Putting Big Pharma on Trial in the COVID-19 Era, Part 3
Backing the Big Four: Big Pharma and the FDA, WHO, NIH, CDC
By Rebecca Strong | February 16, 2022
I know what you’re thinking. Big pharma is amoral and the FDA’s devastating slips are a dime a dozen — old news. But what about agencies and organizations like the National Institutes of Health (NIH), World Health Organization (WHO), and Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC)? Don’t they have an obligation to provide unbiased guidance to protect citizens? Don’t worry, I’m getting there.
The WHO’s guidance is undeniably influential across the globe. For most of this organization’s history, dating back to 1948, it could not receive donations from pharmaceutical companies — only member states. But that changed in 2005 when the WHO updated its financial policy to permit private money into its system. Since then, the WHO has accepted many financial contributions from big pharma. In fact, it’s only 20% financed by member states today, with a whopping 80% of financing coming from private donors. For instance, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) is now one of its main contributors, providing up to 13% of its funds — about $250–300 million a year. Nowadays, the BMGF provides more donations to the WHO than the entire United States.
Dr. Arata Kochi, former head of WHO’s malaria program, expressed concerns to director-general Dr. Margaret Chan in 2007 that taking the BMGF’s money could have “far-reaching, largely unintended consequences” including “stifling a diversity of views among scientists.”
“The big concerns are that the Gates Foundation isn’t fully transparent and accountable,” Lawrence Gostin, director of WHO’s Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law, told Devex in an interview. “By wielding such influence, it could steer WHO priorities … It would enable a single rich philanthropist to set the global health agenda.”
Bill Gates, Francis Collins, Anthony Fauci. Photo credit: National Institutes of Health
Take a peek at the WHO’s list of donors and you’ll find a few other familiar names like AstraZeneca, Bayer, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Merck.
The NIH has the same problem, it seems. Science journalist Paul Thacker, who previously examined financial links between physicians and pharma companies as a lead investigator of the United States Senate Committee, wrote in The Washington Post that this agency “often ignored” very “obvious” conflicts of interest. He also claimed that “its industry ties go back decades.” In 2018, it was discovered that a $100 million alcohol consumption study run by NIH scientists was funded mostly by beer and liquor companies. Emails proved that NIH researchers were in frequent contact with those companies while designing the study — which, here’s a shocker — were aimed at highlighting the benefits and not the risks of moderate drinking. So, the NIH ultimately had to squash the trial.
And then there’s the CDC. It used to be that this agency couldn’t take contributions from pharmaceutical companies, but in 1992 they found a loophole: new legislation passed by Congress allowed them to accept private funding through a nonprofit called the CDC Foundation. From 2014 through 2018 alone, the CDC Foundation received $79.6 million from corporations like Pfizer, Biogen, and Merck.
Of course, if a pharmaceutical company wants to get a drug, vaccine, or other product approved, they really need to cozy up to the FDA. That explains why in 2017, pharma companies paid for a whopping 75% of the FDA’s scientific review budgets, up from 27% in 1993. It wasn’t always like this. But in 1992, an act of Congress changed the FDA’s funding stream, enlisting pharma companies to pay “user fees,” which help the FDA speed up the approval process for their drugs.
A 2018 Science investigation found that 40 out of 107 physician advisors on the FDA’s committees received more than $10,000 from big pharma companies trying to get their drugs approved, with some banking up to $1 million or more. The FDA claims it has a well-functioning system to identify and prevent these possible conflicts of interest. Unfortunately, their system only works for spotting payments before advisory panels meet, and the Science investigation showed many FDA panel members get their payments after the fact. It’s a little like “you scratch my back now, and I’ll scratch your back once I get what I want” — drug companies promise FDA employees a future bonus contingent on whether things go their way.
Here’s why this dynamic proves problematic: a 2000 investigation revealed that when the FDA approved the rotavirus vaccine in 1998, it didn’t exactly do its due diligence. That probably had something to do with the fact that committee members had financial ties to the manufacturer, Merck — many owned tens of thousands of dollars of stock in the company, or even held patents on the vaccine itself. Later, the Adverse Event Reporting System revealed that the vaccine was causing serious bowel obstructions in some children, and it was finally pulled from the U.S. market in October 1999.
Then, in June of 2021, the FDA overruled concerns raised by its very own scientific advisory committee to approve Biogen’s Alzheimer’s drug Aduhelm — a move widely criticized by physicians. The drug not only showed very little efficacy but also potentially serious side effects like brain bleeding and swelling, in clinical trials. Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, a Harvard Medical School professor who was on the FDA’s scientific advisory committee, called it the “worst drug approval” in recent history, and noted that meetings between the FDA and Biogen had a “strange dynamic” suggesting an unusually close relationship. Dr. Michael Carome, director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, told CNN that he believes the FDA started working in “inappropriately close collaboration with Biogen” back in 2019. “They were not objective, unbiased regulators,” he added in the CNN interview. “It seems as if the decision was preordained.”
That brings me to perhaps the biggest conflict of interest yet: Dr. Anthony Fauci’s NIAID is just one of many institutes that comprises the NIH — and the NIH owns half the patent for the Moderna vaccine — as well as thousands more pharma patents to boot. The NIAID is poised to earn millions of dollars from Moderna’s vaccine revenue, with individual officials also receiving up to $150,000 annually.
Operation Warp Speed
In December of 2020, Pfizer became the first company to receive an emergency use authorization (EUA) from the FDA for a COVID-19 vaccine. EUAs — which allow the distribution of an unapproved drug or other product during a declared public health emergency — are actually a pretty new thing: the first one was issued in 2005 so military personnel could get an anthrax vaccine. To get a full FDA approval, there needs to be substantial evidence that the product is safe and effective. But for an EUA, the FDA just needs to determine that it may be effective. Since EUAs are granted so quickly, the FDA doesn’t have enough time to gather all the information they’d usually need to approve a drug or vaccine.
Pfizer CEO and chairman Albert Bourla has said his company was “operating at the speed of science” to bring a vaccine to market. However, a 2021 report in The BMJ revealed that this speed might have come at the expense of “data integrity and patient safety.” Brook Jackson, regional director for the Ventavia Research Group, which carried out these trials, told The BMJ that her former company “falsified data, unblinded patients, and employed inadequately trained vaccinators” in Pfizer’s pivotal phase 3 trial. Just some of the other concerning events witnessed included: adverse events not being reported correctly or at all, lack of reporting on protocol deviations, informed consent errors, and mislabeling of lab specimens. An audio recording of Ventavia employees from September 2020 revealed that they were so overwhelmed by issues arising during the study that they became unable to “quantify the types and number of errors” when assessing quality control. One Ventavia employee told The BMJ she’d never once seen a research environment as disorderly as Ventavia’s Pfizer vaccine trial, while another called it a “crazy mess.”
Over the course of her two-decades-long career, Jackson has worked on hundreds of clinical trials, and two of her areas of expertise happen to be immunology and infectious diseases. She told me that from her first day on the Pfizer trial in September of 2020, she discovered “such egregious misconduct” that she recommended they stop enrolling participants into the study to do an internal audit.
“To my complete shock and horror, Ventavia agreed to pause enrollment but then devised a plan to conceal what I found and to keep ICON and Pfizer in the dark,” Jackson said during our interview. “The site was in full clean-up mode. When missing data points were discovered the information was fabricated, including forged signatures on the informed consent forms.”
A screenshot Jackson shared with me shows she was invited to a meeting titled “COVID 1001 Clean up Call” on Sept. 21, 2020. She refused to participate in the call.
Jackson repeatedly warned her superiors about patient safety concerns and data integrity issues.
“I knew that the entire world was counting on clinical researchers to develop a safe and effective vaccine and I did not want to be a part of that failure by not reporting what I saw,” she told me.
When her employer failed to act, Jackson filed a complaint with the FDA on Sept. 25, and Ventavia fired her hours later that same day under the pretense that she was “not a good fit.” After reviewing her concerns over the phone, she claims the FDA never followed up or inspected the Ventavia site. Ten weeks later, the FDA authorized the EUA for the vaccine. Meanwhile, Pfizer hired Ventavia to handle the research for four more vaccine clinical trials, including one involving children and young adults, one for pregnant women, and another for the booster. Not only that, but Ventavia handled the clinical trials for Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and Novavax. Jackson is currently pursuing a False Claims Act lawsuitagainst Pfizer and Ventavia Research Group.
Last year, Pfizer banked nearly $37 billion from its COVID vaccine, making it one of the most lucrative products in global history. Its overall revenues doubled in 2021 to reach $81.3 billion, and it’s slated to reach a record-breaking $98-$102 billion this year.
“Corporations like Pfizer should never have been put in charge of a global vaccination rollout, because it was inevitable they would make life-and-death decisions based on what’s in the short-term interest of their shareholders,” writes Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice Now.
As previously mentioned, it’s super common for pharmaceutical companies to fund the research on their own products. Here’s why that’s scary. One 1999 meta-analysis showed that industry-funded research is eight times less likely to achieve unfavorable results compared to independent trials. In other words, if a pharmaceutical company wants to prove that a medication, supplement, vaccine, or device is safe and effective, they’ll find a way.
With that in mind, I recently examined the 2020 study on Pfizer’s COVID vaccine to see if there were any conflicts of interest. Lo and behold, the lengthy attached disclosure form shows that of the 29 authors, 18 are employees of Pfizer and hold stock in the company, one received a research grant from Pfizer during the study, and two reported being paid “personal fees” by Pfizer. In another 2021 study on the Pfizer vaccine, seven of the 15 authors are employees of and hold stock in Pfizer. The other eight authors received financial support from Pfizer during the study.
As of the day I’m writing this, about 64% of Americans are fully vaccinated, and 76% have gotten at least one dose. The FDA has repeatedly promised “full transparency” when it comes to these vaccines. Yet in December of 2021, the FDA asked for permission to wait 75 years before releasing information pertaining to Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, including safety data, effectiveness data, and adverse reaction reports. That means no one would see this information until the year 2096 — conveniently, after many of us have departed this crazy world. To recap: the FDA only needed 10 weeks to review the 329,000 pages worth of data before approving the EUA for the vaccine — but apparently, they need three-quarters of a century to publicize it.
In response to the FDA’s ludicrous request, PHMPT — a group of over 200 medical and public health experts from Harvard, Yale, Brown, UCLA, and other institutions — filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act demanding that the FDA produce this data sooner. And their efforts paid off: U.S. District Judge Mark T. Pittman issued an order for the FDA to produce 12,000 pages by Jan. 31, and then at least 55,000 pages per month thereafter. In his statement to the FDA, Pittman quoted the late John F. Kennedy: “A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”
As for why the FDA wanted to keep this data hidden, the first batch of documentation revealed that there were more than 1,200 vaccine-related deaths in just the first 90 days after the Pfizer vaccine was introduced. Of 32 pregnancies with a known outcome, 28 resulted in fetal death. The CDC also recently unveiled data showing a total of 1,088,560 reports of adverse events from COVID vaccines were submitted between Dec. 14, 2020, and Jan. 28, 2022. That data included 23,149 reports of deaths and 183,311 reports of serious injuries. There were 4,993 reported adverse events in pregnant women after getting vaccinated, including 1,597 reports of miscarriage or premature birth. A 2022 study published in JAMA, meanwhile, revealed that there have been more than 1,900 reported cases of myocarditis — or inflammation of the heart muscle — mostly in people 30 and under, within 7 days of getting the vaccine. In those cases, 96% of people were hospitalized.
