The Dark Origins of the Davos Great Reset
By F. William Engdahl | Global Research | October 25, 2022
Important to understand is that there is not one single new or original idea in Klaus Schwab’s so-called Great Reset agenda for the world. Nor is his Fourth Industrial Revolution agenda his or his claim to having invented the notion of Stakeholder Capitalism a product of Schwab.
Klaus Schwab is little more than a slick PR agent for a global technocratic agenda, a corporatist unity of corporate power with government, including the UN, an agenda whose origins go back to the beginning of the 1970s, and even earlier. The Davos Great reset is merely an updated blueprint for a global dystopian dictatorship under UN control that has been decades in development. The key actors were David Rockefeller and his protégé, Maurice Strong.
In the beginning of the 1970s, there was arguably no one person more influential in world politics than the late David Rockefeller, then largely known as chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank.
Creating the new paradigm
At the end of the 1960s and into the early 1970s, the international circles directly tied to David Rockefeller launched a dazzling array of elite organizations and think tanks. These included The Club of Rome; the 1001: A Nature Trust, tied to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF); the Stockholm United Nations Earth Day conference; the MIT-authored study, Limits to Growth; and David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission.
Club of Rome
In 1968 David Rockefeller founded a neo-Malthusian think tank, The Club of Rome, along with Aurelio Peccei and Alexander King. Aurelio Peccei, was a senior manager of the Fiat car company, owned by the powerful Italian Agnelli family. Fiat’s Gianni Agnelli was an intimate friend of David Rockefeller and a member of the International Advisory Committee of Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank. Agnelli and David Rockefeller had been close friends since 1957. Agnelli became a founding member of David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission in 1973. Alexander King, head of the OECD Science Program was also a consultant to NATO. [i] That was the beginning of what would become the neo-Malthusian “people pollute” movement.
In 1971 the Club of Rome published a deeply-flawed report, Limits to Growth, which predicted an end to civilization as we knew it because of rapid population growth, combined with fixed resources such as oil. The report concluded that without substantial changes in resource consumption, “the most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.”
It was based on bogus computer simulations by a group of MIT computer scientists. It stated the bold prediction, “If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years.” That was 1971. In 1973 Klaus Schwab in his third annual Davos business leader meeting invited Peccei to Davos to present Limits to Growth to assembled corporate CEOs. [ii]
In 1974, the Club of Rome declared boldly, “The Earth has cancer and the cancer is Man.” Then: “the world is facing an unprecedented set of interlocking global problems, such as, over-population, food shortages, non-renewable resource [oil-w.e.] depletion, environmental degradation and poor governance.” [iii] They argued that,
‘horizontal’ restructuring of the world system is needed… drastic changes in the norm stratum – that is, in the value system and the goals of man – are necessary in order to solve energy, food, and other crises, i.e., social changes and changes in individual attitudes are needed if the transition to organic growth is to take place. [iv]
In their 1974 report, Mankind at the Turning Point, The Club of Rome further argued:
Increasing interdependence between nations and regions must then translate as a decrease in independence. Nations cannot be interdependent without each of them giving up some of, or at least acknowledging limits to, its own independence. Now is the time to draw up a master plan for organic sustainable growth and world development based on global allocation of all finite resources and a new global economic system. [v]
That was the early formulation of the UN Agenda 21, Agenda2030 and the 2020 Davos Great Reset.
David Rockefeller and Maurice Strong
By far the most influential organizer of Rockefeller’s ‘zero growth’ agenda in the early 1970s was David Rockefeller’s longtime friend, a billionaire oilman named Maurice Strong.
Canadian Maurice Strong was one of the key early propagators of the scientifically flawed theory that man-made CO2 emissions from transportation vehicles, coal plants and agriculture caused a dramatic and accelerating global temperature rise which threatens “the planet”, so-called Global Warming.
As chairman of the 1972 Earth Day UN Stockholm Conference, Strong promoted an agenda of population reduction and lowering of living standards around the world to “save the environment.”
Strong stated his radical ecologist agenda:
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” [vi]
This is what is now taking place under cover of a hyped global pandemic.
Strong was a curious choice to head a major UN initiative to mobilize action on the environment, as his career and his considerable fortune had been built on exploitation of oil, like an unusual number of the new advocates of ‘ecological purity,’ such as David Rockefeller or Robert O. Anderson of Aspen Institute or Shell’s John Loudon.
Strong had met David Rockefeller in 1947 as a young Canadian eighteen and from that point, his career became tied to the network of the Rockefeller family.[vii] Through his new friendship with David Rockefeller, Strong, at age 18, was given a key UN position under UN Treasurer, Noah Monod. The UN’s funds were conveniently enough handled by Rockefeller’s Chase Bank. This was typical of the model of “public-private partnership” to be deployed by Strong—private gain from public government. [viii]
In the 1960s Strong had become president of the huge Montreal energy conglomerate and oil company known as Power Corporation, then owned by the influential Paul Desmarais. Power Corporation was reportedly also used as a political slush fund to finance campaigns of select Canadian politicians such as Pierre Trudeau, father of Davos protégé Justin Trudeau, according to Canadian investigative researcher, Elaine Dewar. [ix]
Earth Summit I and Rio Earth Summit
By 1971 Strong was named Undersecretary of the United Nations in New York and Secretary General of the upcoming Earth Day conference, United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (Earth Summit I) in Stockholm, Sweden. He was also named that year as a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation – which financed his launch of the Stockholm Earth Day project.[x] In Stockholm the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) was created with Strong as its head.
By 1989 Strong was named by the UN Secretary General to head the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development or UNCED (“Rio Earth Summit II”). He oversaw the drafting of the UN “Sustainable Environment” goals there, the Agenda 21 for Sustainable Development that forms the basis of Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset, as well as creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the UN. Strong, who was also a board member of Davos WEF, had arranged for Schwab to serve as a key adviser to the Rio Earth Summit.
As Secretary General of the UN Rio Conference, Strong also commissioned a report from the Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution, authored by Alexander King which admitted that the CO2 global warming claim was merely an invented ruse to force change:
“The common enemy of humanity is man.In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome.The real enemy then, is humanity itself.” [xi]
President Clinton’s delegate to Rio, Tim Wirth, admitted the same, stating,
“We have got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.” [xii]
At Rio Strong first introduced the manipulative idea of “sustainable society” defined in relation this arbitrary goal of eliminating CO2 and other so-called Greenhouse Gases. Agenda 21 became Agenda 2030 in Sept 2015 in Rome, with the Pope’s blessing, with 17 “sustainable” goals. It declared among other items,
“Land, because of its unique nature and the crucial role it plays in human settlement, cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market. Private land ownership also is a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth and therefore contributes to social injustice… Social justice, urban renewal, and development, the provision of decent dwellings and healthy conditions for the people can only ‘be achieved if land is used in the interests of society as a whole.”
In short private land ownership must become socialized for “society as a whole,” an idea well-known in Soviet Union days, and a key part of the Davos Great Reset.
