Like every other important social phenomenon, propaganda regimes have historical genealogies. For example, a very strong case could be made that the ongoing, and sad to admit, largely successful Covid propaganda onslaught under which we now live can trace its roots back to the two so-called demonstration wars (the Panama Invasion and the First Gulf Conflict) waged by George Bush Sr.
The American elites were badly stung by the country’s defeat in Vietnam. In it, they rightly saw a considerable curtailment of what they had come to see as their divine right since the end of WWII: the ability to intervene as they so fit in any country not explicitly covered by the Soviet nuclear umbrella.
And in their analysis of that failure, they correctly alighted to the role that the media—by simply bringing the tawdry and ignoble reality of the war into our living rooms—had played in undermining citizen willingness to engage in such fruitless, costly and savage adventures in the future.
With his massive military build-up and heavy support of proxies in Latin America in the eighties, Ronald Reagan took the first steps toward recovering this lost elite prerogative.
But it was not until the administration of George Bush Sr. and the two conflicts mentioned above that, as he himself exultantly put it in the wake of his pitiless slaughter of some 100,000 poorly equipped Iraqis, “We’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.”
Bush knew what he was talking about, and it wasn’t necessarily, or even primarily, military force or prowess.
What had largely limited Reagan to proxy wars during eight years in office were two things. The first was a citizenry that still had fresh memories of the debacle in Southeast Asia. The second, and arguably more important one was a press corps with on-the-ground familiarity with the reality of these conflicts that continued to challenge him on both their morality and strategic efficacy.
Bush and his team, which as you’ll remember included one Richard Cheney at Defense, made remedying this “problem” of war-hesitancy one of the central aims of his presidency. As Barbara Trent suggests in her remarkable The Panama Deception, experimenting with new media management techniques was not a strategic sideshow of the conflict, but rather its prime goal.
The Panama invasion was followed in quick succession by the Gulf War, where press coverage put heavy emphasis on the opinions of US military figures and their explanations of the technical genius of American-made military technology. In this way, the war was presented to Americans as a sort of exciting video game characterized by flashes of light in the night and precision attacks devoid of any bloodshed and death.
This process of desensitizing of the media, and from there, the American people to the horrendous human effects of war-making culminated in the revolting spectacle, on January 30th, 1991 of reporters chuckling along with General Norman Schwartzkopf as he joked while showing them videos of supposed “smart bombs” killing people like ants from the safety of 30,000 feet.
Having received no coordinated pushback from anyone with power about this degrading treatment of human life and the American people, they tripled down and went full Manichaean after September 11th.
Why not?
With Reagan’s repeal of the fairness Doctrine in 1987 and Bill Clinton’s Telecommunications Act of 1996 never had the media been a) concentrated in so few hands b) so beholden to the government regulation for the continuance of the super-profitability generated through this consolidation c) debilitated by the internet-induced collapse of the newspaper business model and thus d) less obligated to the reflect take into account the concerns and interests of a broad spectrum of the American people.
It was now truly, as George Bush Jr said, a matter of “You’re either with us or against us,” us of course being the war-making government (including the Deep State) along with its slavishly loyal media mouthpieces. If like Susan Sontag—who whether you like her or not, was a very bright and highly accomplished thinker—you believed the maniacal presumptions of the US response to September 11th were flawed, and said so, you could in this new environment, expect to be the object of well-coordinated attacks on your character.
Never once did the administration call for restraint in such attacks, nor did any administration figures remind people of the importance of the supposedly American value of everyone’s right to be respectfully heard.
Seeing the exhaustion of the Bush brand after the Iraq debacle, the Deep State switched party allegiances in the run-up to the 2008 election. And it has stayed firmly on the side of the so-called “left” ever since, encouraging the use of Bush-Cheney-style government-media mobbing against those who might dare to question the motives of the sainted warmonger Obama, or, say, the “logic” of trying to reduce the problems of racism by promoting it through identity politics.
The efficiency of such mob-style takedown tactics was greatly enhanced by the dramatic expansion of social media platforms in the Obama and Trump years.
It is no exaggeration to say that a person born in 1990 or later has little if any understanding of what it means to disagree in detail and in good faith with someone whose political and/or social ideals are different than their own. Nor what it means to feel obligated to respond to the claims of others with careful factual refutations.
What they do know, because it’s mostly all that they have seen from their “betters,” is that to argue is to seek the destruction of one’s interlocutor, and failing that, to make sure his or her arguments are impeded from circulating freely in our shared civic spaces. The ever-increasing dialectical poverty of those who have been socialized and educated in this environment is evident to anyone who has served as a classroom instructor during the last quarter century.
A sanctuary for the weary
While most people seemed to want to pretend that nothing new was happening, that the collaboration between media and government had always been this extreme, many of us did not. We had memories. And we knew the “field of thinkable thought” was dramatically smaller in 2005 than in 1978. And we knew it had become much, much smaller in 2018 than it was in 2005. In our search for answers we turned to media critics and scholars of media history. We also turned to the writings of journalist-activists with both interest and insight into these matters.
When it came to this last group, I found myself drawn principally to what might be termed leftist anti-imperialists. Reading them, I widened my understanding of how elites and their chosen “experts” manage information flows, and constantly seek to shrink the parameters of acceptable opinion on foreign policy issues.
Two years ago last March, however, my sense of intellectual kinship with this subset of thinkers suddenly became very strained. We were facing what I immediately recognized as the largest and most aggressive “perception management” campaign in recent times, and perhaps in the history of the world. One, moreover, that was utilizing all the techniques employed during the previous two to three decades to insure citizen allegiance to US war-making.
And yet in the face of it, almost all my go-to people on propaganda analysis had little or nothing to say. And when I sent contributions outlining my doubts about the congruity of the emergent Covid discourse to places that had generally welcomed my analyses of pro-war propaganda, suddenly there was hesitation on the other end.
And the passage of time cured nothing. Indeed, the only things these people said down the road; that is, if they addressed Covid at all, was to underscore the unprecedented severity of the situation (a very questionable assertion) and harp on Trump’s supposedly disastrous handling of it.
There was virtually no daylight between the opinions of these people and the feckless liberals they, as true-blue leftists, always claimed to disdain. And on it went, for the entire two years of the Covid panic.
A week or so ago, John Pilger, arguably one of the brightest and more persistent leftist analysts of establishment propaganda, published “Silencing the lambs: How propaganda works” on his website and then a number of progressive news outlets.
In it, he repeats all sorts of well-known ideas and concepts. There’s a reference to Leni Riefenstahl and how she believed the bourgeoisie are those most amenable to influence campaigns, a reminder of Julian Assange’s horrendous and undeserved fate, much deserved praise for Harold Pinter’s absolutely extraordinary if largely ignored Nobel acceptance speech, an intelligent discussion about how our media studiously refuses to tell us about anything that went on between Russia and the West, and Russia and Ukraine between 1990 and February of this year.
The underlying thesis of the piece is that while emitting and constantly pushing elite-approved messages are key elements of propaganda, so too is the strategic disappearance of essential historical realities and truths.
All good stuff. Indeed, all themes that I have written about with frequency and conviction over the years.
Toward the end piece Pilger asks the following rhetorical question:
When will real journalists stand up?
And a few lines later, after providing us with a list of where to find the few outlets and journalists that do know what they are doing when it comes to the elite’s informational misdirection plays, he adds:
And when will writers stand up, as they did against the rise of fascism in the 1930s? When will film-makers stand up, as they did against the Cold War in the 1940s? When will satirists stand up, as they did a generation ago?
Having soaked for 82 years in a deep bath of righteousness that is the official version of the last world war, isn’t it time those who are meant to keep the record straight declared their independence and decoded the propaganda? The urgency is greater than ever.
Reading this final flourish while remembering the lamb-like silence of John Pilger in the face of the sustained Covidian onslaught of institutionalized lies and Soviet-grade censorship, one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
And when considering that virtually all those he endorses as exemplars of propaganda-savvy journalism—people such as Chris Hedges, Patrick Lawrence, Jonathan Cook, Diana Johnstone, Caitlin Johnstone all of whose work I have frequently and enthusiastically championed over the years—took the same cud-chewing path, the sense of farce only grows.
The same can be said of most all of the outlets (Grayzone, Mint Press News, Media Lens, Declassified UK, Alborada, Electronic Intifada, WSWS, ZNet, ICH, CounterPunch, Independent Australia, Globetrotter ) who portray themselves as being wise to the wiles of elite-sponsored influence operations.
Who, the question thus occurs to me, is actually living in a “a deep bath of righteousness” that impedes the ability to access the truths that lie beyond the “official version” of our past and present?
Who is failing to respond to the presence of fascistic tendencies in our midst?
If I didn’t know better, I’d swear it was John and his merry band of crack propaganda dissectors.
Is it that hard for them to see the shadow of fascism in the now heavily documented collaboration between the US government and Big Tech in censoring opinions that go counter to the government’s and Big Pharma’s desired discourse on Covid?
Is it really difficult for them to see the presence of the same dark forces in the US government’s insouciant abrogation of the Nuremberg principle relating to informed consent and medical experimentation?
Are they not troubled by the fact that the experimental vaccines that were sold to the population on the basis of their ability to stop infection do not do that? Or that this was known to anyone who read the FDA briefing papers published when these injections were unleashed on the public?
Does this count as a major “propaganda problem” worth looking into?
Do they care about the millions of people who lost their jobs over these lies, and of course the government’s abject disdain for the longstanding statutory right to object to medical treatment on religious grounds?
As long-time mavens of foreign policy, have they looked into the mafia-like nature of the vaccine contracts forced upon sovereign countries around the world?
Being the great sleuths of information-hiding that they are, did it raise any suspicions in them when Pfizer sought to keep all clinical information relating to the vaccines under wraps for 75 years?
And being the good progressives they are, did the enormous upward transfer of wealth that took place during the years of the Covid state of exception trouble them?
Did it light any suspicions that all this hullabaloo might not just be about health?
Have they organized support groups and action plans for the billions of children around the world whose lives were thrown into chaos by the useless quarantine and masking that was foisted upon them, and who, in all likelihood will never recover the years of developmental progress lost to this program of senseless cruelty?
I could go on.
As far as I can tell, the answer to all these questions is a resounding “NO!”
I am truly grateful for all that John Pilger and his companions in the leftist propaganda dissection cadres have taught me over the years. But as Ortega y Gasset said, a public intellectual is only as good as his ability to remain at the “height of his times.”
Sadly, this group of otherwise talented individuals has failed this test, badly, over the last two-plus years. As much as it may pain them to hear this, they have shown themselves to be much more like the “clerics” that Julien Benda rightly castigated in 1927 after they lost their moral bearings and their critical acuity before the massive propaganda onslaught used to promote the senseless slaughters of World War I.
Why these professional uncoverers of camouflaged realities of our times suddenly decided to unsee what was happening before their eyes is a job for future historians.
But if I had to hazard a guess today, I’d say that it had a lot to do with all the usual human things like fear of losing friends and prestige or being seen by ideological enforcers on their side as going over to the enemy. All of which is fine and understandable.
But if that is the case, isn’t it too much to publicly admit now that you missed the boat on this important story?
And if you can’t manage that, could you at least have the sense to stop issuing sermons on topics like “how propaganda works” for a good long while?
Thomas Harrington, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is Professor Emeritus of Hispanic Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, where he taught for 24 years. His research is on Iberian movements of national identity and contemporary Catalan culture. His essays are published at Words in The Pursuit of Light.
The Russian president, other senior officials, and the heads of the Donbass republics, Zaporozhye and Kherson gathered in the Kremlin on Friday to formalize the results of status referendums held between September 23-27, in which overwhelming majorities of voters expressed their support for their regions becoming part of Russia.
Below is the full, unredacted, official Kremlin translation of President Vladimir Putin’s historic speech before lawmakers in Moscow on Friday dedicated to the accession of four new regions into the Russian Federation:
“Citizens of Russia, citizens of the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics, residents of the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions, deputies of the State Duma, senators of the Russian Federation,
As you know, referendums have been held in the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics and the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions. The ballots have been counted and the results have been announced. The people have made their unequivocal choice.
Today we will sign treaties on the accession of the Donetsk People’s Republic, Lugansk People’s Republic, Zaporozhye Region and Kherson Region to the Russian Federation. I have no doubt that the Federal Assembly will support the constitutional laws on the accession to Russia and the establishment of four new regions, our new constituent entities of the Russian Federation, because this is the will of millions of people.
It is undoubtedly their right, an inherent right sealed in Article 1 of the UN Charter, which directly states the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples.
I repeat, it is an inherent right of the people. It is based on our historical affinity, and it is that right that led generations of our predecessors, those who built and defended Russia for centuries since the period of Ancient Rus, to victory.
Here in Novorossiya, [Pyotr] Rumyantsev, [Alexander] Suvorov and [Fyodor] Ushakov fought their battles, and Catherine the Great and [Grigory] Potyomkin founded new cities. Our grandfathers and great-grandfathers fought here to the bitter end during the Great Patriotic War.
We will always remember the heroes of the Russian Spring, those who refused to accept the neo-Nazi coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014, all those who died for the right to speak their native language, to preserve their culture, traditions and religion, and for the very right to live. We remember the soldiers of Donbass, the martyrs of the “Odessa Khatyn,” the victims of inhuman terrorist attacks carried out by the Kiev regime. We commemorate volunteers and militiamen, civilians, children, women, senior citizens, Russians, Ukrainians, people of various nationalities; popular leader of Donetsk Alexander Zakharchenko; military commanders Arsen Pavlov and Vladimir Zhoga, Olga Kochura and Alexei Mozgovoy; prosecutor of the Lugansk Republic Sergei Gorenko; paratrooper Nurmagomed Gadzhimagomedov and all our soldiers and officers who died a hero’s death during the special military operation. They are heroes. Heroes of great Russia. Please join me in a minute of silence to honour their memory.
(Minute of silence.)
Thank you.
Behind the choice of millions of residents in the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics, in the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions, is our common destiny and thousand-year history. People have passed this spiritual connection on to their children and grandchildren. Despite all the trials they endured, they carried the love for Russia through the years. This is something no one can destroy. That is why both older generations and young people – those who were born after the tragic collapse of the Soviet Union – have voted for our unity, for our common future.
In 1991 in Belovezhskaya Pushcha, representatives of the party elite of that time made a decision to terminate the Soviet Union, without asking ordinary citizens what they wanted, and people suddenly found themselves cut off from their homeland. This tore apart and dismembered our national community and triggered a national catastrophe. Just like the government quietly demarcated the borders of Soviet republics, acting behind the scenes after the 1917 revolution, the last leaders of the Soviet Union, contrary to the direct expression of the will of the majority of people in the referendum of 1991, destroyed our great country, and simply made the people in the former republics face this as an accomplished fact.
I can admit that they didn’t even know what they were doing and what consequences their actions would have in the end. But it doesn’t matter now. There is no Soviet Union anymore; we cannot return to the past. Actually, Russia no longer needs it today; this isn’t our ambition. But there is nothing stronger than the determination of millions of people who, by their culture, religion, traditions, and language, consider themselves part of Russia, whose ancestors lived in a single country for centuries. There is nothing stronger than their determination to return to their true historical homeland.
For eight long years, people in Donbass were subjected to genocide, shelling and blockades; in Kherson and Zaporozhye, a criminal policy was pursued to cultivate hatred for Russia, for everything Russian. Now too, during the referendums, the Kiev regime threatened schoolteachers, women who worked in election commissions with reprisals and death. Kiev threatened millions of people who came to express their will with repression. But the people of Donbass, Zaporozhye and Kherson weren’t broken, and they had their say.
I want the Kiev authorities and their true handlers in the West to hear me now, and I want everyone to remember this: the people living in Lugansk and Donetsk, in Kherson and Zaporozhye have become our citizens, forever.
We call on the Kiev regime to immediately cease fire and all hostilities; to end the war it unleashed back in 2014 and return to the negotiating table. We are ready for this, as we have said more than once. But the choice of the people in Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhye and Kherson will not be discussed. The decision has been made, and Russia will not betray it. (Applause.) Kiev’s current authorities should respect this free expression of the people’s will; there is no other way. This is the only way to peace.
We will defend our land with all the forces and resources we have, and we will do everything we can to ensure the safety of our people. This is the great liberating mission of our nation.
We will definitely rebuild the destroyed cities and towns, the residential buildings, schools, hospitals, theatres and museums. We will restore and develop industrial enterprises, factories, infrastructure, as well as the social security, pension, healthcare and education systems.
We will certainly work to improve the level of security. Together we will make sure that citizens in the new regions can feel the support of all the people of Russia, of the entire nation, all the republics, territories and regions of our vast Motherland.
Friends, colleagues,
Today, I would like to address our soldiers and officers who are taking part in the special military operation, the fighters of Donbass and Novorossiya, those who went to military recruitment offices after receiving a call-up paper under the executive order on partial mobilisation, and those who did this voluntarily, answering the call of their hearts. I would like to address their parents, wives and children, to tell them what our people are fighting for, what kind of enemy we are up against, and who is pushing the world into new wars and crises and deriving blood-stained benefits from this tragedy.
Our compatriots, our brothers and sisters in Ukraine who are part of our united people have seen with their own eyes what the ruling class of the so-called West have prepared for humanity as a whole. They have dropped their masks and shown what they are really made of.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, the West decided that the world and all of us would permanently accede to its dictates. In 1991, the West thought that Russia would never rise after such shocks and would fall to pieces on its own. This almost happened. We remember the horrible 1990s, hungry, cold and hopeless. But Russia remained standing, came alive, grew stronger and occupied its rightful place in the world.
Meanwhile, the West continued and continues looking for another chance to strike a blow at us, to weaken and break up Russia, which they have always dreamed about, to divide our state and set our peoples against each other, and to condemn them to poverty and extinction. They cannot rest easy knowing that there is such a great country with this huge territory in the world, with its natural wealth, resources and people who cannot and will not do someone else’s bidding.
The West is ready to cross every line to preserve the neo-colonial system which allows it to live off the world, to plunder it thanks to the domination of the dollar and technology, to collect an actual tribute from humanity, to extract its primary source of unearned prosperity, the rent paid to the hegemon. The preservation of this annuity is their main, real and absolutely self-serving motivation. This is why total de-sovereignisation is in their interest. This explains their aggression towards independent states, traditional values and authentic cultures, their attempts to undermine international and integration processes, new global currencies and technological development centres they cannot control. It is critically important for them to force all countries to surrender their sovereignty to the United States.
In certain countries, the ruling elites voluntarily agree to do this, voluntarily agree to become vassals; others are bribed or intimidated. And if this does not work, they destroy entire states, leaving behind humanitarian disasters, devastation, ruins, millions of wrecked and mangled human lives, terrorist enclaves, social disaster zones, protectorates, colonies and semi-colonies. They don’t care. All they care about is their own benefit.
I want to underscore again that their insatiability and determination to preserve their unfettered dominance are the real causes of the hybrid war that the collective West is waging against Russia. They do not want us to be free; they want us to be a colony. They do not want equal cooperation; they want to loot. They do not want to see us a free society, but a mass of soulless slaves.
They see our thought and our philosophy as a direct threat. That is why they target our philosophers for assassination. Our culture and art present a danger to them, so they are trying to ban them. Our development and prosperity are also a threat to them because competition is growing. They do not want or need Russia, but we do.
I would like to remind you that in the past, ambitions of world domination have repeatedly shattered against the courage and resilience of our people. Russia will always be Russia. We will continue to defend our values and our Motherland.
The West is counting on impunity, on being able to get away with anything. As a matter of fact, this was actually the case until recently. Strategic security agreements have been trashed; agreements reached at the highest political level have been declared tall tales; firm promises not to expand NATO to the east gave way to dirty deception as soon as our former leaders bought into them; missile defence, intermediate-range and shorter-range missile treaties have been unilaterally dismantled under far-fetched pretexts.
And all we hear is, the West is insisting on a rules-based order. Where did that come from anyway? Who has ever seen these rules? Who agreed or approved them? Listen, this is just a lot of nonsense, utter deceit, double standards, or even triple standards! They must think we’re stupid.
Russia is a great thousand-year-old power, a whole civilisation, and it is not going to live by such makeshift, false rules.
It was the so-called West that trampled on the principle of the inviolability of borders, and now it is deciding, at its own discretion, who has the right to self-determination and who does not, who is unworthy of it. It is unclear what their decisions are based on or who gave them the right to decide in the first place. They just assumed it.”
That is why the choice of the people in Crimea, Sevastopol, Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhye and Kherson makes them so furiously angry. The West does not have any moral right to weigh in, or even utter a word about freedom of democracy. It does not and it never did.
Western elites not only deny national sovereignty and international law. Their hegemony has pronounced features of totalitarianism, despotism and apartheid. They brazenly divide the world into their vassals – the so-called civilised countries – and all the rest, who, according to the designs of today’s Western racists, should be added to the list of barbarians and savages. False labels like “rogue country” or “authoritarian regime” are already available, and are used to stigmatise entire nations and states, which is nothing new. There is nothing new in this: deep down, the Western elites have remained the same colonisers. They discriminate and divide peoples into the top tier and the rest.
We have never agreed to and will never agree to such political nationalism and racism. What else, if not racism, is the Russophobia being spread around the world?
What, if not racism, is the West’s dogmatic conviction that its civilisation and neoliberal culture is an indisputable model for the entire world to follow? “You’re either with us or against us.” It even sounds strange.
Western elites are even shifting repentance for their own historical crimes on everyone else, demanding that the citizens of their countries and other peoples confess to things they have nothing to do with at all, for example, the period of colonial conquests.
It is worth reminding the West that it began its colonial policy back in the Middle Ages, followed by the worldwide slave trade, the genocide of Indian tribes in America, the plunder of India and Africa, the wars of England and France against China, as a result of which it was forced to open its ports to the opium trade. What they did was get entire nations hooked on drugs and purposefully exterminated entire ethnic groups for the sake of grabbing land and resources, hunting people like animals. This is contrary to human nature, truth, freedom and justice.
While we – we are proud that in the 20th century our country led the anti-colonial movement, which opened up opportunities for many peoples around the world to make progress, reduce poverty and inequality, and defeat hunger and disease.
To emphasise, one of the reasons for the centuries-old Russophobia, the Western elites’ unconcealed animosity toward Russia is precisely the fact that we did not allow them to rob us during the period of colonial conquests and forced the Europeans to trade with us on mutually beneficial terms. This was achieved by creating a strong centralised state in Russia, which grew and got stronger based on the great moral values of Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism, as well as Russian culture and the Russian word that were open to all.
There were numerous plans to invade Russia. Such attempts were made during the Time of Troubles in the 17thcentury and in the period of ordeals after the 1917 revolution. All of them failed. The West managed to grab hold of Russia’s wealth only in the late 20thcentury, when the state had been destroyed. They called us friends and partners, but they treated us like a colony, using various schemes to pump trillions of dollars out of the country. We remember. We have not forgotten anything.
A few days ago, people in Donetsk and Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporozhye declared their support for restoring our historical unity. Thank you!
Western countries have been saying for centuries that they bring freedom and democracy to other nations. Nothing could be further from the truth. Instead of bringing democracy they suppressed and exploited, and instead of giving freedom they enslaved and oppressed. The unipolar world is inherently anti-democratic and unfree; it is false and hypocritical through and through.
The United States is the only country in the world that has used nuclear weapons twice, destroying the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. And they created a precedent.
Recall that during WWII the United States and Britain reduced Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne and many other German cities to rubble, without the least military necessity. It was done ostentatiously and, to repeat, without any military necessity. They had only one goal, as with the nuclear bombing of Japanese cities: to intimidate our country and the rest of the world.
The United States left a deep scar in the memory of the people of Korea and Vietnam with their carpet bombings and use of napalm and chemical weapons.
It actually continues to occupy Germany, Japan, the Republic of Korea and other countries, which they cynically refer to as equals and allies. Look now, what kind of alliance is that? The whole world knows that the top officials in these countries are being spied on and that their offices and homes are bugged. It is a disgrace, a disgrace for those who do this and for those who, like slaves, silently and meekly swallow this arrogant behaviour.
They call the orders and threats they make to their vassals Euro-Atlantic solidarity, and the creation of biological weapons and the use of human test subjects, including in Ukraine, noble medical research.
It is their destructive policies, wars and plunder that have unleashed today’s massive wave of migrants. Millions of people endure hardships and humiliation or die by the thousands trying to reach Europe.
They are exporting grain from Ukraine now. Where are they taking it under the guise of ensuring the food security of the poorest countries? Where is it going? They are taking it to the self-same European countries. Only five percent has been delivered to the poorest countries. More cheating and naked deception again.
In effect, the American elite is using the tragedy of these people to weaken its rivals, to destroy nation states. This goes for Europe and for the identities of France, Italy, Spain and other countries with centuries-long histories.
Washington demands more and more sanctions against Russia and the majority of European politicians obediently go along with it. They clearly understand that by pressuring the EU to completely give up Russian energy and other resources, the United States is practically pushing Europe toward deindustrialisation in a bid to get its hands on the entire European market. These European elites understand everything – they do, but they prefer to serve the interests of others. This is no longer servility but direct betrayal of their own peoples. God bless, it is up to them.
But the Anglo-Saxons believe sanctions are no longer enough and now they have turned to subversion. It seems incredible but it is a fact – by causing explosions on Nord Stream’s international gas pipelines passing along the bottom of the Baltic Sea, they have actually embarked on the destruction of Europe’s entire energy infrastructure. It is clear to everyone who stands to gain. Those who benefit are responsible, of course.
The dictates of the US are backed up by crude force, on the law of the fist. Sometimes it is beautifully wrapped sometimes there is no wrapping at all but the gist is the same – the law of the fist. Hence, the deployment and maintenance of hundreds of military bases in all corners of the world, NATO expansion, and attempts to cobble together new military alliances, such as AUKUS and the like. Much is being done to create a Washington-Seoul-Tokyo military-political chain. All states that possess or aspire to genuine strategic sovereignty and are capable of challenging Western hegemony, are automatically declared enemies.
These are the principles that underlie US and NATO military doctrines that require total domination. Western elites are presenting their neocolonialist plans with the same hypocrisy, claiming peaceful intentions, talking about some kind of deterrence. This evasive word migrates from one strategy to another but really only means one thing – undermining any and all sovereign centres of power.
We have already heard about the deterrence of Russia, China and Iran. I believe next in line are other countries of Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, as well as current US partners and allies. After all, we know that when they are displeased, they introduce sanctions against their allies as well – against this or that bank or company. This is their practice and they will expand it. They have everything in their sights, including our next-door neighbours – the CIS countries.
At the same time, the West has clearly been engaged in wishful thinking for a long time. In launching the sanctions blitzkrieg against Russia, for example, they thought that they could once again line up the whole world at their command. As it turns out, however, such a bright prospect does not excite everyone – other than complete political masochists and admirers of other unconventional forms of international relations. Most states refuse to ”snap a salute“ and instead choose the sensible path of cooperation with Russia.
The West clearly did not expect such insubordination. They simply got used to acting according to a template, to grab whatever they please, by blackmail, bribery, intimidation, and convinced themselves that these methods would work forever, as if they had fossilised in the past.
Such self-confidence is a direct product not only of the notorious concept of exceptionalism – although it never ceases to amaze – but also of the real ”information hunger“ in the West. The truth has been drowned in an ocean of myths, illusions and fakes, using extremely aggressive propaganda, lying like Goebbels. The more unbelievable the lie, the quicker people will believe it – that is how they operate, according to this principle.
But people cannot be fed with printed dollars and euros. You can’t feed them with those pieces of paper, and the virtual, inflated capitalisation of western social media companies can’t heat their homes. Everything I am saying is important. And what I just said is no less so: you can’t feed anyone with paper – you need food; and you can’t heat anyone’s home with these inflated capitalisations – you need energy.
That is why politicians in Europe have to convince their fellow citizens to eat less, take a shower less often and dress warmer at home. And those who start asking fair questions like “Why is that, in fact?” are immediately declared enemies, extremists and radicals. They point back at Russia and say: that is the source of all your troubles. More lies.
I want to make special note of the fact that there is every reason to believe that the Western elites are not going to look for constructive ways out of the global food and energy crisis that they and they alone are to blame for, as a result of their long-term policy, dating back long before our special military operation in Ukraine, in Donbass. They have no intention of solving the problems of injustice and inequality. I am afraid they would rather use other formulas they are more comfortable with.
And here it is important to recall that the West bailed itself out of its early 20th century challenges with World War I. Profits from World War II helped the United States finally overcome the Great Depression and become the largest economy in the world, and to impose on the planet the power of the dollar as a global reserve currency. And the 1980s crisis – things came to a head in the 1980s again – the West emerged from it unscathed largely by appropriating the inheritance and resources of the collapsed and defunct Soviet Union. That’s a fact.
Now, in order to free itself from the latest web of challenges, they need to dismantle Russia as well as other states that choose a sovereign path of development, at all costs, to be able to further plunder other nations’ wealth and use it to patch their own holes. If this does not happen, I cannot rule out that they will try to trigger a collapse of the entire system, and blame everything on that, or, God forbid, decide to use the old formula of economic growth through war.
Russia is aware of its responsibility to the international community and will make every effort to ensure that cooler heads prevail.
The current neocolonial model is ultimately doomed; this much is obvious. But I repeat that its real masters will cling to it to the end. They simply have nothing to offer the world except to maintain the same system of plundering and racketeering.
They do not give a damn about the natural right of billions of people, the majority of humanity, to freedom and justice, the right to determine their own future. They have already moved on to the radical denial of moral, religious, and family values.
Let’s answer some very simple questions for ourselves. Now I would like to return to what I said and want to address also all citizens of the country – not just the colleagues that are in the hall – but all citizens of Russia: do we want to have here, in our country, in Russia, “parent number one, parent number two and parent number three” (they have completely lost it!) instead of mother and father? Do we want our schools to impose on our children, from their earliest days in school, perversions that lead to degradation and extinction? Do we want to drum into their heads the ideas that certain other genders exist along with women and men and to offer them gender reassignment surgery? Is that what we want for our country and our children? This is all unacceptable to us. We have a different future of our own.
Let me repeat that the dictatorship of the Western elites targets all societies, including the citizens of Western countries themselves. This is a challenge to all. This complete renunciation of what it means to be human, the overthrow of faith and traditional values, and the suppression of freedom are coming to resemble a “religion in reverse” – pure Satanism. Exposing false messiahs, Jesus Christ said in the Sermon on the Mount: “By their fruits ye shall know them.” These poisonous fruits are already obvious to people, and not only in our country but also in all countries, including many people in the West itself.
The world has entered a period of a fundamental, revolutionary transformation. New centres of power are emerging. They represent the majority – the majority! – of the international community. They are ready not only to declare their interests but also to protect them. They see in multipolarity an opportunity to strengthen their sovereignty, which means gaining genuine freedom, historical prospects, and the right to their own independent, creative and distinctive forms of development, to a harmonious process.
As I have already said, we have many like-minded people in Europe and the United States, and we feel and see their support. An essentially emancipatory, anti-colonial movement against unipolar hegemony is taking shape in the most diverse countries and societies. Its power will only grow with time. It is this force that will determine our future geopolitical reality.
Friends,
Today, we are fighting for a just and free path, first of all for ourselves, for Russia, in order to leave dictate and despotism in the past. I am convinced that countries and peoples understand that a policy based on the exceptionalism of whoever it may be and the suppression of other cultures and peoples is inherently criminal, and that we must close this shameful chapter. The ongoing collapse of Western hegemony is irreversible. And I repeat: things will never be the same.
The battlefield to which destiny and history have called us is a battlefield for our people, for the great historical Russia. For the great historical Russia, for future generations, our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. We must protect them against enslavement and monstrous experiments that are designed to cripple their minds and souls.
Today, we are fighting so that it would never occur to anyone that Russia, our people, our language, or our culture can be erased from history. Today, we need a consolidated society, and this consolidation can only be based on sovereignty, freedom, creation, and justice. Our values are humanity, mercy and compassion.
And I want to close with the words of a true patriot Ivan Ilyin: “If I consider Russia my Motherland, that means that I love as a Russian, contemplate and think, sing and speak as a Russian; that I believe in the spiritual strength of the Russian people. Its spirit is my spirit; its destiny is my destiny; its suffering is my grief; and its prosperity is my joy.”
Behind these words stands a glorious spiritual choice, which, for more than a thousand years of Russian statehood, was followed by many generations of our ancestors. Today, we are making this choice; the citizens of the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics and the residents of the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions have made this choice. They made the choice to be with their people, to be with their Motherland, to share in its destiny, and to be victorious together with it.
After a delay of 6 months, the journal PLOS One returned our manuscript saying that they could not find an academic editor and reviewers for our manuscript. PLOS One is a fairly open minded journal and has a team of editors representing wide diversity of fields. That’s why this kind of response is quite surprising. This is only for the second time in my life I received this response. Earlier incident was with the journal Biology Direct. Are the two incidents only a matter of rare chance? Or are there any specific reasons to it?
One thing common about both is that both were about diabetes, highlighting models that are at substantial deviation from the prevalent mainstream thinking in the field. I think there lays the reason.
What was our paper about? It pointed out a large number of anomalies in the prevalent theory of glucose dysregulation in type 2 diabetes. It listed dozens of mismatches between the theory and an array of reproducible experimental or epidemiological findings. It also suggested an alternative model that could account for almost every anomaly in a coherent thread of logic. Classically type 2 diabetes is believed to result from an elusive concept of “insulin resistance” and inadequate compensatory insulin response. We, on the other hand assumed with sufficient evidence in hand that diabetes begins with vasculopathy. Because of deficient vasculature there is inadequate and defective glucose transport to the brain which makes the brain deficient in glucose. Deprived of sufficient glucose, the brain instructs the liver to release more glucose in blood. Vasculopathy is long known to be a characteristic of diabetes but the thinking was that chronic rise in glucose is the cause of vasculopathy. We are saying the reverse, vasculopathy the cause of rise in sugar. There is clear demonstration that transport of glucose from blood to brain is reduced prior to hyperglycemia. Further, ALL the experimental and epidemiological patterns not explained by the insulin resistance theory are explained with complete coherence by the “vasculopathy first” model. Therefore the alternative model looks more promising. There also exists published evidence that early signs of vasculopathy are seen much prior to hyperglycemia.
The catch is, if we accept the alternative model, the entire line of treatment of diabetes will become completely redundant. That would lead to collapse of a trillion dollar business. But that is much ahead in the sequence. Right now we are not over-claiming. We only say in this paper that the alternative model explains almost all the anomalies and therefore needs to be considered seriously and trigger research on a new line.
How do researchers in a field react to a finding, hypothesis, model or synthesis that directly contradicts the prevalent theory? You would expect them to critically view the new finding, may be find flaws in the argument, aggressively criticize, debate and so on. I am ready to believe that a welcome response is highly unlikely. It would be natural to expect heavy criticism. This might happen if the new argument is inherently flawed and it is easy to find the flaws in it. But what if the prevalent theory itself is flawed and the new argument it substantially stronger and sound in terms of logic, mathematics and evidence?
From repeated experience I know what a typical response of scientists is, particularly from the field of biomedicine. They prefer to keep mum. They neither accept nor reject any disruptive thinking or evidence. They pretend that they just haven’t heard of it. Criticism can be replied to. A debate is likely to take a logical path so that ultimately truth will prevail with a good chance, if not every time. But the strategy that always defeats novel thinking is “silence”. When the giants in a community have vested interests in a prevalent theory and someone makes a sound case that it is wrong, they just keep mum, pretend that nobody said anything; they did not hear anyone saying anything. In the days of hierarchical structure of science publishing this strategy can perhaps never be defeated. The giants in the field can block the new thought from getting published in the flagship journals of the field. They don’t care if it gets published anywhere else because they know nobody reads research anyway. Research is propagated only through a handful of journals; that too only through the titles and abstracts. Rarely if ever, research papers are read completely. So often the data in the paper contradicts the statements in the abstract. But everyone reads only the abstract and therefore truth remains masked. If we point out stark difference in the data and the conclusions in a paper, the journal is guaranteed to not respond.
This is not different in principle, from the responses of researchers to a disruptive idea described by Thomas Kuhn, albeit two major differences. One is that of difference in culture of the research fields. Kuhn mostly talked about physics in which ideas are debated. Debate is not in the culture of biomedicine. They have smarter ways to suppress alternative thinking. The second difference is that Kuhn wrote when peer review was not a mandatory norm in science publishing. Now peer review is another weapon by which any upcoming thought can be swiftly killed. And you need not waste any time in reading and commenting as well. Just decline to handle the manuscript and that is enough!! Here is our manuscript in a preprint form (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.19.477014v1) and see below the correspondence with the editors.