“It is understandable that the FDA does not want independent scientists to review the documents it relied upon to license Pfizer’s vaccine given that it is not as effective as the FDA originally claimed, does not prevent transmission, does not prevent against certain emerging variants, can cause serious heart inflammation in younger individuals, and has numerous other undisputed safety issues,” writes Aaron Siri, the attorney representing PHMPT in its lawsuit against the FDA.
Siri told me in an email that his office phone has been ringing off the hook in recent months.
“We are overwhelmed by inquiries from individuals calling about an injury from a COVID-19 vaccine,” he said.
By the way — it’s worth noting that adverse effects caused by COVID-19 vaccinations are still not covered by the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. Companies like Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson are protected under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act, which grants them total immunity from liability with their vaccines. And no matter what happens to you, you can’t sue the FDA for authorizing the EUA, or your employer for requiring you to get it, either. Billions of taxpayer dollars went to fund the research and development of these vaccines, and in Moderna’s case, licensing its vaccine was made possible entirely by public funds. But apparently, that still warrants citizens no insurance. Should something go wrong, you’re basically on your own.
To be continued…
Research Shows Persons With Vitamin D Levels Under 20 nmol/l Are 18 Times More Likely To Die From Covid!
By P Gosselin – No Tricks Zone – April 8, 2022
In his book “Herdengesundheit” (Herd Health), German physician and molecular geneticist Dr. Michael Nehls says “Vitamin D would have prevented severe cases of disease and also most Covid-related deaths”.
He is convinced: Vitamin D is the game-changer and suggests the simple act of eliminating the great Vitamin D deficits much of the population now suffers would be far more effective than the current COVID vaccines.
Vitamin D is an important factor in our immune system’s ability to ward off viral infections. To illustrate this Dr. Nehls presents here a chart depicting how much higher mortality is in times of low Vitamin D (November to April):
Source: here.
18 times higher mortality risk
Citing a Belgian study and a Heidelberg study, Nehls reports that in the wintertime, when vitamin D levels are well under 50 nmol/l, you have a four times greater chance of dying from COVID, independent of age or preexisting conditions. And prospects become very dire for persons with a Vitamin D level of less than 20 nmol/l, where the risk of mortality in case of a covid infection is 18 times higher!
Statistically, researchers calculated that with a Vitamin D level of 120 nmol/l, a level that Nehls says is our natural level, a zero mortality rate from respiratory viral infections would be nearly achieved.
Much less infectious
Another interesting feature about Vitamin D levels is that the likelihood of testing positive on a PCR test drops more 50% for a person with a Vitamin D level of over 125 compared to a person with 50 nmol/l. That alone would mean having a healthy Vitamin D level would make you far less infectious. Not even the “vaccines” have been able to achieve that:
Percent corona PCR positive vs. Vitamin D level nmol/l. Source here,
Public health gross negligence
In the interview, Dr Nehls says that the government’s failure to make sure the immune system of people stays strong by ensuring healthy Vitamin D levels is “grossly negligent.” Moreover, health authorities are aware that the Vitamin D levels for the general population are far to low, but they choose to do nothing about it.
“A lack of Vitamin D leads to chronic disease” says Nehls. “With chronic disease the most money gets made. I can imagine there’s an interest not to make the recommendation, and that doesn’t apply just to Vitamin D.”
Nehls recommends taking Vitamin K2 along with Vitamin D to avoid possible side effects.
Beware of “cleverly manipulated” studies
Nehls criticizes studies that claim Vitamin D provides no real health benefit, accusing the authors of improperly conducting the studies in order to get a predetermined result. One study, Nehls said, was “very cleverly manipulated in order to encourage people not to bother taking Vitamin D”.
When asked if it would be recommendable to take Vitamin D as a way to treat vaccine injury, Nehls says “absolutely” and that it is urgently advised to have vitamin D levels of 125 nmol/l if you get vaccinated, which he then says wouldn’t be necessary because at that Vitamin D level, the chances of a serious COVID illness are practically zero.
Putting Big Pharma on Trial in the COVID-19 Era, Part 2
“Nurse prepares to vaccinate children” by World Bank Photo Collection is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
By Rebecca Strong | February 16, 2022
Big Pharma Lawsuits, Scandals, and Cover-Ups
While the OxyContin craze is undoubtedly one of the highest-profile examples of big pharma’s deception, there are dozens of other stories like this. Here are a few standouts:
In the 1980s, Bayer continued selling blood clotting products to third-world countries even though they were fully aware those products had been contaminated with HIV. The reason? The “financial investment in the product was considered too high to destroy the inventory.” Predictably, about 20,000 of the hemophiliacs who were infused with these tainted products then tested positive for HIV and eventually developed AIDS, and many later died of it.
In 2004, Johnson & Johnson was slapped with a series of lawsuits for illegally promoting off-label use of their heartburn drug Propulsid for children despite internal company emails confirming major safety concerns (as in, deaths during the drug trials). Documentation from the lawsuits showed that dozens of studies sponsored by Johnson & Johnson highlighting the risks of this drug were never published.
The FDA estimates that GSK’s Avandia caused 83,000 heart attacks between 1999 and 2007. Internal documents from GSK prove that when they began studying the effects of the drug as early as 1999, they discovered it caused a higher risk of heart attacks than a similar drug it was meant to replace. Rather than publish these findings, they spent a decade illegally concealing them (and meanwhile, banking $3.2 billion annually for this drug by 2006). Finally, a 2007 New England Journal of Medicine study linked Avandia to a 43% increased risk of heart attacks, and a 64% increased risk of death from heart disease. Avandia is still FDA approved and available in the U.S.
In 2009, Pfizer was forced to pay $2.3 billion, the largest healthcare fraud settlement in history at that time, for paying illegal kickbacks to doctors and promoting off-label uses of its drugs. Specifically, a former employee revealed that Pfizer reps were encouraged and incentivized to sell Bextra and 12 other drugs for conditions they were never FDA approved for, and at doses up to eight times what’s recommended. “I was expected to increase profits at all costs, even when sales meant endangering lives,” the whistleblower said.
When it was discovered that AstraZeneca was promoting the antipsychotic medication Seroquel for uses that were not approved by the FDA as safe and effective, the company was hit with a $520 million fine in 2010. For years, AstraZeneca had been encouraging psychiatrists and other physicians to prescribe Seroquel for a vast range of seemingly unrelated off-label conditions, including Alzheimer’s disease, anger management, ADHD, dementia, post-traumatic stress disorder, and sleeplessness. AstraZeneca also violated the federal Anti-Kickback Statute by paying doctors to spread the word about these unapproved uses of Seroquel via promotional lectures and while traveling to resort locations.
In 2012, GSK paid a $3 billion fine for bribing doctors by flying them and their spouses to five-star resorts, and for illegally promoting drugs for off-label uses. What’s worse — GSK withheld clinical trial results that showed its antidepressant Paxil not only doesn’t work for adolescents and children but more alarmingly, that it can increase the likelihood of suicidal thoughts in this group. A 1998 GSK internal memo revealed that the company intentionally concealed this data to minimize any “potential negative commercial impact.”
In 2021, an ex-AstraZeneca sales rep sued her former employer, claiming they fired her for refusing to promote drugs for uses that weren’t FDA-approved. The employee alleges that on multiple occasions, she expressed concerns to her boss about “misleading” information that didn’t have enough support from medical research, and off-label promotions of certain drugs. Her supervisor reportedly not only ignored these concerns but pressured her to approve statements she didn’t agree with and threatened to remove her from regional and national positions if she didn’t comply. According to the plaintiff, she missed out on a raise and a bonus because she refused to break the law.
At the top of 2022, a panel of the D.C. Court of Appeals reinstated a lawsuit against Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Roche, and GE Healthcare, which claims they helped finance terrorist attacks against U.S. service members and other Americans in Iraq. The suit alleges that from 2005–2011, these companies regularly offered bribes (including free drugs and medical devices) totaling millions of dollars annually to Iraq’s Ministry of Health in order to secure drug contracts. These corrupt payments then allegedly funded weapons and training for the Mahdi Army, which until 2008, was largely considered one of the most dangerous groups in Iraq.
Another especially worrisome factor is that pharmaceutical companies are conducting an ever-increasing number of clinical trials in third-world countries, where people may be less educated, and there are also far fewer safety regulations. Pfizer’s 1996 experimental trials with Trovan on Nigerian childrenwith meningitis — without informed consent — is just one nauseating example. When a former medical director in Pfizer’s central research division warned the company both before and after the study that their methods in this trial were “improper and unsafe,” he was promptly fired. Families of the Nigerian children who died or were left blind, brain damaged, or paralyzed after the study sued Pfizer, and the company ultimately settled out of court. In 1998, the FDA approved Trovan only for adults. The drug was later banned from European markets due to reports of fatal liver disease and restricted to strictly emergency care in the U.S. Pfizer still denies any wrongdoing.
But all that is just the tip of the iceberg. If you’d like to dive a little further down the rabbit hole — and I’ll warn you, it’s a deep one — a quick Google search for “big pharma lawsuits” will reveal the industry’s dark track record of bribery, dishonesty, and fraud.
In fact, big pharma happens to be the biggest defrauder of the federal government when it comes to the False Claims Act, otherwise known as the “Lincoln Law.” During our interview, Panara told me she has friends still working for big pharma who would be willing to speak out about crooked activity they’ve observed, but are too afraid of being blacklisted by the industry. A newly proposed update to the False Claims Act would help to protect and support whistleblowers in their efforts to hold pharmaceutical companies liable, by helping to prevent that kind of retaliation and making it harder for the companies charged to dismiss these cases. It should come as no surprise that Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Merck, and a flock of other big pharma firms are currently lobbying to block the update. Naturally, they wouldn’t want to make it any easier for ex-employees to expose their wrongdoings, potentially costing them billions more in fines.
Something to keep in mind: these are the same people who produced, marketed, and are profiting from the COVID-19 vaccines. The same people who manipulate research, pay off decision-makers to push their drugs, cover up negative research results to avoid financial losses, and knowingly put innocent citizens in harm’s way. The same people who told America: “Take as much OxyContin as you want around the clock! It’s very safe and not addictive!” (while laughing all the way to the bank).
