In 2015, Justice Department press chief Brian Fallon bitterly complained to USA Today editors about my articles walloping Attorney General Eric Holder, including ”Eric Holder’s Lawless Legacy,” [Feb. 3, 2015] and “Eric Holder’s Police Shooting Record? Dismal,” [Aug. 20, 2014]. Fallon (who later became presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s press secretary) protested to USA Today commentary editor David Mastio and another USA Today editor, Brian Gallagher, about my “consistently nasty words about Mr. Holder” and said that Bovard “has never had a kind thing to say about Holder.” (Actually, I praised Holder’s curtailing prosecutions of minor drug possession in a 2013 USA Today column that recounted my experiences working with a convict road gang.)
Fallon caterwauled that I had “authored pieces in various places criticizing [Holder] on civil liberties, relations with law enforcement, civil asset forfeiture and media subpoenas. In the past, Bovard even has articulated a conspiracy theory involving Mr. Holder and the incident at Waco in the 1990s.” (Waco was only “the incident… in the 1990s”? No wonder Fallon loathed me.) Fallon groused, “I don’t understand why USA Today would provide a platform on repeated occasions for his Holder bashing.”
Mastio never flinched. He replied, “As an opinion section, much of what we publish is written by writers with agendas… Just as our door is open to writers who want to say nasty things about the attorney general, our door is wide open to the attorney general when he wants to write about the top issues of the day.” Mastio also declared, “The guarantor of balance in the opinion section is that we are open to a wide variety of views.”
I acquired Fallon’s messages and Mastio’s responses via a 2019 Freedom of Information Act request, reposted in full PDF form here.
Mastio recently resigned from USA Today and wrote about the changes he saw on its editorial policy last week in the New York Post.
In the years following that pressure from the Justice Department press office, Mastio and USA Today published some of the hard-hitting articles I submitted to them on federal law enforcement outrages, including:
I don’t know how many other publications have been pressured by politicians or federal agencies to not publish or to muzzle my work. Unfortunately, I am unlikely to hear such details when the federal elbows succeed. I know some of the backstory of how the Washington Post caved in 1994 on an article on drug education turning kids into narcs; the Post added six paragraphs to my article and ended up libeling an innocent Georgia couple as drug dealers. The Post paid an undisclosed libel settlement and hushed up the incident. In 1999, Reader’s Digest took a dive after the Clinton White House pressured them not to publish my investigation of AmeriCorps. (My editors at the American Spectator weren’t intimidated, snapping up the piece and running it as a cover story.) There were other articles that were accepted by high-profile publications but then killed, sometimes for bizarre arcane reasons that almost certainly came from insiders at the agency I was whacking.
I don’t know if those cases were the tip of the iceberg of media kowtowing or a few exceptional cases of editorial nerves failing. In prior times, when I filed Freedom of Information Act requests seeking to learn of G-men covertly targeting my work, the responses came back so empty that I sometimes burst out laughing. The FBI said they had nothing on me in their files—even though FBI chief Louis Freeh wrote letters to two newspapers in 1995 condemning my articles on Ruby Ridge. When I filed a request for mentions of my name in the records of the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (which I often hammered in the 1990s), the official response notified me that they had nothing in their files on “Kevin Bovard.” Ya, well, I wasn’t asking about my cousin.
Jim Bovard is the author of Public Policy Hooligan (2012), Attention Deficit Democracy (2006), Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (1994), and 7 other books.
Since climate change has once again risen to the top of the charts, as an issue of “deep concern,” I’m reposting my piece about Al Gore from several years ago:
Freeman Dyson, physicist and mathematician, professor emeritus at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, Fellow of the Royal Society, winner of the Lorentz Medal, the Max Planck Medal, the Fermi Award: “What has happened in the past 10 years is that the discrepancies [in climate change models] between what’s observed and what’s predicted have become much stronger. It’s clear now the models are wrong, but it wasn’t so clear 10 years ago… I’m 100 per cent Democrat myself, and I like Obama. But he took the wrong side on this [climate change] issue, and the Republicans took the right side…” (The Register, October 11, 2015)
Dr. Ivar Giaever, Nobel-prize winner in Physics (1973), reported by Climate Depot, July 8, 2015: “Global warming is a non-problem… I say this to Obama: Excuse me, Mr. President, but you’re wrong. Dead wrong.”
Green Guru James Lovelock, who once predicted imminent destruction of the planet via global warming: “The computer models just weren’t reliable. In fact, I’m not sure the whole thing isn’t crazy, this climate change.” (The Guardian, September 30, 2016)
And these are but a tiny fraction of the statements made by dissident scientists who reject manmade global warming.
The science is only settled in government circles where leaders have climbed on board the Globalist plan to undermine economies all over the world by grossly lowering energy production, as a way to “reduce warming.”
