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10 MINUTES COVID MADNESS. #NEVERFORGET

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October 22, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | | Leave a comment

Aortic Dissection after COVID-19 Vaccination

Some Injuries are for Keeps

By Dr. Peter McCullough & John Leake | Courageous Discourse | October 21, 2022

Yesterday I met a 42-year-old optometrist who six days after the second mRNA COVID-19 vaccination suffered a distal aortic dissection. He was healthy and was physically fit. He knew something was wrong when back pain and leg weakness developed resulting in severe effort intolerance on vacation. He rushed home, was hospitalized and underwent the appropriate diagnostics to determine the presence of an aortic aneurysm or widening of the aorta and then a discrete tear which blood flow now goes through the true lumen and a false lumen created by the dissection. This occurs in the outer third of the media or the muscular layer of the blood tube.

In his mind this catastrophic event is due to the COVID-19 vaccine, and I agree. The mRNA and Spike protein produced by the mRNA circulates in blood on average two weeks, so it is freely able to deposit in the lining of blood vessels and the vascular media of major vessels.[i] [ii] Once present, the Spike protein damages cells and incites inflammation which is a destructive process driven by white blood cells, cytokines, and complement. It is known that the second injection is approximately 80-fold more reactogenic with fever, pain, myalgia, etc. As part of that response, there can be a major surge in blood pressure due to release of catecholamines or stress hormones.[iii] This increase in the change in pressure over the change in time for each heartbeat is the driving force to initiate the tear in the aorta. Once this happens, there is no turning back, the rip goes down the major blood tube and threatens the blood supply to the spinal cord, vital organs, and legs. Each patient is different, with some having external rupture resulting in death. Others require emergency surgery or endovascular stenting to restore blood flow to vital organs. In the case of the optometrist, he was managed conservatively with medications to control blood pressure. Data from the International Registry of Acute Aortic Dissection (IRAD) indicates he faces a 22% 3-year mortality rate and this is increased by his history of prior aortic aneurysm (HR, 2.17; 95% CI, 1.03 to 4.59; P=0.04).[iv] It is exactly this complication for which I have always advised patients with prior aortic abnormalities (aortopathies) to avoid COVID-19 vaccination.  If you know someone who has died shortly after vaccination and they had antecedent back pain or a prior aneurysm, ask the family if there was an autopsy. This is important since aortopathies can be familial and other family members could be screened with imaging and genetic testing. This man’s life is indelibly changed because COVID-19 vaccination was for “keeps.”

October 21, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Where Are All the Vaccine Safety Reports the MHRA Promised Us, Ask Doctors and Scientists

BY WILL JONES | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | OCTOBER 19, 2022

The Health Advisory and Recovery Team (HART), an expert group of medics, clinicians, scientists and academics, has published an article reminding the U.K. drug regulator, the MHRA, that it initially set out a solid plan of how it would monitor the safety of the Covid vaccines it had approved for emergency use. It asks what happened to that plan and all the vaccine safety reports promised under it.

The article starts by setting out the ways in which the MHRA has fallen short in its duty to regulate the vaccines.

The U.K. drug regulator, the MHRA, did not carry out the toxicity, biodistribution and pharmacokinetics studies that are required of new drugs because of the political pressure to approve. However, nearly two years have passed since then and the MHRA has not set a deadline for the pharmaceutical companies to provide these data. The MHRA allowed the treatments to be presented as vaccines like any other when they are a novel class of agents, never before approved for human use despite the technology being around for decades (mostly because they have been dangerous and ineffective in previous human trials).

The trials should have remained placebo controlled and ongoing for two to five years minimum in order to establish an understanding of their safety. Authorisations were based on two months of safety data in healthy people and the MHRA allowed the pharmaceutical companies to vaccinate the placebo control group such that further safety data could not be collected.

Approvals for children were unethical when the trial data did not show evidence of a benefit from the drug to the children themselves when there was already good evidence of short term safety issues and when long term safety data was inevitably unavailable. Approving for younger children after the arrival of Omicron was even less defensible.

The MHRA failed to notice that the total mortality in the trial was higher in the vaccination group than the placebo group, showing no evidence of an overall mortality benefit, and the serious adverse reactions were much higher in the vaccination group such that one in 800 participants were hospitalised for a non-Covid condition, which far outweighed the small reduction in Covid hospitalisations.

Dame June Raine, the head of the U.K. drug regulator the MHRA, appeared to take a unilateral decision to change its role. She said “the Covid pandemic has catalysed the transformation of the regulator from a watchdog to an enabler.”

The regulator receives 86% of its funding from industry fees. In 2005, the House of Commons’ health committee expressed concerns regarding the U.K. drug regulator that pharmaceutical funding could lead the agency to “lose sight of the need to protect and promote public health above all else as it seeks to win fee income from the companies”. Do we want a regulator which sees itself as an enabler of pharmaceutical companies?

At the outset, the MHRA set out an excellent plan for safety monitoring of the Covid vaccines which was required because of the minimal safety data from trials and the planned extensive rollout. It described this as a four part system of “proactive vigilance… to rapidly detect, confirm, characterise and quantify any new risks that were not detected in clinical trials”.

The four parts were:

1. Have doctors report concerns to the Yellow Card system
2. Actively analyse GP data on a weekly basis to look for increases in any suspected condition
3. Proactively survey to follow up a sample of people after vaccination
4. Academic studies of large medical databases

The only publications from the MHRA in the last two years on safety have been the Yellow Card reports and even these do not divulge the number of people affected or the seriousness of the reports.

Where are these weekly analyses of GP data, proactive surveys of the vaccinated and academic studies of large medical databases? We’re approaching two years into the rollout – where are all these promised reports? And why is no one apart from HART and a smattering of others asking these questions?

Worth reading in full.

