, and to nip it in the bud, only raises the real probability that those involved in such a conspiracy will try again, and again, until they fulfill their suicidal objective of a NATO-Russian conflict.
November 19, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine |
Leave a comment
A look at its origins as it surges in youngsters around the world
Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) is surging around the world right now. Could this be due to “immunity debt” after lockdowns or because Covid and/or mass vaccination has messed around with our immune systems? The majority of young children have not been vaccinated against Covid, so the direct effect of vaccination can be ruled out here.
RSV is relatively mild for healthy adults but can be more dangerous to young children and the elderly. Every year there are approximately 30 million acute respiratory illnesses and over 60,000 childhood deaths caused by RSV worldwide.
But where did RSV come from?
According to Wikipedia it was first discovered in 1956 when researchers isolated a virus from a population of chimpanzees with respiratory illness. It was later realised that the chimpanzees actually caught the infection from their caretakers.
However, a different version of this story exists. As it is extremely unlikely that the real truth will ever come to light, you decide which version sounds more plausible, the Wikipedia entry above, or the alternative below. Please add any other details you have in the comments below.
Whilst Wikipedia is correct, in that RSV was first discovered in 1956, the story begins a year earlier in 1955.
This was a time when research was being undertaken into the mass production of the polio viral vaccine. In order to conduct the research, viruses were grown in monkey kidney cells. As a result hundreds of thousands of monkeys were shipped to the US.
In late 1955 a troop of chimpanzees at the Walter Reed Army Institute began coughing and sneezing. Morris et al isolated the agent that caused the respiratory illness in one of the chimps and called it Chimpanzee Coryza Agent Virus (CCA). The remaining 13 chimps all developed antibodies to this newly isolated virus.
As documented by Morris, a person working at the Institute started to experience respiratory infection and later developed antibodies to CCA. Once this worker had become infected, a new name was proposed – Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) and from then on, CCA was rarely used in medical literature.
They were curious about this new virus and so susceptible chimpanzees were inoculated intranasally with CCA virus. After a 3 day incubation period, this new troop of monkeys all got ill as well.
A year later, in 1957, Chanock and Finberg reported on recovery from infants with respiratory illness of a virus related to CCA. They said it is clear that their findings show that the viruses infecting the infants are indistinguishable from the CCA virus.
Subsequently, the virus was recovered from infants and small children with pneumonia or bronchiolitis in the Maryland-District of Columbia.
In the winter of 1958, Beem et al isolated a similar virus, with antigenic similarities, in Chicago.
By 1961, Lewis et al had isolated further specimens which looked like CCA.
Prior to July 1960, the influenza and parainfluenza viruses predominated in infant epidemic respiratory infections. In July 1961 the pattern changed abruptly with sudden increases in bronchiolitis and bronchitis, infrequent before. 58% were under 12 months, and patients under 4 years predominated. Infants with bronchiolitis and severe bronchitis yielded RCA not previously isolated. Deaths have occurred.
Many of the research papers said it was likely that the initial chimpanzee virus was the result of an infection passed to the troop by a human.
However, within five years of the discovery of this virus in chimpanzees, children went from predominantly being hospitalised by influenza to hospitalisation due to bronchitis linked to RSV.
Now, approximately one half of all infants become infected with RSV in their first year of life, almost all of them by the age of two. In the US alone, hospitalisation of children with RSV costs $300 million.
So there are two theories, one that the virus passed from a human to the chimps and the other that it passed from the chimps to humans. However, the fact that this virus was unknown in humans before the chimp got ill and within five years the predominant illness in children flipped from influenza to RSV suggests that the latter theory is correct.
November 18, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | COVID-19 Vaccine |
Leave a comment
How Our Regulatory Agency Got Out of the Way from the Beginning
When the US HHS invoked the Emergency Use Authorization and the Department of Defense offered COVID-19 vaccination to be administered by the US FDA and CDC, it was clear the FDA was going to play no role in stopping the vaccination freight train that was about to steamroll America. A recent paper from Dr. Maryanne Demasi points out that the FDA “checked-out” early in the COVID-19 pandemic:[i] “Regulatory documents show that only nine out of 153 Pfizer trial sites were subject to FDA inspection before licensing the mRNA vaccine. Similarly, only 10 out of 99 Moderna trial sites and five of 73 remdesivir trial sites were inspected. Now, facing a backlog of site inspections, experts have criticized the FDA’s oversight of clinical trials, describing it as “grossly inadequate.” They say the problem, which predated covid-19, is not limited to a lack of inspections but also includes failing to notify the public or scientific journals when violations are identified—effectively keeping scientific misconduct from the medical establishment. The FDA is “endangering public health” by not being candid about violations that are uncovered during clinical trial site inspections, says David Gortler, a pharmacist and pharmacologist who worked as an FDA medical reviewer between 2007 and 2011 and was then appointed as a senior adviser to the FDA commissioner in 2019-21.”
Demasi goes on to point out the FDA suspended inspections and despite having vast resources, does not utilize their discretionary budget to protect Americans from product safety threats. “With a total budget of $6.1bn in 2021, he [Gortler] suggests the agency needs to be leaner and more efficient, with employees interested in improving public health.” “The bottom line is that the FDA has over 18,000 full time employees, more than any other drug regulatory agency by far, so it could have retrained and retooled anybody to tackle the need for increased inspections,” he says. “Half of its budget, about $3bn, is discretionary, which means it could have hired contractors, retirees, or repurpose existing workers. It chose not to. The FDA was just yawning its way through the pandemic. The entire agency is broken.” “The lack of full transparency and data sharing does not allow physicians and other medical scientists to confirm the data independently and make comprehensive risk-benefit assessments,” continues Gortler, who is now a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington DC.”
The most egregious example of FDA malfeasance is the intent to withhold release of the Pfizer regulatory dossier on its COVID-19 vaccine for 55 years knowing it contained reports of 1,223 deaths shortly after administration of their vaccine. In a continued set of historic blunders, the FDA approved the COVID-19 bivalent vaccines with no randomized trials powered for clinical outcomes with Omicron, and no information on safety. I believe Drs Demasi and Gortler are correct, the FDA is broken beyond repair, officials and staff involved in malfeasance should be named as targets in federal investigations since so many lives have been impacted by their malfeasance.
[i] Demasi M. FDA oversight of clinical trials is “grossly inadequate,” say experts BMJ 2022; 379 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.o2628 (Published 16 November 2022) Cite this as: BMJ 2022;379:o2628
November 18, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, FDA, United States |
Leave a comment
Samizdat – 17.11.2022
The Hague sentenced two Russian nationals and one Ukrainian to life in prison in absentia on Thursday for their alleged roles in the 2014 downing of a Malaysia Airlines jetliner in the Donbass. Moscow slammed the ruling, accusing the court of violating the principles of impartial justice for the sake of political expediency.
Thursday’s long-awaited Hague ruling on Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 was a “foregone conclusion,” and the only decision to be expected from the court, given the politicized nature of the trial, and the geopolitical implications at stake, international legal experts, IR analysts and political commentators have told Sputnik.
“The verdict today was a foregone conclusion given the way the investigations were conducted, to exclude Russian testimony and without demanding that the USA share the intelligence from satellites that it said it possessed shortly after the event,” Gilbert Doctorow, an international relations analyst and specialist on Russian affairs, said.
Citing the MH17 incident as a “classic case of ‘false flag’ operations” by Kiev aimed at ramping up Western pressure against Moscow, Doctorow pointed out that unlike this week’s WW3 scare involving a Ukrainian air defense missile falling on Polish territory – which Kiev immediately blamed on Russia but the West surprisingly questioned, the US and its allies did not intervene in MH17 in 2014 to swat down Ukrainian claims.
“With MH17, the USA pointed the finger at Russia minutes after the crash, but then this was only a propaganda play in the Information Wars that had the objective of bringing Europe on board for severe sanctions against Russia. However, with the missile hitting Poland yesterday, first the Polish president and then Joe Biden said within hours that while a proper investigation was needed, the available intelligence on the trajectory of the missile excluded its being fired from Russia. Why this very different development of the case? Because there is a proxy war going on now and USA/NATO did not want an escalation to nuclear war through pushing a false flag story,” the observer suggested.
Political commentator and author Joe Quinn echoed Doctorow’s characterization of the verdict as a “foregone conclusion,” suggesting the Hague “was always going to find Russia guilty,” because that was “the premise of the investigation from the outset.”
“Russia wasn’t allowed to take part because Russia was deemed guilty in advance of any investigation. In fact, within one day of the shooting down of MH17, Western media outlets were already declaring Russia guilty, with one notable UK tabloid declaring on its front page ‘Putin Killed My Baby!’ From there, the stage was set for both the Dutch Safety Board and the Joint Investigative Team to ‘fix the facts around the policy’ that Russian-backed separatists were to blame,” Quinn stressed.
The commentator suggested that “any sober analysis” of the JIT’s findings would show that the investigation was slanted against these ‘Russian-backed separatists’ “and by extension [against] Russia,” to prove them guilty.
“To reach this conclusion they were required to avoid giving any serious credence to evidence presented by the Russian government. The JIT’s final conclusions were primarily based on unnamed ‘eyewitnesses’ and ‘insiders’. The credibility of the statements of these people has not been subject to impartial scrutiny,” Quinn said.
Asked why the US never bothered to release satellite data related to the MH17 crash which could prove Russia’s innocence, the commentator emphasized that the US government “has a vested interest in withholding any and all information that would disprove” the ‘Russia did it’ thesis. “The same applies to the authorities in Kiev and Holland.”
Quinn is convinced that there was “zero possibility” for the verdict to be anything other than it was, since the destruction of MH17 was a “political event” – one “that occurred in the context of the ongoing geopolitical rivalry between Russia and the US, and more broadly ‘East vs West’.”
Tiberio Graziani, chairman of Vision & Global Trends, a Rome-based geopolitical affairs think tank, expressed similar sentiments, saying that “given the current circumstances related to the crisis between the West and the Russian Federation,” Thursday’s verdict could not have been nonpolitical. “Russia was not allowed to participate in the trial in which it was directly accused, precisely because it was considered – a priori – guilty from the outset. We recall that the tragic event was used right from the start in the context of the long hybrid war that the West has waged since at least the early years of this century. Furthermore, in [this] specific case, the question of the insurance companies that will have to pay the damages must also be taken into account,” Graziani said.
‘Farce Masquerading as a Trial’
Christopher C. Black, an international criminal and human rights lawyer with over 20 years of experience covering war crimes and international relations under his belt, provided Sputnik with an in-depth account of the question marks surrounding the MH17 saga and, like his counterparts above, characterized Thursday’s verdict as the “conclusion of a farce masquerading as a trial.”
Black pointed out that from the outset, Washington and its allies blamed the Donbass republics for shooting down the passenger airliner, despite no evidence that the militias even had access to the sophisticated Buk anti-aircraft missiles allegedly used in the crime (but which Kiev did have).
“Also ignored was the eyewitness evidence of civilians on the ground who observed at least one Kiev Sukhoi Su-25 fighter jet ascend and approach the civilian airliner and that, immediately afterwards, the plane crashed. There were reports as well that a Spanish air traffic controller in Kiev, known as Carlos, sent out messages on Twitter contemporaneous with the shoot down, using the Twitter address @Spainbuca, that he observed this on his radar and overheard the pilot’s conversations with Kiev air traffic control confirming that the Ukraine jet shot down the plane. There are later reports that a Ukrainian pilot admitted he flew the plane that shot it down. Both these men have since disappeared from view. Remarkably, the investigating body has never followed up these important facts,” Black emphasized.
The observer noted that the Hague has refused to follow up on any information related to the incident provided by the Russian government, and pointed out that since the plane was downed in Donbass territory, under international law, it should have been the Donetsk People’s Republic which led the investigation into the plane’s destruction, recognition or no recognition.
“But the Donetsk Republic was denied that role by the Kiev regime which claimed it took place in Ukraine territory and so assumed the role of investigator and then, under NATO, and especially American pressure, delegated the investigation to NATO, in the guise of the Dutch Safety Board, on the justification that the majority of the passengers were Dutch,” Black said.
“Since then, what should have been an open, international and objective investigation has descended into a burlesque of deception, fraud, and cover up of mass murder by the NATO powers. For whoever brought down that plane is guilty of mass murder. Since there is persuasive and compelling evidence that it was the forces of the Kiev regime that brought it down, and since they had to have done it either with the real time connivance or later assistance of the United States and its allies, then the governments of all those countries are guilty of a crime against humanity, a war crime. The motive for this crime is unclear. It is thought by some that the Kiev regime hoped to assassinate President Putin who, it was reported, was flying through the area on a similar plane, though the Russians have not confirmed this. The only other explanation is that the Kiev regime murdered all those people in order to discredit the Russian government. Both motives would be to the benefit of NATO in its ongoing aggression against Russia. As to possible Russian or Donbass motives, I can think of none,” the observer said.
Black stressed that the Dutch Safety Board’s 2015 report on the incident simply ignored any evidence pointing to Kiev’s responsibility for the plane’s destruction, such as the holes found in the airliner’s fuselage which “match the 30mm cannon shells used by the Kiev Sukhoi Su-25… seen approaching the plane.”
Black also pointed to the mysterious January 2017 detention by Dutch police of a pair of journalists and the seizure of their equipment, cameras, phones, notes and interview materials on MH17, characterizing that incident as a “blatant attempt by the Dutch government to suppress the evidence these journalists gathered.”
“It is only reasonable to conclude that the NATO authorities are worried in case these journalists found evidence confirming NATO culpability for the incident. After all, [they] had written an article about it and announced that they were willing to share the information with the Dutch government. But apparently there is a fear in NATO that they might share too much with too many and so pounced on them and robbed them and us of the information they had before they could. The Dutch government has yet to offer a legal justification for this seizure,” the observer said.
The Hague District Court found Russian nationals Igor Girkin (aka Igor Streklov) and Sergei Dubinsky and Ukrainian Leonid Kharchenko guilty in the downing of MH17, sentencing them in absentia to life in jail. The men were also ordered to pay over 16 million euros in compensation to the families of the 298 victims of the plane crash. Moscow blasted the “politicized” decision.
Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 Flight MH17 went down in the eastern Donetsk People’s Republic on July 17, 2014 while on route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. The plane’s route over the Donbass was approved by Ukrainian authorities despite the fact that Kiev forces and local militias were engaged in fierce clashes in the area. All 298 people aboard the aircraft were killed.
November 17, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular | MH17, Ukraine |
Leave a comment
The United Nations General Assembly has finally voted on a resolution calling on Israel to destroy its entire nuclear arsenal and allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to visit its nuclear facilities. 152 countries voted “yes”, five – Canada, Israel, Micronesia, Palau, and the United States – against, and another 24 countries, including members of the European Union, abstained from voting.
Few people can say where the “great states” of Micronesia or Palau are located. It is well known that the official head of Canada is the King of Great Britain, and it is not surprising that these three countries have, as befits good servants, unanimously followed the American order. Most states, aware of the enormous danger posed by Israel with its secret nuclear weapons and their means of delivery, responsibly voted in favor of this resolution.
The document states that Israel is the only state in the West Asian region and one of the few members of the UN (193 in total) that has not signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). The strong support for the resolution at the UN General Assembly in New York reflects widespread international frustration with the Israeli regime’s control of the nuclear threat in West Asia. This is especially true given how many countries Israel has invaded or attacked and how many genocides it has committed. The presence of Israel’s nuclear weapons has made the occupation regime over the Arab people of Palestine, according to the Saudi newspaper Arab News, “an extraordinary source of instability in the region.”
The resolution reiterated “the importance of Israel acceding to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and placing all its nuclear facilities under comprehensive safeguards by the International Atomic Energy Agency to achieve the goal of universal adherence to the treaty in the Middle East (West Asia).” The document called on Israel “to accede to the Treaty without further delay, not to develop, produce, test, or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons, to renounce possession of nuclear weapons, and to place all of its unsafeguarded nuclear facilities under comprehensive safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as an important confidence-building measure among all states in the region and as a step toward strengthening peace and security.”
Despite fierce and extensive Western propaganda and hysteria focused on Iran’s nuclear program, which has been repeatedly deemed peaceful by the IAEA, the resolution emphasizes that Israel poses a real threat to the region. The proposal for a nuclear-weapon-free zone in West Asia was also approved by the First Committee with 170 votes, including Iran. Perhaps not surprisingly, Israel was the only state to again oppose the text, as has happened repeatedly in the United Nations. The United States, Cameroon, Comoros, and Tanzania were the only four countries to abstain.
Iran’s representative to the UN General Assembly First Committee, Heidar Ali Baluji, criticized Israel for acquiring weapons of mass destruction and spending huge sums on conventional military needs. “In addition to weapons of mass destruction, the Israeli regime continues to threaten peace and security in the region and beyond with its large arsenal of sophisticated conventional offensive weapons. The regime is the largest cumulative recipient of US foreign aid since World War II,” Baluji said. Israel spent $24.3 billion on the military last year, equivalent to 5.2% of its GDP, placing it among the top five countries in West Asia for military spending. How much the Israelis spend on the military nuclear program and the constant improvement of these deadly weapons is anyone’s guess.