One of the major warming hustlers is, of course, Al Gore.
Consider facts laid out in an uncritical Washington Post story (October 10, 2012, “Al Gore has thrived as a green-tech investor”):
In 2001, Al was worth less than $2 million. By 2012, it was estimated he’d locked up a nice neat $100 million.
How did he do it? Well, he invested in 14 green companies, who inhaled — via loans, grants and tax relief — somewhere in the neighborhood of $2.5 billion from the Federal government to go greener.
Therefore, Gore’s investments paid off, because the Federal government was providing massive cash backup to those companies. It’s nice to have Federal friends in high places.
For example, Gore’s investment firm at one point held 4.2 million shares of an outfit called Iberdrola Renovables, which was building 20 wind farms across the United States.
Iberdrola was blessed with $1.5 billion from the Federal government for the work which, by its own admission, saved its corporate financial bacon. Every little bit helps.
Then there was a company called Johnson Controls. It made batteries, including those for electric cars. Gore’s investment company, Generation Investment Management (GIM), doubled its holdings in Johnson Controls in 2008, when shares cost as little $9 a share. GIM sold when shares cost $21 to $26.
Note: Johnson Controls had been bolstered by $299 million dropped at its doorstep by the administration of President Barack Obama.
On the side, Gore had been giving speeches on the end of life as we know it on planet Earth, for as much as $175,000 a pop. (It wasn’t really on the side. Gore was constantly on the move from conference to conference, spewing jet fumes in his wake.) Those lecture fees can add up.
So Gore, as of 2012, had $100 million.
The man has worked every angle to parlay fear of global-warming catastrophes into a humdinger of a personal fortune. And he didn’t achieve his new status in the free market. The Federal government has been helping out with major, major bucks.
This wasn’t an entrepreneur relying exclusively on his own smarts and hard work. Far from it.
— How many scientists and other PhDs have been just saying no to the theory of manmade global warming?
A letter to The Wall Street Journal signed by 16 scientists just said no. Among the luminaries: William Happer, professor of physics at Princeton University; Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; William Kininmonth, former head of climate research at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.
And then there was the Global Warming Petition Project, or the Oregon Petition, that just said no. According to Petitionproject.org, the petition has the signatures of “31,487 American scientists,” of which 9,029 stated they had Ph.D.s.
Global warming is one of the Rockefeller Globalists’ chief issues. Manipulating it entails convincing populations that a massive intervention is necessary to stave off the imminent collapse of all life on Earth. Therefore, sovereign nations must be eradicated. Political power and decision-making must flow from above, from “those who are wiser.”
Al Gore is one of their front men.
He jets here and he jets there, carrying their messages. He’s their delivery kid.
And for his work, he is paid $100 million — a drop in the bucket.
Globalists want all national governments on the planet to commit to lowering energy production by a significant and destructive percentage in the next 15 years—“to save us from a horrible fate.”
Their real agenda is clear: The only solution to climate change is a global energy-management network. Globalist leaders are in the best position to manage such a system. They’ll mandate FAR LOWER energy-use levels throughout planet Earth, region by region, nation by nation, and eventually, citizen by citizen.
Yes, citizen by citizen.
This is the long-term goal. This is the Globalists’ Holy Grail.
Why was there no democracy in Hong Kong under British colonial rule? And why democracy can be developed in an orderly manner in Hong Kong only on the premise of firmly implementing the policy of “One Country, Two Systems” and the Basic Law of the HKSAR. Einar Tangen, our current affairs commentator, tells more.
Congressman Louie Gohmert discusses his recent comments at the FDA’s VRBPAC meeting demanding answers about the safety of Covid vaccines as well as legislation he’s working on to put liability back on vaccine manufacturers.
leaders do not, mostly, lead. they follow the public mood. and as that mood is shifting, it’s becoming OK to ask the pointy questions and start getting to the bottom of things.
debbie had a tough outing here and gets pinned on a simple and vital issue:
when public health officials and agencies stridently told america that the covid vaccines would be a “dead end for the virus” and stop infection and spread, upon what did they base that claim and how did they get it so wrong?
once jordan gets a hold of her, this is like a tuna filled piñata in a tiger cage.
jj: was the government lying when they said this?
db: i don’t know. i was not part of the taskforce discussions
strong start. non-denial denial, offers up others for the trip under the bus. both evasive and self-protective. politics 101.
she then speaks of her family still using “layered protection” because she knew that vaccine immunity would wane like natural immunity. this is both inaccurate and deeply dishonest. if she and her compatriots “knew” that, they certainly were not saying it in public.
and boy oh boy do we have the receipts on that one…
jj: when the government told us the vaccinated could not transmit it (covid), was that a lie or a guess?
db: “i think it was hope”
see, now that seems like a pretty poor pretext for pushing vaccination as social duty, mandating jabs, and endless campaigns of vilification, othering and claims to be on the “side of science.”