October 20, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

‘Insane’: Boston Researchers Create ‘More Lethal’ Strain of COVID, Prompting Calls to Shut Down Risky Gain-of-Function Research

By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | October 18, 2022

A team of 14 scientists at Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL) developed a new strain of COVID-19 that killed 80% of the mice infected with the virus in a laboratory setting, according to a preprint study published Oct. 14.

Following the announcement, numerous news stories about the study’s results focused on the fatality rate observed in the laboratory mice used in the study.

However, behind the headlines, some scientists and others raised concerns about the nature of the research and the fact that it was partially funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci.

The research was conducted using what some scientists called “gain-of-function” research, raising concerns that this type of research — which some theorize led to the creation and escape of the original Wuhan strain of COVID-19 — is still being done, despite concerns that it could lead to more lab escapes and more pandemics.

Gain of function refers to the “manipulation of pathogens to make them more dangerous,” in the hope of “getting ahead of a future outbreak.”

Commenting on the researchers’ announcement, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Children’s Health Defense chairman of the board and chief legal counsel, remarked on the potential danger of such research — and its federal funding:

“What could be more insane than Anthony Fauci funding more of his GOF [gain of function] experiments to soup up coronavirus lethality in the middle of a pandemic caused by a juiced-up coronavirus that has killed millions?

“All of horrified humanity is watching Lord Of The Flies play out at NIH [National Institutes of Health] and praying for the adults to appear.”

Rachel Lapal Cavallario, Boston University’s associate vice president for public relations and social media, told the media the research conducted was not gain-of-function research and that, “In fact, this research made the virus [replication] less dangerous.”

However, others disputed that claim.

Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), a doctor, said the research involved “lethal gain of function virus research” that creates the “potential to kill more people than any singular nuclear weapon.”

“Viruses have managed to escape even the most secure labs,” Marshall said, adding that this type of “research must stop immediately while the risks and benefits can be investigated.”

Jessica Rose, Ph.D., commenting on the NEIDL research on Substack, wrote:

“What they have done in this work, as described by their own methods and results, is akin to madness.

“It is akin to madness because … they basically created and published a recipe for a deadly pathogen (80% mortality rate in the subjects of their experiments) of their own construction in their lab.

“By the way, this is precisely gain-of-function research. It couldn’t be more descriptive.”

Boston University today issued the following statement, downplaying the risks of the research:

“The research was reviewed and approved by the Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC), which consists of scientists as well as local community members. The Boston Public Health Commission also approved the research.

“Furthermore, this research mirrors and reinforces the findings of other, similar research performed by other organizations, including the FDA. Ultimately, this research will provide a public benefit by leading to better, targeted therapeutic interventions to help fight against future pandemics.”

Efforts to prevent construction of NEIDL BSL-4 lab failed

NEIDL describes itself as “a Boston University Center dedicated to research on emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases and the pathogens that cause them,” and “a major step forward in advancing public health” that “provide[s] the necessary information and understanding to develop diagnostic tests, treatments, and vaccines.”

NEIDL also claims that it “will not conduct any secret or classified research” and that “the public will have access through several channels to information about any and all research before it even begins” — making NIAID’s claims that it was unaware of the spike protein research project all the more perplexing.

According to the Daily Mail, NEIDL is one of 13 biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) labs in the U.S.

However, this particular research took place under BSL-3 precautions, although according to STAT, “There is no evidence the work … was conducted improperly or unsafely,” noting that an internal biosafety review committee and the Boston Public Health Commission approved the work.

The journal Nature described the difference between BSL-3 and BSL-4 as follows:

“BSL-3 laboratories are designed so that scientists can safely work with potentially lethal and inhalable pathogens in a contained environment. Experiments are conducted in sealed workspaces in which the air is filtered and not recirculated, and the entrance to the facility is typically secured by self-closing doors.

“BSL-4 facilities, in which researchers work with fatal pathogens that can spread through aerosols, and for which vaccines or treatments are lacking or limited, require extra security measures.”

University of Illinois international law professor Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., said the dangers of BSL-4 facilities have long been known, which is why he participated in efforts to stop the construction of the NEIDL facility.

Boyle, a bioweapons expert who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, told The Defender:

“Years ago, there was a lawsuit to prevent and stop the building of this BSL-4 [facility] at Boston University that I did work on, and we failed.

“At that time we argued that the BSL-4 would engage in existentially type dangerous biological warfare research, and that was even before … gain-of-function.

So, we knew from the get-go how dangerous this lab was going to be and tried to stop it. We tried, we failed, and now this Nazi biowarfare death science dirty work is going on.”

However, the Boston University facility was completed with $128 million in NIH funding.

Commenting on gain-of-function research in general, Boyle said:

“You’ll note it was funded by NIH and NIAID under Tony Fauci.

“The New York Times has pointed out that about 94% of all this Nazi biowarfare death science dirty work has been funded by NIH and NIAID since Reagan put him in charge of NIAID.”

According to Boyle, this has resulted in more than $100 billion in federal bioweapons spending since Sept. 11, 2001.

Boyle said the federal government “doesn’t rein in or prosecute” scientists working on such projects, “because the federal government is paying for this type of Nazi biowarfare death science dirty work.”

Such research, and the facilities in which it is performed, also pose a risk to surrounding communities and the world at large, Boyle said, suggesting a Wuhan-like leak could occur at any similar facility in the U.S.:

“This is another catastrophe waiting to happen, and that Boston University BSL-4 [facility] should be shut down immediately.

“They know full well how existentially dangerous this is, certainly for the metropolitan Boston area … and especially for the African American community in Dorchester surrounding that Boston University BSL-4 lab.”

For Boyle, “It’s not enough to ban gain-of-function.” He also called for BSL-3 and BSL-4 facilities, including the Boston University facility, a CDC facility in Atlanta and a new facility in Kansas where the federal Plum Island Animal Disease Center is being relocated, to be shut down.