So, ask yourself this: if a partner, friend, or family member repeatedly lied to you — and not just little white lies, but big ones that put your health and safety at risk — would you continue to trust them?
To be continued…
Vaccinated Have Up To SIX Times the Infection Rate of Unvaccinated, NZ Government Data Show
By Amanuensis | The Daily Sceptic | April 9, 2022
New Zealand is a fascinating country – amazing geography, likeable population, and, unlike its neighbour Australia, most of its wildlife isn’t planning on killing you at the slightest opportunity. It is also fascinating with respect to Covid because its population has a very high vaccination rate across all age groups (well, down to five), but up until recently there has been negligible natural immunity to Covid. Because of these two factors, New Zealand was always going to be of interest as soon as Covid arrived properly, if only to see how its vaccination efforts had protected its population.
For those who missed it, since the end of last year New Zealand has had a succession of Covid waves. These started small, but in the most recent wave, taking place during February and March, infection rates were enormous – if we had these infection rates in the U.K. we’d have peaked at approximately 350,000 cases per day (rather than around 200,000). What’s more, it looks like New Zealand exceeded its testing capacity during that wave, suggesting that peak infections were probably even higher. It is relevant to note that during February and March, New Zealand had over 90% of all the cases it has ever had and most of the rest occurred in January – prior to 2022 New Zealand reported very few Covid infections.
So much for the Covid vaccines protecting against infection – but what do the data look like in detail?
Cases
New Zealand is somewhat helpful in that it does publish daily cases, hospitalisations and deaths by vaccine status; somewhat because it doesn’t allow easy access to anything other than the current day’s report. Thankfully, the Wayback Machine ensures that at least some web pages aren’t forever lost to history. These data were collated for dates since mid February 2022 and smoothed with a seven-day moving average to create a time series of Covid cases by vaccine status.
The first time the above graph popped up on my computer screen I had to go and double check all the data sources – and then I triple checked them. The data shown on the graph are notable for several reasons:
- Firstly the obvious one – during the most recent Covid wave there was a much lower infection rate in the unvaccinated, compared with those that had been given one, two or three doses of vaccine. What’s more, this isn’t a small effect – over the period shown approximately:
- 10% of the triple vaccinated in New Zealand were infected.
- 14% of the single vaccinated were infected.
- An astounding 18% of the double vaccinated were infected.
- Yet only 3% of the unvaccinated appear to have been infected.
- The order of the effect is unexpected – for some time in the U.K. the highest case rates have been found in the triple vaccinated, with case rates in the single and double jabbed much lower. In New Zealand the highest rates are seen in the double vaccinated.
- The data for cases in the double dosed appear to have an earlier peak than seen in the data for the unvaccinated, single jabbed and triple jabbed.
- The fall from peak cases to the most recent data point is also interesting. Case rates in the unvaccinated, single dosed and the double dosed have all fallen approximately 45% since their respective peaks, however, case rates in the triple vaccinated have only fallen approximately 20% since their peak. This is rather concerning, as it suggests that we might find that the boosted population maintain a viral reservoir for Covid, ensuring that case rates take much longer to fall to trivial levels and hindering attempts to get society back to a post-Covid normal.
The infections data from New Zealand allow us to estimate the vaccine effectiveness for the Covid vaccines in the absence of natural immunity.
Unadjusted estimates of vaccine effectiveness against infection as at end of March 2022
These data are in contrast to recent data from the U.K., which show one and two doses of vaccine to have a VE of minus-50% to minus-100%, and the booster to have a VE of around minus-300%. While this sounds counterintuitive, it is possible that we’re seeing a complex interplay between a waning of the impact of the vaccine and the impact of additional vaccine doses:
- The U.K. vaccinated early, allowing for the impact of those early vaccine doses to have waned significantly for those choosing not to top-up their ‘protection’.
- The Covid vaccines appear to have a period of approximately two to three months where their impact on the immune system is different than in later periods; this is possibly due to the creation of short-lived IgA (mucosal) antibodies. In the U.K., booster vaccinations were given in autumn 2021, and thus most individuals will have been beyond this period when the Omicron variant’s first wave appeared in December.
In New Zealand, the timescales are very different: those given the booster dose will still be in the two-three month period where short-lived immune responses dominate; those given two doses will be in the proposed period of maximal vaccine negative impact; while those that chose not to accept the offer of a second vaccine dose will be in the period where vaccine effects are waning.
There’s one more point to add for cases in New Zealand, and it relates to the U.K. For months, the UKHSA has been telling us that one possible reason for us seeing far fewer cases in the unvaccinated compared with the vaccinated is because the unvaccinated have natural immunity following high infection rates previously (presumably because the unvaccinated are reckless and didn’t follow lockdown rules – I imagine that they also ride motorcycles too quickly, set off fireworks indoors and play with matches while filling up the car). These data from New Zealand, which at the time had very few individuals previously infected with Covid, show lower case rates in the unvaccinated without any significant levels of natural immunity, contradicting the claim of the UKHSA and eliminating one of its reasons for ignoring the alarming data.
Hospitalisations
Analysis of the hospitalisations data offered by the New Zealand authorities is made complex by there being no stratification of the hospitalisations by age group, and the lack of complete vaccinations data by age. However, U.K. data show that in recent weeks approximately 95% of hospitalisations were in those aged over 60; assuming that this will also hold true for the New Zealand population allows us to offer a indicative analysis of the likely impact for that age group of the vaccines on hospitalisations in the country.
The analysis is also hindered by the data on vaccine coverage for those aged over 60 not differentiating between those that have had only one dose of vaccine and those that are unvaccinated. This might in isolation from other data appear to be ‘sensible’ – after all, the single dosed have the ‘least protection’ as well as ‘the longest time for protection to wane’. However, the data shown in the previous section suggest that the unvaccinated and those having taken a single dose of vaccine are in no way comparable, and that considering them as a single group could lead to misleading conclusions. Nevertheless, that’s the hand that’s been dealt for us.
The data are somewhat surprising. While those given a booster dose of vaccine seem to have lower levels of hospitalisations than found in the group containing the unvaccinated and those given only one dose of vaccine – as might be expected – the double dosed have significantly higher hospitalisation rates.
Also interesting is the trend in the data:
- Hospitalisations in the unvaccinated/single-dosed appear to peak earliest – we have also seen this effect in U.K. data, usually in the form of dire warnings early in each Covid wave that the only people being hospitalised are the unvaccinated, only for the warnings to go quiet later in the Covid wave when the data move in the opposite direction.
- Hospitalisations in those given two doses of vaccine appear to peak towards the end of the period shown.
- Hospitalisations in the boosted population appear to show little signs of slowing down, let alone reducing, over the period in question. Note also that this group saw a fourfold increase over the time period shown, whereas the double dose and single-dose/unvaccinated group both saw a 25% increase, albeit with an intermediate period with higher hospitalisation rates.
It was not possible to properly disentangle the hospitalisations data for the unvaccinated, but the data suggest that in aggregate those having taken two or three doses of vaccine (when the two groups are put together) have approximately 45% lower risk of hospitalisation than the unvaccinated/single-dosed. It is worth noting that in the U.K. data we see higher hospitalisation rates in the single vaccinated in those aged over 60, compared with the unvaccinated. It is possible that the same pattern is found in New Zealand, only ‘covered up’ by the co-mingling of the data. If this is the case then the apparent protection offered by the vaccine in the two or three dose individuals will be somewhat lower than 45%.
Deaths
The mortality data from New Zealand are also complicated because the health authorities lump together into one group all the unvaccinated and those having taken a single dose of vaccine. Beyond that complication, deaths data can be tricky to analyse, because there are such huge differences in death rates from (or with) Covid by age. Fortunately, the mortality data offered by the New Zealand authorities do include deaths by age group, which allows a finer analysis than was possible with the infections and hospitalisations data.
Covid mortality per 100,000 per week, by vaccination status and age
The above table suggests that while those given three doses of vaccine have a decreased risk of death from (or with) Covid compared with the mortality rate in the strange group called ‘unvaccinated or one dose’, the risk of death is greatest in those given two doses of vaccine.
However, it is possible that New Zealand’s data have a similar pattern to that seen in the U.K. (and elsewhere), where dose effects are complicated by the health of those given each vaccine, namely that those closest to death were spared a dose of vaccine, and thus concentrated deaths into the very small number left in the prior dose group. A comparison of the data for ‘unvaccinated or one dose’ with ‘two or three doses’ suggests that the vaccines do still protect against death, but only to a very low degree in younger age groups.
Covid mortality per 100,000 per week, by vaccination status and age
The data above support the use of vaccination to protect against death from (or with) Covid for those aged over 80. On the other hand, the mortality rate in those aged under 60 is very low, and the estimated vaccine effectiveness in protecting against death for those aged under 80 is only approximately 30% – once again, the real-world vaccine effectiveness estimate is rather low. It is also of note that these rather poor figures for the protection offered by the vaccines against mortality come from a country that started vaccination rather late (summer 2021) and where most of the population were only given their booster doses two to three months ago. These data suggest that the vaccines simply do not offer substantive protection against death for newer Covid variants, rather than it simply being a case of waning vaccine protection.
It is also important to note that the data on the benefits of the vaccine in protecting against death shown above should be treated with caution:
- Data on deaths in the unvaccinated and those given a single dose of vaccine are co-mingled; the New Zealand hospitalisation data suggest that death rates might be greater in the single-jabbed.
- The vaccinated appear to have significant increased risk of catching Covid, which contributes to overall risk of serious disease and death.
- These calculations do not include any consideration of the risk of side-effects and complications following vaccination.
Overall mortality
One other aspect of the data coming from New Zealand that is of interest relating to Covid is excess mortality. These data are of interest because New Zealand managed to keep itself more-or-less clear of Covid until the last few months of 2021, and even then case numbers were very low until 2022, with the result that Covid deaths were negligible prior to 2022. With that in mind, its excess death data between the start of 2020 and the end of 2021 are very interesting.
Many countries around the world had a peak in excess deaths in the first quarter of 2020, followed by a significant reduction in deaths into mid 2020. There has been speculation that this pattern was seen because Covid infections in early 2020 killed the most vulnerable, leaving a period in which there were fewer people left to die. However, New Zealand also has this pattern of excess deaths in the first half of 2020 (black data points in the graph above) without Covid infections, suggesting that the reduction in deaths seen in mid 2020 were a result of lockdown. The reason for the excess deaths in New Zealand in the first quarter of 2020 are not at all clear.
Most countries then saw an increase in deaths towards the end of 2020; this has been explained by a resurgence in Covid cases. However, New Zealand saw a similar pattern without Covid infections (red data points). It is possible that this increase was caused by the impact of the reduced healthcare provision during the extreme lockdown – though there are no data to support this supposition. There are reports that the New Zealand healthcare system experienced its busiest summer (January and February) on record with hospitals across the country reaching ‘crisis point’ and several emergency departments at capacity. The cause of this healthcare pressure is unclear, however.
Perhaps the most interesting data in the graph above are seen in 2021. During the first half of 2021 excess deaths slowly reduced from the high seen at the start of 2021 (green data points), perhaps a result of healthcare provision returning to normal. However, around mid-year the trend reversed and excess deaths started to climb again (purple data points). Again, it must be pointed out that there were very few Covid cases in New Zealand at this time, and negligible deaths. Just about the only unusual things occurring in the country at that time were a lack of international travel, restrictions in day-to-day activities for the population and an enormous mass vaccination campaign using novel, under-tested vaccines.
During 2020-2022, there were approximately 2,000 excess deaths in New Zealand, a significant number in a country with a population of five million. We don’t know the proportion that occurred because of lockdown, vaccines or something else; all that we do know is that they weren’t a result of Covid.
Note on data analysis methods. Infection, hospitalisation and mortality data were obtained from the New Zealand Ministry for Health (using Wayback Machine for historical data). Vaccination data were also obtained from the NZ Ministry for Health. Population data were obtained from Stats.govt.nz. Vaccination data were offset by seven days for the infections analysis to account for the Ministry for Health’s definition of vaccine status at infection. An additional seven days offset was applied for hospitalisation, and 14 days for death, to account for the typical timescales of disease progression.
Amanuensis is an ex-academic and senior Government scientist. He blogs at Bartram’s Folly.
The Hypocrisy of Medical Experts
By Vinay Prasad | April 3, 2022
On the one hand, there are many biomedical faculty who are passionately arguing why 2-4 year olds should be forced to wear cloth masks. (NY City is fighting this in the courts). Even though there is no randomized data, even though cloth masks failed in adults (let alone toddlers), even though it contradicts the WHO, even though it fails common sense, we must keep doing this!
On the other hand, doctors post pictures of them attending industry sponsored academic conferences. Getting drinks and partying. Packed in tight rooms. No masks. Praising each other for their work. Drenched in financial conflict of interest and pro-new and pro-costly bias.
How can both these things be true?
We are facing such a health emergency that we have to mask toddlers by force of law AND we can continue to enjoy entirely superfluous medical gatherings that risk viral spread.
Don’t say it’s vaccines.
Because the vaccinated, boosted 50 year old, elevated BMI doc with comorbidities has far higher risk than the healthy, unvax’d 4 year old.
Don’t say it’s about spreading the virus.
Both can spread the virus to others.
Don’t say it’s about the activities, importance.
The adult’s entirely excessive medical conference is less important than the child’s early education.
COVID-19 policy reveals the selfishness of adults, the indifference to kids, and the hypocrisy of medicine. It’s disgusting to witness and history will judge it poorly.
Putting Big Bad Pharma Back on Trial in the COVID-19 Era
They keep telling us to “trust the science.” But who paid for it?
Photo credit: Massimo Giachetti
By Rebecca Strong – February 16, 2022
After graduating from Columbia University with a chemical engineering degree, my grandfather went on to work for Pfizer for almost two decades, culminating his career as the company’s Global Director of New Products. I was rather proud of this fact growing up — it felt as if this father figure, who raised me for several years during my childhood, had somehow played a role in saving lives. But in recent years, my perspective on Pfizer — and other companies in its class — has shifted. Blame it on the insidious big pharma corruption laid bare by whistleblowers in recent years. Blame it on the endless string of big pharma lawsuits revealing fraud, deception, and cover-ups. Blame it on the fact that I witnessed some of their most profitable drugs ruin the lives of those I love most. All I know is, that pride I once felt has been overshadowed by a sticky skepticism I just can’t seem to shake.
In 1973, my grandpa and his colleagues celebrated as Pfizer crossed a milestone: the one-billion-dollar sales mark. These days, Pfizer rakes in $81 billion a year, making it the 28th most valuable company in the world. Johnson & Johnson ranks 15th, with $93.77 billion. To put things into perspective, that makes said companies wealthier than most countries in the world. And thanks to those astronomical profit margins, the Pharmaceuticals and Health Products industry is able to spend more on lobbying than any other industry in America.
While big pharma lobbying can take several different forms, these companies tend to target their contributions to senior legislators in Congress — you know, the ones they need to keep in their corner, because they have the power to draft healthcare laws. Pfizer has outspent its peers in six of the last eight election cycles, coughing up almost $9.7 million. During the 2016 election, pharmaceutical companies gave more than $7 million to 97 senators at an average of $75,000 per member. They also contributed $6.3 million to president Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign. The question is: what did big pharma get in return?
ALEC’s Off-the-Record Sway
To truly grasp big pharma’s power, you need to understand how The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) works. ALEC, which was founded in 1973 by conservative activists working on Ronald Reagan’s campaign, is a super secretive pay-to-play operation where corporate lobbyists — including in the pharma sector — hold confidential meetings about “model” bills. A large portionof these bills is eventually approved and become law.
A rundown of ALEC’s greatest hits will tell you everything you need to know about the council’s motives and priorities. In 1995, ALEC promoted a bill that restricts consumers’ rights to sue for damages resulting from taking a particular medication. They also endorsed the Statute of Limitation Reduction Act, which put a time limit on when someone could sue after a medication-induced injury or death. Over the years, ALEC has promoted many other pharma-friendly bills that would: weaken FDA oversight of new drugs and therapies, limit FDA authority over drug advertising, and oppose regulations on financial incentives for doctors to prescribe specific drugs. But what makes these ALEC collaborations feel particularly problematic is that there’s little transparency — all of this happens behind closed doors. Congressional leaders and other committee members involved in ALEC aren’t required to publish any records of their meetings and other communications with pharma lobbyists, and the roster of ALEC members is completely confidential. All we know is that in 2020, more than two-thirds of Congress — 72 senators and 302 House of Representatives members — cashed a campaign check from a pharma company.
Big Pharma Funding Research
The public typically relies on an endorsement from government agencies to help them decide whether or not a new drug, vaccine, or medical device is safe and effective. And those agencies, like the FDA, count on clinical research. As already established, big pharma is notorious for getting its hooks into influential government officials. Here’s another sobering truth: The majority of scientific research is paid for by — wait for it — the pharmaceutical companies.
When the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) published 73 studies of new drugs over the course of a single year, they found that a staggering 82% of them had been funded by the pharmaceutical company selling the product, 68% had authors who were employees of that company, and 50% had lead researchers who accepted money from a drug company. According to 2013 research conducted at the University of Arizona College of Law, even when pharma companies aren’t directly funding the research, company stockholders, consultants, directors, and officers are almost always involved in conducting them. A 2017 report by the peer-reviewed journal The BMJ also showed that about half of medical journal editors receive payments from drug companies, with the average payment per editor hovering around $28,000. But these statistics are only accurate if researchers and editors are transparent about payments from pharma. And a 2022 investigative analysis of two of the most influential medical journals found that 81% of study authors failed to disclose millions in payments from drug companies, as they’re required to do.
Unfortunately, this trend shows no sign of slowing down. The number of clinical trials funded by the pharmaceutical industry has been climbing every year since 2006, according to a John Hopkins University report, while independent studies have been harder to find. And there are some serious consequences to these conflicts of interest. Take Avandia, for instance, a diabetes drug produced by GlaxoSmithCline (GSK). Avandia was eventually linked to a dramatically increased risk of heart attacks and heart failure. And a BMJ report revealed that almost 90% of scientists who initially wrote glowing articles about Avandia had financial ties to GSK.
But here’s the unnerving part: if the pharmaceutical industry is successfully biasing the science, then that means the physicians who rely on the science are biased in their prescribing decisions.
Where the lines get really blurry is with “ghostwriting.” Big pharma execs know citizens are way more likely to trust a report written by a board-certified doctor than one of their representatives. That’s why they pay physicians to list their names as authors — even though the MDs had little to no involvement in the research, and the report was actually written by the drug company. This practice started in the ’50s and ’60s when tobacco execs were clamoring to prove that cigarettes didn’t cause cancer (spoiler alert: they do!), so they commissioned doctors to slap their name on papers undermining the risks of smoking.
It’s still a pretty common tactic today: more than one in 10 articles published in the NEJM was co-written by a ghostwriter. While a very small percentage of medical journals have clear policies against ghostwriting, it’s still technically legal —despite the fact that the consequences can be deadly.
Case in point: in the late ’90s and early 2000s, Merck paid for 73 ghostwritten articles to play up the benefits of its arthritis drug Vioxx. It was later revealed that Merck failed to report all of the heart attacks experienced by trial participants. In fact, a study published in the NEJM revealed that an estimated 160,000 Americans experienced heart attacks or strokes from taking Vioxx. That research was conducted by Dr. David Graham, Associate Director of the FDA’s Office of Drug Safety, who understandably concluded the drug was not safe. But the FDA’s Office of New Drugs, which not only was responsible for initially approving Vioxx but also regulating it, tried to sweep his findings under the rug.
“I was pressured to change my conclusions and recommendations, and basically threatened that if I did not change them, I would not be permitted to present the paper at the conference,” he wrote in his 2004 U.S. Senate testimony on Vioxx. “One Drug Safety manager recommended that I should be barred from presenting the poster at the meeting.”
Eventually, the FDA issued a public health advisory about Vioxx and Merck withdrew this product. But it was a little late for repercussions — 38,000 of those Vioxx-takers who suffered heart attacks had already died. Graham called this a “profound regulatory failure,” adding that scientific standards the FDA apply to drug safety “guarantee that unsafe and deadly drugs will remain on the U.S. market.”
This should come as no surprise, but research has also repeatedly shown that a paper written by a pharmaceutical company is more likely to emphasize the benefits of a drug, vaccine, or device while downplaying the dangers. (If you want to understand more about this practice, a former ghostwriter outlines all the ethical reasons why she quit this job in a PLOS Medicine report.) While adverse drug effects appear in 95% of clinical research, only 46% of published reports disclose them. Of course, all of this often ends up misleading doctors into thinking a drug is safer than it actually is.
Big Pharma Influence On Doctors
Pharmaceutical companies aren’t just paying medical journal editors and authors to make their products look good, either. There’s a long, sordid history of pharmaceutical companies incentivizing doctors to prescribe their products through financial rewards. For instance, Pfizer and AstraZeneca doled out a combined $100 million to doctors in 2018, with some earning anywhere from $6 million to $29 million in a year. And research has shown this strategy works: when doctors accept these gifts and payments, they’re significantly more likely to prescribe those companies’ drugs. Novartis comes to mind — the company famously spent over $100 million paying for doctors’ extravagant meals, golf outings, and more, all while also providing a generous kickback program that made them richer every time they prescribed certain blood pressure and diabetes meds.
Side note: the Open Payments portal contains a nifty little database where you can find out if any of your own doctors received money from drug companies. Knowing that my mother was put on a laundry list of meds after a near-fatal car accident, I was curious — so I did a quick search for her providers. While her PCP only banked a modest amount from Pfizer and AstraZeneca, her previous psychiatrist — who prescribed a cocktail of contraindicated medications without treating her in person — collected quadruple-digit payments from pharmaceutical companies. And her pain care specialist, who prescribed her jaw-dropping doses of opioid pain medication for more than 20 years (far longer than the 5-day safety guideline), was raking in thousands from Purdue Pharma, AKA the opioid crisis’ kingpin.
Purdue is now infamous for its wildly aggressive OxyContin campaign in the ’90s. At the time, the company billed it as a non-addictive wonder drug for pain sufferers. Internal emails show Pursue sales representatives were instructed to “sell, sell, sell” OxyContin, and the more they were able to push, the more they were rewarded with promotions and bonuses. With the stakes so high, these reps stopped at nothing to get doctors on board — even going so far as to send boxes of doughnuts spelling out “OxyContin” to unconvinced physicians. Purdue had stumbled upon the perfect system for generating tons of profit — off of other people’s pain.
Documentation later proved that not only was Purdue aware it was highly addictive and that many people were abusing it, but that they also encouraged doctors to continue prescribing increasingly higher doses of it (and sent them on lavish luxury vacations for some motivation). In testimony to Congress, Purdue exec Paul Goldenheim played dumb about OxyContin addiction and overdose rates, but emails that were later exposed showed that he requested his colleagues remove all mentions of addiction from their correspondence about the drug. Even after it was proven in court that Purdue fraudulently marketed OxyContin while concealing its addictive nature, no one from the company spent a single day behind bars. Instead, the company got a slap on the wrist and a $600 million fine for a misdemeanor, the equivalent of a speeding ticket compared to the $9 billion they made off OxyContin up until 2006. Meanwhile, thanks to Purdue’s recklessness, more than 247,000 people died from prescription opioid overdoses between 1999 and 2009. And that’s not even factoring in all the people who died of heroin overdoses once OxyContin was no longer attainable to them. The NIH reports that 80% of people who use heroin started by misusing prescription opioids.
Former sales rep Carol Panara told me in an interview that when she looks back on her time at Purdue, it all feels like a “bad dream.” Panara started working for Purdue in 2008, one year after the company pled guilty to “misbranding” charges for OxyContin. At this point, Purdue was “regrouping and expanding,” says Panara, and to that end, had developed a clever new approach for making money off OxyContin: sales reps were now targeting general practitioners and family doctors, rather than just pain management specialists. On top of that, Purdue soon introduced three new strengths for OxyContin: 15, 30, and 60 milligrams, creating smaller increments Panara believes were aimed at making doctors feel more comfortable increasing their patients’ dosages. According to Panara, there were internal company rankings for sales reps based on the number of prescriptions for each OxyContin dosing strength in their territory.
“They were sneaky about it,” she said. “Their plan was to go in and sell these doctors on the idea of starting with 10 milligrams, which is very low, knowing full well that once they get started down that path — that’s all they need. Because eventually, they’re going to build a tolerance and need a higher dose.”
Occasionally, doctors expressed concerns about a patient becoming addicted, but Purdue had already developed a way around that. Sales reps like Panara were taught to reassure those doctors that someone in pain might experience addiction-like symptoms called “pseudoaddiction,” but that didn’t mean they were truly addicted. There is no scientific evidence whatsoever to support that this concept is legit, of course. But the most disturbing part? Reps were trained to tell doctors that “pseudoaddiction” signaled the patient’s pain wasn’t being managed well enough, and the solution was simply to prescribe a higher dose of OxyContin.
Panara finally quit Purdue in 2013. One of the breaking points was when two pharmacies in her territory were robbed at gunpoint specifically for OxyContin. In 2020, Purdue pled guilty to three criminal charges in an $8.3 billion deal, but the company is now under court protection after filing for bankruptcy. Despite all the damage that’s been done, the FDA’s policies for approving opioids remain essentially unchanged.
Purdue probably wouldn’t have been able to pull this off if it weren’t for an FDA examiner named Curtis Wright, and his assistant Douglas Kramer. While Purdue was pursuing Wright’s stamp of approval on OxyContin, Wright took an outright sketchy approach to their application, instructing the company to mail documents to his home office rather than the FDA, and enlisting Purdue employees to help him review trials about the safety of the drug. The Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act requires that the FDA have access to at least two randomized controlled trials before deeming a drug as safe and effective, but in the case of OxyContin, it got approved with data from just one measly two-week study — in osteoarthritis patients, no less.
When both Wright and Kramer left the FDA, they went on to work for none other than (drumroll, please) Purdue, with Wright earning three times his FDA salary. By the way — this is just one example of the FDA’s notoriously incestuous relationship with big pharma, often referred to as “the revolving door”. In fact, a 2018 Science report revealed that 11 out of 16 FDA reviewers ended up at the same companies they had been regulating products for.
While doing an independent investigation, “Empire of Pain” author and New Yorker columnist Patrick Radden Keefe tried to gain access to documentation of Wright’s communications with Purdue during the OxyContin approval process.
“The FDA came back and said, ‘Oh, it’s the weirdest thing, but we don’t have anything. It’s all either been lost or destroyed,’” Keefe told Fortune in an interview. “But it’s not just the FDA. It’s Congress, it’s the Department of Justice, it’s big parts of the medical establishment … the sheer amount of money involved, I think, has meant that a lot of the checks that should be in place in society to not just achieve justice, but also to protect us as consumers, were not there because they had been co-opted.”
Big pharma may be to blame for creating the opioids that caused this public health catastrophe, but the FDA deserves just as much scrutiny — because its countless failures also played a part in enabling it. And many of those more recent fails happened under the supervision of Dr. Janet Woodcock. Woodcock was named FDA’s acting commissioner mere hours after Joe Biden was inaugurated as president. She would have been a logical choice, being an FDA vet of 35 years, but then again it’s impossible to forget that she played a starring role in the FDA’s perpetuating the opioid epidemic. She’s also known for overruling her own scientific advisors when they vote against approving a drug. Not only did Woodcock approve OxyContin for children as young as 11 years old, but she also gave the green light to several other highly controversial extended-release opioid pain drugs without sufficient evidence of safety or efficacy. One of those was Zohydro: in 2011, the FDA’s advisory committee voted 11:2 against approving it due to safety concerns about inappropriate use, but Woodcock went ahead and pushed it through, anyway. Under Woodcock’s supervision, the FDA also approved Opana, which is twice as powerful as OxyContin — only to then beg the drug maker to take it off the market 10 years later due to “abuse and manipulation.” And then there was Dsuvia, a potent painkiller 1,000 times stronger than morphine and 10 times more powerful than fentanyl. According to a head of one of the FDA’s advisory committees, the U.S. military had helped to develop this particular drug, and Woodcock said there was “pressure from the Pentagon” to push it through approvals. The FBI, members of congress, public health advocates, and patient safety experts alike called this decision into question, pointing out that with hundreds of opioids already on the market there’s no need for another — particularly one that comes with such high risks.
Most recently, Woodcock served as the therapeutics lead for Operation Warp Speed, overseeing COVID-19 vaccine development.
To be continued…
Rebecca Strong is a Boston-based freelance health and wellness writer currently contributing to Insider, Health magazine, Healthline, Eat This Not That, and more.
Evidence of Pandemic and Bioweapon Cover-Ups
By Dr. Joseph Mercola | April 7, 2022
As evidence of a potential bioweapons cover-up has started emerging, a company called Metabiota is gaining prominence. The links between Metabiota and several key players in the COVID pandemic and/or the Ukraine labs story are manifold, so there’s no really simple way to unravel it in a logical sequence. That said, let’s start with what Metabiota does and the connections of its founder, and expand from there.
Metabiota’s Mission
Metabiota’s mission is to make the world more resilient to epidemics by providing “data, analytics, advice and training to prepare for global health threats and mitigate their impacts.”1
Through data analysis, they help “decision makers across government and industry” to estimate and mitigate pandemic risks. But they also claim to support “sustainable development,” which seems to have little to do with pandemic risk management.
That term, “sustainable development,” is one promoted by Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF). It’s part and parcel of Schwab’s plan for a global Great Reset and transhumanist revolution (aka, the Fourth Industrial Revolution).
It’s not surprising, then, to find out that the founder of Metabiota, Nathan Wolfe, not only has close ties to the WEF, but is also a rising star there. He’s a WEF Young Global Leader graduate and was awarded the WEF’s Technology Pioneer award in 2021.
Metabiota and the Search for Pandemic Viruses
Metabiota was a core partner of a United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Pandemic Threat Program called PREDICT, which sought to identify viruses with pandemic potential.
Contractors funded through this program have included the EcoHealth Alliance, headed by Peter Daszak. The PREDICT program, directed by Dennis Carroll, appears to have served as a proof of concept for the Global Virome Project that Carroll founded.
According to a recent investigation by U.S. Right to Know (USRTK),2 Carroll appears to have diverted government funds from the PREDICT program while he was still running it, to fund this personal side project, which was set up with the intention to collect, identify and catalogue 1 million viruses from wildlife in an effort to predict which ones might cause a human epidemic.
Metabiota’s Funding
Metabiota receives funding from several interconnected organizations and agencies, including:3
•Pilot Growth Management, cofounded by Neil Callahan. Callahan is also a cofounder of Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners, and he sits on Metabiota’s board of advisers
•The Global Virome Project, which reportedly paid (or was planning to pay) Metabiota $341,000 to conduct a cost-benefit analysis4
•In-Q-Tel, a CIA venture capital firm that specializes in high-tech investments that support or benefit the intelligence capacity of U.S. intelligence agencies
•The U.S. Department of Defense’s Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA).5 Specifically, in 2014, DTRA awarded Metabiota $18.4 million in federal contracts for scientific and technical consulting services to the DTRA’s labs in Ukraine and Georgia6
By outsourcing work to private companies, DTRA is able to circumvent Congressional oversight. Russia is now accusing the U.S. of funding secret and illegal bioweapons research in these Ukraine labs, and claims this was the real reason behind its invasion
•Rosemont Seneca,7 an investment fund co-managed by Hunter Biden.8 If Russia’s accusations turn out to be true, this tie may prove deeply problematic for the White House, as this means the Biden family was more or less directly involved in the funding of that research
Wolfe has also received more than $20 million in research grants from Google, the NIH and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, just to name a few, and was a friend of now-deceased Jeffrey Epstein. In his 2012 book, “The Viral Storm,” Wolfe thanked friends for their support, including Epstein and Boris Nikolic. Nikolic, a biotech venture capitalist, was named “back-up executor” in Epstein’s will.9
Epstein, who besides being a convicted pedophile and accused child sex trafficker, had a robust interest in eugenics. It’s now well-known that he dreamed of creating a “superhuman” race of his own by impregnating dozens of women at a time at his New Mexico ranch.10 Epstein also managed to secure meetings with Bill Gates,11 whose family history is also marked by an interest in eugenics and population control.
Metabiota’s Founder Tied to Suspect in COVID Pandemic
In addition to having close ties to the WEF and its Great Reset agenda, Wolfe, the founder of Metabiota, has also served on the EcoHealth Alliance’s editorial board since 2004. In 2017, he even co-wrote a study on coronaviruses in bats together with EcoHealth Alliance president, Peter Daszak.
As you may recall, EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit organization focused on pandemic prevention, worked closely with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China, where SARS-CoV-2 is suspected of having originated.12
Daszak — who received funding for coronavirus research from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, and the U.S. State Department13 — subcontracted some of that work to Shi Zheng-li at the WIV. He was also the coauthor on research projects at the WIV.
Once rumors of SARS-CoV-2 being man-made first began, Daszak played a central role in the plot to obscure the lab origin by crafting a scientific statement condemning such inquiries as “conspiracy theory.”14,15 This manufactured “consensus” was then relied on by the media to counter anyone presenting theories and evidence to the contrary.
This, despite the fact that he, in 2015, warned that a global pandemic might occur from a laboratory incident — and that “the risks were greater with the sort of virus manipulation research being carried out in Wuhan”!16
In 2021, two investigations into the origins of the COVID pandemic were opened, one by the World Health Organization17 and another by The Lancet,18 and Daszak somehow managed to end up on both of these committees, despite having openly and repeatedly dismissed the possibility of the pandemic being the result of a lab leak.19
Editor’s note: The WHO reference has been scrubbed from both the agency’s website and internet archives, but several news stories like this one from NPR,20 published after the investigation was launched, are still live and accessible.
Interestingly, one of EcoHealth Alliance’s policy advisers is a former Fort Detrick commander named David Franz. Fort Detrick is the principal U.S. government-run “biodefense” facility, although Franz himself has publicly admitted that “in biology … everything is dual use — the people, the facilities and the equipment.”21
Metabiota and the DTRA
In late May 2016, Metabiota hired Andrew C. Weber,22 a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, to head up its Global Partnerships.23 Between 2009 and 2014, Weber served as assistant secretary of defense for Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Defense under then-president Obama.
Weber is credited with creating the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) — a combat support agency within the U.S. DoD, specializing in countering weapons of mass destruction, including biological weapons24,25 — and as mentioned earlier, the DTRA has reportedly funded Metabiota to operate U.S.-funded biological research labs in Ukraine.
The DTRA has also issued a number of grants to the EcoHealth Alliance, totaling at least $37.5 million,26,27 including a 2017 grant for $6.5 million to “understand the risk of bat-borne zoonotic disease emergence in Western Asia.”28
According to a December 2020 report by The Defender,29 EcoHealth Alliance had tried to hide most of the Pentagon funding that it had received between 2013 and 2020, most of which came from the DTRA.
Metabiota’s Bungled Ebola Response
In 2016, CBS News published a scathing critique of Metabiota’s response to the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa.30 Metabiota had been hired by the WHO and the local government of Sierra Leone to monitor the spread of the epidemic, but according to an investigation by The Associated Press, “some of the company’s actions made an already chaotic situation worse.”
In a July 17, 2014, email obtained by AP, Dr. Eric Bertherat, medical officer at the WHO’s Department of Epidemic and Pandemic Alert and Response, complained about misdiagnoses and “total confusion” at the small laboratory Metabiota shared with Tulane University in Kenema, Sierra Leone.
According to Bertherat, there was “no tracking of the samples” and “absolutely no control on what is being done.” “This is a situation that WHO can no longer endorse,” he wrote. Similarly, Sylvia Blyden, special executive assistant to the president of Sierra Leone, told AP Metabiota’s response was a disaster:31
“’They messed up the entire region,’ she said. She called Metabiota’s attempt to claim credit for its Ebola work ‘an insult for the memories of thousands of Africans who have died.’”
U.S. health official Austin Demby, who evaluated Metabiota’s and Tulane’s lab work at the request of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the government of Sierra Leone, was also critical.
In one email, Demby noted used needles were left out and there was no ultraviolet light for decontamination. The space was also too small to safely process blood samples. “The cross-contamination potential is huge and quite frankly unacceptable,” he wrote.
Anja Wolz, an emergency coordinator with Doctors Without Borders, told AP she witnessed Metabiota workers entering homes of suspected Ebola patients without protective gear, and leaving high-risk areas without performing any kind of decontamination procedure. She also accused Metabiota of miscalculating the severity of the outbreak, while insisting that they had the situation under control when clearly, they didn’t.
Tulane microbiology professor Bob Garry was also critical of Metabiota’s choice to have Dr. Jean-Paul Gonzalez run the operation, as Gonzalez, in 1994, had accidentally gotten infected with a rare hemorrhagic fever while working in a Yale University lab.
He failed to notify anyone about the exposure for more than a week, a delay that put more than 100 other people at risk. Gonzalez was ordered to take a remedial safety course, but according to Garry, such carelessness was a red flag, and he didn’t think Gonzalez was the right man to teach Sierra Leoneans about Ebola.
“Do you really want the person who infected himself with hemorrhagic fever going around explaining to people how to be safe?” Garry asked in an email to a Metabiota media representative. Wolfe defended his company, saying there was no evidence they’d done anything wrong. Some of the problems he blamed on misunderstandings, and others on commercial rivalry.
Lab Accident ‘Most Likely,’ yet Least Probed Cause of COVID
In a March 28, 2022, report,32 U.S. Right to Know (USRTK) revealed the contents of a 2020 State Department memo33 obtained by the group. USRTK writes:34
“‘Origin of the outbreak: The Wuhan labs remained the most likely but least probed,’ reads the topline. The memo is written as a BLUF — ‘bottom line up front’ — a style of communication used in the military. The identity of the author or authors is unknown …
‘BLUF: There is no direct, smoking gun evidence to prove that a leak from Wuhan labs caused the pandemic, but there is circumstantial evidence to suggest such is the case,’ the memo reads. Apparently drafted in spring 2020, the memo details circumstantial evidence for the ‘lab leak’ theory — the idea that COVID-19 originated at one of the labs in Wuhan, China, the pandemic’s epicenter.
The memo raises concerns about the ‘massive amount’ of research on novel coronaviruses apparently conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the nearby Wuhan Center for Disease Control lab … The memo also flags biosafety lapses at both labs, calling the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s ‘management of deadly viruses and virus-carrying lab animals … appallingly poor and negligent.’
The memo provides an extraordinary window into behind-the-scenes concerns about a lab accident among U.S. foreign policy leaders, even as this line of inquiry was deemed a conspiracy theory by international virologists, some of whom had undisclosed conflicts of interest.
The memo also calls into question these virologists’ impartiality. Shi Zhengli, a Wuhan Institute of Virology coronavirus researcher nicknamed the ‘Bat Woman,’ has forged wide-reaching international collaborations, including with prestigious Western virologists, the memo notes.
‘Suspicion lingers that Shi holds an important and powerful position in the field in China and has extensive cooperation with many [international] virologists who might be doing her a favor,’ it reads …
The memo laments that ‘the most logical place to investigate the virus origin has been completely sealed off from inquiry by the [Chinese Communist Party]’ … The memo even suggests that other hypotheses may have served as a distraction from a probe of the city’s extensive research on novel coronaviruses. ‘All other theories are likely to be a decoy to prevent an inquiry [into] the WCDC and WIV,’ it states …
The memo cites a 2015 paper35 coauthored by Shi titled ‘A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence’ that described creating a ‘chimera,’ or engineered virus, with the spike protein of a coronavirus from a Chinese horseshoe bat.
Editors at Nature Medicine added a note in March 2020 cautioning that the article was ‘being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered’ … But the memo shows that the State Department indeed considered the paper relevant to the pandemic’s origins.”
NIH Retracted Gene Sequence at WIV Researcher’s Request
While we’ve yet to obtain bulletproof evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was developed as a bioweapon, there’s plenty of circumstantial evidence that points in that direction. Disturbingly, as time goes on, more and more of this circumstantial evidence seems to highlight the United States’ involvement. If one proverbial finger is pointing at China, four others are pointing back at us.
This is profoundly bad news, but it really ought to strengthen our resolve to get to the bottom of it. None of us are safe until the mad scientists responsible for this pandemic are brought to justice. It doesn’t matter who they are. In all likelihood, we’ll find that blame cannot be pinned on a single nation. At bare minimum, the U.S. and China appear to be covering for each other.
As just one example, there are the deletions of information that have occurred both at the National Institutes of Health and the WIV, either at the other’s request, or as what appears to be a favor.
As reported by Just the News,36 NIH deleted a genetic sequencing submission of SARS-CoV-2 from its Sequence Read Archive (SRA) at the request of a researcher at the WIV. Emails37 obtained via FOIA request to the NIH by Empower Oversight show a WIV researcher who had submitted two genetic sequences to the SRA, one in March 2020, and a second in June 2020, asked to have the last one retracted.
NIH initially stated that it would be better to edit or replace the submission rather than retracting it, but the researcher insisted it be removed, which they did. To be fair, the NIH also states it has retracted at least eight SRA submissions in total, most from American researchers, at their request. However, emails also show the NIH directed reporters on how to provide more favorable and less sensationalized coverage of the deletion of the Chinese sequence. Just the News writes:38
“[Empower Oversight] says one of the most disconcerting elements of the emails is evidence showing the NIH has refused to participate in a transparent process to examine data on the deleted sequences.
‘Most importantly, why has NIH refused to examine archival copies of deleted sequences in an open scientific process to determine whether any of that information might be able to shed light on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic?’ the group asked.
However, that argument was dismissed by NIH official Steve Sherry. Although sequences are never fully deleted, according to the agency, Sherry told a researcher who asked for transparency, ‘As you know, when data sets are withdrawn from the database, that status does not permit use for further analyses.’”
WIV Deleted Mentions of US Collaborators
The WIV has also deleted information in what appears to be an effort to shield the NIH. Shortly after Fauci testified in a Senate hearing in March 2021,39 the WIV quietly deleted all mentions of its collaboration with Fauci’s NIAID, the NIH and other American research partners from its website. As reported May 15, 2021, by The National Pulse :40
“March 21st, 2021, the lab’s website listed six U.S.-based research partners: University of Alabama, University of North Texas, EcoHealth Alliance, Harvard University, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the United States, and the National Wildlife Federation.41
One day later, the page was revised to contain just two research partners — EcoHealth Alliance and the University of Alabama.42 By March 23rd, EcoHealth Alliance was the sole partner remaining.43
EcoHealth Alliance is run by long-standing Chinese Communist Party-partner Dr. Peter Daszak, who National Pulse Editor-in-Chief Raheem Kassam has repeatedly claimed will be the first ‘fall guy’ of the Wuhan lab debacle …
Beyond establishing a working relationship between the NIH and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, now-deleted posts44 from the site also detail studies bearing the hallmarks of gain-of-function research conducted with the Wuhan-based lab.”
Indeed, a now-deleted WIV web page titled “Will SARS Come Back?” stated that:45
“Prof. Zhengli Shi and Xingyi Ge from WIV, in cooperation with researchers from University of North Carolina, Harvard Medical School, Bellinzona Institute of Microbiology … examine the disease potential of a SARS-like virus, SHC014-CoV, which is currently circulating in Chinese horseshoe bat populations.
Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system, the scientists generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone.
The results indicate that group 2b viruses encoding the SHC014 spike in a wild-type backbone can efficiently use multiple orthologs of the SARS receptor human angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2), replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV.
Evaluation of available SARS-based immune-therapeutic and prophylactic modalities revealed poor efficacy; both monoclonal antibody and vaccine approaches failed to neutralize and protect from infection with CoVs using the novel spike protein.
On the basis of these findings, they synthetically re-derived an infectious full-length SHC014 recombinant virus and demonstrate robust viral replication both in vitro and in vivo …”
The WIV’s deletions of American research partners from its website (with the exception of EcoHealth Alliance), and its deletion of the article discussing genetic research on the SARS virus only served to strengthen suspicions of a cover-up. At the time, the most surprising thing about it was that they were covering up American involvement and not just their own.
Are We the Bad Guys?
https://twitter.com/MaajidNawaz/status/1496800671739174913
Alas, as noted by Maajid Nawaz,46 a former Islamist revolutionary who became an anti-extremism activist, if it turns out that the U.S. did in fact engage in illegal bioweapons development in Ukraine, it might just turn out that we’re the bad guys here. He writes, in part:47
“On the 24th February 2022, the very day of Russia’s invasion, some of us were already worried about the prospect of biological weapons laboratories existing in Ukraine …
The existence of bio-weapons labs on Ukraine’s border with Russia has since been confirmed by both Russia and the US (I say both because the Ukrainian government is essentially serving as a US proxy). The only remaining question is around what we were doing in those laboratories.
It is no longer in doubt that we funded bio-weapons research in the Wuhan lab in China, from where it is now believed that COVID most likely leaked from. So were we doing the same in Ukraine too? Russia has certainly made the allegation …
The official representative of the Russian Ministry of Defense, Major General Igor Konashenkov stated48 ‘In the course of a special military operation, the facts of an emergency cleansing by the Kiev regime of traces of a military biological program being implemented in Ukraine, funded by the US Department of Defense, were uncovered.’
With this, he released this document drop49 alleging … that these papers substantiated their case. If Russia’s allegations hold up, the US and her proxy Ukrainian regime would be in violation of the first article of the UN Convention on the Prohibition of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons.50
Russia’s announcement appears to have forced America’s hand to admit that such bio labs do indeed exist. US Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland framed this admission by stating that these labs were for defensive research only.
Under Secretary Nuland however continued to make the case that such labs would be dangerous if they fell into Russian hands, without apparently noticing the contradiction inherent in her position that such labs are only dangerous because they can be weaponized …
Matching Russian precision strikes to a map of bio lab locations inside Ukraine certainly does suggest that Putin’s ‘special military operation’ appears to be targeting some of these dangerous labs.”
Indeed, Nawaz highlights a 2021 Ukrainian petition51,52 to president Zelensky, asking for a) the immediate closure of “American bio-laboratories in the territory of Ukraine,” b) an investigation into the activities of those labs, and c) an investigation into potential Ukrainian participation in the creation of SARS-CoV-2.
In other words, at least some Ukrainians, by 2021, were wondering whether the U.S. labs in their country might have been involved in the creation of this pandemic.
Denouncements Ring Hollow
Not surprisingly, the U.S. State Department took a hard line, denouncing all allegations with the statement that “The United States does not have chemical and biological weapons labs in Ukraine.”53 In another statement,54 the State Department “clarified” that the labs were for “biodefense,” not biological weapons, thus semantically cleansing their criminal activities.
The problem with that is that there’s no hard line between biodefense and bioweapons research. As admitted by EcoHealth Alliance’s policy advisor and former Fort Detrick commander David Franz, it’s all “dual use — the people, the facilities and the equipment.”55 Biodefense implies biowarfare, as it involves the creation of more dangerous pathogens for the alleged purpose of finding treatments against them.
Bioweapons expert Francis Boyle, who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, has also pointed out that most BSL-4 labs are dual use: “They first develop the offensive biological warfare agent and then they develop the supposed vaccine.”56 And then, there’s the weapons proliferation agreement57 between the U.S. and Ukraine, signed at the end of August 2005.
Incidentally, former President Barrack Obama spearheaded the project to construct these Ukrainian labs back in 2005, when he was still a senator and, curiously, the online announcement of his involvement in this project has also been deleted from the web.58
According to this agreement, the U.S. Department of Defense will assist the Ministry of Health in Ukraine, at no cost, to prevent “proliferation of technology, pathogens and expertise” found in a number of Ukraine labs, that “could be used in the development of biological weapons.”
The Burning Question of Intent
So, the agreement itself clarifies that they’re working on pathogens that COULD be used as biological weapons, and Nuland’s stated concerns back this up. The only question remaining then is one of intention. What’s the intended use of these pathogens? Defense? Or offense? And is there really a difference?
As noted by Nawaz, the U.S. clinging to the defense of “biodefense” and anti-bioweapons proliferation is “the equivalent of denying that Einstein’s discovery of splitting the atom to generate energy is not also something that could be used to make nuclear weapons. After the COVID outbreak, the notion that bio labs can be weaponized should simply be presumed as a rule.”
Also, consider the network of players reviewed earlier. The Ukrainian-American collaboration to study pathogens capable of weaponization is run by the DTRA, which funds Metabiota, which is run by a WEF leader with close personal ties to the one person — Daszak — suspected of being a key player in the creation of SARS-CoV-2, a go-between of the NIH and the WIV, and a central force in the cover-up of the lab leak theory.
Interestingly, Metabiota is also financially backed by Hunter Biden’s investment company, and let’s not forget that young Biden also collected a six-figure salary from a Ukrainian gas company for doing literally nothing, other than supplying his “powerful name.”59
Circumstantial or not, it just doesn’t look good. And, by now, it should be crystal clear that any lab doing defensive work is equally capable of churning out offensive weapons. Debating that point is just silly, as it all boils down to semantics.
According to Bulgarian journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhieva, Metabiota is a key player in the Ukrainian labs. David Horowitz, a political writer, has noted that Metabiota is “a company that tracks the trajectory of outbreaks and sells pandemic insurance, but also seems to have its hand in the actual labs that … might be the source of some of these outbreaks.”60
In other words, could it be that Metabiota has been producing biological agents under diplomatic cover and then selling pandemic insurance and pandemic trackers to “help countries get ahead of what they are putting out”?61
Nawaz asks, “was ensuring that a ‘next pandemic’ doesn’t occur by taking out these bio labs, what Putin had in mind by his phrase ‘special military operation’?”62 At this point, it seems a valid question.
Sources and References
- 1 Metabiota.com
- 2 USRTK March 16, 2022
- 3, 5, 9 The Daily Expose March 20, 2022
- 4 Disinformation Chronicle Substack March 22, 2022
- 6, 60 Medicalexperiments.news March 31, 2022
- 7 Rosemont Seneca Investments
- 8 Rosemont Seneca Team
- 10 New York Times July 31, 2019
- 11 New York Times October 12, 2019
- 12, 16 Daily Mail January 9, 2021
- 13 Independent Science News March 24, 2021
- 14 USRTK November 18, 2020
- 15 GM Watch November 19, 2020
- 17 WHO.int Origins of the SARS-CoV-2 Virus
- 18 The Lancet October 10, 2020; 396(10257): 1102-1124
- 19 GM Watch September 23, 2020
- 20 NPR. WHO Launches a New Group to Study the Origins of the Coronavirus. October 13, 2021
- 21, 29, 55 The Defender December 18, 2020
- 22 D60.darpa.mil Andrew Weber bio
- 23 Twitter Alexis Baden-Mayer March 28, 2022
- 24 DTRA.mil
- 25 History of DTRA 1998-2008
- 26 Daily Caller June 7, 2021
- 27 USA Spending Project Grant to EcoHealth August 2019
- 28 USA Spending Project Grant to EcoHealth October 2017
- 30, 31 CBS News March 7, 2016
- 32, 34 USRTK March 28, 2022
- 33 State Department Memo
- 35 Nature Medicine 2015; 21: 1508-1513
- 36, 38 Just the News March 29, 2022
- 37 FOIA emails from the NIH
- 39 MSNBC March 19, 2021
- 40 National Pulse May 15, 2021
- 41 Web Archive WIV research partners March 21, 2021
- 42 Web Archive WIV research partners March 22, 2021
- 43 Web Archive WIV research partners March 23, 2021
- 44, 45 Web Archive WIV Will SARS Come Back? December 4, 2015
- 46, 47, 53, 59, 61, 62 Maajid Nawaz Substack March 14, 2022
- 48 CDN Substack
- 49 Exposing the Darkness Substack March 6, 2022
- 50 UN Convention on the Prohibition of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons
- 51 National File March 11, 2022
- 52 Petition on Ukraine’s government website
- 54 WSWS.org March 11, 2022
- 56 Mercola interview with Francis Boyle published March 8, 2020
- 57 Agreement Between the United States and Ukraine August 29, 2005
- 58 Web Archive Bioprepwatch.com June 18, 2010
Three discoveries that should make you think twice, or thrice about COVID vaccinations
By Meryl Nass, MD | April 7, 2022
I don’t write enough about the adverse events from COVID vaccines. The reason is that I like to be accurate, but most of the data on vaccine side effects is hidden from us. So while I have pointed out the many databases that FDA and CDC have available and are supposed to be using to assess vaccine safety, only 1 is publicly available: VAERS. Officially, it is the joint FDA-CDC Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. Steve Kirsch and Jessica Rose have done the best job analyzing the VAERS data, so I suggest you go to their substacks and read what they have to say.
Both FDA and CDC each have about ten other databases that taxpayers pay for, but most of them we never hear about. Here are the FDA databases:
Below, then-head of Immunizations at CDC, Dr. Nancy Messonier, told the public about the databases that would be used to assess COVID vaccines’ safety just before the rollout, on December 10, 2020.
Both agencies provided the public with promises of what these vaccine safety databases could provide. The databases FDA rents include more than 100 million Americans, for example. But since the rollout, the federal agencies have been almost silent on what they reveal.
However, yesterday I came across 3 very important items about COVID vaccine safety that I had not seen mentioned until now. Each one is an important, though limited, piece of the COVID vaccine safety puzzle–but together, they give you a very good idea of what we are all dealing with as we traverse this data desert, touching small bits of the elephant like the blind men, but never being able to grasp the picture in its entirety.
Item 1 was posted on the FDA website on July 12, 2021 with no fanfare. It revealed that yes, FDA was using its Medicare beneficiary database to look for potential vaccine adverse reactions, and it found four related to Pfizer’s vaccine, which is the most widely used COVID vaccine. FDA writes:
FDA has routinely been using screening methods to monitor the safety of COVID-19 vaccines and to evaluate potential adverse events of interest (AEI) related to these vaccines. One of these methods, called near real-time surveillance, detected four potential AEIs in the Medicare healthcare claims database of persons aged 65 years and older who had received the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. The four potential AEI are pulmonary embolism, acute myocardial infarction, immune thrombocytopenia, and disseminated intravascular coagulation. The screening methods have not identified these AEI after vaccination in persons 65 years and older who received the two other authorized COVID-19 vaccines…
These events have not been identified as safety concerns or signals in the CDC Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) or the Veterans Administration (VA) Healthcare data systems screening methods. The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), another government monitoring system, also has not identified any association between any COVID-19 vaccine and these AEI.
FDA continues to closely monitor the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines and will further investigate these findings by conducting more rigorous epidemiological studies. FDA will share further updates and information with the public as they become available.
If the vaccine caused blood clots and bleeding, as is suspected, these are exactly four diagnoses I would expect to see indicating vaccine injuries. The claim that FDA has not seen them in its other databases, including VAERS, is curious, because people who independently study VAERS have in fact reported higher rates of myocardial infarctions and pulmonary emboli.
Six weeks after FDA posted about these very serious warning signs, FDA issued a full, unrestricted license for Pfizer’s vaccine, the very one they were warning about. The FDA website where the above information is posted has never been updated, and FDA has not revealed what the last 8 months of “more rigorous epidemiological studies” show.
Item 2 is an academic paper published by the CDC in its own, non peer reviewed journal, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. It was written by CDC scientists with researchers at various sites that participate in a CDC-funded data collection on COVID.
The paper concludes that while myocarditis is known to occur after COVID vaccinations, it is more common after getting the disease COVID. This is an unusual claim, since myocarditis rates as high as 1 in 2000 males aged 18-24 have been reported after the second Covid shot, and no one has claimed that such rates apply after getting the disease.
So what did CDC do? It chose to examine this issue using a database that admittedly misattributed most vaccinations! CDC has access to everyone’s vaccination data and could easily have have used an accurate dataset, but chose not to. Instead, CDC admitted in the paper’s fine print that while 82% of Americans over age 5 have reportedly received at least one COVID vaccine, in the 15 million person dataset it used, only 28% were recorded as vaccinated. The only reasonable interpretation is that a large number of vaccinated individuals were incorrectly assigned to the unvaccinated category. It seems a case could be made that this is scientific fraud.
Item 3 came from the Pfizer documents that were released on April 1. Huge thanks to all the volunteers who have been digging through these documents to piece together the truth about the vaccines. Huge thanks also to the scientists and attorneys who had to file suit and win in court to force FDA to release them.
This information, I think, could be a gamechanger. It turns out that Pfizer had to hire 600 new full-time employees simply to process the adverse event reports that were coming in regarding vaccine injuries and deaths: 600 new hires in the first 2 1/2 months of the vaccine rollout. And Pfizer further said it planned to hire another 1800. Eighteen hundred more! Just to manage the paperwork resulting from its vaccine-caused carnage.
FDA knew. But FDA wanted it buttoned up for 75 years. CDC knew also, since the reports of deaths to VAERS for COVID vaccines exceed all death reports for the past 30 years, for all other vaccines, put together. Both agencies hid what they knew. CDC even played tricks with data to mislead us. Pfizer knew. DHHS must have known.
There is no Public Health without public honesty. Our public health agencies have become public trickery agencies. Why should anyone believe anything they say now? Why would anyone do what they recommend?
US War Crimes Since World War 2
Samizdat | April 7, 2022
Speaking before the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed Russia was responsible for “the most terrible war crimes in the world” since World War II amid its ongoing special operation in Ukraine, and demanded Russia’s expulsion from UN bodies.
Zelensky was specifically referring to film footage shown to the council of dozens of dead bodies in Bucha, a suburb of Kiev, which the Ukrainian government has claimed were executed by Russian forces before they withdrew from the city last week.
The Russian Defense Ministry has dismissed the claims as a provocation, noting that Ukrainian artillery had previously bombarded the town and that Ukrainian police conducted an operation in Bucha to “clear the area of saboteurs and accomplices of Russian troops” prior to news emerging of the alleged massacre, both of which could also be responsible for the deaths.
Regardless, the claim that the Bucha incident represents the worst war crime since the total war that ended in 1945 is clear hyperbole, especially considering the incessant war-making of Ukraine’s patron, the United States.
To help jog the memory of the Ukrainian president, we have compiled a few examples of US war crimes since 1945 that have not been investigated as crimes.
No Gun Ri Massacre, July 1950
Early in the Korean War, US soldiers from the 7th Cavalry Regiment attacked a large group of South Korean refugees at a railroad bridge near the village of No Gun Ri. According to the No Gun Ri Peace Foundation, between 250 and 300 people were killed, mostly women and children.
The massacre was covered up until 1999, when an Associated Press report revealed it to the world, citing US and North Korean documentation of the killings that showed US troops had orders to fire on all refugees, as they believed North Korean infiltrators might be among them.
The group massacred at No Gun Ri were by no means the only ones killed by US troops, either, as accusations of more than 200 separate incidents emerged when an investigative committee was launched in South Korea in 2008.
The US investigation led to then-US President Bill Clinton issuing a statement of regret, but Washington rejected an outright apology or the possibility of compensation for the survivors. South Korean investigators called the US probe a “whitewash.”
Operation Speedy Express, December 1968 – May 1969
The US Army’s 9th Infantry Division was responsible for “pacifying” a large part of the Mekong River Delta in order to reduce Vietnamese National Liberation Front operations near the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon (today Ho Chi Minh City).
During the six-month operation, the US troops carried out indiscriminate massacres of Vietnamese villages, using air assaults and nighttime riverine attacks to kill as many people as possible. Commanders in the field were reportedly given orders not to return until killing an acceptable number of people, and so-called “free-fire zones” resulted in massive civilian deaths.
An internal probe by the US Army Inspector General found the operation created between 5,000 and 7,000 civilian casualties, and that another 10,899 fighters had been killed. However, the distinction between fighters and civilians was often inflated in the fighters’ favor during the Vietnam War, in order to make US commanders look more effective.
Highway of Death, February 1991
In the final days of Operation Desert Storm, US aircraft annihilated as many as 2,000 vehicles on Highway 80, which runs north out of Kuwait City toward Basra, Iraq. A mix of civilians fleeing the war and Iraqi military units withdrawing from military operations were bombed during two days of airstrikes from February 25 to 27. As the fleeing soldiers were outside of combat, they were not legitimate military targets, according to former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark.
Estimates of the deaths vary wildly, from 200 to more than 1,000. In addition, American eyewitnesses reported that a US armored unit had opened fire on a group of 350 disarmed Iraqi soldiers who had surrendered after fleeing the carnage, killing an unknown number of them.
Bombing of Albanian Refugees at Koriša, May 1999
On May 14, 1999, US aircraft bombed a group of several hundred Albanian refugees near Koriša, Kosovo, who had been hiding in the hills for weeks. According to Yugoslav authorities, 87 refugees were killed in the strike. The US claimed they were being used as human shields by the Yugoslavs, but provided no evidence to back up its claim.
Second Battle of Fallujah, November 2004
The US Marine Corps, in conjunction with Special Operations forces, US air forces, and the British “Black Watch” battalion, launched a massive assault on the Iraqi city of Fallujah in November 2004 that destroyed almost the entire city. The stated objective was to weaken the Iraqi insurgency against the US-UK occupation, but the heavy use of artillery, airstrikes, and chemical weapons such as white phosphorus and incendiary bombs, and depleted uranium, resulted in massive civilian deaths.
The Red Cross estimated that 800 civilians were killed in the battle, while Iraqi NGOs and medical workers estimated between 4,000 and 6,000 people were killed, mostly civilians, which the Guardian noted was a higher death rate than the British cities of Coventry and London faced during The Blitz bombing campaign by Germany in 1940.
Bombing of Kunduz Hospital, October 2015
On October 3, 2015, a US Air Force AC-130U gunship circled the Kunduz Trauma Center in the northern Afghan city of Kunduz, bombarding it with artillery and machine-gun fire for 30 minutes. The hospital was operated by Medecins Sans Frontieres, who denied US claims that Taliban fighters were hiding in the facility. Forty-two people were killed in the assault and another 33 went missing, including both MSF staff and patients.
The Pentagon initially tried to cover up the strike, claiming there might have been some incidental collateral damage due to nearby fighting. However, after it emerged that the strike had been directly ordered by US commanders, then-US President Barack Obama apologized for the strike and paid the families of victims $6,000 each. MSF accused the US of admitting to a war crime by attempting to justify the attack by claiming Taliban fighters were inside.
Bombing of al-Aghawat al-Jadidah, March 2017
It’s estimated that 40,000 civilians were killed during the nine-month siege of Mosul, Iraq, by Iraqi forces and the US-led anti-Daesh coalition, in large part due to the unrelenting artillery bombardment of the city. However, one particular incident stands out: a US airstrike on March 17, 2017, in the al-Aghawat al-Jadidah neighborhood in western Mosul.
The US admitted a week after the attack that it had targeted “the location corresponding to allegations of civilian casualties.” Amnesty International reported that as many as 150 civilians were killed in the attack after having been told not to flee the city by US officials, although Iraqi reports say more than 300 were killed.
Siege of Raqqa, June – October 2017
As the battle for Mosul was drawing to a close, the siege of Daesh’s de facto capital of Raqqa, Syria, began. US Marine Corps artillery pounded the city nonstop, firing 35,000 rounds in five months – more than were used in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Twice during the bombardment, US M777 155 mm howitzers burned through their cannon barrels – an extremely rare feat, notes the Marine Corps Times.
At the same time, US air forces dropped some 20,000 munitions across Iraq and Syria, most of which also fell on Raqqa. Investigations by Amnesty International and Airwars found that the total number of civilians killed in Raqqa was more than 1,600.
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Secret document reveals plans for civil war in Lebanon, Israeli false flags, and invasion
By Randi Nord | Geopolitics Alert | April 5, 2019
Beirut – During his visit with US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, Lebanese President Michael Aoun reportedly received a US-Israeli document detailing plans for creating a civil war in Lebanon with covert false flag operations and possible Israeli invasion.
Although the source of the document is Israeli and created in partnership with Washington, no one knows who presented it to Aoun. The Lebanese TV station, Al-Jadeed, initially reported the document on Lebanese TV and a video on its website. Geopolitics Alert translated the report for this article. … continue
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