“we did it cuz hope.”
digging further into this is going to get really good. it’s clear these people are neither smart nor informed. they hipshot and hoped. and all the carnage and calamity it drove is going to land on them.
it’s clear they lack basic justification for their towering, condescending certitude.
this fallback to “and that’s why i think scientists and public health leaders always have to be at the table being very clear what we know and don’t know” is awe inspiring in its manipulative mendacity.
sure, the statement is true, but could anyone produce a standard that less describes what was actually done?
they expressed as iron bar certainty that which they now admit was “a hope.”
they attacked viciously anyone who dared call their narrative into question.
i seriously cannot believe she just said that.
that she did not actually burst into flame getting that out is near certain proof that she’s wearing asbestos underpants.
jordan ends on a wonderful high note:
“i’m just struck with the irony. we’ve got government agencies guessing, hoping, or lying with the information they’re presenting to the american people and this is the same administration that wants to set up the disinformation governance board and want to talk about misinformation. they are the biggest purveyor of misinformation, false information, hopeful information, but not accurate and true information…”
take that, scary poppins!
this is, of course, 100% correct.
and just who the liars and suppressors of science here were is going to keep coming out.
trust in government is dropping like tropical sunset: slowly at first then suddenly, darkness.
No longer are we presumed innocent. Now we’re presumed guilty unless we can prove our innocence beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. Rarely, are we even given the opportunity to do so.
Although the Constitution requires the government to provide solid proof of criminal activity before it can deprive a citizen of life or liberty, the government has turned that fundamental assurance of due process on its head.
Each and every one of us is now seen as a potential suspect, terrorist and lawbreaker in the eyes of the government.
Consider all the ways in which “we the people” are now treated as criminals, found guilty of violating the police state’s abundance of laws, and preemptively stripped of basic due process rights.
Red flag gun confiscation laws: Gun control legislation, especially in the form of red flag gun laws, allow the police to remove guns from people “suspected” of being threats. These laws, growing in popularity as a legislative means by which to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others, will put a target on the back of every American whether or not they own a weapon.
Government watch lists. The FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies have increasingly invested in corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior. Where many Americans go wrong is in naively assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or harmful in order to be flagged and targeted for some form of intervention or detention.
Thought crimes. For years now, the government has used all of the weapons in its vast arsenal—surveillance, threat assessments, fusion centers, pre-crime programs, hate crime laws, militarized police, lockdowns, martial law, etc.—to target potential enemies of the state based on their ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that might be deemed suspicious or dangerous. It’s not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you think that is being tracked and targeted.
Security checkpoints and fusion centers. By treating an entire populace as suspect, the government has justified wide-ranging security checkpoints that subject travelers to scans, searches, pat downs and other indignities by the TSA and VIPR raids on so-called “soft” targets like shopping malls and bus depots by black-clad, Darth Vader look-alikes. Fusion centers, which represent the combined surveillance efforts of federal, state and local law enforcement, track the citizenry’s movements, record their conversations, and catalogue their transactions.
Surveillance, precrime programs. Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people. For instance, the U.S. Postal Service, which has been photographing the exterior of every piece of paper mail for the past 20 years, is also spying on Americans’ texts, emails and social media posts.
Threat assessments and AI algorithms. The government has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state. Before long, every household in America will be flagged as a threat and assigned a threat score.
Militarized police. America is overrun with militarized cops who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.” This is how we have gone from a nation of laws—where the least among us had just as much right to be treated with dignity and respect as the next person (in principle, at least)—to a nation of law enforcers (revenue collectors with weapons) who treat “we the people” like suspects and criminals.
Constitution-free zones. Merely living within 100 miles inland of the border around the United States is now enough to make you a suspect, paving the way for Border Patrol agents to search people’s homes, intimately probe their bodies, and rifle through their belongings, all without a warrant. Nearly 66% of Americans now live within that 100-mile-deep, Constitution-free zone.
Asset forfeiture schemes. Hard-working Americans are having their bank accounts, homes, cars electronics and cash seized by police under the assumption that they have been associated with some criminal scheme.
Bodily integrity. The government’s presumptions about our so-called guilt or innocence have extended down to our very cellular level. The groundwork being laid is a prologue to what will become the police state’s conquest of a new, relatively uncharted, frontier: inner space, specifically, the inner workings (genetic, biological, biometric, mental, emotional) of the human race.
The Security-Industrial Complex. Every crisis—manufactured or otherwise—since the nation’s early beginnings has become a make-work opportunity for the government to expand its reach and its power at taxpayer expense while limiting our freedoms at every turn. As a result, the American people have been treated like enemy combatants, to be spied on, tracked, scanned, frisked, searched, subjected to all manner of intrusions, intimidated, invaded, raided, manhandled, censored, silenced, shot at, locked up, denied due process, and killed.
These programs push us that much closer towards a suspect society where everyone is potentially guilty of some crime or another and must be preemptively rendered harmless.
The ramifications of empowering the government to sidestep fundamental due process safeguards are so chilling and so far-reaching as to put a target on the back of anyone who happens to be in the same place where a crime takes place.
The groundwork has been laid for a new kind of government where it won’t matter if you’re innocent or guilty, whether you’re a threat to the nation, or even if you’re a citizen. What will matter is what the government—or whoever happens to be calling the shots at the time—thinks. And if the powers-that-be think you’re a threat to the nation and should be locked up, then you’ll be locked up with no access to the protections our Constitution provides.
The Allies suffered over 100,000 casualties during pointless fighting in Africa when they could have invaded Sicily. Some believe the US Army lacked the experience to fight a major war and fighting confused Frenchmen in Africa provided that. However, most of the American generals, colonels and senior sergeants had fought in World War I. There were no German ground combat troops in Sicily in late 1942 and not many Italian. The best Italian units and equipment were dedicated to fighting the British in Egypt and there were little preparations to defend Sicily, which only had five second-rate infantry divisions with dispersed units providing security at key points. A November 1942 invasion of Sicily would have been bloody, but losses would be far less than the 100,000 casualties suffered fighting in Africa plus the 25,000 lost invading Sicily in July 1943 after it had been fortified.
“Major Convoy Operation to Malta, 10-15 August 1942 (Operation Pedestal)”; Milan Vego; Naval War College Review; 2010; https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi…
1. Brincidofovir. Brincidofovir is licensed (since 1996) for treatment of smallpox but is not available in the US stockpile (termed the National Strategic Stockpile) and CDC is considering obtaining an expanded access IND (a legal permission from FDA to test/use it in people) so that it could legally be used if needed. But it could be used off-label, since it is licensed. Why is CDC jumping through unnecessary hoops? Probably in order to control the supply, in a similar though not identical manner to what FDA did with donated hydroxychloroquine.
2. TPOXX, the controversial drug made by SIGA Technologies. When the Obama administration first tried to buy this drug, Congress had a fit and the media helped blow up the deal. From David Willman, writing for the LA Times in 2011:
Over the last year, the Obama administration has aggressively pushed a $433-million plan to buy an experimental smallpox drug, despite uncertainty over whether it is needed or will work.
Senior officials have taken unusual steps to secure the contract for New York-based Siga Technologies Inc., whose controlling shareholder is billionaire Ronald O. Perelman, one of the world’s richest men and a longtime Democratic Party donor.
When Siga complained that contracting specialists at the Department of Health and Human Services were resisting the company’s financial demands, senior officials replaced the government’s lead negotiator for the deal, interviews and documents show.
When Siga was in danger of losing its grip on the contract a year ago, the officials blocked other firms from competing…
Negotiations over the price of the drug and Siga’s profit margin were contentious. In an internal memo in March, Dr. Richard J. Hatchett, chief medical officer for HHS’ biodefense preparedness unit, said Siga’s projected profit at that point was 180%, which he called “outrageous.”
So the Obama administration simply waited out the media storm, and bought the drug for $30 million more in 2013. Here is what the NYT said about it in 2013, when the purchase was finalized:
The United States government is buying enough of a new smallpox medicine to treat two million people in the event of a bioterrorism attack, and took delivery of the first shipment of it last week. But the purchase has set off a debate about the lucrative contract, with some experts saying the government is buying too much of the drug at too high a price.
A small company, Siga Technologies, developed the drug in recent years. Whether the $463 million order is a boondoggle or bargain depends on which expert is talking…
Dr. Henderson and Dr. Philip Russell, who formerly headed the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and served on the advisory panel with him, said they expected the government to pay much less for an antiviral drug since they cost little to make and the alternative, vaccines, cost the government $3 a dose. “If they’re talking $250 a course, they’re a bunch of thieves,” Dr. Russell said.
Asked how much TPOXX (Tecovirimat) and 3. Vaccinia Immune Globulin there is in the stockpile, the CDC’s Dr. Petersen would not answer, only saying there was enough. He didn’t know that I recalled the NY Times had spilled the beans on the initial purchase of 2 million courses. How much have they bought since? Presumably someone decided it would not be in the governments’ best interest for the public to know how much of these unproven products were purchased from a top Dem donor.
In 2018, FDA gave the drug a license. The NYT explained how this happened:
The antiviral pill, tecovirimat, also known as Tpoxx, has never been tested in humans with smallpox because the disease was declared eradicated in 1980, three years after the last known case.
But it was very effective at protecting animals deliberately infected with monkeypox and rabbitpox, two related diseases that can be lethal. It also caused no severe side effects when safety-tested in 359 healthy human volunteers, the F.D.A. said…
The F.D.A. approval of the drug went to Siga Technologies of Corvallis, Ore., a private company that developed the medicine under a federal biomedical defense contract… Research on tecovirimat — originally designated ST-246 — began at the institute (NIAID) after the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, Dr. Fauci said.
So the taxpayer paid to develop it, and paid through the nose to buy it, Fauci-style, no doubt paying royalties back to the NIAID.
Is there a public health emergency?
Dr. Maldonado asked about the possible designation of a public health emergency of International Concern by WHO, and how this would impact CDC.
Yes, WHO had a meeting to discuss this today, said Dr. Petersen, and CDC participated but he does not know what the result was. EUAs could eventuate if there are emergency declarations.
Dr. Maldonado further noted that the presentation (the severity and overall clinical picture) of moneypox is unexpected for orthopox viruses… and then asks what to do about children. There have been NO child cases internationally (excluding Africa?—Nass) said Dr. Rao. She says cases in Nigeria have been strange too, but I was confused about whether they were equivalent to those in the west or more like historical cases. Dr. Petersen agreed. Melinda Wharton (the new exec secretary of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) as well as having been a member of the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee) says that recommended PPE for moneypox includes gloves and respirator, and was not sure if medical providers would be considered at risk after seeing a patient, particularly if they used no respirator.
Dr. Rao says she will need to get back to the committee on this; the risk exposure assessment is being revised, it seems, by CDC.
Dr. Fryhofer asked about expected adverse events of the proposed drugs. Cidofovir has renal toxicity and is used with cimetidine in an effort to prevent that. Brincidofovir has liver and GI toxicity.
TPOXX is “quite safe and well tolerated” says Dr. Petersen.
However, it was only tested in 359 people in a phase 3 trial, according to the label. At least one experienced EKG (cardiac) changes, and at least one had a drop in their blood count. Another had palpable purpura, which can be quite serious, usually the result of autoimmune vasculitis. Facial swelling suggests anaphylaxis. That is a rate of more than 1% experiencing serious adverse events after only taking the drug for 14 days or less. This was the first lie I caught him on.
Regarding how moneypox spreads, Dr. Rao says “the cases we are aware of are due to skin contact or towels, bedding”. 99% of cases recently were attributed to gay males, I read elsewhere. Dr. Long persists with her original question, asking whether the general US population should be worried about normal casual contacts, like going to the grocery store? Dr. Rao hedges, saying that Americans don’t need to worry about this, and at first said it seems to require “pretty intimate contact.” But then she qualified it, noting, “The risk to the general public at this time is still very low.”
Dr. Rao is asked to comment on a CDC statement that the virus is transmitted through respiratory secretions. She says it is due to saliva, respiratory droplets, implying no airborne spread.
Dr. Sanchez asks how severe the disease actually is. The breifer said hospitalizations have been for pain control, like proctitis. 197 courses of TPOXX have been distributed and 8 cases have received the drug… but none have gotten it iv, so I am again confused by the answer. I think what was meant is that no one has received immune globulin (an iv drug) yet. Dr. Petersen admits cases have been mild.
Dr. Grace Lee says she was exhausted, they have been meeting so much to provide info to the public, and it is time to adjourn.
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My computer saves the day
I am so glad my computer started broadcasting the end of the ACIP meeting when I finally got to my destination—as soon as it connected to wifi and before I had even plugged it in, it began talking to me. I heard the second part of Dr. Brent Petersen’s presentation, and the questions, described above.
Why am I glad? Because I caught Dr. Petersen lying to the ACIP. Twice. He claimed that there were 5.7. cases of myocarditis per 1,000 recipients due to ACAM2000 smallpox vaccine [true], but none from Jynneos.
This reminded me that before I began live-blogging some of the meetings, years ago, I had discovered from reading the abbreviated ACIP meeting minutes [who knows how accurate they are?] that the CDC briefers were lying to the ACIP about anthrax vaccine. It seems they leave nothing to chance in order to get their desired vaccine approvals.
If you read my post on Monkeypox published June 22, you would know that I looked over the 200 page FDA licensure review of the Jynneos smallpox-monkeypox vaccine. That is where I discovered that 2 studies of Jynneos found that 11% in one and and 18% of recipients in the other had developed elevated levels of cardiac enzymes (troponin). This implies heart muscle damage of some kind. It was not studied further, and the reviewers admitted they did not know whether myocarditis was caused by the Jynneos vaccine, or not. And that they would need to perform future surveillance to find out.
I wonder why Dr. Petersen, one of CDC’s monkeypox leads, brazenly lied to the committee about this? Was he so instructed? Or was he incompetent and ignorant? We can probably assume that CDC’s employees know on which side their bread is buttered. Since CDC has made the decision that Jynneos is to be used against monkeypox, despite its apparently awful risk-benefit ratio (see my monkeypox article) I imagine all its employees will be sticking to this story.
__________________
Here is what the Jynneos label (aka package insert, the legal document explaining the studies that led to licensure) has to say. 1.3% of recipients had a cardiac adverse event of special interest, and 2.1% if they had previously been vaccinated for smallpox. That seems pretty serious, and it seems like a very high rate: 1 in 75. From the label:
Cardiac AESIs were reported to occur in 1.3% (95/7,093) of JYNNEOS recipients and 0.2% (3/1,206)
of placebo recipients who were smallpox vaccine-naïve. Cardiac AESIs were reported to occur in 2.1% (16/766) of JYNNEOS recipients who were smallpox vaccine-experienced. The higher
proportion of JYNNEOS recipients who experienced cardiac AESIs was driven by 28 cases of asymptomatic post-vaccination elevation of troponin-I in two studies: Study 5, which enrolled
482 HIV-infected subjects and 97 healthy subjects, and Study 6, which enrolled 350 subjects with
atopic dermatitis and 282 healthy subjects. An additional 127 cases of asymptomatic post-vaccination
elevation of troponin-I above the upper limit of normal but not above 2 times the upper limit of normal
were documented in JYNNEOS recipients throughout the clinical development program, 124 of which occurred in Study 5 and Study 6. Proportions of subjects with troponin-I elevations were similar
between healthy and HIV-infected subjects in Study 5 and between healthy and atopic dermatitis
subjects in Study 6. A different troponin assay was used in these two studies compared to the other
studies, and these two studies had no placebo controls. The clinical significance of these
asymptomatic post-vaccination elevations of troponin-I is unknown. Among the cardiac AESIs reported, 6 cases (0.08%) were considered to be causally related to
JYNNEOS vaccination and included tachycardia, electrocardiogram T wave inversion,
electrocardiogram abnormal, electrocardiogram ST segment elevation, electrocardiogram T wave
abnormal, and palpitations. None of the cardiac AESIs considered causally related to study vaccination were considered serious.
Dr. Andrew Bostom, an epidemiologist who had over 47,000 followers and who was a significant dissenting figure during the coronavirus pandemic, has been permanently banned from Twitter after posting a peer-reviewed study on Covid vaccination effects.
Dr. Bostom made several appearances in the media and qualified as an expert witness in epidemiology in a lawsuit filed by parents against an executive order in Rhode Island requiring children to wear masks in schools.
According to the plaintiffs, Gov. Dan McKee did not have the authority to impose a mask mandate for children. They also asserted that masks affect the physical and psychological well-being of kids, arguing that masks lead to social isolation that then leads to depression. Some experts have argued that not seeing the facial expressions of peers can cause depression in children.
The member states of BRICS called for “a world free of nuclear weapons” in a joint declaration adopted on Thursday.
“We reaffirm our commitment to a world free of nuclear weapons and stress our strong commitment to nuclear disarmament and our support to the work on this subject during the session of 2022 of the Conference on Disarmament,” the declaration reads.
The group also lauded a joint statement by the permanent members of the UN Security Council (P5) – China, France, Russia, the UK, and the US – affirming that a “nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” The major nuclear powers managed to show a rare display of unity earlier this year.
Apart from that, the BRICS resolution rallied support towards “negotiations in bilateral and multilateral formats to resolve all issues pertaining to the Korean Peninsula, including its complete denuclearization.” The group also urged to “resolve the Iranian nuclear issue through peaceful and diplomatic means.”
The BRICS bloc – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – has convened for its 14th summit, hosted by China, which currently holds the rotating presidency within the group. The BRICS leaders held a meeting on Thursday via a video link.
The Covid era gave rise not only to popular mania but also to astonishing intellectual pretension. The experts were everywhere. They had all the answers. They knew for certain that a path never tried in anyone’s lifetimes was the certain way to go in order to control a virus. And this fanatical attachment to one goal caused all other considerations to be pushed aside.
The end of the story was baked in from the start. The experts were proven to have massively exaggerated their prowess and understanding of events. On point after point, their models blew up. The epidemic would end the way they always have, through acquired immunity and endemicity. Nowhere did the methods of the vaunted experts achieve the goal; at best they delayed the end point and created tremendous destruction along the way.
Now there is a problem: how to dial it all back without admitting profound error. This is a particular problem for those who wrote books before the story was complete. And by complete I am referring especially to the tremendous waves of infections that came 20 months after lockdowns were first imposed.
A paradigmatic case is Devi Sridhar, professor and chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. During the pandemic, she became a ubiquitous presence on television for two years both in the UK and the US. Her main message was to advocate and defend lockdowns, masking, mandates, and the entire apparatus of compulsion that characterized the pandemic response in nearly every country in the world. Her message was always geared toward what is called eliminationism or zero Covid.
As a Rhodes scholar in a high prestige position, she was well positioned to be this messenger. She has a compelling way and presents well in the medium. Plus, the message she delivered was the one that earned an official stamp of approval from all mainstream media. She was also a pro at delivering an attitude of disdain toward anyone who dared question the zero Covid story.
Now she has a book out that further elaborates on her point of view. It has the right title: Preventable: How a Pandemic Changed the World and How to Prevent the Next One. It’s a pretentious title, presuming that she knows for certain that the pandemic was preventable and therefore she should be trusted to tell us what to do next time.
What’s striking is the contrast between the certitude of the body of the book in which she is an unapologetic defender of China-style lockdowns and the afterword, which must have been written only days before the book went to print. Here we have a very different tone, discussed toward the end of this review.
Sadly for her, the book came out just before a wave of new lockdowns came to China that wrecked the lives and liberties of hundreds of millions of people and made an enormous mess of the entire economic mission of the country. She must not have had time to revise the manuscript.
Of China, her book says:
The way China set about eliminating SARS-CoV-2 could be described as draconian. It undertook house-to-house testing and removed individuals to quarantine facilities if they tested positive (sometimes against their will); it used tracking technology to trace 99–100 per cent of those who had had contact with the infected; it locked down entire buildings so individuals could not leave their flats or have free movement; and it constructed completely new hospitals within days…
The Chinese government understood well that the virus moves when people move. So it stopped people moving internally…
The efforts to contain the spread within Wuhan were effective and focused on reducing the R number…
These measures to contain spread worked…
[China showed that] containment strategies (however draconian) could be effective at stopping this respiratory pathogen…
The evidence in February 2020 showed that containment was successful…
Within the span of three months, China had eliminated the virus fully within its borders…
This is the same message she delivered to millions day after day for two years.
We could just stop this review here, observing that none of the above turns out to be true. Currently, China faces an enormous problem. If we are to believe the data, vast swaths of China’s population still lack acquired immunity to Covid. Millions or billions need the exposure, and, as with all places in the world, the result for nearly everyone moderately healthy and not elderly will be recovery. This will happen with or without lockdowns.
President Xi Jinping, however, became convinced either by virtue of his ego or his circle of sycophants that his lockdowns two and a half years ago were his greatest achievement. He was celebrated by the World Health Organization and nearly every country in the world copied his brutal methods of virus suppression. He regarded it then as evidence that the CCP was destined to rule the future, by virtue of its masterful social, economic, and now medical management of society.
So of course the CCP cannot turn back now. He has stated repeatedly that there will be no compromise of the zero Covid stance that both he and Dr. Sridhar have long advocated. He must now either continue to threaten and enact lockdowns or figure out some clever way to back away from the position without admitting past error. He may in fact figure it out at some point.
After all, nearly every other government in the world has finally figured it out. Even under the best of assumptions that lockdowns offer some contribution to mitigate the ill-effects of a pathogen, the costs far outweigh those benefits. And those costs not only include economic, educational, and nutritional ones but also costs in terms of deaths from overdoses, despair, and self-harm from the inevitable demoralization from being treated like a prisoner or lab rat.
So I did read Dr. Sridhar’s book in search of some insight as to why she could have made such a profound error. All I found was a relentless and single-minded attachment to a zero Covid agenda, or some version of it, a genuine belief that the right deployment of human force could somehow make a virus go away. It truly boggles the mind.
The rest of the narrative is utterly predictable.
Countries that locked down are good, especially New Zealand and Australia. Countries that did not are bad, especially Sweden but also the UK and the US after reopening. Countries that kept lockdowns longer are good. Countries that opened up too soon are corrupt and rejecting “the science.” The Great Barrington Declaration is bad. Ramdesivir is good while Ivermectin is bad. And so on.
Her hard-core bias extends even to a rousing defense of Rebekah Jones, the low-level data employee in Florida who wrongly accused the Governor’s office of manipulating data in a case that was later tossed out.
The book is so partisan that she sometimes lets her politics even race ahead of her epidemiological position. For example, and this probably won’t surprise you, she comes to the defense of the George Floyd protests even in the midst of lockdowns:
In late May 2020, I was asked whether protesters were wrong to take to the streets. I replied that racism is also a pandemic, and one that Black Americans feel can’t be swept under the carpet any longer. While clearly mass gatherings during a pandemic are risky, I could understand that people were willing to take this risk in order to effect change for their children and the children of their children. This is how the civil rights movement has attempted to progress racial equality over decades.