“The only remedy here is to shut down all BSL-3s and BSL4-s in the U.S.A., immediately and effectively,” Boyle said. “Otherwise, there is going to be another leak.”

Notably, the Wuhan Institute of Virology where research involving “engineered novel bat coronaviruses” took place is said to have been performed in BSL-2 and BSL-3 facilities.

Rose questioned the lower safety conditions under which the NEIDL researchers created the hybrid strain, while also raising broader security concerns and calling for gain-of-function work to be “banned” and its products “destroyed immediately.”

She said:

“This paper reveals more than the successful creation of a deadly new virus. It [gives] this recipe in the methods to anyone with a decent lab to recreate it.

“They don’t even mention what the hell they are planning to do with this new virus! They don’t say a bloody word about the fact that they created a virus that for all intents and purposes, is a Level IV pathogen, so why the hell are they playing with it in a Level III [laboratory]?”

NIH claims it didn’t know what it was funding

According to NEIDL, grants from the NIH “provide the support for research at NEIDL.”

In September, the study’s lead author, Mohsan Saeed, Ph.D., received a five-year, $2 million grant from the NIAID, and a separate five-year, $2 million grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, to “explore novel aspects of clinically important viruses and human defense mechanisms.”

Nancy J. Sullivan, NEIDL’s new director previously was chief of the Biodefense Research Section at NIAID’s Vaccine Research Center.

Following the publication of the preprint study — and the controversy that ensued — the NIAID appeared to distance itself from the research. According to STAT, “The research team did not clear the work” with the NIAID, leading the agency to look “for some answers as to why it first learned of the work through media reports.”

Dr. Emily Erbelding, M.P.H., director of the NIAID’s Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, told STAT that the research team’s “original grant applications did not specify that the scientists wanted to do this precise work. Nor did the group make clear that it was doing experiments that might involve enhancing a pathogen of pandemic potential in the progress reports it provided to NIAID.”

Erbelding said the NIAID is “going to have conversations” with the research team in the coming days, adding that “we wish that they would have” informed NIAID of the “intent of the research.”

According to Erbelding, this would have likely resulted in a committee being convened “that would assess the risks and benefits” of the research involving “enhanced pathogens of pandemic potential.”

What the NEIDL researchers did

According to STAT, the NEIDL researchers set out “to determine if the mutations in the Omicron spike protein were responsible for this variant’s increased ability to evade the immunity to SARS-2 that humans have built up, and whether the changes led to Omicron’s lower rate of severity.”

The research involved extracting the Omicron variant’s spike protein and attaching it to the original strain.

Put differently, the scientists took the deadliest COVID-19 strain and combined it with the spike protein from the most infectious strain. They then infected laboratory mice and human cells with the new hybrid strain.

The results showed that while the Omicron variant’s spike protein was responsible for the variant’s ability to evade immunity developed via infection, vaccination or both, it is not responsible for the decrease in the severity of the Omicron strain.

According to the Daily Mail :

“The researchers looked at how mice fared against the new hybrid strain compared to the original Omicron variant.

“When a similar group of rodents were exposed to the standard Omicron strain, however, they all survived and only experienced ‘mild’ symptoms. …

“[The researchers] found the hybrid strain produced five times more viral particles than the original Omicron.”

According to the MetroUK, “The scientists also infected human cells with the hybrid variant and found it was five times more infectious than Omicron.”

In the preprint, the researchers wrote:

“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.”

In a statement remarking on the outcome of the study, NEIDL’s Saeed, who is also an assistant professor of biochemistry at Boston University, said:

“Consistent with studies published by others, this work shows that it is not the spike protein that drives Omicron pathogenicity, but instead other viral proteins.

“Determination of those proteins will lead to better diagnostics and disease management strategies.”

Media focuses on study’s findings, but critics more concerned about the research itself

Some media outlets focused on the researchers’ findings that 100% of the mice infected with the engineered virus died.

Others, however, downplayed the study’s findings. According to Fox News, for example, one of the study’s limitations was that the specific breed of mice used may not provide an accurate model for the risk posed to humans, “as other types [of mice] are more similar to humans.”

In a blog post, commentator Alex Berenson, a former writer for The New York Times, also addressed the sensationalism surrounding the study’s findings, pointing out that while an 80% fatality rate in lab mice sounds bad, 100% of the mice that previously were infected with the wild variety of COVID-19 had died.

He wrote:

“[The research] says the Omicron/wild-type Sars-Cov-2 combination the researchers created is more lethal than Omicron.

“However, it ALSO says the Omicron/wild type virus is LESS lethal than [the] original wild type. Neither of those findings should be a surprise. Omicron is much less dangerous than the original Sars-Cov-2, so blending the two together produces a virus with intermediate lethality.

“What’s with the 80 percent mortality rate then? It’s in mice, people. And guess what? The wild-type had a 100 percent mortality rate in mice. Yes, all the mice infected with the original Sars-Cov-2 died. I think we can agree that Sars-Cov-2 does not have a 100 percent mortality rate in humans.”

Specifically addressing the probable risk to humans, Berenson added:

“Nor did the researchers provide any evidence that the blended Omicron/wild-type coronavirus is able to defeat antibodies in people who have been infected with and recovered from Omicron. Which is basically all of us. (They did show that both the original Omicron and their variant beats the mRNA vaccines, but that fact is not a surprise either.)”

Erbelding shared similar remarks, stating, “That 80% kill rate, that headline doesn’t tell the whole story, because Wuhan” — the original strain — “killed all the mice.”

In turn, behind its headline, the Daily Mail wrote, “The scientists admit the hybrid virus is unlikely to be as deadly in humans as it was in mice,” adding, “This is because the specific breed of lab mice used are very susceptible to severe COVID disease. Mice and humans also have very different immune responses to the virus.”