At Rio in 1992 where he was chairman and General Secretary, Strong declared:
“It is clear that current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class— involving high meat intake, consumption of large amounts frozen and convenience foods, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and work place air-conditioning, and suburban housing — are not sustainable.” [xiii] (emphasis added)
By that time Strong was at the very center of the transformation of the UN into the vehicle for imposing a new global technocratic “paradigm” by stealth, using dire warnings of planet extinction and global warming, merging government agencies with corporate power in an unelected control of pretty much everything, under the cover of “sustainability.” In 1997 Strong oversaw creation of the action plan following the Earth Summit, The Global Diversity Assessment, a blueprint for the roll out of a Fourth Industrial Revolution, an inventory of every resource on the planet, how it would be controlled , and how this revolution would be achieved.[xiv]
At this time Strong was co-chairman of Klaus Schwab’s Davos World Economic Forum. In 2015 on Strong’s death, Davos founder Klaus Schwab wrote,
“He was my mentor since the creation of the Forum: a great friend; an indispensable advisor; and, for many years, a member of our Foundation Board.” [xv]
Before he was left UN over an Iraq Food-for-Oil corruption scandal, Strong was member of the Club of Rome, Trustee of the Aspen Institute, Trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation and Rothschild Foundation. Strong was also a director of the Temple of Understanding of the Lucifer Trust (aka Lucis Trust) housed at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City,
“where pagan rituals include escorting sheep and cattle to the alter for blessing. Here, Vice President Al Gore delivered a sermon, as worshippers marched to the altar with bowls of compost and worms…” [xvi]
This is the dark origin of Schwab’s Great Reset agenda where we should eat worms and have no private property in order to “save the planet.” The agenda is dark, dystopian and meant to eliminate billions of us “ordinary humans.”
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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
Notes
[i] Biographies of 1001 Nature Trust members, Gianni Agnelli, accessed in http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/sociopol_1001club02.htm
[ii] Klaus Schwab, The World Economic Forum: A Partner in Shaping History–The First 40 Years: 1971 – 2010, 2009, World Economic Forum, p. 15, https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_First40Years_Book_2010.pdf
[iii] Quoted from Club of Rome Report, Mankind at the Turning Point, 1974, cited in http://www.greenagenda.com/turningpoint.html
[iv] Ibid.
[v] The Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point, 1974, quoted in Brent Jessop, Mankind at the Turning Point – Part 2 – Creating A One World Consciousness, accessed in http://www.wiseupjournal.com/?p=154
[vi] Maurice Strong, Opening Speech to UN Rio Earth Summit, Rio de Janeiro, 1992, accessed in http://www.infowars.com/maurice-strong-in-1972-isnt-it-our-responsibility-to-collapse-industrial-societies/
[vii] Elaine Dewar, Cloak of Green: The Links between key environmental groups, government and big business, Toronto, James Lorimer & Co., 1995, pp. 259-265.
[viii] Brian Akira, LUCIFER’S UNITED NATIONS, http://www.fourwinds10.com/siterun_data/religion_cults/news.php?q=1249755048
[ix] Elaine Dewar, op cit. p. 269-271.
[x] Ibid., p. 277.
[xi] What is Agenda 21/2030 Who’s behind it ? Introduction, https://sandiadams.net/what-is-agenda-21-introduction-history/
[xii] Larry Bell, Agenda 21: The U.N.’s Earth Summit Has Its Head In The Clouds, Forbes, June 14, 2011, https://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2011/06/14/the-u-n-s-earth-summit-has-its-head-in-the-clouds/?sh=5af856a687ca
[xiii] John Izzard, Maurice Strong , Climate Crook, 2 December, 2015, https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2015/12/discovering-maurice-strong/
[xiv] What is Agenda 21/2030 Who’s behind it ? Introduction, https://sandiadams.net/what-is-agenda-21-introduction-history/
[xv] Maurice Strong An Appreciation by Klaus Schwab, 2015, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/11/maurice-strong-an-appreciation
[xvi] Dr. Eric T. Karlstrom, The UN, Maurice Strong, Crestone/Baca, CO, and the “New World Religion”, September 2017, https://naturalclimatechange.org/new-world-religion/part-i/
The EU’s energy security now rests in Turkey’s hands
Europe has sought to bypass Russian gas with disastrous results. Turkey is set to reap the benefits.
By Karin Kneissl | The Cradle | October 24 2022
“Geography is the constant of history,” is a quote attributed to the German statesman Otto von Bismarck. Today, those words ring true as we witness geography altering global politics, finance, and alliances.
The geostrategic importance of Turkey has rarely been as clear to European politicians as it has been in recent months, as the continent grapples with a burgeoning energy crisis this coming winter.
Whether it is grain exports from the Black Sea region or the flow of energy supplies from the eastern producing countries, the Bosphorus and the links to Eurasia are once again playing a decisive geopolitical role, as they so often have throughout history. The fact is, Turkey is now crucial for the security of Europe.
Pipeline politics
On the occasion of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s meeting with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Sochi at the beginning of August 2022, the focus was mainly on bilateral cooperation in energy matters.
Putin told journalists after the tete-a-tete that Europeans should be grateful to Ankara for its gas supplies due to the reliability of the TurkStream pipeline.
Last year, Russian natural gas accounted for around 45 percent of European gas imports. But that share has fallen to less than 10 percent after supplies were halted via the eastbound Yamal-Europe pipeline and suspected US-backed operatives blew up Nord Stream, which also curtailed exports via Ukraine.
The Russian-Turkish TurkStream gas pipeline project was announced in December 2014 after Moscow realized that the long-planned SouthStream project – meant to deliver Russian natural gas via the Black Sea directly to European Union (EU) member state Bulgaria – was not feasible.
Russian energy giant Gazprom and the Italian energy company ENI were the main partners in the consortium. However, following the Crimean crisis in March 2014, the EU Commission blocked this major infrastructure project, citing competition rules.
As far as Moscow was concerned, this arrangement had already been completed in the form of terminals and pipeline routes. Thousands of work contracts had been issued between Bulgaria and Hungary at the time.
Construction was scheduled to begin in June 2014, but Brussels alluded to apparent violations of competition rules in the awarding of contracts by the Bulgarian authorities and brought everything to a halt.
Turkey as a Russian energy hub
Nine months later, during a joint press conference with Erdogan in Ankara, Putin remarked that “If Europe does not want to carry it out, then it will not be carried out.” Putin then announced the TurkStream project, which was formally launched in early 2020.
One pandemic and a war later, the world has experienced and continues to experience rising natural gas prices, while Russian-Turkish energy cooperation is intensifying. On 19 October, Erdogan said he had agreed with Putin to set up a comprehensive hub for Russian natural gas built in Turkey from where Europe could meet its energy needs.
“If Turkey and our potential buyers are interested, we could consider building another gas pipeline and creating a gas hub in Turkey for sale to third countries, especially in Europe,” Putin proposed. In addition, a gas exchange could also be created in Turkey to determine prices, he added.
Neither the EU nor the US have welcomed these developments or, in some cases, faits accomplis. Turkey makes no secret of the fact that it wants to expand its status in the China-led Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and will probably soon become the tenth member of this important regional organization.
It should be noted that the SCO’s statutes stipulate energy and security – especially the fight against terrorism – as its essential agenda. The EU, it must be said, is only just discovering the importance of these issues.
Attempts to bypass Russian gas
In the recent past, governments and energy companies have looked to Turkey as an alternative to the existing transit routes for oil and gas between the east and west. In 2005, the 1750 km long Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline was opened, transporting Caspian oil across the Caucasus to the Turkish Mediterranean port.
Crucially, this route had the backing of Washington, reinforcing the close connection between politics and the oil business. As per an apt saying from the early 20th century US oil industry: “The oil business is too important to leave it to the oil people.”
The Nabucco pipeline project, intended to reduce Europe’s reliance on Russia’s gas, consisted of a consortium of six corporations based on the initiative of the Austrian partly state-owned OMV. The project was supported politically and financially by the European Commission, with the premise being that natural gas would be supplied from the Caspian region via Turkey to Central Europe to the Baumgarten hub in Austria.
Billions were spent on marketing this project between 2002 and 2014. However contractual agreements surrounding the deal never materialized. Though inconceivable now, Iran was also initially planned as an alternative supplier, yet these efforts failed from 2005 onwards due to UN Security Council sanctions on Iran from 2008 until the present.
Additionally, supply contracts with Iraq and Turkmenistan were targeted in vain, although these arguably had a lot to do with complete mismanagement. In the case of Turkmenistan, countless advisory opinions were commissioned on the status of the Caspian Sea under international law, sea, or lake, and the possible transit pipelines for landlocked Turkmenistan.
A failed strategy
After many years of mere marketing and a lot of hot air between Brussels and Vienna around the Nabucco project, OMV’s partners finally backed out in 2014. It was clear that there was no natural gas available.
In my book “Der Energiepoker” (The Energy Poker) I wrote in 2006: “If the managers had not gone to the State Opera to see Verdi’s Nabucco, but had seen the operetta by Johann Strauss “Wiener Blut” (Viennese Blood), then this natural gas pipeline would have been given a more appropriate name.
Now, in view of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline boycotted by the EU, OMV is facing further setbacks, as the contracts with take-or-pay clauses were drafted in such a way that payment would have to be made for the Russian natural gas, even if there was no physical delivery. These conditions apparently apply until 2040.
EU will buy Russian energy indirectly
While the EU wants to bypass Russian energy sources for political reasons, Turkey, India, and China, among others, will gladly fill in the consumer void. As described, Turkey already benefited in 2014 from the SouthStream project, which became TurkStream. The EU ultimately lost out, while Ankara stood to gain, with the EU presently buying Russian natural gas via Turkey.
This energy route is set to expand even further once the Russian natural gas hub in Turkey is established. Turkey thus becomes the safeguard of the EU’s energy security. While this was the case a few years ago with non-Russian natural gas and oil, it now looks as if Russia is merely adapting its role for the European market on a regional basis.
For some years, Ankara aligned its prospective role as a hub for BTC and the Nabucco project with its EU accession ambitions. Now it seems that Turkey will become a member of the SCO much faster, and despite its NATO membership, part of the security cooperation with Russia and China.
The EU is more dependent than ever on the goodwill of those it once created obstacles for, and Turkey and Russia are no exception. The coming months will show with all their force just how irresponsibly the EU governments handled the continent’s energy security needs.
Ukrainian Army War Crimes Include Shelling of Ambulances, Firetrucks, and Rescue Workers in the Donbass Republics — Similar to Israelis and U.S. Backed Terrorists in Syria
By Eva Bartlett | CovertAction Magazine | September 23, 2022
In the more than eight years of bombing the civilians of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, Ukraine has committed untold numbers of war crimes. These include bombing residential areas, markets, hospitals, schools, parks—including with prohibited heavy weapons and banned cluster munitions—and, since late July, raining banned “Petal” mines down on populated civilian areas, including the very center of Donetsk, including as recently as September 7.
A lesser-known war crime is Ukraine’s routine targeting of ambulances, fire trucks, medics and rescuers, and their headquarters and stations. Many of the times Ukraine bombs such heroic rescuers, it is when they are on the way, or already on site, to help civilians often themselves just bombed by Ukraine.
On August 21, Ukrainian shelling of the DPR’s Gorlovka wounded twelve, including five firefighters.
The day prior, Ukrainian shelling targeted an ambulance station in the LPR’s Lysychansk, wounding several and damaging some of the ambulances.
On June 23, the Kievskiy District of Donetsk came under repeated shelling over the course of the two hours I was visiting the Emergency Services headquarters there. On the grounds, I saw the remnants of a “Hurricane” missile from a previous Ukrainian attack.
The previous day, Ukrainian forces targeted an Emergency Services fire truck on call, leaving the driver hospitalized in critical condition. According to his colleagues, they saw a drone above them just prior to Ukraine’s strike. The targeting was unquestionably deliberate.
On June 18, Ukraine targeted a central Donetsk district after Emergency Services had arrived, killing a firefighter and the driver, and injuring three more rescuers.
In early June, heavy Ukrainian shelling of Kuibyshevsky District, Donetsk, destroyed an ambulance and seriously injured the driver.
Ukraine’s attacks on emergency workers is not new; Ukraine has been doing so for years.
In June 2021, during a humanitarian cease-fire, Ukrainian forces targeted an ambulance which had arrived to evacuate three injured DPR soldiers.
In October 2019, Ukrainian forces fired an anti-tank guided missile at a DPR military ambulance en route to help a child, wounding the driver and a paramedic.
In August 2018, Ukrainian forces fired a missile at a DPR ambulance, killing the driver and two female paramedics.
When I first visited the DPR in September 2019, going to hard-hit areas around Gorlovka, I was told by Zaitsevo administration that ambulances could not reach the villagers.
“The paramedics don’t go farther than this building; it’s too dangerous. If somebody needs medical care near the front lines, someone has to go in their own car and take them to a point where medics can then take them to Gorlovka. The soldiers also help civilians who are injured.”
This is something I was very familiar with in Gaza, occupied Palestine, where Israeli soldiers routinely fire at Palestinian farmers and other laborers on agricultural land, a policy of harassment to drive Palestinians off their land. In most cases, ambulances likewise could not reach the injured due to Israel’s policy of targeting ambulances. Consequently, seriously injured Palestinians bleed to death.
In Zaitsevo, I was told this had happened there, too. “A woman died due to huge blood loss because no one could reach her house to take her away in time. She was injured in the shelling and bled to death.”
Targeting medics and other rescuers ensures those in need of help are deprived of it, and increases the likelihood that people who might have lived instead die of their injuries.
The intentional targeting of ambulances and medics, as well as fire trucks and other emergency services vehicles and workers, is against international law.
Speaking to DPR Rescuers
During my last two visits to the DPR, in June and August 2022, I interviewed a number of Emergency Services workers and medics.
According to Konstantin Zhukov, the Chief Medical Officer of Donetsk Ambulance Services, the ambulance services workers face shelling daily, constantly, and many employees have been wounded while working. One of the ambulance stations was completely destroyed by Ukrainian shelling.
Outside, I spoke with Tatyana Golota, an emergency physician, and Alena Kondrasheva, a paramedic.
Both reiterated that it is normal coming under repeated Ukrainian fire. They spoke of Ukraine shelling after medics and emergency services workers had arrived to help civilians.
They showed me an ambulance completely destroyed by Ukrainian shelling. It was new and had only been operational a few months before being destroyed.
“That day we were at work and heard about the brigade coming under fire. The doctor had gone to help people, and the driver, by chance, walked away to try to get a mobile signal. At that moment, there was a direct hit on the vehicle.”
Also in Donetsk, I spoke with Sergei Neka, Director of the Department of Fire and Rescue Forces of the Ministry of Emergency Situations.
He likewise said rescuers increasingly come under fire when they go out on a call, sometimes making it impossible to reach the people in need.
According to him, from February 24, 2022, to when I spoke with him in August, four people were killed and 40 injured, as well as significant damage to equipment and buildings.
“Our units arrive at the scene of the accident and Ukraine begins to shell it. A lot of equipment has been damaged and destroyed.”
I asked about the impact of the “Petal” mines Ukraine has been dropping on the city, and was told a 21-year-old employee was injured by a PFM-1S mine after a region was cleared, the mine falling from the building and the unsuspecting rescuer stepping on it, losing his foot.
In Makeevka, just east of Donetsk, I went to an orphanage that had been shelled with the mines. Most of the clean-up was completed by the time I arrived on the second day of de-mining, but one remained. I watched a sapper find and detonate it, and although I had previously seen a group of eight mines detonated, creating a massive blast, the force of the single mine was still quite powerful.
According to Dmitry Chamota, Head of Donetsk Emergency Services Deminers, they found 26 PFM-1 mines scattered around the grounds of the orphanage, including on the playground.
In June, I met Andrey Levchenko, Chief of Kievskiy District Emergency Ministry. Over the course of the two hours at his station, Ukraine was intensively shelling the district, leading us to take cover inside the building lest the property be targeted again.
We did venture outside between bouts of shelling, where Levchenko pointed out damage to the buildings and the shell of the Ukrainian-fired Hurricane MLRS which struck the premises.
The building has blown out windows, sandbagged windows to attempt to protect the workers; some days prior, the chief’s office had been damaged by shrapnel from the shelling. Thankfully, he had just stepped out a minute before the blast.
He showed me the fire truck damaged on June 22, pointing out the many shrapnel holes and noting one of the rear tires had been blown out.
Two of the employees who had been out on that call spoke to me about that day, saying that, after Ukrainian shelling of the district, they received a call that people were trapped inside a building with the door blocked after the shelling. A fire was spreading to the second and third floors, and that people were unable to escape. As the rescuers assessed the situation, a shell hit a wall near the truck and wounded the driver.
They said that, prior to the shelling, they saw a drone overhead. This, combined with the facts that they were uniformed and the fire truck was clearly marked and in a civilian area where people were calling for help, makes it credible to believe Ukraine deliberately targeted the rescuers.
Of Ukraine’s heightened shelling over the past many months, Levchenko said it was constant and daily. “Before, if we speak about 2014-2015, twenty minutes, one hour maximum. Now six-seven hours non-stop, every day.”
He said that the Ukrainian forces shell, wait until rescuers arrive and then shell again. “They wait for 30 minutes for us to arrive. We arrive there, start assisting people, and the shelling resumes.”
This is something I witnessed for myself when, on August 4, Ukraine bombed the hotel in which I was staying, the fourth and fifth shells landing 50 meters away and then directly beside the hotel, respectively. When the fifth struck, shattering inwards the lobby glass doors, I had fortunately just stepped out of the lobby where 30 seconds earlier I had been speaking to journalists who had run in from the street.
When it seemed the shelling had stopped, journalists went outside to document the damage. Sadly, a young woman outside the hotel had been killed by the shelling. Five others just two streets away were also torn apart by the bombs, including a promising 12-year-old ballerina, her grandmother, and her world famous former ballerina ballet teacher.
Galina Vasilyevna Volodina (left), and twelve-year-old Katya Kutubaeva, the ballerina killed by Ukraine. [Source: slippedisc.com]
Emergency Services arrived and, not long after, Ukraine resumed its shelling. Fortunately, they were able to get inside, but this is just one example of Ukraine’s double strikes.
According to Levchenko, Ukraine does not only shell two times, but that they sometimes shell three times: “They wait again, our guys hide in the shelters, as soon as we go out, put out the fire, help people, there could be people under the debris, doors stuck, people can’t get out and get to the basement…then shelling resumes.”
He described the people engaging in this sort of warfare against civilians and rescuers as “Shameless. Scumbags. Terrorists.”
He is not wrong.
Targeting Rescuers: A Terrorist Tactic Adopted by U.S. Allies in Ukraine, Israel and Syria
As the DPR Emergency Services chief pointed out damage to the fire truck, I was reminded of Israel’s attacks on Palestinian medics and fire brigades in Gaza, including during the December 27, 2008-January 18, 2009, Israeli war on Gaza, where I was living at the time.
During those three weeks, I rode in the medics’ ambulances, documenting the destruction and the victims of Israel’s war crimes, but also in a sense as a human shield, in the hope that Israel would not strike ambulances in which a handful of internationals and I were riding.
As it turned out, by the end of the Israeli massacre of Gaza, Israeli forces killed 16 medical rescuers, four in one day alone. Another 57 were injured. At least 16 ambulances were damaged, with at least nine completely destroyed.
One of the murdered was a 35-year-old paramedic, Arafa Abd al-Dayem, who I had accompanied the night prior to his murder. As I wrote of that evening, “The dead, a 24-year-old night watchman, had no warning of the at least 2 missiles which leveled the school and tore him apart. The medics work to load the corpse, first having to replace the flat tire. Working frantically, still fearful of potential strikes, they crowd the ambulance, hoist the van, replace the flat. A missile hits 50 meters away. Surely, undoubtedly, those warplanes above us know—from the markings of the ambulance, the clothes of the medics, the crystal clear photos their drones can take—that we are civilians and medics below. Yet they fire.”
Arafa was killed later that day, when Israeli forces fired a flechette shell directly at his ambulance, shredding him with the dart-like flechettes, causing massive internal bleeding in his abdomen, blood in his lung, shock, and death.
A surgeon I interviewed later when writing about Israel’s widespread use of flechettes in Gaza told me that flechettes cause more injuries than other small munitions precisely because they spread in a larger area. And while the darts appear innocuously small, their velocity and design enable them to bore through cement and bones and “cut everything internal.” Accordingly, the prime cause of death is severe internal bleeding from slashed organs, particularly the heart, liver and brain.
One of the injured, Hassan al-Attal, 35, was a medic whose ambulance I was in when he and another medic came under Israeli sniper fire while attempting to retrieve a corpse from the street just beyond the ambulance. The sniper fire reached the ambulance itself. Hassan was wounded in the leg. This was during a few hours of supposed cease-fire. But in any case, the medics never should have been targeted.
As I wrote, “Although the Geneva Conventions explicitly state that ‘medical personnel searching, collecting, transporting or treating the wounded should be protected and respected in all circumstances,’ throughout Israel’s invasion this was not the case. Indeed, as the injured and emergency workers testify, Israeli forces targeted and prevented medical workers from reaching the wounded.
Without coordination, many ambulances did not dare risk Israeli gunfire and shelling, meaning hundreds of calls went unanswered, according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. Denied medical care, many victims succumbed to their wounds.”
Israeli forces killed 13 Civil Defense workers and injured 31, also destroyed six civil defense stations and damaging four.
From that same article, “Civil Defense workers, like medics, are protected under international law. The Fourth Geneva Convention states not only that emergency workers must be respected and allowed to do their work, but that their buildings, equipment and vehicles must not be targeted.
Yousef al-Zahar, director-general of Civil Defense in Gaza, told me at the time, ‘Targeting the Civil Defense centers and teams is an obvious indicator that the Israeli forces intended to paralyze Civil Defense activities in the Gaza Strip to raise civilian victims’ numbers in the casualties.’”
According to statistics from the Palestinian Authority Ministry of Health and the PRCS, from the outbreak of the second Intifada in September 2000 to when I wrote the 2010 article, Israeli Forces have killed at least 56 medical rescuers, including paramedics, drivers, doctors and volunteers—an average of one rescuer every two months—and have injured at least another 500 medical rescuers.
Likewise, British journalist Vanessa Beeley has written at length about Syrian rescuers targeted by terrorist factions in Syria, their equipment stolen. In one of her articles, she cited a Commanding Officer of the Real Syria Civil Defense in an Aleppo district describing a scenario which Donbas and Palestinian rescuers would recognize:
“They (terrorists) targeted us deliberately in order to destroy our equipment & structures. They wanted to prevent us being able to work for our people. They would target our crew with sniper fire and explosive bullets. Their main mission was to kill the crew and destroy our base so we couldn’t care for the people of Aleppo.”
In that same article, she noted that “terrorist groups systematically carried out double-tap attacks” on the rescuers, just as Israel does to Palestinian rescuers and Ukraine to Donbas rescuers.
Ukraine Continues Killing Donbas Rescuers
On September 1, 13 DPR Emergency workers were killed and 9 injured from Ukrainian shelling. According to a representative of the Emergency Situations, the shelling was intentional.
“The missiles exactly hit residential buildings. The vehicle was outside and it was hit with shrapnel and pieces of the destroyed building. But again, you can see it’s an emergency vehicle—a fire vehicle. This is a war crime.”
The following day, two more Emergency Services workers were killed and two injured by Ukrainian shelling of their fire truck, in Makeevka. They were en route to put out a fire. Images accompanying the news show a mangled bright red fire truck, unmistakably a rescue services vehicle.
When in August I spoke with the Director of the Donetsk Department of Fire and Rescue of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, he told me that, at that time, four Emergency Services workers had been killed and 40 injured by Ukrainian shelling.
With Ukraine’s targeting of Emergency Services in September, the number of rescuers Ukraine has killed is now at least 19, with another 51 injured.
I had the chance to speak with the mother of a young firefighter, Pavel (“Pasha”) Legonkiy, killed by Ukrainian shelling on June 18, 2022. He and other Emergency Services personnel had gone to the site of a Ukrainian shelling, in central Donetsk. A Ukrainian double-tap strike killed Pasha and the driver, injuring three others.
Svetlana spoke proudly of her courageous, compassionate son.
“He loved his work very much. He lived for this work. It was his duty to help people. My son dreamed of starting a family, dreamed of having children, dreamed of working! And one shell that you sent here ended his life.”
These men and women know very well the threats they face when going out on a call, but go anyway, to help their citizens under Ukrainian attacks.
The two women I spoke to at Donetsk Ambulance Services replied to my question about whether they considered stopping their work.
“I’m really scared, everyone is scared. But what can we do? How about the patients? They are people like me, they hurt and are even more scared. They are waiting for our help. While you are driving you feel fear, but as soon as you get to the place of the tragedy, the fear goes away and you just start doing your job and forget about this fear.”
The Kievskiy Emergency Ministry Chief, Andrey Levchenko, said of the rescuers, “They are all heroes. If it were possible, I would give a medal to every one of them, to honor their work, to support them. But they don’t do that for the medals, no way. Nobody ever said, ‘we’re not going, we don’t want to,’” he said, referring to when rescuers go out on calls.
He is right. These rescuers are heroes, putting their lives on the line every time they go out to help a person in need, knowing full well Ukraine frequently strikes an area a second and a third time, specifically to target rescuers. While they might not receive or want medals, they should be afforded their right under international law to rescue people without fear of being shelled by Ukraine.
How Worried Should We Be About Boston University’s Gain-of-Function Covid Virus That Kills 80% of Mice?
BY DR RANDALL BOCK | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | OCTOBER 23, 2022
This week, Boston University found itself at the centre of scorn over claims its laboratories were engineering a “SARS-CoV-3” virus that would (hypothetically) put humanity one lab-leak away from a renewed Covid pandemic.
In the midst of worldwide relief over SARS-CoV-2’s eventual replacement by the mild, ‘common cold’ Omicron variant, BU’s scientists have created de novo an “Omicron S-bearing virus”, potentially marrying Omicron’s transmissibility with the Wuhan strain’s dangerous pathogenicity.
Boston University leadership should not be shocked by the widespread condemnation of this experiment. It has its own hubris to blame: steamrolling neighbourhood opposition to the urban placement of America’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL), through which BU amasses lucrative research grants. As the philosopher Spider-Man has said, “with great power, there must also come great responsibility.”
In this case, BU exhibits power, but avoids responsibility. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is examining whether these experiments should have triggered a federal review as ‘gain of function’ with SARS CoV-2’s gaining new or enhanced abilities, which NIH deems “inherently risky”. Boston University says it “did not have an obligation to disclose this research”, despite having received federal NIAID funding which BU states was only for “tools and platforms” used by the scientists.
“We take our safety and security of how we handle pathogens seriously, and the virus does not leave the laboratory,” noted NEIDL’s Dr. Ronald Corley. Cynics might point out that as recently as 2018, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) touted that its work “held the secret to preventing epidemics”. NEIDL has (probably) released fewer unintentional pandemics than WIV, so there’s that.
NEIDL can be seen as either a bulwark against – or conversely, a conduit for – bioterrorism. NEIDL houses the Level-3 Biosafety Lab (BSL-3) of this trans-viral graft experiment as well as one of the rare US BSL-4 laboratories, intended for studying the deadliest transmissible diseases, such as Ebola.
Lab-coat scientist researchers are not selected or rewarded for political acumen, nor should they be. Actual wet-lab work often embodies the phrase by which physicians tease anesthesiologists: “99% boredom and 1% panic” – but, without the panic. Instead, researchers have their 1%-portion comprised of the brief, refreshing glory on the occasion of publishing consequential results – the news of which usually stays within a small coterie of PhDs cognisant of the technical ‘twin-speak‘ pertinent to the narrow focus of the experiment performed.
Upending the news cycle, bringing fear and then furor to a Covid-weary populace, and a posse of paparazzi upon itself is not the usual modus operandi of researchers releasing a preprint dryly titled (as they often are): “Role of spike in the pathogenic and antigenic behavior of SARS-CoV-2 BA.12 Omicron“. Boston University’s Mohsan Saeed (et al.) ‘buried the lede‘ by not communicating clearly having formed a SARS-CoV-2 mutant through chimeric graft of Omicron spike onto SARS CoV-2.
The researchers’ insularity is evident in their not predicting that producing novel camouflage for the pandemic’s perpetrator would be sufficient cause for all hell to break loose. Given Dr. Saeed’s interim disappearance from the scene, it is assumed notoriety was not the researchers’ actual intent. His additional lack of communicating the societal need for a rejiggering of COVID-19 spare parts into a new mutant strain is its own problem.
NIAID says that the BU should have communicated in advance the purpose and nature of the study. BU responds that it did not have to because the primary funds were from BU itself. Medical ethicist Dr. Arthur Caplan says, “the entire research community would benefit from better communication.” Perhaps even earlier “better communication” might have obviated the experiment itself.
By focusing so intently within the micro-world, it’s perhaps forgivable virologists lose sense of the macro. Conversely, the general public has earned every right to be twitchy and tetchy over ‘gain of function’ engineered augmentations to SARS-CoV-2 after the many millions of excess deaths following what many suspect was a Wuhan lab leak.
The Daily Mail’s story headlined “‘This is playing with fire – it could spark a lab-generated pandemic’” had this graphic stating the mutant strain has an 80% kill rate.
Sensationalism definitionally entails shocking language at the expense of accuracy. Corrections are therefore in order:
- Yes, this lab is performing a ‘Frankenstein’s monster’ experiment: putting Omicron’s spike protein (head) on ancestral SARS CoV-2’s envelope (body) – but, this is the standard operating procedure for virologists. Chimeric work allows comparisons to be made gauging the relative strength or pathogenicity of individual virion segments.
- Yes, this is a brand-new ‘deadly strain’ – but for a particularly and purposefully vulnerable strain of mice, not for humans. The new ‘Frankenstein’ Omicron-spike-and-Wuhan-body chimeric coronavirus caused 80% of hACE-2 lab mice to die – fewer, actually, than had perished from the ancestral Wuhan SARS-CoV-2 itself. For better or worse, these mice have been specifically genetically engineered to have 100% fatality to SARS-CoV-2. If the mice instead replicated human’s very low fatality rate against this virus (less than 0.1% in the non-vulnerable), it would be nigh impossible to make any statistically significant judgements in any experiment unless multi-thousands of mice were included in every phase.
This specific type of work was performed in an appropriate BSL-3 laboratory, and was technically legal even though it encompassed ‘gain of function‘ work. There had been a moratorium in the mid-2010s on such potentially dangerous work within the United States, but that was repealed in 2017. The rationale for reversing the moratorium was similar to that of any military’s maintaining and testing weaponry and engaging in wargames: “Researchers deliberately make viruses more dangerous to help prepare better responses to outbreaks that might occur naturally.”
Ostensibly, the moratorium was lifted to keep us safe; however, it was instituted for the very same reason, in 2014, to curtail scientists’ juicing up avian flu.
In 2011, Fouchier and Kawaoka alarmed the world by revealing they had modified the deadly avian H5N1 influenza virus so that it spread between ferrets (animals used for their similarity to humans’ influenza response). Critics worried a souped-up virus could spark a pandemic if it escaped from a lab (accidentally or as bioterror).
The flip-flopping in allowing gain of function research points to the dual needs in relation to such cutting edge science. Even as the moratorium was lifted, there were rules about the flow of information on gain of function experiments. Open communication is a prerequisite to scientific innovation but also can provide ready blueprints for any intrepid bioterrorist. An additional complication is that almost every study in the U.S. receives federal funds, creating a loophole of having to divulge sensitive results through any given FOIA request.
It is uncertain if BU’s newly chimeric COVID-19 mutant could qualify as a bio threat. Personally, I think not. Almost every one of its mutations is less efficacious than the parent. Viruses go through trillions in order to adapt sequentially to changing immune systems amongst the host. That researchers would come up with a highly dangerous one on the first try seems unlikely. In any event, there is vast natural immunity to Omicron and natural and vaccine immunity to ancestral SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19.
So what was the purpose of the BU NEIDL team? Since poor communication seems to be a threat throughout this story, it is perhaps no surprise that this preprint’s abstract section lacks clarity – and features instances of ‘begging the question (highlighted).
The recently identified, globally predominant SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant (BA.1) is highly transmissible, even in fully vaccinated individuals, and causes attenuated disease compared with other major viral variants recognised to date. The Omicron spike (S) protein, with an unusually large number of mutations, is considered the major driver of these phenotypes. We generated chimeric recombinant SARS-CoV-2 encoding the S gene of Omicron in the backbone of an ancestral SARS-CoV-2 isolate and compared this virus with the naturally circulating Omicron variant. The Omicron S-bearing virus robustly escapes vaccine-induced humoral immunity, mainly due to mutations in the receptor binding motif (RBM), yet unlike naturally occurring Omicron, efficiently replicates in cell lines and primary-like distal lung cells. In K18-hACE2 mice, while Omicron causes mild, non-fatal infection, the Omicron S-carrying virus inflicts severe disease with a mortality rate of 80%. This indicates that while the vaccine escape of Omicron is defined by mutations in S, major determinants of viral pathogenicity reside outside of S.
Let’s translate the abstract into general English:
Omicron is milder – and its spike protein is structurally different enough from the ancestral Wuhan strains that an mRNA vaccine to SARS CoV-2 does nothing to protect mice from Omicron. This is somewhat immaterial because Omicron doesn’t make these mice sick in the first place (basically the same situation as with humans). So, with research funding in hand, what are we going to do? Let’s put an Omicron ‘Halloween mask’ on the dangerous Wuhan strain! How many mice will die? A lot, nearly 80%. That’s sounds really bad, but we forgot to mention (in this abstract) that Wuhan strain without the Omicron-spike mask kills 100% of these mice, which sadly are canaries in a coal mine, engineered to die from SARS-CoV-2. Conclusion: the stuff inside the SARS-CoV-2 envelope is the really bad stuff. With its very own original spike protein it’s more dangerous, but what did we expect? We just made a virus that’s different from a fairly dangerous one and it’s not quite as dangerous.
Thus restated, it becomes difficult to ascertain the genuine need for doing this experiment (whose results seem obvious, predictable and axiomatic). Einstein favored Gedankenexperimente (‘thought experiments’) using conceptual rather than actual experiments in creating the theory of relativity. There’s nothing like the ‘real thing’, but I’m imagining 99% of virologists could have foreseen a conclusion similar to this without having done any of the study. Moreover, most would not have seen a real point in doing this study in the first place. Of course, getting paid and churning research grants can help provide motivation.
Even without the researchers’ having read my own article “Is it Time to Accept That Omicron is not COVID-19?” in The Daily Sceptic, September 25, 2022 – they should still have had enough information to know Omicron (despite its Greek letter) is not a SARS CoV-2 variant nor lineal genomic or genetic descendent. Such information was easily available January 2022. With this in mind, the highlighted portions make little sense and the purpose of the study even less.
One virologist offered these criticisms of the preprint’s study (in confidence):
- Why put Omicron S on a virus that is no longer circulating? I’m not sure what scientific question they are trying to answer.
- The grants that are cited for the work were meant to study innate immunity. They claim they want to study the role of spike protein in phenotype but they are not using the proper controls.
- It would have made more sense to have reversed the experiment, i.e., put the Wuhan spike on the Omicron envelope.
- Also, site-directed mutagenesis (creating specific, targeted changes) would have been a more useful technique, given that there are so many mutations in Omicron’s spike protein compared to earlier variants.
- The authors’ conclusion, “These findings indicate that the S protein is not the primary determinant of Omicron’s pathogenicity in K18-hACE2 mice,” should say that “S protein was not a primary determinant of Wuhan pathogenicity”.
- They actually [downwardly] attenuate the Wuhan strain by putting the Omicron-S onto that virus, yet try to sell it as if they had made the virus more lethal.
- Overall, they seem to really be studying Wuhan pathogenicity in the context of Omicron spike.
All products and methods of technology (e.g. nuclear power, mining, fossil fuels) are variously considered ‘double-edged swords’. So too it is with these studies. There are potential benefits and potential risks. In this particular case, were the risks worth it? Was the study appropriately directed and was the information gleaned worth the global consternation? The answer to both is ‘no’.
“It’s not like they made this monster virus, that’s a complete misinterpretation,” states infectious disease specialist Dr. Daniel Kuritzkes. “Researchers compared the ancestral version, Omicron, and a combined version of the two to research what piece of the virus dictates how sick a person will get. What we see in animal models does not translate directly to what we will see in humans. The labs are extraordinarily careful in how they do these experiments. There are strict protocols in place to make sure that nothing produced in the lab is released into the environment.”
My assessment is that this is more ‘tempest in a teapot’ than monster – although Dr. Frankenstein’s methods and ethical issues find resonance here. That there is a federal investigation into this case is interesting for the side reason that it seems an admission against its own interest, namely to the possibility that virology laboratories can potentially leak mutant strains. Who would’ve thought? For so long, it was all but forbidden to consider such a possibility for China’s WIV, even though ancillary evidence is nearly conclusive it occurred.
Dr. Randall Bock is a primary care physician near Boston, Massachusetts, and the author of Overturning Zika.
Repeal the National Childhood Vaccine Act of 1986
Good products do not need universal liability shields, but bad actors are enabled by them.
el gato malo – bad cattitude – october 22, 2022
much as been made about the possibility of schools mandating covid vaccinations for kids to be allowed to attend.
it may or may not happen. perhaps it will be treated like a flu shot. perhaps they’ll try for requirements. it’s likely to vary place to place and many states are already saying “no way” and if imposed this could cause flood of school change and really unleash the idea of vouchers and free choice and a swansong for public schools.
in the end, i’m not sure how many are crazy enough to try it and honestly, i doubt that any public school system in america could survive for long mandating this.
i doubt that this is really what the approval is about.
and that is a thing we need to fix.
longtime gatopal™ jennifer cabrera has a simple, common sense solution:
If the predicted red wave produces a strong Republican majority in Congress, one of their first acts should be to repeal the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986. No excuses, Republicans. Liability is the only mechanism that can produce safe vaccines.
because this law is an abomination.
it creates ALL the wrong incentives and has swollen the US pediatric vaccine schedule (which used to be 3 well tested vaxxes, MMR, DTP, polio) with ineffective or marginally effective crap lacking valid risk reward and possessing meaningful side effect tails.
the case for several (HPV, flu, rota, pneumococcal) is basically non-extant.
but hey, no liability, no need to worry.
interestingly, gardasil does not appear to have this coverage hence the mass of lawsuits.
stop me if this sounds familiar:
landing in court on this is not, perhaps “the system working” as this vaccine looks to have been approved and marketed on numerous false pretenses and perhaps outright fraud. but at least the system is cleaning up its mess after the fact and discouraging such behavior in the future.
and the covid vaccines put all the others in the shade in terms of corners cut and data looking dodgy. but if we shield them and other things like them from liability, where is the disincentive to act badly? (and if you just said “because the drug companies wouldn’t lie to us!” i have some denver harbor bonds to sell you.)
you can get around this exemption by pfinding phraud, but should this really be necessary (especially when they hide the data and thus could have all sorts of little gems in it that the public had not seen)?
so how about we end this harmful “safe harbor” instead?
there is NO good consumer protection reason for this act. it’s a license for pharma to misbehave and it eliminates accountability and incentive to test properly. if you want to jab your drugs into kids, you need to own the side effects.
if you fail to predict or disclose risks, you own the ill outcomes instantly and forever.
let them decide, on that basis, how many studies to do and for how long prior to release.
i would LOVE to see what a class action jury award for fraud in a child vaccine lawsuit looks like.
this is the reason we have a tort system.
let it work.
it’s really simple:
mandate + no liability = disaster and “soft mandates” are just as bad.
everyone passes the buck to claim “iT wUZ nEvER a MAnDatE!” when they know full well that it functionally was.
how many times did you see this?
you mandate, you own the side effects. simple, reasonable, and incentive aligning.
this is one we can easily do.
we made this law. it has had perverse, anti-consumer effects. so let’s unmake it.
no more liability waivers.
only voluntary informed consent to risk subject to strict disclosure liability. “oh, we never tested for that!” is no longer an excuse.
i am not saying you get to sue for any bad outcome. but if the risks were not disclosed or were misstated you can. if they did not look for fear of what might be found, they own that. the onus is on them to prove safety and delineate risks and share them accurately and completely.
this encourages full, accurate reporting so people can make real, informed decisions.
it’s kind of stunning that we don’t have this.
if any public agency requires a jab, they become liable for bad outcomes.
no one gets forced and drug companies need to make a case for risk reward that will convince people and providers of healthcare.
let the market find the proper level of testing and reporting.
because healthcare is everywhere and always a cost benefit decision.
and you need free choice and sound data to make such choices well.
not exactly rocket surgery, is it?
or did you need another tour of the land of perverse incentives and regulatory capture?
New Study Blames COVID on NIH, University of North Carolina — Finds Fauci and Baric’s Fingerprints on Pandemic Bug
By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., J. Jay Couey, Ph.D., and Charles Rixey | The Defender | October 21, 2022
Critics have long questioned why the National Institutes of Health (NIH) would fund experiments by University of North Carolina of Chapel Hill (UNC) professor Ralph Baric to develop a technique for hiding evidence of human tampering in laboratory-created super viruses.
Aided by some $220.5 million in National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) funding, Baric developed a so-called “Seamless Ligation” technique, which he boasted could perfectly conceal all evidence of human tampering in laboratory-created viruses. Baric nicknamed his invention the “no-see’m” method.
Now a new study, “Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV2,” published on the preprint server bioRxiv, shows that — apparently unbeknownst to Baric — the “seamless ligation” concealment gimmick leaves its own minute but legible signature.
Most momentously, these same researchers have discovered that damning signature in the genome of the virus that causes COVID-19.
Baric’s technique has long been controversial. “It’s the artist that doesn’t sign his name to the painting; the virologist that doesn’t put his signature into the virus to let us know whether or not it is emerging naturally or whether it is produced in a laboratory,” said Jeffrey Sachs, chair of The Lancet COVID-19 Commission, a task force that investigated the origins of COVID-19.
“All of it says, my God, there was really a big, very risky research agenda underway.”
This month, Sachs published the results of his 22-month investigation in The Lancet, including the damaging conclusion that COVID-19 was probably laboratory-generated and that the technology probably came from NIH-funded science.
Referring to Baric’s seamless ligation methodology, evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein observed:
“It’s the exact opposite of what you would do if your interest was public health. Public health scientists would be marking their enhancements with red flags — not devising ways to hide them. The only reason you would want a concealer is to advance a sinister purpose — such as illegal bioweapons development — some mischief that the scientist didn’t want traceable back to his lab.”
Baric taught his “no-see’m” method to the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s (WIV) “Bat Lady” Shi Zhengli in 2016. In return, Baric received Chinese coronaviruses collected by Shi from bats in Yunnan province. (Scientists have linked the COVID-19 genome’s pedigree to closely related bats.)
Shi and her colleagues at the Wuhan Institute subsequently demonstrated their mastery of Baric’s high-risk technique in a series of published — and highly controversial — gain-of-function experiments at the Wuhan lab. It has been even more puzzling to his critics that Baric, again with NIAID funding, chose to share this dangerous technique for weaponizing pathogens with Chinese scientists who have clear links to the Chinese military.
Experts say that the implications of this new study could be far-reaching. By pointing the finger at Baric, the study raises the possibility of potentially devastating liability for the NIAID and the University of North Carolina and other parties.
Scientists, including those close to Dr. Anthony Fauci, have repeatedly pointed out that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, has genomic sequences that appear inconsistent with natural evolution: The COVID-19 virus is no longer infectious in bats, and its spiked protein feature — which is unknown in this family of coronavirus — includes numerous mutations that make it ideally infectious in humans.
The closest known coronavirus relative — a coronavirus from the Wuhan lab — is 96.2% identical to SARS-CoV-2. The peculiar spike accounts almost completely for the entire 3.8% difference. Oddly, there are multiple novel mutations in the spike and almost none in the rest of the genome.
Natural evolution would be expected to leave mutations distributed evenly across the genome. The fact that virtually all the mutations occur on the spike led these scientists to suspect that that particular Wuhan lab coronavirus collected by Shi Zhengli is the direct progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 and that its new spike was implanted through engineering.
However, the unmistakable fingerprints of lab engineering were absent — leaving many experts wondering whether Baric’s technique was used to assemble a novel coronavirus with the engineered spike while removing the evidence of lab generation.
This new study connects the biological breadcrumbs that link federally funded research to a global pandemic. That trail leads directly to UNC and NIAID.
The authors of the study — a team of researchers from Duke University, University Clinics of Würzburg and an industry group — identified a characteristic signature in the amino acid code. That indelible artifact could only have emerged from Baric’s “no-see’m” methodology.
In an interview last spring, Baric himself confessed, that at the time the pandemic began, only two or three labs in the world were using his protocol – including his UNC lab and the WIV.
The study’s authors’ conclusions rest on the presence of unique sites in the COVID-19 virus. These sites allow special enzymes called “restriction enzymes” to cut the DNA into building blocks of unique size that then can be “stitched together in the correct order of the viral genome,” according to the study’s authors.
Essentially, Baric’s technique leaves behind unique spellings in the “genetic vocabulary.” The new words include “odd spelling choices” subtly distinguishing them from typical viral vocabulary.
The magic of Baric’s “no-see’m” technique is to invisibly weave these telltale “spelling” changes into the viral sequence between relevant genes without altering the viral protein. This is like changing the “spelling” of the word without changing its meaning; the casual listener will never notice the difference.
The research team used forensic tools to drill down on minute “spelling differences” in the SARS-CoV2 genome that betray laboratory tampering using the “no-see’m” technique.
Consider how a Brit would spell “colour,” “manoeuvre” or “paediatric.” The choice to spell a word in a certain way can reveal your nation of origin. Similarly, these nearly imperceptible changes in the viral sequence give away the laboratory origins of this virus.
In sharing his seamless ligation technique with Shi Zhengli, Baric assured that the WIV possessed all the required elements of the assembly process. EcoHealth Alliance’s infamous DEFUSE proposal describes the same techniques in detail. (submitted to The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, in 2018).
The world now has proof positive that SARS-CoV2 is an engineered laboratory creation generated with technology developed by Ralph Baric with U.S. government funding.
Prosecutors and private attorneys representing clients injured by the COVID-19 pandemic now have a smoking gun. The gun points at humanity. Forensic scientists have now successfully lifted faint but precise fingerprints from the lethal pistol’s grip and trigger. Those fingerprints belong to the NIAID and the University of North Carolina.
Baric is Fauci’s favorite gain-of-function scientist. The cascade of NIAID funding to Baric and his UNC lab has financed 152 studies approaching a quarter-billion dollars.
Those federal grants have made Baric the global kingpin of gain-of-function science. In conformance with standard practice, it is probable that UNC pockets one-quarter to one-half of NIH’s financial felicities to Baric for “administrative costs.”
These monumental payments have probably incentivized UNC to turn a blind eye to Baric’s reckless experiments and to his controversial decision to transfer his dangerous technologies to a Chinese military laboratory known to suffer from deficient safety protocols and shoddy construction that make it, in the words of Congressional investigators, less secure than a “dentist’s office.”
UNC’s role in enabling the questionable conduct may have precipitated a global pandemic that could easily give rise to liability for negligence.
UNC and NIAID’s liability is now clear. But do we have positive proof that the Wuhan lab created the monstrosity that caused COVID-19?
The cumulative evidence strongly suggests that the Wuhan lab used Baric’s methodologies to cobble together the chimeric virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic. But a few missing puzzle pieces still prevent us from definitively proving that this dangerous construction project occurred at the Wuhan lab.
As The Lancet Commission report concluded, the released emails show that NIH’s Dr. Francis Collins, NIAID’s Fauci and EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak, and others are continuing to collaborate with Shi Zhengli and Chinese officials to suppress the public release of information that would allow us to complete this picture. Stay tuned!
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
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Clash of Civilization, Iran Part II
By Jamal Kanj – Intifada-Palestine.com – January 14, 2011
Israel’s survival kit is: perpetuate conflict, insecurity to rationalize collective hate and finally playing victim.
Devoid of conflict, Israel implodes internally; without hate, Zionism loses its justification; and playing eternal victim to continue blackmailing the West. Absence of this holy trinity, Israel ceases to exist.
From its inception, the house of Zion has mastered exploiting adversarial powers to advance Israel’s cause. For instance, their influence over the Democratic Party in the US began with President Truman’s bid for 2nd term election in 1948.
Responding to strong opposition from Secretary of State General George Marshall and Department experts urging against recognition of Israel, President Truman replied: “I’m sorry gentlemen but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands [Jewish voters] who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of [voting] Arabs among my constituents”
Zionists influence over liberal American politics was matched with the doctrinal school of Conservative theoreticians aligning the Republican Party’s platform with Israel’s objectives. The Neoconservative Zionists, coined Zioncons, invented the “Clash of Civilization” concept to fight Israel’s wars. … continue
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- Deconstructing Netanyahu’s pants-on-fire UN rant – Daily Update
- Trump betrayed voters with his campaign lies and prioritized a foreign country once he took office
- Netanyahu calls Israel’s war in Gaza ‘opposite of genocide’ in UN speech to near-empty hall
- Settler Kidnappings: Torture, Sexual Abuse and Terrorisation of Palestinian Abductees as Israel Deepens Annexation of West Bank
- Gaza winter nears as 162,000 tents become unusable, raising fears of humanitarian crisis
- Netanyahu says, “It’s the opposite of genocide”; UN says Gaza economy is world’s ‘most severe crisis on record’ – Daily Update
- Israel’s US-Backed Assault on Gaza Has Created the ‘World’s Most Severe Economic Crisis on Record’: UN
- ‘Protecting U.S. Citizens’… From Israel
- ‘This is where I live now, the back of a truck’: a day in the life of a grandmother in Gaza
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
- Economic Masterminds: German Socialists Suggest Taxing Productivity Gains Stemming From Using AI
- The South China Sea Has Not Been Cooperating With The Climate Change Narrative
- Energy Crisis: Germany Enters Heating Season With Historically Low Gas Reserve Fill Levels
- New Study: The Antarctic Ice Sheet Gained Mass From 2020-2024 Due To Staggering Snow And Ice Accumulation
- Study: Ocean Heating Rates From Thousands Of Years Ago ‘Dwarf’ Modern Ocean Heating Rates
- Climate Extremists Target, Attack Large-Scale Power Grid Infrastructure In Germany!
- New Study: Antarctic Ice Melt Has Contributed Less Than 1 Centimeter To Sea Level Rise In The Last 30 Years