In any case, you get the point here. She has a tribe and she wants to be its messenger. Still, I struggled through the entire text to see if I could find insight. This one jumped out at me:
While WHO was at the forefront of press briefings and leading technical and normative guidance to the pandemic, the World Bank had the financial power to help governments respond with key policies, whether through building up health systems and testing, putting in place economic packages to support lockdown measures, or in acquiring and distributing vaccines.
There we go: the World Bank subsidized lockdowns. Fascinating. That I did not know. This is a serious problem that needs to be fixed. How many millions face malnutrition as a result?
So much for the body of the book.
Probably the most telling part of the book is the afterword, written January 2022. Here our author jumps in with the latest information, namely that China had not in fact eradicated the virus and now keeps locking down, which she says is due to inferior vaccines. Within a few paragraphs, she – for the first time in the book – recognizes that even the best vaccines do not stop infection and do not stop the spread..
Whoops. Is she willing to rewrite the entire book in light of this last-minute realization that lockdown eliminationism and even mass vaccination cannot achieve the goal? No. Is she willing to rethink? Perhaps a bit but not enough.
While some say we should adapt normal social relations and mixing for the foreseeable future, I struggle with this line of thought. Humans are social: we need to hug, talk, dance, sing, kiss and be around others. We’re not bears or rhinos or other solitary creatures. We like seeing each other’s faces. And we know that a sense of community and connection are vital to wellbeing too. A holistic approach to public health is vital, and this includes not just people’s mental health but also their ability to pay rent, feed their family, stay warm through the winter and have a meaningful role in society, be that going to church or being part of a glee club. For a certain period of time, altering these made sense, so that we could avoid preventable illness and deaths; allow vaccines to be created, trialled and distributed in 2020 and into 2021; allow clinicians to better understand how to treat COVID-19; and allow a better understanding of transmission and risk.
Again, very interesting, especially because the change in tone from the rest of the book is so sharp. She doesn’t come close to repudiating her entire book – and she still believes that totalitarian measures somehow make sense for a “period of time” – but she does say that she is tired and exhausted and perhaps ready for some rethinking.
“I’ve taken a step back from media work… I’ve been testing several times a week, and, while I cautiously avoid crowded spaces, and wear masks on public transport and in shops, I continue to go to the gym and to hot yoga and to see friends outside or in small groups. I’ve found a sustainable way to live alongside COVID-19 for now… You’ve heard enough from me.
These are hopeful signs. It’s possible that even Devi Sridhar might eventually come to see the error of her ways. Or perhaps like most of the exalted experts who assisted in driving the world into the greatest calamity of the modern era, she will quietly disappear from the op-ed pages and television screens and go back to her prior life as a public health professor with degrees in anthropology. At some point, too, she will get Covid and discover with millions of others that it is part of the human experience to get sick and get well and become stronger as a result.
We will wait in vain for any sort of extended literary mea culpas. Not even the pensive afterword comes close. After all, when the next great health crisis presents itself, the WHO pushes for lockdowns again, and the major media empires need some great excuse to order people back home to be glued to the screen, the expertise of these compelling pundits – now with real media experience – will need to be called upon again.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown.
In this edition of #SolutionsWatch, James talks to Frode Burdal Klevstul about his new self-published book, Bill Goats and the Forest. We discuss the power of narrative in helping children (and adults) to understand world events in their proper context and we talk about the process of conceptualizing, writing and self-publishing a book.
By Thomas Riggins | Dissident Voice | February 5, 2014
A new report in Science News Magazine (1-25-2014) by Bruce Bower details a reevaluation of the view that the Rapa Nuians, the native inhabitants of Easter Island (Rapa Nui), were responsible for the collapse of their population and society due to over exploitation of natural resources and the destruction of the rain forest on their island, a view recently popularized by Jared Diamond in his book Collapse (2005).
As Bower reports, the anthropologist Maria Mulrooney has published the results of her studies of the Rapa Nui culture (Journal of Archeological Science, December 2013) based on new radiocarbon dates from archeological sites on the island. She has concluded that after the clear cutting of the forest in the 1500s, to make room for agricultural production, the population of Rapa Nui remained sufficiently vibrant to carry on food production and continue their cultural development.
Exactly when the Rapa Nui arrived on Easter Island is unknown but it was on or before 1200 A.D. or so. Mulrooney maintains they had a thriving culture which was still going strong even after their “discovery” by the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen on Easter Sunday 1722. This would indicate that they had not suffered “collapse” as a result of forest clearance. … continue
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