STAT also remarked on this point, writing:

“The fatality rate seen in this strain of mice when they were infected with these viruses raises questions about how good a model they are for what happens when people are infected with SARS-2. The Wuhan strain killed less than 1% of people who were infected.”

But Boyle and Rose and others, like David Livermore, Ph.D., a professor of microbiology at the University of East Anglia, and Shmuel Shapira, an Israeli government scientist, said the news coming out of NEIDL was less about the study’s results and more about the research itself.

Livermore told the Daily Mail, “Given the strong likelihood that the COVID pandemic originated from the escape of a lab-manipulated coronavirus in Wuhan, these experiments seem profoundly unwise.”

Shapira also condemned the research. “This should be totally forbidden, it’s playing with fire,” he said.


Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”

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.

October 19, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Arrests made in Dutch journalists case

El Salvador Perspectives | October 18, 2022

Forty years have past since their crimes were committed. But in the past week, former military figures from El Salvador’s civil war have been arrested for their roles in the cold-blooded killing of four Dutch journalists covering that war.

In early 1982, El Salvador was a dangerous place for journalists covering the civil war between FMLN guerrillas and the country’s armed forces. Despite the danger, Dutch journalists, Koos Koster, Jan Kuiper, Joop Willemse and Hans ter Laag, ventured out to the Department of Chalatenango to get an interview with guerrilla fighters. The Salvadoran army ambushed their group and killed all the journalists.

The ambush was one of the war crimes documented in the 1993 UN Truth Commission Report following the conclusion of El Salvador’s civil war:

On the afternoon of 17 March 1982, four Dutch journalists accompanied by five or six members of FMLN, some of them armed, were ambushed by a patrol of the Atonal Battalion of the Salvadorian armed forces while on their way to territory under FMLN control. The incident occurred not far from the San Salvador-Chalatenango road, near the turn off to Santa Rita. The four journalists were killed in the ambush and only one member of FMLN survived. Having analysed the evidence available, the Commission on the Truth has reached the conclusion that the ambush was set up deliberately to surprise and kill the journalists and their escort; that the decision to ambush them was taken by Colonel Mario A. Reyes Mena, Commander of the Fourth Infantry Brigade, with the knowledge of other officers; that no major skirmish preceded or coincided with the shoot-out in which the journalists were killed; and, lastly, that the officer named above and other soldiers concealed the truth and obstructed the judicial investigation…

1. The Commission on the Truth considers that there is full evidence that Dutch journalists Koos Jacobus Andries Koster, Jan Cornelius Kuiper Joop, Hans Lodewijk ter Laag and Johannes Jan Willemsen were killed on 17 March 1982 in an ambush which was planned in advance by the Commander of the Fourth Infantry Brigade, Colonel Mario A. Reyes Mena, with the knowledge of other officers at the El Paraíso barracks, on the basis of intelligence data alerting them to the journalists’ presence, and was carried out by a patrol of soldiers from the Atonal BIRI, under the command of Sergeant Mario Canizales Espinoza.

2. These same officers, the sergeant and others subsequently covered up the truth and obstructed the investigations carried out by the judiciary and other competent authorities.

During the war a judicial investigation of the events came to an end in 1988 when the judge on the case sought asylum outside of El Salvador after receiving death threats, and the 1993 amnesty law prevented any prosecution thereafter.

After the amnesty law was nullified, the Fundación Comunicándonos and the Asociación Salvadoreña para los Derechos Humanos (ASDEHU) filed a complaint on March 13, 2018 asking for El Salvador’s attorney general (FGR) to reopen the case and prosecute the military officers in command of the ambush. The ambassador to El Salvador from the Netherlands joined the human rights attorneys as they presented the demand, and expressed his hope that the FGR would investigate and bring the guilty to justice.

The case was reopened, and now arrest warrants have been issued by the judge.

El Faro English describes the week’s developments:

General Guillermo García, the minister of defense and strongman of the Salvadoran Army in the early 1980s, has been detained for his alleged responsibility in the murder of four Dutch journalists in 1982, members of the judicial branch involved in the case and two relatives of the victims confirmed to El Faro. Also arrested was Colonel Francisco Antonio Morán, the former director of the defunct Treasury Police, a fearsome security force tied to massacres, enforced disappearances, torture, and extrajudicial activities attributed to death squads.

The arrests were ordered on October 13 by Judge María Mercedes Argüello of the trial court in Dulce Nombre de María, Chalatenango, after finding sufficient grounds for the accused officers to face trial for the murder of Jacobus Andries Koster, Jan Cornelius Kuiper, Hans Ter Laag, and Johannes Jan Willemsen, Dutch journalists ambushed and executed by the Salvadoran Army on Mar. 17, 1982, in rural Chalatenango.

General García and Colonel Morán were detained in the early hours of Friday, October 14, in their homes in San Salvador. Their first hearing was set for Monday, October 17.

The court also ordered the arrests of Colonel Mario Adalberto Reyes Mena, former commander of the Fourth Infantry Brigade of El Paraíso; Colonel Rafael Flores Lima, ex-chief of the Joint General Staff; and Sergeant Mario Canizales Espinoza, of the Atonal Battalion.

The 89 year old Garcia was deported from the US in 2016 after a federal court found him guilty of serious violations of human rights prior to his entry to the US. He has also been linked to other civil war atrocities such as the massacre at El Mozote and the killing of four US churchwomen.

Judge María Mercedes Arguello also ordered that authorities begin an extradition process against Col. Mario Adalberto Reyes Mena, former commander of El Salvador’s 4th Infantry Brigade, who currently resides in the United States. Reyes Mena is alleged to have given the orders in 1982 to kill the four Dutch journalists. The massacre occurred in Santa Rita close to the base of the 4th Infantry Brigade in El Paraíso, Chalatenango.