Ron Johnson, the only Federal politician that has publicly called out the deep corruption behind the failed U.S COVID response, is helping protect doctors.
Senator Ron Johnson and I just published an Op-Ed Monday on the Fox News site, the 3rd most visited news site on the internet, with almost one billion visits per month.
As some are probably aware, California’s Legislature just passed an obscenity of a bill titled “AB 2098” which calls for the state’s medical board to revoke the license of any physician who expresses an opinion “contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus to the standard of care.” I am not even sure what that means but holy cow, they just literally started to outlaw opinions.
Not sure which genius came up with that bill but to pretend there is a “scientific consensus” on a novel disease and a novel gene therapy is absurd. That is not how science works. Medicine is (was?) constantly trying to increase its knowledge base throughout history. In fact, one of the core responsibilities of a physician is not just to care for a patient as their “primary consideration” but also to add knowledge to the discipline and to teach it to others. Here is another responsibility articulated in the Hippocratic Oath written around the 4th century BC: Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course. Whoa. Hippocrates was warning us 24 centuries ago about the situation of being asked to administer poisons. Wow.
Anyway, what is medical consensus – is it state-wide, national or international? I am sure there are more than a couple of California doctors (or maybe not) whose opinions conflict with the captured Federal health agencies but are instead supported by academies of scientists and health agencies in other countries. Or even states like Tennessee that made ivermectin legally available over the counter to its citizens!
Denmark long ago restricted any person under 30 from getting the Moderna “vaccine.” In the US we now give it to toddlers. I repeat, in the U.S, we now give it to toddlers. If I object to injecting toddlers with Moderna, using the same “science” that Denmarks authorities are using, am I then a misinformationist that should not be allowed to practice medicine? What would happen to me if I go even further and espouse Denmark’s latest guidance which is to not recommend COVID mRNA vaccination to any low risk individual under 50? I guess the California State Department of Health guidance would trump that of Denmark’s. Watch out Denmark, here I come!
The scariest part of that legislation to me is that it reflects a complete ignorance of decades of evidence demonstrating that our Federal Health Agencies are under regulatory capture by the Pharmaceutical Industry. Just look at all the shenanigans the PFDA (the P is not a typo) pulled to sell the most vaccines. The below policies were all written by the Pharmaceutical Industry and issued by the PFDA, yet California doctors who know this and try to warn their patients in order to protect them from the evils of that industry could lose their license. Remember these two brilliant scientific standards?
(I paraphrase from memory)
Testing is no longer indicated for those who have received COVID mRNA vaccination (luckily this one didn’t last very long).
Testing for antibodies to assess prior exposure to COVID is not recommended prior to administering COVID mRNA vaccination.
They literally tried to avoid gathering data that would prove the vaccines were ineffective. Then they literally established that natural immunity should be ignored. With no data to support those “standards.” One of the greatest absurdities in the history of medicine was the fact that the entire health system started vaccinating people right after they recovered from COVID. They didn’t even wait for the variant to change first. But, if you publicly express a difference of opinion with this expert approach to managing an infectious disease, your livelihood could be taken away from you. Seriously? What is happening in America? This is absolutely terrifying stuff. Fantods ripple up and down my spine as I contemplate the very high possibility that such an absurd bill could start spreading across the country, trampling on the very Constitution it is supposedly supported by.
Further, in order to establish a “true” consensus and/or standard of care guideline it has been estimated to require numerous studies over an average of 17 years. So, am I not allowed to voice an opinion until 17 years of studies pass? In a novel pandemic in which insights and data accumulate rapidly? What if I am an expert way ahead of the curve based on research I am doing and/or the ever evolving data and insights I gain from treating patients with this novel disease. Should I be quiet for 17 years until such a time when my insights and expertise are more widely established and accepted?
How will our silence ever get us to that consensus? How will my patients fare during that time? Stay home, wait until your lips turn blue because I am not allowed to have an opinion or practice in treating you if it differs from either non-treatment or giving pathetic Paxlovid, a drug which has one mechanism of action identical to that of just one of ivermectin’s many mechanisms. This is exhausting.
And should I ignore the decades of examples of corruption of the medical sciences via its journals and research funding? The vehicles that have propagated guidelines on any number of fraudulent medications (SSRI’s, statins, Xygris, Oxycontin, Vioxx, Bextra, Avandia and many more). Should I be silent until those frauds are more widely exposed?
Think about all the doctors who saved their patients from those frauds despite being propagated as “medical consensus” at the time? A free and open scientific debate, championing those voices without conflicts of interest is what is needed. Instead this bill will silence those without conflicts while further amplifying the media megaphone of vaccine manufacturer CEO’s. These are dark dark times.
And why are we suddenly displacing the time honored protections of medical malpractice – where the consequences of harming a patient was borne by the physician if they adopted an idea or practice which hurt a patient. That has kept doctors in line for decades. But now, prior to any idea or practice I espouse actually resulting in harm, my opinion would be silenced or else I lose my license to practice. This is an obscenity. This would disappear care practices that would help patients far more frequently than it would care practices that harm patients.
This bill will lead to even more morbidity and mortality, not only in COVID, but in other diseases as well. Pharma already controls the medical journals and Federal Health agencies. But they don’t control independent physician’s opinions and voices. Well, at least they didn’t until now.
Good luck California, I fear for you. No-one from the medical field will be able to warn you of the continued rampages of a documented criminal industry.
Our Op-Ed is here, but I think I already covered most of it. Enjoy, although it ain’t fun.
My recent post about scientists finding mRNA nanoparticles containing Covid vaccine genetic code, in the breast milk of vaccinated mothers, and mentioning an infant documented to have died thereof, got quite a bit of traction online.
Today, I want to look at a study from a year ago that purported to NOT find mRNA nanoparticles in breast milk. We will see why exactly the team having Bill Gates and CDC-sponsored researchers, could not find what the independent scientists could find a year later!
I decided to compare the two studies (one that found mRNA in breast milk and the other that did not) very closely and compare their methodologies using the “Modern Discontent” method.
Modern Discontent has a great post about his method, but he mostly is saying “pay close attention and understand the whole f… thing”, which is basically what I usually do with something interesting and important anyway. He posted his method three days ago, and I had my substack for a while longer. So, I intuitively used many of his approaches, but he laid them out very systematically and clearly. His article is extremely useful for all people writing about biomedical science, so take a look:
At first sight, both studies, which I will call the 2022 shedding study (which I discussed two days ago) and the 2021 no-shedding study, superficially appear to be similarly designed. They took several lactating women and tested their milk. One study found shedding, while the other did not. Upon a closer look, the differences between these studies turned out to be extremely important!
Here’s a summary of their differences:
You can see that the study that found mRNA lipid nanoparticle shedding, was done more thoroughly. The shedding study had:
More participants (11 vs 7)
More milk samples were taken (131 vs 13!)
Samples better preserved (frozen immediately)
Samples were taken at varied moments post-vaccination including within mere hours, and also days
Looked at very important Extracellular Vesicles
As a result of being more thorough and covering more cases, the shedding study found actual shedding! Surprise!
What if the women in the shedding study, getting the same vaccines, were analyzed using the poorer methodology of the no-shedding study?
I took the chart from the shedding study showing five women with milk samples positive for mRNA nanoparticles. I crossed out samples that WOULD NOT BE DETECTED, if the no-shedding study methodology was applied to the samples of the shedding study:
You can see that if the researchers in the shedding study used the crippled methodology of the no-shedding study, they would detect only two positive samples, instead of seven.
The methodology of the no-shedding study would miss all extracellular vesicle (EV) samples because they did not look at EVs. That is shown in the column on the right that is entirely crossed out.
The no-shedding study would also miss the 1 hour and three-hour samples because they did not take those samples (save for just ONE woman who happened not to be positive).
As a result, had the less thorough no-shedding study methodology been applied to the shedding study, only 2 positive samples, instead of 7, would be detected!
Since the actual no-shedding study collected only 13 samples and not 131 samples and used deficient methodology, no wonder they missed all positive instances!
It is as if the no-shedding study was intentionally designed not to find anything. Hmmm…
Fishing Analogy
Let me give an analogy that many will understand — fishing using fishing nets.
Let’s say that a good fisherman (the shedding study) was asked to do his best job fishing to see if a particular lake has fish (mRNA nanoparticles). A bad fisherman, on the contrary, would be asked to design his fishing expedition to not catch any fish, so as to falsely prove that the lake has no fish. What would they do? This infographic shows the difference:
What’s up with Bill Gates and the CDC?
By pure coincidence, the study that did not find mRNA nanoparticles in breast milk (the no-shedding study), had key scientists sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. They also received money from the CDC. You can see that Prof. Gaw and Dr. Flaherman were key participants, making the most important decisions and analyses!
Did these sponsorships influence the authors’ approach to designing the experiment? We cannot know this. We can only wonder.
One of the best places to raise children is The Netherlands. In several consecutive UNICEF reports the Netherlands ranked first for raising the happiest children among wealthy countries (2008, 2013, 2020). However, in the spring of 2020, The Netherlands became a harsh place for children and young people. The Dutch government adopted a one-size-fits-all policy handling the covid-19 pandemic, which did not spare the youngest and took a great toll on Dutch children. The Nobel Laureate Michael Levitt remarked that the Dutch policies would ‘set the record for worst covid-response ever.’
‘Intelligent Lockdown’
Unable to withstand the rising global panic, the Dutch government on March 16th 2020 announced an “intelligent” lockdown, a phrase coined by Prime Minister Mark Rutte.
Dutch society came to a halt. Offices, shops, restaurants and bars, libraries, sport facilities, as well as daycare centers, schools and universities were closed. The closure of schools was unexpected since the government’s official advisory group, the medics-dominated Outbreak Management Team (OMT), advised against it, for a school closure would have a minimal effect on the spread of the coronavirus.
A reconstruction of events showed that the main reason the Dutch government closed schools was that the educational field started to panic about keeping schools open.Closing schools was a political decision to follow the panic, not a medical decision. Schools supposedly closed for three weeks. Three weeks became three months. Research by The University of Oxford (Engzell, et al. 2021) shows that during the first wave the average Dutch student learned next to nothing during homeschooling. Moreover, students whose parents were not well-educated suffered up to 60% more learning losses.
School Closure ‘No Effect’
According to the Dutch equivalent of Fauci – Jaap van Dissel, chief scientist of the Dutch Health Agency (RIVM) and chairman of the Dutch OMT – the closure of schools in the spring of 2020 had “no effect.” Media, experts and politicians paid no attention to evidence though. Children were portrayed as ‘virus factories’ and schools were depicted as ’unsafe’ environments. Fear had a strong grip on the field of education and teaching unions exaggerated the risks of teachers in schools resulting in a drastic increase in safety demands.
The data was clear that not only did children not run any significant risk, but also that there was ‘no evidence that children play an important role in SARS-CoV-2 transmission.’ Still, a second lockdown would hit children. That second lockdown – now called a ‘hard lockdown’ – was announced on December 15th 2020. Schools closed again, this time advised by the OMT who had increased the number of areas it deemed itself expert on, on the basis of models, of course, proving Martin Kulldorff’s point that lab scientists are no public health scientists.
Dutch minister of Health Hugo de Jonge caused a stir by explaining this intervention was meant to coerce parents to stay at home. The international children’s rights organization KidsRights harshly criticized this policy: “The Netherlands has set a bad example internationally by closing schools during the corona pandemic to keep parents at home.” This children’s rights organization concluded that children were not a priority in Dutch corona policy and warned for the possible consequences.
As new insights on the negative impact of closing schools on children’s lives emerged, governments from countries all over the world decided not to close them again in the future. Undeterred, the Dutch government closed schools again on December 18 2021, just long enough to deny children their traditional Christmas dinner at school with their classmates, a big event in the childhood of Dutch children.
The deteriorating mental health of Dutch children was striking. The Dutch Health Authorities (RIVM) published a disturbing report which stated that more than one in five (22%) teenagers and young adults between the ages of 12 and 25 seriously considered taking their own life between December 2021 and February 2022 during the third lockdown. From happiest in the world to suicidal in a matter of three lockdowns.
Record Low in Sports Participation
Not only were schools closed by diktat. For two years, sports facilities were also repeatedly forced to close. The restrictions were constantly changing, with as a low point banning parents from watching their child play sports outdoors. Once again, there was no scientific evidence that this would help minimize the spread of the virus. The result is a record low in sports participation nationwide. The Dutch Olympic Committee and the Dutch Sports Federation (NOC*NSF) were ‘particularly’ worried by the negative effect on young people’s sports participation.