In 1986, Mordechai Vanunu, a technician at Israel’s Dimona nuclear power plant, made headlines when he revealed Israel’s nuclear secrets to the world. The regime sent him to prison and only in 2004, after serving an 18-year sentence, most of which he spent in solitary confinement, was he released. However, strict conditions were placed on his release, including a ban on leaving Israel, a ban on entering the Palestinian territories, and a ban on communicating with foreign journalists. Since his release, Vanunu has served at least two prison terms after being convicted of alleged parole violations.
Not only does Israel possess nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, the regime also disposes of its nuclear and radioactive waste in the Palestinian-occupied West Bank. According to numerous reports that have appeared in Palestinian and Arab newspapers in recent years, there is growing concern about the high rates of various cancers and birth defects among people in the southern West Bank. Israel has turned Palestinian towns and villages into a dumping ground for its nuclear and radioactive waste. Investigations in the Palestinian town of al-Khalil have revealed that its residents are suffering from radioactive contamination. According to reports, the radiation originates from Israeli nuclear facilities and nuclear waste storage sites in the area. It could also be the result of the use of depleted uranium weapons against the Palestinians.
Based on numerous studies, it is widely believed that there is a strong link between radiation and nuclear waste from Israel’s Dimona reactor (where a nuclear weapons facility was completed in 1963) and an increase in cancer cases in the southern West Bank. In the same areas in the south of the occupied West Bank, not a single case of cancer was reported before the Israeli factory began producing nuclear weapons. Many Palestinians currently suffer from cancer and birth defects, as well as recurrent miscarriages among women.
According to an Arabic Post investigation, Israeli authorities have not heeded official warnings from Palestinian officials who expressed serious concern about the danger of high levels of nuclear radiation in the atmosphere and groundwater in areas in the south of the West Bank, particularly in the city of al-Khalil (Hebron), where record levels of cancer and fetal malformations are recorded every year.
In December 2021, Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh accused Israel of dumping hazardous nuclear waste, such as burnt oil, chemical and electronic waste, and others in the Palestinian territories. All this, he said, poses a long-term threat to the Palestinian environment (soil, water, air, and wildlife), in addition to the outbreak of cancer and birth defects. “There are 6,251 cancer patients in the country, which is a high percentage compared to neighboring countries,” Shtayyeh said. He also attributed this to the fact that the Israelis use the occupied territories as a dumping ground for nuclear waste.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani speaking before the UN, said that Israel’s advanced nuclear program poses a serious threat to international security and stability. Kanaani called on the IAEA to fulfill its mandate and responsibility in this regard.
It is worth noting that, according to various experts, Israel has 200 to 400 nuclear warheads in its arsenal due to its active nuclear policy and the patronage of the West, especially the United States. It has repeatedly vehemently refused to have its military nuclear facilities inspected, not to mention refusing to sign the NPT. At the same time, Iran is a party to the NPT and has consistently maintained that its nuclear program is exclusively civilian in nature and subject to the strictest oversight by the UN and the IAEA. It is not surprising that Iran has repeatedly been subjected to the most thorough inspections by international bodies, and in Israel, even experts do not know where and what is located, not to mention the fact that not a single IAEA inspection has taken place there.
The policy of double standards is quite clear. When it comes to stopping nuclear proliferation, Israel is absolved of its responsibility. As a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran operates a peaceful program for energy and medical purposes, but is subject to the most stringent inspection program in IAEA history. At the same time, the West, especially the United States, has imposed the most painful sanctions regime on the Islamic Republic.
At the same time, Israel, which has hundreds of nuclear warheads, is not inspected by either the UN or the IAEA, and these organizations do not even want to hear about any control of Israel’s military nuclear program. On the contrary, Israel is supplied with endless amounts of military weapons (paid for by American taxpayers) and huge sums of money from the West, and also enjoys great diplomatic and political support on the world stage. An umbrella of uncontrollability, so to speak, is erected over Tel Aviv. The West is making it clear to Israel: do what you want, and we will cover you. But it is not the same for the peoples of this region, over whom hangs constantly the nuclear sword of Damocles, which can break loose at any moment with the use of nuclear weapons and the death of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.
Viktor Mikhin is a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences.
November 16, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Canada, Israel, NPT, Palestine, Sanctions against Iran, United States, West Bank, Zionism |
Leave a comment
Aletho News
Aletho News 