Dutch journalists from ZEMBLA tracked Reyes Mena down through social media activity to a house in the United States. He has reportedly been living in the US since 1984, two years after the massacre. From NL Times :

Zembla tracked down the colonel who ordered the murder of the four Dutch. The now 79-year-old Mario Reyes Mena has been living in the United States for four years. Zembla found him through his three adult children, who are active on social media.

In 1993 a United Nations truth commission concluded that Reyes Mena  was responsible for the ambush and the murder of the Dutch journalists – Koos Koster, Jan Kuiper, Joop Willemsen and Hans ter Laag. That same year an amnesty law was passed in El Salvador, which meant that he could not be prosecuted in that country.

The ZEMBLA team tweeted the video of meeting Reyes Mena at his front door where they asked to speak to him about the allegations in the Truth Commission report.

Reyes Mena is seen answering the door in an ARENA T-shirt and angrily telling the reporters that he was never charged with anything. The video begins in English and later their conversation switches to Spanish.

The families of the victims and the Dutch government have been seeking justice in this case throughout the past 40 years.  As prospects for reopening the case brightened, they published a multimedia website in English and Spanish which presents the story of the massacre, the historical context and the quest for justice.

Dutch news outlets reported reactions to news of the arrests:

For Gert Kuiper, the brother of the murdered Jan Kuiper, the news about the arrests came as a big surprise. “It’s really good news, I’m hopeful that they will be brought to justice. These arrests give me hope that impunity will be nullified,” he told NOS. Kuiper is also happy that El Salvador is asking for the extradition of Colonel Reyes Mena, the leader of the unit that shot the Dutch. He left for the United States two years after the murders and still lives there. “The Americans can hardly let him live his life in Virginia unmolested,” says Kuiper.

Gert Kuiper and other relatives received the news about the arrests from their lawyers. Zembla reports that representatives of the Dutch Public Prosecution Service are going to El Salvador to speak with the suspects.

Advocates for the families held a press conference on Monday, October 17, to praise the actions of the court:

It is a very important case, considered as a crime against humanity, for which truth and justice have been demanded for 40 years. It is one of the crimes described in the report of the [UN] Truth Commission for El Salvador; thus we must recognize the courage of the judge,” said Oscar Pérez, president-director of Fundación Comunicarnos, an organization that, together with the Salvadoran Association for Human Rights (ASDEHU), is advancing the case in El Salvador.

October 19, 2022 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

The United States and Britain continue secret biological research in Central Asia

By Vladimir Platov – New Eastern Outlook – 19.10.2022 

Despite numerous publications about military research in secret US biology laboratories in the post-Soviet space and demands to place their activities under strict international control, there is, unfortunately, no qualitative improvement of the situation in this matter. Therefore, it is not surprising that at the recent 22nd Meeting of the SCO Council of Heads of State, the Chinese president additionally drew the attention of the association’s member countries to the need “to effectively meet the challenges in biosecurity, and other non-traditional security domains”. As part of the Samarkand Declaration of 2022, SCO countries were urged to strictly adhere to the Biological Weapons Convention and to adopt a protocol to it that provides for an effective verification mechanism.

After Russia initiated the special operation to denazify Ukraine, alongside publicly exposing the illegal US biological weapons development activities in secret biolabs, the Pentagon sought to move unfinished programs in Ukraine to other countries in the post-Soviet region as quickly as possible. This particularly pertains to the territory of the states of Central Asia (CA) and Eastern Europe.

Recently, Russia Today journalists have found out that the US has decided to study the deadly anthrax in a bio-lab in Kyrgyzstan. In this regard, the US Department of Health & Human Services plans to fund this work and allocate about a quarter of a million dollars for this purpose. According to the tender published on the procurement portal of the US government, the regional hospital in the city of Osh in the south of the republic will become the base for these tests. At the same time, the publication reminded that Kyrgyzstan and the United States are negotiating a new agreement between the two countries in the field of US biological laboratories in the Republic of Kazakhstan, but the nuances and points of the future document are hidden from the public.

Very disturbing information in this regard has recently come from Uzbekistan, where, according  to the Telegram channel, the active work of US representatives to create a powerful military-biological cluster in that country is confirmed. This is particularly evidenced by the growing “work” in Uzbekistan in recent years on the part of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). On this issue, the publication has prepared an infographic on US military-biological activities in Uzbekistan, which clearly indicates the potential damage to the security of the countries of Central Asia, the Russian Federation and China, the main political opponents of the White House.

There is also information that the United States and the United Kingdom continue to conduct joint research at the Kazakhstan Central Reference Laboratory (CRL) in Almaty. In early 2022, the United Kingdom shipped a large number of samples of virus strains, laboratory equipment, diagnostic instruments, etc. through the British shipping company WN Shipping the first half of the year.

Kazakhstan’s CRL in Almaty was built with Pentagon funds and has a third level of biohazard because a repository for particularly dangerous infectious agents is located on the premises of this facility, which are examined by staff of specialized laboratories for plague, cholera, zoonotic bacterial and natural viral focal infections. According to Kazakhstan’s official information, no US military experts (biologists and virologists) reportedly work at CRL, and as of January 1, 2020, it is fully funded and owned exclusively by Kazakhstan’s budget. However, in reality, this facility is not directly funded by the United States, but through a system of American grants, i.e. the research is carried out in the interest of the United States under a certain program of the Pentagon. And apparently this “cooperation” continues.