The Corona Pass
So no school and no sports. Another low point with regard to children was the corona pass (Coronatoegangsbewijs) that was mandatory from September 25th, 2021 for every Dutch citizen above 12. The corona pass was required for most social activities, such as going to the movies, attending a sports game with parents, or entering the canteen at sports club with teammates to drink tea or lemonade after the match.
Unsurprisingly, there was no scientific evidence that this intervention would reduce the spread of covid-19, but the Dutch government enforced it anyway. Crucially, the corona pass required vaccination, recovery from covid-19 or a negative result from a coronavirus test taken less than 24 hours before entry. So essentially, access to social life was used by the government to blackmail Dutch children into invasive medical procedures.
The madness continued, unsupported by evidence. At one point in time, outside playgrounds for children were closed. Parents were not allowed to enter swimming pools to dress their preschoolers before and after swimming lessons. In the winter of 2020-2021 the Dutch government even went as far as trying to regulate snowball fights, by dictating that only those from the same household were allowed to participate, and that their group could not exceed a certain number.
Neither sex nor the sea were exempt from the regulators. Young adults were advised which forms of sex were recommended, bearing the 1.5 m distance rule in mind. Drones were used to prevent people from gathering on the beach. To restrict the movements of young people even further, an evening curfew was introduced. It was not supported by any scientific explanation, just “boerenverstand” (common sense) as the advisory group OMT called it.
Restricting the lives of children and young people during the pandemic should require a great deal of evidence, as well as a risk-benefit evaluation. The Swedish government decided early in January 2020 that the measures in Sweden should be evidence-based. So it kept schools open, a decision supported by the evaluation of the Swedish Corona Commission in 2022. In Norway – where schools only closed briefly – the corona commission concluded in April 2022 that the Norwegian government had not done enough to protect children and that the measures regarding children had been excessive. The Norwegians essentially took the unethical initial decision to harm children without evidence and its authorities recognized that afterwards.
Sweden’s approach to the pandemic contains inconvenient truths for the Dutch, which is why Dutch authorities ignored the evidence from Sweden (and from Norway). As the Swedish journalist and author Johan Anderberg states in the epilogue of his book The Herd:
“From a human perspective, it was easy to understand why so many were reluctant to face the numbers from Sweden. For the inevitable conclusion must be that millions of people had been denied their freedom, and millions of children had had their education disrupted, all for nothing. Who would want to be complicit in that?”
This year, my wife and I decided to spend our summer holidays in Sweden and after two years of often doubtful restrictions in our home country, the Swedish summer and the beaches of Skåne were a breath of fresh air. As a parent and a Special Needs Education Generalist (and former teacher of Physical Education) I am greatly impressed by the path chosen by The Swedish Public Health Agency and the Swedish Government as they remained focused on the health, well-being, and education of children in the process of policy-making. Anders Tegnell and his predecessor JohanGiesecke have tirelessly advocated for not disturbing the lives of children, and they have been proven right.
A very outspoken Giesecke gave his frank opinion on Swedish television: “I am a father and grandfather myself, and I feel if children are given the opportunity to receive a good education and that the risk for me to become infected with covid-19 would increase slightly, it is worth it. Their future is worth more than my future, and it’s not just about my grandchildren, it’s about all the children.”
The successful Swedish approach shows that in many countries government policies met the criteria of child abuse. A key lesson for the future is that schools should not close again in similar circumstances. The Dutch government and the OMT failed the children of their country, a dark and shameful chapter in our history that future historians will surely not look favorably upon.
All expert knowledge and wisdom that has contributed to the health and well-being of Dutch children was thrown out of the window overnight in the spring of 2020. Children and young people were made to carry the burden in order to ‘supposedly’ protect adults.
As Sunetra Gupta and many others have stated, that is the precautionary principle turned upside down. The Danish-American epidemiologist Tracy Beth Høeg rightly condemned such policies, which were also pursued in the US, by calling them: Sacrificing children’s health in the name of Health.
After two years of closing down children’s lives, I firmly believe we owe it to children and their parents to make amends for the wrongs that were done to Dutch children. Above all, Article 3 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child should never be forgotten: “In all measures concerning children, the best interests of the child must come first.” It is mind-boggling how quickly children’s rights have gone out of the window worldwide. With disastrous consequences.
For children and young people a recovery plan should focus on repairing the damage done in education, recovering sports participation, and restoring the trust in the government and institutions that they can traditionally rely on for their health and their well-being. The Netherlands should be a safe haven for children, as it used to be. Pandemic preparedness also includes watching over children’s health and well-being and in this regard the Dutch failed their children and young people. We should do better in the future. Much better.
Dr. Hans Koppies has completed the Academy of Physical Education (ALO). He then studied Pedagogical Sciences at the VU University Amsterdam, specializing in Orthopedagogics: Families in Psychosocial Difficulties. He has worked as a remedial educationalist at various institutions in youth care and special education. He writes about growing up and raising children, parenting and counseling in articles and essays in newspapers and magazines.
As my beleaguered teaching colleagues and I try to get our school communities into the swing of things once again this new academic year, I find myself to be merely, powerlessly wishing that no more grotesque permutations of the Covid Madness return for a third consecutive winter. ‘Home-learning’ in particular was, of course, disastrous for children in a myriad of ways. On a purely practical level, it was fairly tricky for the teachers too, so I do believe that most of the profession hopes to avoid the insidious perfidy of forced absences or outright closures. Granted, I would prefer my colleagues to be motivated in these desires by an understanding of the abhorrent, casual neglect of children’s fundamental needs over which we were forced to preside for two years. But I’ll have to be content if the Department for Education will just let us stay open.
Belatedly, conventional wisdom has it that Covid doesn’t tend to seriously affect the school-aged population. Perhaps if the undistorted version of that truism was more widely accepted – that Covid doesn’t tend to seriously affect the healthy population – some teachers (and their unions) might find that their selfish and flawed but unending clamour for ‘more to be done’ lost its sympathisers.
It’s been a typically warm and sunny September thus far, but a small number of our students remain curiously attached to their face-coverings, sporting them lesson in, lesson out, as I look on aghast but unable to order their removal. The so-called harmless, cost-free non-pharmaceutical intervention continues to wreak its harms.
For those of us who have, by now, long fought Covid restrictions, it might feel like a further, renewed battle this Autumn to see off the prospect of the Return of the Madness. After all the hammer-blows of Spring 2020, we ordered our thoughts, picked our battles, identified our sacrifices, practised our polemics, marshalled our arguments and, eventually, took to the fray. For many of us with little or no previous experience in politicking, we may even have learnt some tricks about the art of discourse and debate along the way.
I am not referring here to my professional life of course. In my professional life I am – quite rightly – not permitted to express my personal or political ideologies or opinions to students. No good and proper teacher would dream of doing so – unless of course you suddenly, naively found that your beliefs fell in line with the government propaganda of the day. If you happened to support the mantra “Hands, Face, Space”, you could plaster it across every TV screen and vacant stretch of wall in the whole place. If you were minded to promote social distancing, or face coverings, or bubbles, or ‘don’t kill granny’, or healthy 12 year-olds giving their own consent to being tested for Covid before entering the building, or any other similar paean to the dreaded virus – exhort it from the corridors, folks! If you were an Assistant Head, you might even have the surprising chutzpah to lead a series of science-themed assemblies (to 1,200 impressionable young minds) in which you vaingloriously celebrated the disingenuous and risible proposition that Professor Sarah Gilbert’s AstraZeneca vaccine “saved 2 billion lives”.
No – when I refer to my endeavouring anew to muster awareness of the risk of restrictions this winter, I’m talking about in my personal life, away from school.
There is a danger for those of us who have resisted the mainstream Covid narrative for two-and-a-half years that we forget quite how completely and devastatingly uninterested the compliant majority are in our version of events. Many may have shifted their positions slightly, faced with ever more piles of evidence (from their own preferred sources) of the damage needlessly done. Surely, it would be hard to find someone who would embrace it all quite so gleefully all over again.
But the big arguments are not won; the wider population are still just not listening. Family members try to gently talk us down; friends tactlessly avoid the subject altogether or just silently disappear from view; some colleagues regard me warily and with increasing wryness as a bit of a crank. They all seem to manage to tell themselves that none of it really affects them and, with a special kind of inward-looking perspective, I suppose they can make that be true.
So we keep talking and waiting and wondering where the socially palatable prima facie evidence to incontrovertibly back us up and help us definitively put a stop to all this might come from. I continue to posit theories, based on my understanding of basic principles of human decency and common sense. Anecdotes, ideas and experiences should be part of our arguments and, after all, when that single piece of elusive, critical, confirmatory data lands – why should anybody ever believe what any expert says these days anyway?
Some older adults – I overhear them in crowded cafes – are delightedly and obediently getting in line for their fifth (count ‘em!) Covid jab, and some disconcerting individuals in the High Street and park remain devotedly wedded to their face-covering. They don’t seem one bit ashamed or embarrassed by the many peculiar and ridiculous things their Government forced them to do for a good while there. Is that just it for them? Over and Out, Shut Up, Move On. Are these things, this history, these awful, ungodly consequences we’re all living with, just a permanent feature of the rest of their lives, no questions asked?
There are certainly those who seemed to revel in the whole drama of it all, those who still reel performatively, sanctimoniously backwards in doorways when you dare to step near; those who complied without thought and still appear blissfully ignorant of any possibility of error or mishap or downside and who probably watch too much TV; those who spewed the new terminologies of their epoch with uneasy, faltering confidence: ‘flatten the curve’, ‘viral load’, ‘third wave’, and – my personal favourite – ‘asymptomatic’.
Is it possible that this merry, obstinate lot are the very same people who seem in recent times also to be lurching emptily but enthusiastically from one cause to another? ‘Stay Safe everyone!’ ‘Respect this virus!’, bang a kitchen pan and ‘Save the NHS!’, erect a flag and ‘Stand with Ukraine!’, buy some frozen Chicken Kievs, close everything when it’s hot and etcetera and blah, ad infinitum.
Could it be that the common thread which connects all the headline-followers, the unquestioning, the frighteningly readily compliant, is a lack of something raw, true, local, deep and meaningful in their lives? Might there be a link between the modern world’s malaise, the tragic lack of connection and community, and a very public hankering after connection and community? You don’t know your neighbour, you’re not invested in your town, you couldn’t possibly overcome the awkwardness involved in helping the elderly lady down the road – why not get your phone out instead to prove how good you are at Joining In and Helping Out?
If people don’t have a potentially perilous stake in something close, precious and valuable, or anything at all to believe in which reaches them viscerally, it seems as though they might just keep scrambling around, somewhat manically and pathetically, for Another Good Cause to get behind.
And if I’m right about all of that, then the solution to the real Covid problem lies with people and professionals who don’t know they’ve got a problem.
Get a life. Get a community. Get some meaning. And do not force a single school kid to stay at home again this year.
The Lancet recently released its long-awaited COVID-19 commission report. The report well reflects the current state of public health science and addresses the business needs of the Lancet. It may have been naïve to expect further, but health is an important area and should be taken more seriously.
The level of obfuscation of evidence, misrepresentation of prior knowledge, and disregard for diversity of scientific evidence and opinion does not reflect well on either Lancet or the commission itself.
The Lancet in context
Medicine and public health are particularly dependent on truth and transparency, as the lives and health of people cannot be entrusted to dogma and superstition. Clear and open debate is fundamental to minimizing mistakes, which can kill, and to building the trust that patients and populations need to follow guidance (as they must ultimately be the decision-makers). These two related disciplines are also increasingly lucrative for practitioners and for the companies supplying the wares they employ. These forces inevitably pull in different directions.
Private companies making these wares, such as those in the pharmaceutical industry, have a responsibility to maximize profits for their shareholders. This means encouraging more people to use their tests or drugs, rather than putting people in states of health where they do not need them (either good health, or death).
This is not an extreme position, it is a simple truth – it is how this industry is structured. If there is a wonder drug in a lab somewhere that resolves all metabolic disease with a single dose, and it is easy to manufacture and copy, then the Pharma industry would collapse. Pharma has a duty to build a market, not heal.
Transparency and truth, on the other hand, could mean admitting certain highly profitable drugs are not needed or even dangerous; that an alternative safe and cheap drug, previously available for other purposes, will be more cost-effective and lower risk.
We cannot expect private companies to state this, as it will damage or destroy their income (their business). If they do not try to block a repurposed drug that puts their own investments at risk, they would be betraying their investors. What they should do, for their investors, is overemphasize the advantage of their own product, maximize the desire of people to use them, and run public campaigns to ensure this situation is prolonged as far as possible. This is what any for-profit business does – it is their job. It is not unexpected.
We have long relied on medical journals to act as a conduit for information from researchers to medical practitioners and the public. This is a plausible model if journals are independent and the staff and owners of the journal promote truth above politics or company profit.
This was once the case; the Lancet, a subject of this article, was once family-owned and that could hold to the values of Thomas Wakley and his descendants, standing against medical authorities up to 1921. It has since been owned by other for-profit companies, now a subsidiary of a larger Dutch-based publishing conglomerate, ‘Elsevier.’
Elsevier in turn is owned by RELX group (back in London), a large company with a typical list of major institutional investors including BlackRock (and so its major owner Vanguard), Morgan Stanley and Bank of America – the same list as major pharmaceutical and biotech corporations whose products Lancet publishes on.
The above does not tell us there is intentional wrong or malfeasance, just intrinsic conflicts of interest of the type journals such as Lancet are supposed to guard against. Lancet’s ultimate ownership has a duty to shareholders to use their portfolio of assets to maximize return; on this measure alone Lancet should favor certain pharmaceutical companies. The only thing that could stand in the way is lack of competence by the owners, or a moral code that rates investors below integrity.
In this context, Lancet’s track record over COVID-19 has been checkered. In February 2020 it published a major letter on COVID-19 origins that ignored major conflicts of interest in which nearly all authors were implicated in the alternative lab origin hypothesis. It published clearly fraudulent data on hydroxychloroquine that were significant in halting early treatment studies.
A lack of early effective treatment was necessary to secure Pharma profits for later COVID-19 medications and vaccines. The later exposure of the fraud was subsequently described by The Guardian and was one of the biggest retractions in modern history.
In 2022 Lancet published a weakly-evidencedopinion advocating medical fascism; dividing and restricting people based on compliance with pharmaceutical interventions. Lancet’s top leadership has remained unchanged throughout. This is relevant context for understanding the report of the Lancet ‘commission’ on COVID-19.
The Lancet COVID-19 Commission’s Report
In mid-2020 Lancet recruited people from various aspects of public life to review various aspects of the COVID-19 outbreak. This ‘commission’ (a somewhat grand name for a privately-convened group from a private for-profit business) was headed by economist Jeffrey Sachs, who preceded the recent release of the report by publicly discussing conclusions on the potential source of SARS-CoV-2, highlighting the probability of a laboratory origin as opposed to direct animal-human spread.
This part of the commission’s investigation had been halted early when Sachs discovered that several panel members had undisclosed conflicts of interest amounting to receipt of funding to conduct the very laboratory gain-of-function research widely suspected of promoting rapid human spread. Some had been authors of the earlier Lancet origins letter.
The Executive Summary provides a foretaste of the quality of work to come, noting IHME estimates of “17·2 million estimated deaths from COVID-19,” a “staggering death toll” as the commission notes, particularly staggering as it is higher than the WHO estimates for total excess deaths throughout the pandemic period. These WHO estimates include all deaths caused by lockdowns and those where virus detection was incidental. It is an implausible figure, even ignoring the lack of context here (nearly all in late old age, and with severe comorbidities).
Ironically, the commission reports in its main text over 2.1 million excess deaths from malaria, tuberculosis and HIV arising from the COVID-19 response in 2020 alone. However, this is a misunderstanding by commission members of WHO’s actual estimates – WHO does report significant excess 2020 deaths from these diseases but not this many – though many more will accumulate through subsequent years.
Reflecting the lack of inclusiveness of the commission itself, the report recommends censorship of the alternate approaches, considering “failure to combat systematic disinformation” to be a contributor to severity. The commission then inadvertently provides an example of disinformation in its characterization of the Great Barrington Declaration, misrepresenting it as calling for “uncontrolled spread of the virus.”
This, based on the declaration itself, must be a lie, as the commission must not have read the declaration within the two years they had available. Did they not consider it pertinent to question those who wrote it or (over 900,000) signed it? Whether the declaration was correct or not, it reflected prior WHO evidence-based policy. Ignoring this is simply untenable for a serious inquiry.
The overall findings of the commission are extremely disappointing from the point of view of science, public health, and simple honesty. Its apparent lack of familiarity with prior public health norms and practice, including that of the World Health Organization (WHO), may have been genuine, or may be contrived to emphasize a narrative it was intended to support. Given Lancet’s COVID-19 track record and business imperatives, the latter would not be entirely unexpected, but it is disappointing to see adults in positions of influence producing a document of this nature.
Summary of key findings
The Report helpfully provides a three page ‘Key Findings’ section. While missing aspects of the main body such as the euphemism “prosocial behaviour” to denote social exclusion, and extolling the “logic” of the completely illogical WHO slogan for mass COVID-19 vaccination, “No one is safe until everyone is safe,” it generally captures the main thrust of the whole text. Reading the rest is however recommended to understand how modern public health thinking has so clearly gone off the rails.
The key findings are stepped through here. Anyone with a public health background is encouraged to refute the concerns raised, as many of the commission’s assertions appear to involve common traps that seem inexcusable for public health professionals. They hang heavily on a failure to grasp three fundamentals of COVID-19 and public health:
Public health interventions are about risk and benefit. Interventions have positive and negative impacts. Recommendations therefore cannot be given without considering the potential harms they may cause in the short and long term, weighing these against perceived benefits.
COVID-19 mortality is highly skewed towards very old age, and heavily associated with comorbidities. Therefore it is imperative to consider COVID-19 disease burden relative to other diseases in terms of life-years lost, not raw mortality (from or with) COVID-19.
Prolonged lockdowns, workplace and school closures were not part of prior policy, or were partially recommended only in far more severe outbreaks. This is not implying the interventions were good or bad, it is just a fact that they defied public health norms and prior evidence. They were recommended against due to the harm they potentially cause. This lands most heavily, as WHO notes, on low income people and populations.
Highlights of the commission’s key findings:
“WHO acted too cautiously and too slowly on several important matters: … declare a public health emergency… restrict travel … endorse the use of facemasks…”
The commission seems unaware of the prior WHO pandemic influenza guideline. It is not among their 499 references. WHO specifically warned against restricting travel in this guideline, also noting that evidence on facemasks is “weak.” Travel restrictions can be significantly harmful to economies – cutting tourism income alone in low-income countries can increase mortality through poverty. The report fails to mention costs that extending these response measures would impose. Where lockdown costs are mentioned at all, it is in the context of costs of ‘failure’ to implement earlier or heavier, never in terms of weighing harm avoided against that caused. Ignoring relative costs, including the long-term health costs of increased poverty from longer lockdowns, is anathema to good public health policy.
Metanalysesof randomized control trials of community masking do not show significant benefit, and trials during COVID-19 show similarresults. At a minimum, WHO was therefore evidence-based when recommending against community-masking – the organization is yet to provide evidence to back its later endorsement of their widespread use. The Lancet commission appears to be specifically recommending against the use of evidence-based approaches.
“… most governments around the world were too slow to acknowledge its importance and act with urgency in response….”
Most people live in low and middle income countries with low COVID-19 mortality and far higher burdens from other infectious disease, which occur in far younger people. This statement therefore seems strangely Western-centric. If they had known earlier, what would countries have actually done? (if earlier implementation of poverty-inducing responses, then for how long?)
The commission appears unaware of serological evidence of spread prior to January 2020, in some cases backed by PCR. This would negate any benefit from this recommendation, even ignoring the harms.
Citing the Western Pacific Region as an example of ‘lockdowns working’ similarly makes little sense, as comparisons elsewhere (e.g. Europe) did not show significant benefit, while in crowded slum areas they are clearly pointless. Evidence of early wide transmission (e.g Japan) indicates that low mortality was due to other factors.
“Epidemic control was seriously hindered by substantial public opposition to routine public health and social measures, such as the wearing of properly fitting face masks and getting vaccinated.”
This statement is ignorant or disingenuous. If the commission members have experience in public health, they know that quarantine of healthy people, prolonged ‘distancing’ and workplace closures were never used at scale before, and that widespread lockdowns were not ‘routine public health and social measures.’ If they did not know this, they had two years to find out. The world, including Lancet, knew by March 2020 that COVID-19 overwhelmingly targets the elderly and has little impact on healthy working-age adults.
The vaccines do not significantly reduce overall transmission – heavily vaccinated countries continue to show high transmission – so to suggest low vaccination hindered epidemic control is a vacuous statement. It may seem intuitive (e.g. it occurs with some other vaccines) but the commission had 18 months to observe COVID-19 mass vaccination.
“Public policies have also failed to draw upon the behavioural and social sciences.”
This is an extraordinary statement to use regarding COVID-19. Many Western governments have openly employed behavioral psychology in an unprecedented way in the COVID-19 outbreak. No public health campaign has ever gained such media attention or had such uniform suppression of non-official messaging from media outlets. It is strange to see a statement so removed from reality.
“Heavily burdened groups include essential workers, who are already disproportionately concentrated in more vulnerable minority and low-income communities.”
This appears to be a nod to compassion for vulnerable populations. It is true that certain groups did suffer higher rates of severe COVID-19, though these are highly correlated with rates of comorbidities (obesity in Western countries is unfortunately associated with poverty, and poverty with certain ethnic groups).
However, the burden was overwhelmingly on the elderly – to a rate several thousand times that in young people. It is the response that burdened these groups most clearly and the report does mention inequity-driving school closures, but this appears forgotten elsewhere in an apparent blind support for faster and harder lockdowns.
“In low income and middle-income countries (LMICs)… better outcomes were seen when previous experiences with outbreaks and epidemics were built upon, and when community-based resources—notably community health workers—were used to support screening and contact tracing, capacity and trust-building within communities.”
This claim appears false. Sub-Saharan African countries did well irrespective of prior experience, with a relative exception of South Africa where obesity is more prevalent and there is a higher proportion of old people. Tanzania instituted very few COVID-19 specific measures but has similar outcomes. More than half the sub-Saharan population is less than 20 years of age, an age-group with extremely low mortality in the West. Actual spread in Africa, confirmed by WHO, has been very high.
“… the support for vaccine production in LMICs, for use in those countries, has come at a great cost in terms of inequitable access to vaccines.”
Nearly all people in low and middle income countries (except perhaps China) will by now haveimmunity. Post-infection immunity is equal or more effective to vaccine-induced immunity. Therefore, mass vaccination of a whole population with COVID-19 vaccines that don’t significantly reduce transmission cannot plausibly provide much benefit, whilst resource diversion is harmful. This statement is therefore devoid of public health sense.
“Economic recovery depends on sustaining high rates of vaccination coverage …”
Economic recovery depends on removing impediments to a functioning economy (lockdown measures). Vaccinating immune people with a vaccine that does not stop transmission cannot help to ‘reopen’ an economy. This statement parrots official mass-vaccination messaging elsewhere, but Lancet’s commission had an opportunity to promote logic and evidence-based policy.
“The sustainable development process has been set back by several years, with a deep underfinancing of investments needed to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.”
This is indeed clear. Poverty is worse, malnutrition is worse, and preventable disease burdens are higher. Women’s rights are greatly reduced across much of the world, and school attendance has been denied to hundreds of millions of children, entrenching future poverty. Acknowledging this is important, but it also calls into question much of the remainder of the report. Recommendations that acknowledge these mass harms which are concentrated on populations with lowest COVID-19 risk, but go on to recommend more of the interventions that caused them, do not seem well considered.
The remainder of the key findings recommend policies of mass vaccination ‘to protect populations,’ more money for the World Health Organization, and more money internationally for supporters of the growing pandemic agenda. This plays to Lancet’s gallery, but does not consider the harms of resource diversion, the actual very low mortality from pandemics over the last 100 years, or the heterogeneity of human populations and of risk to disease.
If vaccines worked in reducing mortality (for all-cause mortality (the Pfizer and Moderna randomized controlled trials have not shown this to date), if vaccination was confined to highly vulnerable groups where benefit is most likely, and if the trillions of dollars spent on lockdown compensation, mass testing and mass vaccination had been spent on chronic and endemic disease burdens and poverty mitigation, does the Commission really believe more people would have died and outcomes been worse?
A travesty of public health and science
The commission members appear convinced that lockdowns and mass vaccination were a net benefit, but It also appears that in two years of consultation they have not considered the alternative. The loss of decades of progress on infectious disease, human rights, and poverty reduction caused by lockdowns has not been given sufficient pause for thought.
A virus that mainly targets people over 75 years of age was addressed with a public health response that targets the children and the economically productive, cementing long-term poverty and inequity. They support this approach, but consider it should have been instituted earlier, and was lifted too soon.
After emphasizing mandatory and restrictive measures throughout, and misrepresenting or ignoring alternative approaches, the report ends on a note that it should perhaps have started with. “We note the timeliness of recommitting to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN’s moral charter, as we celebrate its 75th anniversary in 2023.”
This declaration includes rights to work, travel, socialize, and express opinions freely including, specifically, through any media. A quick read of the WHO’s charter would also have helped – health includes social and mental well-being (and physical well-being beyond a single disease). The report is void of such thinking – a travesty of both human rights and public health.
The report could well have been written based on slogans from WHO, Gavi and CEPI (whom the Lancet recommends should receive more money), from Pharma companies (on whose support Lancet is heavily directly or indirectly reliant) and from the World Economic Forum (who seem everywhere these days).
Some will have hoped for careful and considered thought, wide consultation, and a strong evidence base. It seems the corporate world may no longer have time for such indulgence. This is, in the end, a rich person’s club, seeking increased taxpayer funding for their favorite project. They are doing this in the name of public health.
It was reasonable to have hoped for better. What would Thomas Wakley have thought?
David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health. He is the former Program Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, Switzerland.
September 12, 2022, President Biden signed the “Executive Order on Advancing Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Innovation for a Sustainable, Safe and Secure American Bioeconomy.”1
Specified in that order is the development of genetic engineering technologies and techniques “to be able to write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology in the same way in which we write software and program computers,” as well as genetic technologies to “unlock the power of biological data” using “computing tools and artificial intelligence.”
Additionally, “obstacles for commercialization” will be reduced “so that innovative technologies and products can reach markets faster.” What we have here is, in a nutshell, the creation of a fast-tracked mRNA pipeline.
When, in June 2022, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration quietly implemented a “Future Framework” scheme2 to deliver reformulated COVID boosters without additional testing, I predicted that this “no testing required” formula would spread beyond COVID shots. And, according to this executive order, that’s exactly what’s about to happen.
In early September 2022, the FDA also put out medically false and misleading COVID booster campaign messages that prove we’ve officially entered the era of transhumanism:
“It’s time to install that update! #UpdateYourAntibodies with a new #COVID19 booster.”3 “Don’t be shocked! You can now #RechargeYourImmunity with an updated #COVID19 booster.”4
Is This the Death Knell to Allopathic Medicine?
Historically, gene therapies have had to jump through extra hoops, which is why so few exist on the market. As of 2021, there were 20 gene therapies commercially available.5 The world’s first gene therapy trial didn’t begin until 1990, so this is still a very new field.
The entire gene therapy field actually collapsed overnight in 1999, when a teenage trial participant died from side effects. An FDA investigation concluded research had moved too fast and that safety “had not been put first.”6 Progress, thanks to increased caution, slowed from there on.
Such caution is now being thrown to the wind, and it’s not difficult to predict there will be disastrous ramifications. Millions will die from poorly tested gene therapies and, eventually, medical research and allopathic medicine will both cease to exist, as survivors vow to have nothing to do with that murderous cabal ever again.
The only way they might be able to keep going is if they are in control of people’s brain function and/or able to force drugs under threat of death, or worse — neither of which is impossible at this point, shockingly enough. In the meantime, we’re looking at a cornucopia of mRNA shots coming our way.
mRNA Flu Shots Are in the Works
Not surprisingly, mRNA flu shots are in the works.7 While we probably won’t see mRNA flu shots during the 2022/2023 winter season, there’s every reason to expect they’ll be rolled out next year.
September 14, 2022, Pfizer initiated a Phase 3 study, which will test a quadrivalent mRNA-based flu shot on 25,000 American adults.8 Pfizer is also exploring mRNA technology that uses self-amplifying RNA (saRNA), for potential use in the future.9
Moderna began its Phase 3 mRNA flu jab trial in early June 2022.10 It’s also working on mRNA shots for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and cytomegalovirus (CMV), which is in the herpes family, as well as a SARS-CoV-2-influenza combination shot. Ultimately, Moderna wants to create an annual mRNA shot that covers all of the top 10 viruses that result in hospitalizations each year.11
Its current flu jab candidate, mRNA-1010, encodes for the hemagglutinin (HA) glycoproteins of four different influenza strains, including influenza A/H1N1, A/H3N2, influenza B/Yamagata and B/Victoria. According to Moderna:12
“HA is a major influenza surface glycoprotein that is considered an important target to generate broad protection against influenza and is the primary target of currently available influenza vaccines.”
Over the past three years, I’ve written several articles exploring the transhumanist agenda, which all these mRNA shots and genetic technologies are part and parcel of. Basically, the goal of the transhumanist movement is to transcend biology through technology, and to meld human biology with technology and artificial intelligence.
In September 2020, I posted a video with Dr. Carrie Madej (above), in which she suggested we were standing at the crossroads of transhumanism, thanks to the fast approaching release of mRNA COVID-19 shots.
Since these shots are designed to manipulate your biology, they have the potential to also alter the biology of the entire human race. Nearly two years later, we still don’t know the extent to which they might be doing that, yet more fast-tracked and untested gene therapies are on the way.
One reason why it’s important to know for certain whether synthetic RNA ends up creating permanent changes in the genome is because synthetic genes are patented. If they cause permanent changes, humans will contain patented genes, and that brings up very serious questions, seeing how patents have owners, and owners have patent rights.
US Defense Department Aims to Create Human Cyborgs
The hydrogel used to preserve the mRNA can also contain nanobots to create a bioelectric interface capable of connecting to a smartphone or other interface. Novel technologies that measure biological data, such as blood sugar, are based on this. Such technologies will, of course, have immediate ramifications for our privacy.
Who will collect and have access to all this data? Who will be responsible for protecting it? How will it be used? Also, if your cellphone can receive information from your body, what information can your body receive from it, or other sources? Could transmissions affect your mood? Your behavior? Your physical function? Your thoughts or memories?
So far, it doesn’t appear as though the COVID shots have these kinds of capabilities built in, but we do know for a fact that militaries around the world are exploring and working toward such capabilities. In fact, it’s an arms race in its own right.
In his September 14, 2022, Substack article,13 “Human Cyborgs Are Just the Beginning,” Dr. Robert Malone reviewed several of those plans. Certain report titles alone tell the story, such as the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) Biotechnologies for Health and Human Performance Council’s report,14 “Cyborg Soldier 2050: Human/Machine Fusion and the Implications for the Future of the DOD.” It doesn’t leave a whole lot to the imagination, does it? According to the assessment abstract:
“The primary objective of this effort was to forecast and evaluate the military implications of machines that are physically integrated with the human body to augment and enhance human performance over the next 30 years.
This report summarizes this assessment and findings; identifies four potential military-use cases for new technologies in this area; and assesses their impact upon the DOD organizational structure, warfighter doctrine and tactics, and interoperability with U.S. allies and civil society.”
Human augmentation technologies deemed technically feasible by 2050 at the latest include ocular enhancements to improve sight and situational awareness, optogenetic bodysuit to restore or improve muscular strength and control, auditory enhancements, and neural enhancement of the brain for two-way data transfers and brain-to-brain communication.
Changing What It Means To Be Human
In “The Plan to Turn You Into a Genetically Edited Cyborg,” I covered another shockingly dystopian report by the U.K. Ministry of Defense and the German Bundeswehr Office for Defense Planning, published in May 2021.
That report, “Human Augmentation — The Dawn of a New Paradigm, a Strategic Implications Project,”15 reviews the scientific goals of the U.K. and German defense ministries, and they basically mirror that of the U.S. DOD. On page 12 of the report, the concept of the human body as a platform is described, and how various parts of the human platform can be augmented. For example:
Physical performance such as strength, dexterity, speed and endurance can be enhanced, as well as physical senses. One example given is gene editing for enhanced sight
Psychological performance such as cognition, emotion and motivation can be influenced to activate and direct desired behavior. Examples of cognitive augmentation include improving memory, attention, alertness, creativity, understanding, decision-making, intelligence and vigilance
Social performance — “The ability to perceive oneself as part of a group and the readiness to act as part of the team” — can be influenced. Communication skills, collaboration and trust are also included here
They list several different ways to influence the physical, psychological and social performance of the “human platform,” including genetics (germ line and somatic modification), synthetic biology, invasive (internal) and noninvasive (external) brain interfaces, passive and powered exoskeletons, drugs and nano technology, neurostimulation, augmented reality technologies such as external holograms or glasses with built-in artificial intelligence, and sensory augmentation technologies such as external sensors or implants.
As noted in this report, “Human augmentation has the potential to … change the meaning of what it means to be a human.” This is precisely what Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), has stated is the goal of The Fourth Industrial Revolution.16
WEF has been at the center of global affairs for more than 40 years, and if you take the time to dive into WEF’s Fourth Industrial Revolution material, you realize that it’s all about transhumanism. It’s about the merger of man and machine.
This is a dystopian future that WEF and its global allies are actively trying to implement, whether humanity at large agrees with it or not. Importantly, the “Human Augmentation” report readily admits that human augmentation can “directly enhance behavior.”
And, if you think these reports are just brain fodder for geeks in uniforms, think again. The U.K. Defense and Security Accelerator (DASA) is currently, right now, accepting proposals for human augmentation technologies such as those listed above.17 Grants of 70,000 euros ($74,000), will be given to proposals that can provide proof of concept.
We’re Already Being Programmed to Accept Transhumanism
Both the DOD’s “Cyborg Soldier” report and the British/German “Human Augmentation” reports discuss the fact that human augmentation will inevitably widen already existing disparities, inequalities and inequities, and therefore, “efforts should be undertaken to reverse negative cultural narratives of enhancement technologies.”18
In other words, don’t let people come to the conclusion that human cyborgs are a bad idea, because at worst that might prevent their development, and at best, it’ll pitch regular people against the augmented elite, making their efforts to rule the plebs more difficult.
As noted by Malone, “Once again, we are being played before we even know what the playing field looks like.”19
Disturbingly, considering how nontransparent governments have been so far, it’s not inconceivable that technologies capable of influencing thoughts and behaviors would be used on populations without informing anyone, which makes the list of potential risks one takes with each new mRNA injection even longer than it already is.
But we don’t need to be genetically reengineered or have nanobots introduced into our brains to be at risk of outside manipulation. That’s already happening through noninvasive means.
Control Capabilities Go Far Beyond Orwell’s ‘1984’ Vision
In a November 2019 interview with CNN,20 history professor Yuval Noah Harari, a Klaus Schwab disciple, stated that humans are already “hackable,” meaning the technology exists by which a company or government can know you better than you know yourself, and this knowledge can be used for both good and ill.
According to Harari, the available capabilities already go far beyond Orwell’s “1984” authoritarian vision, and it’s only going to become more powerful from here.
He predicted that algorithms will increasingly be used to make decisions that historically have been made by humans, either yourself or someone else, including whether or not you’ll be hired for a particular job, whether you’ll be granted a loan, what scholastic curriculum you will follow and even whom you will marry.
To learn more about the larger issues of transhumanism and the race to merge man with machine and artificial intelligence, check out the Truthstream Media video below.
For example, there are even ongoing attempts to upload the human mind into the cloud, ultimately creating a form of “digital hive mind” where everyone communicates via “Wi-Fi telepathy.” This, despite the fact we still do not fully understand what “the mind” actually is, or where it’s located.
Final Thoughts
I don’t know what it will take to prevent the dystopian post-human world envisioned by Schwab and his technocratic minions, but I suspect education would be a cornerstone of such an endeavor. In order for there to be a resistance, enough people need to be aware of what the plan is, and where we’re actually being led with all these novel therapies and inventions.
In the shorter term, it’s crucial to realize that the fast-tracking of “genetic engineering technologies and techniques to be able to write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology in the same way in which we write software and program computers” means they’re going to cut corners. Loads of them.
Testing is basically going to be done on the population at large, just as they’ve done with the COVID jabs. The results of such experimentation are relatively predictable. People will be seriously injured and many will die. So, think long and hard before you agree to take any of these forthcoming gene therapies.
A British doctor, Aseem Malhotra, has just had a two part, peer-reviewed paper published in the Journal of Insulin Resistance. The aim of the paper was to gain a better understanding of the true benefits and potential harms of the mRNA Covid vaccines. You can read Part 1 and Part 2 in full by clicking on the links.
Dr Malhotra. a cardiologist by trade, was originally a strong Covid vaccine advocate. He volunteered in a vaccine centre, was one of the first people to be double dosed and appeared on morning television to encourage everyone to get vaccinated. He was surprised and concerned at vaccine-hesitant patients when they asked about ‘anti-vax’ propaganda.
That was until, sadly, in July 2021, his father suffered a cardiac arrest and died. His father had been the former deputy chair of the British Medical Association (BMA) and honorary vice president. The 73 year old gentleman was extremely fit and active and heart scans from a few years earlier had revealed no significant problems. Dr Malhotra was shocked to read his father’s post mortem which found that two out of three of his major arteries had severe blockages.
Aseem couldn’t explain the post mortem findings and became more concerned in November 2021 after reading a peer-reviewed abstract in Circulation Journal. In the study, the mRNA vaccine was associated with significantly increasing the risk of a coronary event within five years from 11% pre-mRNA vaccine to 25% 2-10 weeks post vaccine.
He began to question his father’s death and wondered whether the Pfizer vaccination he had received six months earlier could have contributed in some way. After six months of critically appraising the data and speaking to eminent scientists, he reluctantly concluded that, contrary to his own dogmatic beliefs, Pfizer’s vaccine was far from being as safe and effective as first thought.
Questioning the data
During his reassessment of the Covid vaccine he recalled a conversation with a cardiologist colleague who decided against vaccination due to his low personal risk and concerns about short and long term harms. His colleague was particularly alarmed that, during the trials, there had been four cardiac arrests in the vaccine group but only one in the placebo group.
Next, Dr Malhotra assessed the 95% efficacy claims. Whilst this relative risk reduction made good sales material, the true value of a treatment can only be established by looking at the absolute individual risk reduction.
This turned out to be 0.84%, in other words, in a trial of 20,000 people (10,000 in the vaccine group and 10,000 in the placebo group), 4 people in the vaccine group and 88 people in the unvaccinated group would end up testing positive for Covid. Another way to express that is that you would need to vaccinate 119 people to prevent one positive test.
This absolute risk reduction figure (0.84%) is extremely important for doctors and patients to know but how many of them were told this when they received the shot? Transparent communication of risk and benefit of any intervention is a core principle of ethical evidence-based medical practice and informed consent.
The trials did not show statistically significant reductions in serious illness or mortality and in fact there were actually more deaths (19) in the vaccine group versus the placebo group (17). Furthermore, there were only nine severe cases of Covid in the placebo group, representing 0.04%. And this was in regions specifically chosen for their high prevalence of infection.
To find protection against death, then the 119 figure above (people vaccinated to prevent one positive test) must be multiplied by the number of infections that would lead to a single death in each age group. So, Dr Malhotra calculates his rate of death from Delta was 1 in 3,000 meaning the absolute risk reduction of the vaccine protecting him from death is (1 x 3000 x 119) 1 in 357,000.
As also pointed out in a recent editorial by John Ioannidis in BMJ evidence-based medicine the inferred efficacy of the vaccine from non-randomised studies may be ‘spurious’, with bias being generated by ‘pre-existing immunity, vaccination misclassification, exposure differences, testing, disease risk factor confounding, hospital admission decision, treatment use differences and death attribution’.
What should be part of the shared decision-making informed consent discussion when any member of the public is considering taking the shot is something along these lines: Depending on your age, several hundreds or thousands of people like you would need to be injected in order to prevent one person from dying from the Delta variant of COVID-19 over a period of around three months. For the over 80s, this figure is at least 230, but it rises the younger you are, reaching at least 2600 for people in their 50s, 10 000 for those in their 40s, and 93 000 for those between 18 and 29 years. For omicron, which has been shown to be 30% – 50% less lethal, meaning significantly more people would need to be vaccinated to prevent one death. How long any protection actually lasts for is unknown; boosters are currently being recommended after as short a period as 4 months in some countries.
But how many people have had a conversation that even approaches an explanation similar to that? This is before we get into the known, unknown and as yet to be fully quantified harms.
Harms
Concerns have been raised about trial participants being limited as to the type of adverse event they could report. Furthermore, hospitalised participants were withdrawn from the trial and not reported in the final results. To make matters even worse, after two months, the FDA allowed the placebo group to be unblinded and get vaccinated, completely removing any control group with which to assess adverse events.
Dr Malhotra sticks with his field of expertise, cardiology and discusses one of the most common vaccine-induced harms, myocarditis. Whilst authorities say that myocarditis is more likely after infection than vaccination, other studies have shown the opposite. There is no evidence of myocarditis until vaccination began in 2021, a full year after millions of youngsters naturally caught Covid.
Although vaccine-induced myocarditis is not often fatal in young adults, MRI scans reveal that, of the ones admitted to hospital, approximately 80% have some degree of myocardial damage. It is like suffering a small heart attack and sustaining some – likely permanent – heart muscle injury. It is uncertain how this will play out in the longer-term, including if, and to what degree, it will increase the risk of poor quality of life or potentially more serious heart rhythm disturbances in the future.
The UK’s Yellow Card reporting system is addressed and determined to be far from adequate to cope with a rapid roll out of a brand new product. 9.7 million doses were administered before the clotting problems with AstraZeneca were detected. In Denmark, they detected the problem after only 150,000 doses.
Since the beginning of the vaccine roll-out, there have been almost 500,000 adverse events reported involving over 150,000 individuals. This shows around 1 in 120 suffer an adverse event that is beyond mild. This number is unprecedented and represents the same as the total number of reports received in the first 40 years of the Yellow Card system being active. The MMR vaccine reports around 1 in 4000 suffer an adverse event.
The paper also looks at VAERS in the US which has recorded over 24,000 deaths, 29% occurring within 48 hours of vaccination and 50% within two weeks. Before 2020 there were approximately 300 deaths recorded per year.
Of most concern is that these reporting systems are actually likely to be underestimates with one paper suggesting that only 1% of serious adverse events are ever reported to the FDA. Another analysis estimated that only 10% of serious adverse events were ever reported on the Yellow Card system.
Moreover, these reporting systems will generally miss medium and long term harms as it is more difficult to attribute to vaccination.
According to ambulance service data, in 2021 there were an extra 20,000 (20% increase) cardiac arrest calls compared to 2019 and 14,000 more than 2020 in the UK.
Similarly, a recent paper in Nature revealed a 25% increase in both acute coronary syndrome and cardiac arrest calls in the 16- to 39-year-old age groups significantly associated with administration with the first and second doses of the mRNA vaccines but no association with COVID-19 infection.
More harm than good?
One has to raise the possibility that the excess cardiac arrests and continuing pressures on hospitals in 2021/2022 from non-COVID-19 admissions may all be signalling a non-COVID-19 health crisis exacerbated by interventions, which would of course also include lockdowns and/or vaccines.
Given these observations, and reappraisal of the randomised controlled trial data of mRNA products, it seems difficult to argue that the vaccine roll-out has been net beneficial in all age groups.
Dr Malhotra concludes the first part by saying that whilst risks from vaccination remain constant, the benefits reduce over time as the virus become less virulent and variants are not targeted by outdated products. He recommends a pause and reappraisal of vaccination policies.
Pandemic of misinformation
In part 2, Dr Malhotra explores the pandemic of misinformed doctors and a misinformed and unwittingly harmed public.
According to one senior doctor in regular contact with England’s Chief Medical Officer, Chris Whitty, most of his colleagues in leadership positions influencing health policy may not have been critically appraising the evidence and were instead relying on media stories on COVID-19 and the vaccines.
He says there are four key drivers and seven sins that are the root of medical misinformation:
Driver
Much published medical research is not reliable or is of uncertain reliability, offers no benefit to patients or is not useful for decision makers;
Most healthcare professionals are not aware of this problem;
Even if they are aware of this problem, most healthcare professionals lack the skills necessary to evaluate the reliability and usefulness of medical evidence; and
Patients and families frequently lack relevant, accurate medical evidence and skilled guidance at the time of medical decision making
Sins
Biased funding of research (that’s research that’s funded because it’s likely to be profitable, not beneficial for patients)
Biased reporting in medical journals
Biased reporting in the media
Biased patient pamphlets
Commercial conflicts of interest
Defensive medicine
An inability of doctors to understand and communicate health statistics.
There are six components essential to informed decision making: (1) description of the nature of the decision; (2) discussion of alternatives; (3) discussion of risks and benefits (in absolute terms); (4) discussion of related uncertainties; (5) assessment of the patient’s understanding; and (6) elicitation of the patient’s preference.
If the administration of the vaccine did not adhere to these principles (which is likely widespread, consistent with historical evidence), then it is also a significant breach of General Medical Council duties of a doctor to ‘give patients the information they want or need in a way that they can understand’.
The paper continues to look at institutional corruption and erosion of public trust, the failure of regulation, biased reporting in the media and censorship of legitimate scientific debate.
A hard hitting, yet sensible paper which should be read by everyone, especially doctors who lost their critical thinking skills over the last few years. Dr Malhotra is a regular on TV so will this be reported in the MSM… I doubt it.
Last week, The Epoch Times reported that Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), admitted the CDC had stopped monitoring the safety of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines using a method of analysis called proportional reporting ratio (PRR).
Walensky promised to resume the monitoring.
What The Epoch Times missed is that PRR is a fraudulent measure of vaccine harm, designed by the CDC expressly for the new COVID-19 vaccines to disguise the devastation the vaccines are causing.
Why? Because PRR measures the pattern of different vaccine side effects, but it is indifferent to the number of people reporting those side effects.
If some completely new vaccine side effect appears with the introduction of a new vaccine, PRR will catch that.
But the COVID-19 vaccines are associated with huge numbers of people reporting side effects on an unprecedented scale — and, by design, PRR misses this completely.
For example, if one person in a million dies from vaccine A and one person in a thousand dies from vaccine B, then vaccines A and B can have exactly the same PRR score!
PRR is a single number that compares the variety of different side effects for a new vaccine to the variety of side effects from past vaccines.
Of course, there have been many vaccines with different side-effect profiles in the past, and it is difficult to stand out among such a diversity of profiles.
Where the new mRNA vaccines do stand out is the unprecedented number of bad outcomes, including deaths, reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
Of all the reports in the 30-year history of VAERS, two-thirds of them were from the COVID-19 vaccines, introduced in the U.S. in December 2020.
This includes three-fourths of all deaths reported to VAERS and three-fourths of all hospitalizations.
Since the introduction of the COVID-19 vaccines, reports to VAERS have skyrocketed off the charts.
Credit: OpenVAERS
These numbers represent only the reports VAERS has processed and posted. Jessica Rose, Ph.D., has reported that VAERS is months behind in posting these reports because its staff has not increased, while its workload is roughly 50 times greater since the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines.
The sheer volume of VAERS reports, including deaths, should have set off alarm bells within weeks after the vaccines were introduced.
Reporting only PRR and not the actual count provided a convenient cover for “business as usual.”
I am grateful to Mathew Crawford for pointing this out in an article last year.
Josh Mitteldorf, Ph.D., has a background in theoretical physics. Since the 1990s, he is best known for his contributions to the biology of aging, including many articles and two books.
Millions of people suffer and die from the effects of radiation exposure from decades of nuclear weapons testing. Their experience should give serious pause to those who continue to embrace the viability of a nuclear deterrent.
A dust storm originating in the Sahara Desert swept across parts of Spain, France, the UK, and Ireland last month. In addition to bringing a red tinge to the sky, the dust caused a slight, yet noticeable, spike in radiation in the areas it reached. This radiation spike was caused by the presence of cesium-137, a radioactive isotope produced through the nuclear fission of uranium-235 in nuclear weapons. A legacy of French nuclear weapons testing that occurred in Algeria during the 1960s, the cesium-137 contamination is a reminder that while the testing of nuclear weapons may have been halted for the time being, the consequences of these tests live on through the poisoning of the planet mankind calls home.
The Saharan radioactive dust cloud is but the most recent visible phenomenon of a plague that has infected much of the world. … continue
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