This is confirmed, in particular, by the fact that on November 5, 2021, the Ministry of Industry and Infrastructure Development of Kazakhstan initiated the process of public discussion on the construction project of the BSL-4 laboratory for work with especially dangerous strains and an underground storage facility for a collection of dangerous and especially dangerous strains in the village of Gvardeisky in the Zhambyl region, the construction of which is planned for 2025. The fourth biological safety code BSL-4 (Biosafety Level 4) of this planned biological laboratory alone indicates that the facility poses a high risk to people and society of the viruses being studied, most of which are simply impossible to handle.

The Kyrgyz public has already reacted very critically to this project. Protesters have gathered in front of the US Embassy, outraged that the lab will be built near the border with Kyrgyzstan, just 90 kilometers from Bishkek. Kyrgyz experts, together with the International Association for the Control of Biological Research, sent a letter this summer to the president of Kazakhstan, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, asking that the construction of a biological laboratory in the border region be stopped.

Obviously, Washington is eager to preserve the countries of Central Asia as a testing ground for its military biological research. Hence the US efforts to develop similar projects in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan. At the same time, Washington has an increased interest in Tashkent and Alma-Ata, as these two countries have better developed infrastructure and more qualified personnel compared to other Central Asian states. The increased US interest in Uzbekistan is also due to the fact that the country is not a member of the CSTO, which gives Washington more freedom of action.

October 19, 2022 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

IS THERE EVIDENCE TO SUPPORT THE SAFETY OF GENDER AFFIRMING TREATMENTS FOR KIDS?

The Highwire with Del Bigtree | September 23, 2022

Florida Surgeon General, Joseph Ladapo, MD, explains the lack of scientific studies necessary to balance the benefits versus the long term effects of underage children receiving gender affirming treatments.

October 19, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment

Mossad-affiliated spy cell arrested in Malaysia

The Cradle | October 18, 2022

Malaysia-based daily newspaper The Straits Times uncovered on 17 October the arrest of a Mossad-affiliated hit team, involved in the kidnapping of a Palestinian in Kuala Lumpur, on behalf of Israel.

The Mossad team was able to locate two Palestinian computer programming specialists while they were leaving a diner near Jalan Yap Kwan Seng by car, just after 10 pm.

The “snatch-and-grab” team consisted of four local Malaysians who kidnapped the driver of the car and took him into one of the two vehicles used for the operation, leaving the second Palestinian behind and allowing him to escape – something that would later come back to haunt them.

The vehicles left the scene and arrived at the chalet they were headed to, where the Palestinian IT specialist was tied up in one of the rooms and put on a video call with Israeli Mossad operatives who started to bark questions at him, inquiring about Hamas’s cyber unit.

The call was organized by two men, who interrogated the specialist for 24 hours, while the Malaysian team was on standby to torture the victim when answers were unsatisfactory.

The Straits Times learned that the Mossad wanted insight into his experience in software development and his role in assisting the Cyber unit of Hamas to develop new weapons.

Additionally, the Mossad wanted to uncover his associates in the hierarchy of leaders in the Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas.

Meanwhile, the other specialist who was able to escape sensed the gravity of the situation and alerted the security personnel at a hotel nearby, initiating the pursuit to arrest the cell.

Remarkably, it was revealed that the Mossad had prepared another chalet room for the second specialist. A team was waiting overseas to interrogate him as well, but miscommunication confused the kidnappers.

According to Al-Jazeera, the second specialist was a more valuable target. However, had he not been able to escape, the Malaysian police would have remained oblivious to the entire operation.

Reportedly, despite the cell’s training in Europe by Mossad operatives, the recruits failed to notice the CCTV cameras and used fake plates, giving the police enough information to locate them.

“Had the Malaysian police not acted swiftly, the victim would have likely disappeared,” informed sources told The Straits Times.

The newspaper added that the police arrived halfway through the video call, surprising the Israelis at the other end, who terminated the call as soon as they heard the chaos outside and saw the police.

The two Palestinian IT specialists, said to be natives of Gaza, have since left Malaysia for an undisclosed country.

There are no official relations between Malaysia and Israel, and this plot is one of several Mossad operations in southeast Asia. Nonetheless, its impact on the secret ties between both countries is questionable.

Back in 2015, then-prime minister Minister Najib Razak visited the Hamas-run government in Gaza and expressed his support for the besieged enclave in southern occupied Palestine.

“We believe in the struggle of the Palestinian people. They have been suppressed and oppressed for so long,” said Razak.

Nonetheless, data released by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics reveals that Malaysia imported $1.457 billion worth of products in 2014, a 24 percent increase since the previous year. Economic ties are unaffected as of today.

October 18, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

US scientists create new lethal Covid variant

Samizdat | October 17, 2022

Scientists at Boston University claim to have created a new variant of Covid-19 with an 80% mortality rate, by combining the highly-transmissible Omicron variant of the coronavirus with the original Wuhan strain. The research, which echoes experiments thought to have created the virus in the first place, has caused outrage.

In a research paper published last week, the scientists explained that they isolated the spike protein of the Omicron variant and combined it with the “backbone” of the original strain that circulated in early 2020. This created a virus that “robustly escapes vaccine-induced… immunity” and inflicts “serious disease” on laboratory mice, 80% of whom died during testing, the paper stated.

While the team admitted that their mutant strain would likely be less deadly in humans than mice, they found that it produced five times as many virus particles in lab-grown human lung cells when compared to the Omicron variant.

The paper has yet to be peer reviewed.

News of the research caused outrage online, as it is widely believed that similar ‘gain-of-function’ research – a term describing the alteration of a pathogen to enhance its potency – at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China led to the global Covid-19 pandemic. The US funded such research at the Wuhan Institute, although it is still unclear whether the specific coronavirus that caused the pandemic originated in the lab.

“This should be totally forbidden, it’s playing with fire,” former Israel Institute for Biological Research head Shmuel Shapira said of the Boston experiments. “How many times did virologists say they were not making chimeric SARS viruses more deadly? How many???” reporter Paul Thaker tweeted.

The Boston team aren’t the only scientists returning to potentially dangerous research in the aftermath of the pandemic. EcoHealth Alliance, the private company responsible for much of the Wuhan Institute’s pre-2020 gain-of-function research, was awarded a $650,000 grant by the US last month to study “the potential for future bat coronavirus emergence in Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam.”

October 17, 2022 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Those Demonising the Unvaccinated Need to Look in the Mirror

BY NICK RENDELL | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | OCTOBER 17, 2022

It’s been known since the outbreak of Covid that obesity leads to higher rates of hospitalisations and deaths. Despite this, very few resources were deployed to encourage healthier eating and lifestyles. This article argues that this was a disastrous decision for the long term health of the nation and the short to medium term capacity of the NHS.

Boris Johnson (BMI 34; healthy is under 25) in his New Year message broadcast on December 31st 2020 said: “Get a vaccine, it’s far easier than losing weight” (see video from two minutes in). Well, the people of the U.K. took him at his word: we’ve had 30 months to galvanise the population into losing weight and getting fitter, 30 months entirely squandered.

First, let’s just look at how effective spending £25bn injecting 150 million vaccines into the U.K. population has been. As the NHS continues to struggle to meet demand, perhaps Covid hospital admissions are the key metric. For the vaccine programme to have been a success we should expect the unvaccinated to be disproportionately admitted to hospital. They’re not. These figures come from the latest UKHSA Weekly Vaccine Surveillance Report; table 12a on page 49 gives us the figures for hospital admissions between March 21st and August 28th of this year. In each age cohort the unvaccinated are proportionately less likely to be hospitalised than the vaccinated. As an example, in the 50-64 year-olds, 129 of the 1,342 admissions were unvaccinated, that’s 9.6%. Yet, about 14% of that age group are unvaccinated. If the unvaccinated were more likely to be hospitalised we would expect the figures to be reversed, to see a higher proportion of the unvaccinated hospitalised than the total proportion of people unvaccinated.

Demonstrably, despite the Government’s claims that vaccines have reduced hospital admissions, this can’t be true. Something has reduced hospital admissions from the peaks in the first two waves, but if the rate of admission is much the same for the vaccinated and the unvaccinated I struggle to see how vaccines can explain it. Surely, far more likely are the twin benefits of immunity brought about by prior infection and a less virulent variant. Figure 2 shows the peaks and troughs of Covid hospital admissions since the start of the pandemic.

Also worth noting, the seven-day average number of hospital admissions for Covid is currently 132% higher than it was on October 7th 2020, before anyone anywhere had been vaccinated, and 86% higher than on October 7th 2021 when most people had been vaccinated – though it should be noted that over half of Covid hospital admissions since Omicron have been primarily being treated for something else.

Despite my deep scepticism of the efficacy of the mRNA vaccines and the real world evidence presented above, to avoid any accusations of dogmatism I’m going to indulge the vaccine zealots’ figures for vaccine effectiveness. Again, with the data taken from the Government’s week 40 vaccine surveillance report, figure 3 suggests that the UKHSA thinks that the best protection a fourth dose of vaccine can offer is about 50%, soon falling to 20%.

Now let’s compare that vaccine efficacy with the impact of obesity on severe Covid outcomes by turning to a fascinating study published in June in the Lancet that looked at how BMI affects Covid outcomes. What made this latest study particularly interesting was that it used real, though anonymised, data from about 20% of the U.K. population. The data, from QResearch had over 12 million patient records but about 3 million couldn’t be used, mainly because BMI data were missing, but that still left 9,171,524 patient records to be analysed. So, again, we’re looking at real-world evidence whereas the UKHSA vaccine efficacy rates are estimates.

The data related to the period from December 2020 to November 2021. This was the period covering the initial rollout through to booster doses in older people. Part of the summary table is reproduced in Figure 4. I’ve highlighted in red hospital admissions.

There were 3,509,213 people of a healthy weight in the study, of whom 8,315 were hospitalised with Covid, that’s 0.23%. Of the 3,062,925 overweight people, 10,653 or 0.35% were hospitalised. That means the overweight were 50% more likely to end up in hospital than those classed as healthy weight.

Of the 2,278,649 obese people 13,044 or 0.57% were hospitalised. This means they were 150% more likely require hospital treatment than the healthy weight group.

Let’s now compare the relative risk of being vaccinated with that of being obese. The obese get hospitalised at a rate 150% greater than those of a healthy weight while the best you can hope for from your fourth vaccine is a 50% reduction in the likelihood of being admitted to hospital, dropping to 20% after about four months. And that’s another key point, keep the weight off and that risk reduction remains in contrast to any benefit from vaccination that soon wanes to nothing (assuming it ever existed in the first place).

But of course, it’s not just Covid where the overweight and obese have worse outcomes. The Lancet study goes on to list some of the other health outcomes for other conditions. The obese are almost six times more likely to have type 2 diabetes, more than twice as likely to suffer cardiovascular disease and over three times more likely to suffer hypertension.

Lose weight and many of these rates of disease would fall. The burden on the NHS would be reduced, the people losing weight, in most cases, would feel better and no doubt their mental health would, in the round, be improved.

I was interested in a piece by Michael P. Senger in the Daily Sceptic on October 14th 2022 highlighting the demonisation of the unvaccinated. I really don’t recall anyone in the mainstream media or in Government objecting to this vilification at the time yet it was evident from the Week 35 2021 Vaccine Surveillance Report that in each of the age groups from 40 to 80 the double dosed were testing positive for the virus at a higher rate than the unvaccinated (see an article I wrote back in June that goes into some detail on this point), so it was evident that the unvaccinated represented less of a threat than the vaccinated. Likewise, it’s been known since the Covid outbreak on the Diamond Princess back in February 2020 that obesity was a risk factor. However, can you imagine the furore that would result if people were to suggest that the obese were denied hospital treatment?

It’s not the unvaccinated who are clogging up the NHS, it’s disproportionately the obese and overweight – some of whom have been particularly vocal in vilifying the unvaccinated or in failing to promote healthier lifestyles:

  • Andrew Neil (estimated BMI 32) argued for restrictions on the freedoms of the unvaccinated.
  • Piers Morgan (estimated BMI 29) argued for the unvaccinated to be denied NHS care if they caught Covid.
  • Boris Johnson (estimated BMI 34) attempted to bring in vaccine passports.
  • Michael Gove (estimated BMI 28) was a keen advocate of vaccine passports.
  • Therese Coffey (estimated BMI 30), the new Health Minister appears to be far keener on promoting vaccines rather than healthy lifestyles.

The Government spent about £12bn vaccinating the under 50s, largely a pointless exercise. As an advocate of lower taxes and a smaller state I don’t argue that this money should have been spent on schemes to subsidise healthier living. Such schemes invariably fail. What’s more, I would object just as fiercely to coercing people to lose weight as I do to coercing people to get vaccinated. However, I would like to see them campaign to raise people’s awareness of the risks associated with a high BMI. In rough terms, there appears to be about a 10% Covid hospitalisation risk reduction for each BMI point reduction and associated risk reductions for various cancers, diabetes, heart conditions, muscular/skeletal problems and mental health.

Body positivity is all well and good but being overweight is neither risk or cost free. If Andrew Neil, Piers Morgan, Boris Johnson et al. want target a group to be censorious of perhaps they should follow Jordan Peterson’s advice and go tidy their own room first.

October 17, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Scientists Discover Massive Recent Slowdown in Melting of Antarctica ‘Doomsday’ Glacier

By Chris Morrison | The Daily Sceptic | October 16, 2022

Forget coral reefs and polar bears – they are so yesterday’s climate scare stories. The real big one, the tipping point du jour, is the collapse of the West Antarctica ice shelf and the prospect of global flooding on a biblical scale last reported in the times of Noah. It’s in rapid retreat says every scaremonger from Sir David Attenborough to the BBC’s resident green activist Justin Rowlatt. It is in retreat – a natural process as the Earth slowly moves out of an ice age. But now, new scientific work has found the process at the huge Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica – nicknamed the ‘Doomsday Glacier‘ for the supposed approaching catastrophe of its swift demise – is much slower than in the recent past.

The Thwaites Glacier has long been of interest. It is the second largest ice stream in West Antarctica and occupies an area the size of Florida. A group of oceanographers, led by Dr. Alastair Graham of the University of South Florida, has mapped part of the floor once occupied by the glacier, and discovered it was retreating at twice the rate in the past than that now indicated by the satellite measurements made between 2011-2019. The earlier rate of retreat was said to be “exceptionally fast”. Work is in progress to establish when that fast retreat occurred, but it is almost certain it pre-dates the 1950s, could be about 180 years old, and possibly dates back several centuries. What is completely clear, however, given the timing, is that human-caused climate change was not a factor in the faster retreat.

The results were obtained by using autonomous submersibles to map an area of the sea floor where markings were discovered representing the retreating glacier. Mapping 13 square kilometres, the researchers found a series of ridges caused by the moving glacier hitting the sea floor as it rose and fell with the tides. It was found that during the daily tidal cycle, the glacier retreated around 6-7 metres a day, although sometimes reaching 10m. Over about five months of data, the glacier retreated 2.1 kms a year, twice the current rate measured by the satellites.

The ridges were discovered on a ‘bump’ in the sea floor that had helped pin the glacier. It was found that over a 5.5 month period, the average spacing of the ridges increased upstream from 5.8m to 6.3m. This 8% increase accelerated the annual retreat rate from 2.13km to 2.3km. The results are said to indicate that the movement across the area to the present day position was “probably rapid”. The scientists note: “Our results indicate that the rate of retreat from the bump was double the average estimated for the period 1996-2009, and about three times faster than a location immediately inland of the bump between 2011 and 2017.”

Two years ago, another group led by glaciologist Professor Julian Dowdeswell of Cambridge University measured similar tidal wedges under the Larsen continental shelf in the western Weddell Sea. Grounding line retreat rates of 40-50m a day were discovered, equivalent to 10kms a year. The scientists concluded that this retreat occurred 14,000 years ago and was 100 times faster than the rate over the past 10,000 years.

This is all fascinating scientific work that gives us more information about the natural processes that shape the Earth. But it will be largely ignored in the mainstream if such findings are seen to cast doubt on the ‘settled’ science of human-caused global warming. In March 2020, the BBC’s Justin Rowlatt took a camera crew to the middle of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, an area he called the “front line of climate change”. The equilibrium that had held our world in balance for tens of thousands of years was beginning to slip and crash, he claimed. The “epic forces” at work were like a “scream of anguish”, he continued. “The glacier is being torn and shattered.” The acceleration in melting that affected the entire West Antarctica ice sheet was, “needless to say”, the result of the global warming gases our lifestyles produced. The emotional tosh continued: “A colleague interviews me for a programme we are making and I burst into tears. It takes me days to process my emotions.”

Humans may have a part to play in a climate that has always changed. Considering the massive forces at work in the natural world, many only partly understood, it is probably minor or even insignificant. But the move to declare the science around the subject ‘settled’ is harming our efforts to better understand the natural forces that shape the planet. It is certainly harming our ability to have a reasoned conversation about it. Vast sums of money are being diverted into a command-and-control Net Zero political agenda designed to radically alter the lifestyles and economic prospects of every single human on the planet. Only science that supports this political narrative gets a hearing in the mainstream media, and when politics is involved, emotion is never far from the controlling message.


Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

October 16, 2022 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment