THE Northern Territory of Australia often produces a vague sense of unease due to its climate, desert landscape, remoteness and isolation. You wouldn’t venture far off the main highways. The Territory is also a focal point for the culture wars in view of its large indigenous population, who generally live in remote communities in often abhorrent circumstances. Despite two centuries of policy failure there has been little evidence of new thinking in the centres of power. And, given the poor health generally– putting it very mildly – of the resident Aborigines, and their seeming caution in taking the Covid jab, it is a powder keg.
Now a story has emerged that links the two issues of Aboriginal affairs and Covid elimination. It is not pretty, and it comes while Europe is awash with Covid developments that are, not to put too fine a point on it, redolent of the Third Reich. Jonathan Sumption has touched on these ‘dangerous precedents’ as the ‘first symptom of totalitarianism’:
‘Across Europe, basic norms of civilised society are giving way to panic. The unvaccinated are being excluded from an ever-wider range of basic rights. Austria has criminalised them. Italy has stopped them doing their jobs. The Dutch police have fired on anti-lockdown demonstrators, seriously injuring some of them. We are witnessing the ultimate folly of frightened politicians who cannot accept that they are impotent in the face of some natural phenomena.
There is a broad sense that something is about to give. So, not a good week to be caught shipping the unvaccinated off to a Covid camp down under.
This is a story delivered not just by the fringe media but by the Territory’s Chief Minister, Michael Gunner.
After nine new Covid-19 cases were identified in the community of Binjari, it was reported that the Australian army forcibly removed 38 residents said to be ‘close contacts’ to the Howard Springs quarantine camp in Darwin, which I wrote about in TCW Defending Freedom in September (Australia’s Covid concentration camps). Gunner said: ‘Residents of Binjari and [the nearby community of] Rockhole no longer have the five reasons to leave their homes,’ referring to Australia’s five allowable excuses to avoid lockdown (buying food and supplies, exercising for up to two hours, care or caregiving, work or education if it can’t be done from home, and to get vaccinated). He said it was ‘highly likely’ that more residents would be transferred to Howard Springs.
This is a truly astonishing development, even by bizarre Covid policy standards. Very few cases have occurred on Gunner’s patch since March 2020 and the latest piece of policy overreach is in response merely to ‘close contacts’. We do not yet know whether any of those removed are even sick.
Gunner’s now infamous rant against the anti-vaxxers is world class among elected politicians. His enforced removal of the unvaccinated to a holding camp is a global first, as far as I am aware. Australia continues to break new ground.
As a Labor man, Gunner is a partisan brother of the Premiers of Queensland, Western Australia and of Victoria. Daniel Andrews of Victoria needs little introduction. Not a lot more can be said of the Victorian Covid regime, it would seem, that hasn’t already been said and that could possibly add to the public’s understanding of the raving lunatic down south. Western Australia decided long ago in effect to secede and to impose border closures and lockdowns on less than a whim.
Of Queensland, it has recently been observed that there is no Covid crisis yet there are bizarre plans for imminent vaccine passports to be introduced in high summer (December 17, to be precise), following on from months of inexplicable, hard border closures.
The alt-news reports that the Australian Army, with no published explanation, is booking out hotel chains for the summer on the Gold Coast. (This story has no independent corroboration to date.)
But back to the Northern Territory and its current travails. Just like the unvaccinated Queenslanders, the First Australians in the Territory have no place to hide, however remote they might be.
There is no confirmation yet of whether any force accompanied the removal of unvaccinated First Australians from the two communities, but a Darwin Aboriginal elder has shared her distress. Judy Mills said on a video that Northern Territory Aborigines are being dragged out of their communities by the army and police, taken to health centres and forcibly inoculated.
In another video posted on social media, a community member said there were reports of police rounding people up, taking them to a clinic and forcibly vaccinating them; food supplies were being withheld from families and Territory child welfare services were ‘waiting like vultures’ to grab children. She said the government had taken control of communications from these remote communities and it was difficult to confirm information. ‘There’s a state of emergency here. I’m putting out a cry for help to the world,’ she said.
These are incendiary claims. To call this a brazen move by the Northern Territory Government would be to understate considerably the utter gall of the latest push. Messing with Territory Aborigines is normally a no-go area, with every move on the part of politicians needing to be backed by visible community buy-in, painstakingly sought and obtained. That this can be done – with, apparently, not only the knowledge of our perpetually slithering Prime Minister but also with his blessing and, indeed, his resources – is a measure of how far we in Australia have travelled down the road towards totalitarian control.
And totalitarian control that has, by and large, received a pass from the citizenry. There is, now, precious little second-guessing of the political class and its more rampant actions in relation to the virus by that middle go-along-to-get-along group that sits between the rabid Covid class and we-the-non-conforming Covid dissidents and outcasts. This is the group, probably quite substantial, that was unkindly but not inaccurately described by a retired Federal Court Judge as being satisfied so long as they have ‘Netflix, a full belly and a warm place to defecate’. Concern for the rights of fellow Australians, now including indigenous fellow Australians, is not likely to be a priority.
It would be interesting to see the reactions of white Australians, especially those on the Left who are forever championing the interest of remote communities. I say ‘would’ as I am yet to find this story even mentioned in the Australian mainstream media.
Given that indigenous affairs are a core issue in the culture wars and an obsession in the Left-of-centre media, the absence of comment to date is both noteworthy and odd. I am guessing they just don’t know what to think or to say about this. Many, no doubt, would be (quietly) cheering if the Caucasian unvaccinated were marched off for re-education and solitude, a ‘safe’ distance from the vaccinated. No one has quite said it in public, yet.
One might even term this awful affair the Covid Stolen Generation, a term that will have deep resonance for those with an interest in the recent history of the indigenous people of Australia. It all takes us right back to Central Europe and the Auschwitz meme. Lord Sumption is correct. These are, indeed, highly dangerous times.
Last Saturday morning I posted a short post with a very simple chart – two lines in all.
One line tracked the number of weekly deaths per 100,000 vaccinated people aged 10-59 in England. The other tracked the number of deaths per 100,000 unvaccinated people in England. The chart showed that vaccinated people in this age group were dying overall at a higher rate than unvaccinated people.
I’m never exactly sure which posts will “land” – gain traction and go viral. This chart landed. Hard. Someone wrote me that it broke the Internet. It didn’t break the Internet, only Kim Kardashian’s ass can break the Internet, but it has rocketed around ever since. It has been seen over 800,000 times on this page alone and many millions more in screenshots and Twitter posts elsewhere.
Clearly, the reason the chart has gained so much attention is that it quickly and simply provides a way for people who are concerned about the vaccines to provide apparent visual proof that they are increasing all-cause mortality – overall death rates.
The chart has also engendered a fierce backlash from the usual fact-checkers and vaccine fanatics who say it is – wait for it – “misinformation.” (To be clear, I didn’t actually create the chart, but I checked the underlying British government report to make sure it accurately represents the report’s figures. It does, as everyone agrees.)
The “fact-checkers” have two primary complaints about the chart.
The first is that the vaccinated and unvaccinated groups are not exactly the same. A smaller percentage of teenagers than fifty-somethings are vaccinated, so the unvaccinated group overall skews somewhat younger than the older group. Since death rates rise with age, that difference may be enough to explain the gap between the two groups.
The second is that overall death rates in people over 60 (who are not covered in the chart) are much higher than those in the 10-59 range and appear to be lower in the vaccinated over the unvaccinated.
Another way to look at the objections: the first is that the chart doesn’t say what it seems to say, because of a hidden flaw in the data. The second is that it would be basically meaningless even if it did, because other more robust datasets contradict it.
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Part of being on Team Reality is acknowledging reality, and acknowledging when your critics have a factually correct objection. So I want to acknowledge that, like the chart itself, these objections BOTH are valid and factually accurate, viewed individually.
What the fact-checkers and vaccine fanatics appear incapable of understanding is that the two objections effectively cancel each other out – and do nothing to address concerns over the long-term failure of Covid vaccines or their impact on all-cause mortality.
These folks think they are sophisticated thinkers who have blown up apparent evidence that the vaccines are dangerous. In fact, just as they have for the last several months, they are telling themselves what they want to hear instead of listening to what the data are saying – and, increasingly, shouting.
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They have identified and latched on to ONE complication of using population-level data to judge vaccine effectiveness – the fact that differing rates of uptake by age may make the Covid vaccines seem less effective than they are.
But they – deliberately or out of ignorance – are ignoring another one, one that makes the vaccines seem MORE effective than they are.
The second problem is not a secret to epidemiologists.
It has been quietly discussed for flu vaccines for more than a decade, and I have written about it repeatedly in the last year. The problem is this: the popular belief that sick people are more likely to be vaccinated than healthy people is entirely wrong.
People who receive vaccines are healthier overall than those who do not. They care more about avoiding sickness, and they have the time and energy and money to find their way to a vaccination site. They are not healthier because they get vaccines; they get vaccines because they are healthier.
Older people who receive flu vaccines die – of both the flu and all causes – at much lower rates than unvaccinated people after they receive flu shots. But they also die at much lower rates BEFORE they receive the vaccines. The seminal study demonstrating this relationship is now more than 15 years old; it was published in the International Journal of Epidemiology in April 2006.
“The reductions in risk before influenza season indicate preferential receipt of vaccine by relatively healthy seniors,” the authors wrote.
This paradox helps explain why a huge study of flu vaccines in the United Kingdom showed that increasing vaccination levels in older people did not reduce the number of hospitalizations or deaths from the flu.
The researchers took advantage of the fact that Britain prioritizes people 65 and older for vaccinations and that people are much more likely to get a shot when they are 65 or 66 than 64 or 63. Vaccination levels rose sharply as people turned 65, but the health of the people who received the shots did not improve.
The same pattern is visible in the United States, where a massive increase in the number of flu vaccines in the last generation has made no apparent difference in the number of flu deaths. In fact, in 2005, researchers noted that although vaccinations had risen from 20 percent of elderly people in 1980 to 65 percent in 2001, “unexpectedly, estimates of influenza-related mortality in this age group also increased [emphasis added] during this period.”
In other words, influenza vaccines only seem to work. Any observational estimate that compares death rates in people who have gotten shots to those who have not will be inherently untrustworthy, no matter how hard researchers try to correct for the healthy recipient bias.
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What is true for flu vaccines appears to be even more true for Covid vaccines.
The relentless vaccination push means that in many countries, more than 90 percent of elderly people are vaccinated. The split is even more stark in countries like England, where 2.44 million people 80 and over have been fully vaccinated, compared to 69,000 who are unvaccinated (and 24,000 who have received the first dose but not the second).
Look at those numbers again.
2,440,000 people in England 80 and over vaccinated. Almost 97 percent of the total number of elderly people.
69,000 80 and over unvaccinated. Less than 3 percent.
These two groups cannot remotely be compared.
How do they differ? I can’t find any hard data, but we know that at least a fraction of the elderly unvaccinated are too ill to be vaccinated. Some are in hospice care. Norway recommended against giving people in hospice the Covid vaccine in January following deaths in terminally ill patients.
A paper published online in March in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management noted that “communication from hospice organizations has primarily emphasized the vaccination of hospice staff without the same priority mention for patients” and called for hospices to do more to offer vaccines to patients.
The paper’s title was even starker:
A Shot at Inclusion: Reconsidering Categorical Exclusion of Hospice Patients from COVID Vaccine Allocation.
How many Covid deaths in unvaccinated elderly people are actually “with Covid” deaths in people dying in hospice? Again, we don’t know. But what we know is that even a small number of those deaths will hopelessly bias the relative risk ratio for unvaccinated to vaccinated Covid deaths, because the overall number of unvaccinated people is so small.
As of September, about 30 to 35 unvaccinated English people 80 and over died of or with Covid each week, compared to about 250 fully vaccinated people a week.
So trying to measure vaccine effectiveness by looking at the relative risks of the vaccinated and unvaccinated elderly is impossible. But that is exactly what the health authorities and their servants in the media do when they put out figures that seem to show the risk of death from Covid is much lower in elderly people who have been vaccinated.
They are lying with truthful data, and they (some of them, anyway, though probably not the reporters who are writing the stories) are smart enough to know exactly what they’re doing.
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Meanwhile, they are ignoring a much more important indicator – trends in both Covid and all-cause mortality are very much going the wrong way in the vaccinated elderly population.
In the last four weeks for which British data are available, roughly coinciding with September, about 1,000 vaccinated English people 80 and over died from Covid and 16,000 from all causes.
Compare those numbers to four weeks in May, when fewer than 70 vaccinated English people 80 and over died from Covid and 13,000 from all causes.
Put another way, overall deaths rose more than 20 percent in the vaccinated elderly from May to September, and Covid deaths 15-fold. And this was not because many more people were vaccinated. The number of vaccinated elderly people rose only about 4 percent from May to September.
Compare that to the mortality trends in unvaccinated English people 80 and over.
About 800 died of all causes in four weeks in May (at the time, there were about 77,000 unvaccinated elderly people, compared to 69,000 in September). Fewer than 20 of those died of Covid.
In September, about 140 unvaccinated elderly people died of Covid – a eight-fold increase compared to the 15-fold increase in the vaccinated.
The striking part is that only 700 unvaccinated elderly English people died OF ALL CAUSES in those four weeks in September – FEWER than back in May. (The trend roughly tracked the overall drop in the elderly unvaccinated population. It appears that about 1 percent of those folks die a month, at least in warmer months.)
This trend is stunning for two reasons.
First, the fact that 100 more unvaccinated elderly people (supposedly) died of Covid in September yet 100 fewer of them died overall strongly suggests that many of those reported deaths are actually with and not from Covid.
Second, per capita all-cause mortality – not just Covid mortality, all-cause mortality – rose close to 20 percent in the very large group of the vaccinated elderly. Some of those extra deaths came from Covid. But most did not.
And though death rates are still somewhat higher in the unvaccinated – as they should be, given the fact that vaccine recipients are healthier – but that fact is far less relevant than the notable rise in the vaccinated.
What’s behind the rise in those deaths in the vaccinated elderly? We don’t know. But we’d better find out. Especially since we are now stuffing boosters into their arms.
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All of this is somewhat complicated, I’ll admit. The data has lots of confounders and continues to evolve. And trying to explain relative changes in all-cause mortality in the context of healthy vaccine recipient bias using papers about flu vaccine – well, it’s not a soundbite.
Which comes back to the chart from last week.
The chart IS a soundbite.
It is a simple and factually accurate way to say:
Something is wrong. The promises that the health authorities have made over the last 12 months about the vaccines are not coming true. Despite near-complete levels of adult vaccination in Europe, many countries are seeing skyrocketing Covid cases and deaths. And worst of all, all-cause non-Covid mortality is running well above normal in country after country.
Not everyone is going to wade through this article. But everyone can read that chart from last week. It’s not perfect, but it uses real data to raise a crucial issue.
That’s why it landed. And that’s why the vaccine fanatics hate it so much.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s new book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health is not the book of a politician seeking attention. It is the book of a man determined to stake his own life in the resistance against the unfolding bio-terrorist assault on humankind by governments captive of the pharmaceutical industry. He is calling for mass insurrection, and his last word is: “I’ll see you on the barricades.” The book begins like this:
I wrote this book to help Americans—and citizens across the globe—understand the historical underpinnings of the bewildering cataclysm that began in 2020. In that single annus horribilis, liberal democracy effectively collapsed worldwide. The very governmental health regulators, social media eminences, and media companies that idealistic populations relied upon as champions of freedom, health, democracy, civil rights, and evidence-based public policy seemed to collectively pivot in a lockstep assault against free speech and personal freedoms. Suddenly, those trusted institutions seemed to be acting in concert to generate fear, promote obedience, discourage critical thinking, and herd seven billion people to march to a single tune, culminating in mass public health experiments with a novel, shoddily tested and improperly licensed technology so risky that manufacturers refused to produce it unless every government on Earth shielded them from liability. … Conscientious objectors who resisted these unwanted, experimental, zero-liability medical interventions faced orchestrated gaslighting, marginalization, and scapegoating. American lives and livelihoods were shattered by a bewildering array of draconian diktats imposed without legislative approval or judicial review, risk assessment, or scientific citation. So-called Emergency Orders closed our businesses, schools and churches, made unprecedented intrusions into privacy, and disrupted our most treasured social and family relationships.
Kennedy is not a newcomer to this frightening dystopia. “My 40-year career as an environmental and public health advocate,” he writes, “gave me a unique understanding of the corrupting mechanisms of ‘regulatory capture,’ the process by which the regulator becomes beholden to the industry it’s meant to regulate.” From the time he entered the vaccine debate in 2005, he realized that “the pervasive web of deep financial entanglements between Pharma and the government health agencies had put regulatory capture on steroids.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), for example, owns 57 vaccine patents and spent $4.9 billion in 2019 buying and distributing vaccines. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) receives 45 percent of its budget from the pharmaceutical industry. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), with its $42 billion budget, owns hundreds of vaccine patents and often profits from the sale of products it supposedly regulates. High-level officials receive yearly emoluments of up to $150,000 in royalty payments on products that they help develop and then usher through the approval process.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, “America’s reigning health commissar,” stands at the summit of that Leviathan. From 1968, he occupied various posts at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a sub-agency of NIH, of which he became director in 1984. With a $417,608 annual salary, he is the highest paid of all federal employees, including the President. “His experiences surviving 50 years as the panjandrum of a key federal bureaucracy, having advised six Presidents, the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, foreign governments, and the WHO, seasoned him exquisitely for a crisis that would allow him to wield power enjoyed by few rulers and no doctor in history.” He has nurtured a complex web of financial entanglements that has transformed the NIH into a subsidiary of Big Pharma. Reaching into the deep pockets of the Clinton and Gates Foundations, he has used his $6 billion annual budget to achieve dominance and control over many agencies, including the World Health Organization (WHO). He can make and break careers, enrich or punish university research centers, and dictate the outcome of scientific research across the globe, consistently prioritizing pharmaceutical industry profits over public health.
Kennedy’s book documents Fauci’s “two-decade strategy of promoting false pandemics as a scheme for promoting novel vaccines,” as well as “his actions to conceal widespread contamination in blood and vaccines, his destructive vendettas against scientists who challenge the Pharma paradigm, [and] his deliberate sabotaging of patent-expired remedies against infectious diseases.”
But of course, Kennedy’s book is not about a man: it is about an irremediably corrupt and predatory system created in the U.S. and exported worldwide. Ultimately, however, the system is built and run by humans, and focusing on its most emblematic representative shows its very soul.
Kennedy’s book puts the current crisis in historical perspective. But it doesn’t tell the story chronologically. It starts with a very long first chapter on the current Covid crisis—a book by itself—, then goes back, from chapter 3, to the 1980s and the search for the AIDS vaccine, the template for today’s pharmaceutical coup. In this review, I will focus on the AIDS episode, because it is the least familiar part of a history covering fifty years, and it helps make sense of what is happening today. It is an incredible story, that I would have had difficulty believing just three years ago, but that our current enslavement now makes utterly credible.
The thirty-year decampment of journalistic scrutiny means that there is still no coherent public narrative chronicling Dr. Fauci’s futile quest for his “inevitable” AIDS vaccine, much less accountability. Industry and government scientists have instead shrouded the scandalous saga in secrecy, subterfuge, and prevarication, obscuring a thousand calamities and a sea of tears deserving its own book. Every meager effort to research the debacle—on Google, PubMed, news sites, and published clinical trial data—yields only shocking new atrocities—a grim, repetitive parade of horribles: heartbreaking tragedies, entrenched institutional arrogance and racism, broken promises, vast expenditures of squandered treasure, and the recurring chicanery of Anthony Fauci, Bob Gallo, and Bill Gates.
Kennedy deserves praise and gratitude for his courage to bring this controversy out into the open, in a clear and well-documented exposé. His book is destined to become a landmark in the struggle for Life and Truth—and in the Kennedy heroic saga. This article reflects only a fraction of what can be learned from its 480 pages packed with data and references. Since page numbers in the kindle edition (recommended for its thousand hyperlinks) differ from those in the printing book, I have dispensed with them.
In the Beginning
In the first lines of his 2014 book Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak (documenting an astonishing 1,135 percent higher rate of autism among children who took hepatitis B vaccines), Kennedy prudently claimed to be “pro-vaccine” and to “believe that vaccines have saves the lives of hundreds of millions of humans over the past century.” Kennedy makes no such disclaimer in his new book. Rather, he sides with the critics of the popular dogma that vaccines played the key role in abolishing mortal contagious illnesses in North America and Europe, citing a 2000 study by CDC and Johns Hopkins scientists that concluded: “nearly 90 percent of the decline in infectious disease mortality among US children occurred before 1940, when few antibiotics or vaccines were available.” The main causes of the dramatic 74 percent decline in infectious disease mortality in the first half of the twentieth century were improved nutrition and sanitation.
From Kennedy, The Real Anthony Fauci, 2021
This revisionist but objective perspective explains why Fauci and Gates’s obsession with vaccine-preventable diseases has caused negative overall impacts on public health in Africa and Asia, by proportionally reducing assistance streams for nutrition, clean water, transportation, hygiene, and economic development. Gates and Fauci have actually hijacked WHO’s public health agenda away from the projects that are proven to curb infectious diseases, and diverted international aid to wedge open emerging markets for their multinational partners.
To understand their craze for vaccines, Kennedy reminds us of the pioneering influence of the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1911, after the Supreme Court ruled that Standard Oil constituted an “unreasonable monopoly” and splintered it into thirty-four companies, John D. Rockefeller inaugurated what Bill Gates would later call “philanthrocapitalism.” He provided large grants to scientists for synthesizing and patenting chemical versions of the molecules identified in traditional medicine. The Foundation provided almost half of the initial budget for the League of Nations’ Health Organization (LNHO) in 1922, and populated its ranks with its veterans and favorites. It imbued the League with its technocratic philosophy of health, inherited by its successor body, the WHO, in 1948.
The Rockefeller Foundation launched a “public-private partnership” with pharmaceutical companies called the International Health Commission, which first set about inoculating the hapless populations of the colonized tropics with a yellow fever jab. By the time John D. Rockefeller, Jr. disbanded it in 1951, the International Health Commission had spent billions of dollars on tropical disease campaigns in almost 100 countries and colonies. These projects had a hidden agenda, according to a 2017 report, U.S. Philanthrocapitalism and the Global Health Agenda: they allowed the Rockefeller family to open developing world markets for oil, mining, banking and other profitable trades, including pharmaceutical profits that grew tremendously when, in the 1970s:
a wave of new technologies, including PCR and super powerful electron microscopes, had opened windows on teeming new worlds containing millions of species of previously unknown viruses to scientists. … The lure of fame and fortune ignited a chaotic revolution in virology as ambitious young PhDs scrambled to inculpate newly discovered microbes as the cause of old malignancies. … Under this new rubric, every theoretical breakthrough, every find, became potentially the basis for a new generation of drugs.
By the mid-1970s, the CDC was seeking to justify its existence by tracking small outbreaks of rabies. “Drumming up public fear of periodic pandemics was a natural way for NIAID and CDC bureaucrats to keep their agencies relevant. Dr. Fauci’s immediate boss and predecessor as NIAID Director, Richard M. Krause, helped pioneer this new strategy in 1976.” That year the fake swine flu epidemic was concocted. The experimental vaccine was so fraught with problems that the Health and Human Services (HHS) discontinued the jab after vaccinating 49 million Americans. According to news accounts, the incidence of flu was seven times greater among the vaccinated than the unvaccinated. Furthermore, the vaccine caused some 500 cases of the degenerative nerve disease Guillain-Barré Syndrome, 32 deaths, more than 400 paralyzations, and as many as 4,000 other injuries. Injured plaintiffs filed 1,604 lawsuits. By April 1985, the government had paid out $83,233,714 and spent tens of millions of dollars adjudicating and processing those claims.
Another scandal broke in 1983, when a NIH-funded UCLA study found that the DTP vaccine developed by Wyeth—now Pfizer—was killing or causing severe brain injury, including seizures and death, in one in every 300 vaccinated children. While protecting children against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis, the DTP vaccine had ruined their immune systems, making them vulnerable to a wide range of other deadly infections.
The resultant lawsuits caused the collapse of insurance markets for vaccines and threatened to bankrupt the industry. Wyeth claimed to be losing $20 in downstream liability for every dollar it earned on vaccine sales, and induced Congress to pass in 1986 the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which shielded vaccine makers from liability. (This incentive for unrestricted greed was strengthened in 2005 when George W. Bush signed into law the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act).
AIDS and AZT
In 1984, when Fauci became director of NIAID, the AIDS crisis was spiraling out of control. That proved “a redemptive juncture for NIAID and the launch pad for Dr. Fauci’s stellar rise.” In an April 1984 press conference, NIH scientist Robert Gallo linked AIDS to the virus that was soon to be named HIV. Dr. Fauci then moved aggressively to claim jurisdiction for his agency over the National Cancer Institute (NCI), another sub-agency of NIH. “As the nation’s newly appointed AIDS czar, Dr. Fauci was now a gatekeeper for almost all AIDS research … parroting NCI’s vows to cure cancer, Dr. Fauci promised Congress that he would quickly produce drugs and vaccines to banish AIDS.”
At the same time, he was deliberately spreading contagion terror, warning in a 1983 fear-mongering article that “the scope of the syndrome may be enormous”, since “routine close contact, as within a family household, can spread the disease”—despite the fact that AIDS was almost exclusive to intravenous drug users and male homosexuals. A year later, Fauci was forced to concede that health officials had never detected a case of the disease spread through “casual contact.” Nevertheless, Dr. Fauci’s systematic response was “to amplify the widespread panic of dreaded pestilence that would naturally magnify his power, elevate his profile, and expand his influence. Amplifying terror of infectious disease was already an ingrained knee-jerk institutional response at NIAID.”
Having seized control over AIDS research, Fauci captured the new flood of congressional AIDS appropriations flowing to NIH through the lobbying of a newly organized gay community. By 1990, NIAID’s annual AIDS budget reached $3 billion. In the ensuing decades, the federal government spent over half a trillion dollars in the quest for an elusive vaccine that never materialized. Dr. Fauci pumped up taxpayers’ money into nearly 100 vaccine candidates, with no other result than “massive transfers of public lucre to Dr. Fauci’s Pharma partners,” and a sea of tears for millions of unfortunate human guinea pigs.
NIAID’s lack of in-house drug development capacity meant that Fauci had to farm out drug research to a network of so-called “principal investigators” (PIs), academic physicians and researchers controlled by pharmaceutical companies and acting as liaisons, recruiters and spokespersons.
PIs are pharmaceutical industry surrogates who play key roles promoting the pharmaceutical paradigm and functioning as high priests of all its orthodoxies, which they proselytize with missionary zeal. They use their seats on medical boards and chairmanships of university departments to propagate dogma and root out heresy. … They are the credentialed and trusted medical experts who prognosticate on television networks—now helplessly reliant on pharmaceutical ad revenue—to push out Pharma content.
Dr. Fauci’s choice to transfer virtually all of NIAID’s budget to pharmaceutical PIs for drug development was an abdication of the agency’s duty to find the source and eliminate the explosive epidemics of allergic and autoimmune disease that began under his watch around 1989. … NIAID money effectively became a giant subsidy to the blossoming pharmaceutical industry to incubate a pipeline of profitable new drugs targeted to treat the symptoms of those very diseases.
In the late 80s and early 90s, PIs received every year between 4 and 5 billions of dollars from NIH’s budget. But “legalized bribes” from drug companies and royalty payments from drug products often dwarfed their government funding. Celia Farber’s 2006 Harper’s article, “Out of Control: AIDS and the Destruction of Medical Science,” laid bare the culture of squalor, corruption, and vendetta at Fauci’s AIDS Branch, the Division of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (DAIDS).
Despite his miserable track record at reducing illness over the previous decade, Fauci persuaded President Bill Clinton, in May 1997, to set a new national goal for science. In a speech delivered at Morgan State University, Clinton—perhaps not without cryptic irony— imitated Kennedy’s May 25, 1961 moonshot promise, saying, “Today let us commit ourselves to developing an AIDS vaccine within the next decade.”
A year later, Bill Gates, who had just founded his International Aids Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), sealed a deal with Fauci. “Over the next two decades, that partnership would metastasize to include pharmaceutical companies, military and intelligence planners, and international health agencies all collaborating to promote weaponized pandemics and vaccines and a new brand of corporate imperialism rooted in the ideology of biosecurity.” The story of Gates’ involvement in the vaccine business, of his murderous experiments in Africa and India, and of his rise as the unofficial top sponsor of the WHO (ordering in 2011: “All 193 member states, you must make vaccines a central focus of your health systems”), is told in chapters 9 and 10 of Kennedy’s book.
When Dr. Fauci became head of NIAID, azidothymidine, known as AZT, was the only candidate as an AIDS remedy. AZT is a “DNA chain terminator,” randomly destroying DNA synthesis in reproducing cells. It had been developed in 1964 for cancer, but abandoned as too toxic even for short-term therapy. It was deemed so worthless that it was not even patented. In 1985, Samuel Broder, head of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), claimed having found that AZT killed HIV in test tubes. The British company Burroughs Wellcome then patented it as an AIDS remedy. “Recognizing financial opportunity in the desperate terror of young AIDS patients facing certain death, the drug company set the price at up to $10,000/year per patient—making AZT one of the most expensive drugs in pharmaceutical history. Since Burroughs Wellcome could manufacture AZT for pennies per dose, the company anticipated a bonanza.”
Fauci gave Burroughs Wellcome a monopoly control over the government’s HIV response. But all did not go smoothly. “AZT’s horrendous toxicity hobbled researchers struggling to design study protocols that would make it appear either safe or effective.” Another problem is that community-based doctors were achieving promising results with cheap, off-label therapeutic drugs. Dr. Fauci refused to test any of those repurposed drugs that had no Pharma patrons. When he did put on trial AL721, an antiviral that was far less toxic than AZT, he rigged the studies to fail, and abruptly cancelled Phase 2.
Meanwhile, he accelerated testing of AZT, skipping animal testing and allowing Burroughs Wellcome to proceed directly to human trials. In March 1987, Fauci’s team declared the human trials a success after only four months, and Fauci congratulated himself in front of the press. However, when in July 1987, the official report of Burroughs Wellcome’s Phase 2 trial was published, European scientists complained that raw data showed no benefit in reducing symptoms. FDA conducted its own investigation eighteen months later, but kept its results secret, until investigative journalist John Lauritsen obtained some of them by using the Freedom of Information Act; the documents showed that the Fauci/Burroughs Wellcome research teams had engaged in widespread data tampering. More than half of the AZT patients suffered adverse reactions so deadly that they needed multiple blood transfusions just to keep them alive. Nevertheless, Fauci kept on lying himself to the top of the world, with little scrutiny from mainstream media.
A key and enduring legacy of the AZT battle was Dr. Fauci’s emergence as the alpha wolf of HHS [Health and Human Services]. His enormous budget, and multiplying contacts on Capitol Hill, the White House, and the medical industry, thereafter allowed him to influence or ignore a succession of politically appointed HHS directors and to bully, manipulate, and dominate HHS’s other sister agencies, most notably FDA.
AZT was not the only subject of interest to Fauci. By June 2003, NIH was running 10,906 clinical trials on new antiviral concoctions in some four hundred clinical trials in ninety countries. Some of those trials seemed pulled out of Dickens’ worst nightmares. The Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP), a medical industry watchdog organization, has documented that between 1985 and 2005, NIAID conscripted at least 532 infants and children from foster care in New York City as subjects of clinical trials testing experimental AIDS drugs and vaccines. AHRP’s investigation revealed that many of those children were perfectly healthy and may not even have been HIV-infected. Yet 80 of them died. In 2004, journalist Liam Scheff chronicled Dr. Fauci’s secretive experiments on foster children at Incarnation Children’s Center (ICC) in New York City and numerous sister facilities between 1988 and 2002. These disclosures, comments Kennedy, beg many questions:
From what moral wilderness did the monsters who devised and condoned these experiments descend upon our idealistic country? How have they lately come to exercise such tyrannical power over our citizens? What sort of nation are we if we allow them to continue? Most trenchantly, does it not make sense that the malevolent minds, the elastic ethics, the appalling judgment, the arrogance, and savagery that sanctioned the barbaric brutalization of children at the Incarceration Convent House, and the torture of animals for industry profit, could also concoct a moral justification for suppressing lifesaving remedies and prolonging a deadly epidemic? Could these same dark alchemists justify a strategy of prioritizing their $48 billion vaccine project ahead of public health and human life? Did similar hubris—that deadly human impulse to play God—pave the lethal path to Wuhan and fuel the reckless decision to hack the codes of Creation and fabricate diabolical new forms of life—pandemic superbugs—in a ramshackle laboratory with scientists linked to the Chinese military?
Indeed, Kennedy shows in his final chapter, “Germ Games,” that Fauci’s investments in so-called “gain of function” experiments to engineer pandemic superbugs raise “the ironic possibility that Dr. Fauci may have played a role in triggering the global contagion that two US presidents entrusted him to manage.”
Africa is “the venue of choice for companies seeking cooperative government officials, compliant populations, the lowest per-patient enrollment costs, and lax oversight by media and regulatory officials.” In the early 1990s, African dictators rolled out the red carpet for Pharma, cashing in on the lucrative business of farming out their citizens for the booming clinical trial business. And on January 29, 2003, President George W. Bush announced at his State of the Union speech his Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), Fauci’s new swindle:
On the continent of Africa, nearly 30 million people have the AIDS virus. … Yet across that continent, only 50,000 AIDS victims—only 50,000—are receiving the medicine they need. … I ask the Congress to commit $15 billion over the next five years, including nearly $10 billion in new money, to turn the tide against AIDS in the most afflicted nations of Africa and the Caribbean.
Does HIV Cause AIDS?
Kennedy’s chapter 5, “The HIV Heresies,” opens up with the following note:
I hesitated to include this chapter because any questioning of the orthodoxy that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS remains an unforgivable—even dangerous—heresy among our reigning medical cartel and its media allies. But one cannot write a complete book about Tony Fauci without touching on the abiding—and fascinating—scientific controversy over what he characterizes as his “greatest accomplishment” and his “life’s work.”
The controversy illustrates how pharmaceutical industries and health agencies, acting in concert, engineer consensus on incomplete or fraudulent theories, and ruthlessly suppress dissent from even the most gifted recognized scientists. “From the outset,” Kennedy insists, “I want to make clear that I take no position on the relationship between HIV and AIDS.” However, there seems little doubt that his basic point is correct:
During the thirty-six years since Dr. Fauci and his colleague, Dr. Robert Gallo, first claimed that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS, no one has been able to point to a study that demonstrates their hypothesis using accepted scientific proofs. … Even today, incoherence, knowledge gaps, contradictions, and inconsistencies continue to bedevil the official dogma.
The success story of the HIV-AIDS dogma shows “many of the tactics Dr. Fauci has pioneered to dodge debate—bedazzling and bamboozling the press into ignoring legitimate inquiry of the credo, and undermining, gaslighting, punishing, bullying, intimidating, marginalizing, vilifying, and muzzling critics.” One of Fauci’s victims was Dr. Peter Duesberg, who in 1987 was still recognized as the world’s most accomplished retrovirologist. Duesberg argues that HIV does not cause AIDS but is essentially a “free rider” common to high-risk populations who suffer immune suppression due to environmental exposures. HIV, he says, is a harmless passenger virus that has almost certainly coexisted in humans for thousands of generations without causing diseases. While HIV may be sexually transmittable, Duesberg claims, AIDS is not.
Duesberg published his views in a groundbreaking 1987 article, then in a 724-page book,Inventing the AIDS Virus. Kennedy finds that “Duesberg’s rationales appear so clean, so elegantly crafted, and so compelling that, in reading them, it seems impossible that the entire [orthodox] hypothesis did not instantly collapse under the smothering weight of relentless logic.” But Fauci and Gallo never attempted to reply to Duesberg. Blaming AIDS on a virus was the gambit that had allowed NIAID to claim the jurisdiction—and cash flow—away from NCI, and Duesberg was severely punished for endangering this.
Dr. Fauci summoned the entire upper clergy of his HIV orthodoxy—and all of its lower acolytes and altar boys—to unleash a storm of fierce retribution on the Berkeley virologist and his followers. … the AIDS establishment, down to its lowliest doctor, publicly reviled Duesberg, NIH defunded him, and academia ostracized and exiled the brilliant Berkeley professor. The scientific press all but banished him. He became radioactive.
Surprisingly, however, Dr. Luc Montagnier, whose discovery of HIV Gallo had in fact stolen—as he admitted in 1991 after years of litigation—, became Duesberg’s most embarrassing convert, declaring at the San Francisco International AIDS Conference in June 1990, that “the HIV virus is harmless and passive, a benign virus.” He added that, according to his findings, HIV becomes dangerous only in the presence of a second organism, a bacteria-like bug called a mycoplasma. Montagnier, in fact, had never claimed that HIV was the only factor in AIDS, and grew increasingly skeptical of that theory. His repeated questioning of the establishment paradigm signaled the beginning of his vilification, for which his Nobel Prize hardly protected him.
Gallo’s “proof” that the cause of AIDS was a virus—as opposed to toxic exposures— provided the critical foundation stone of Dr. Fauci’s career. It allowed Fauci to capture the AIDS program and launch NIAID as the leading federal partner of the drug-production industry. This explains why Fauci never funded any study to explore whether HIV actually caused AIDS, and took vigorous preemptive action against any such study.
Kennedy cites other dissenting voices on AIDS epidemiology. Dr. Shyh-Ching Lo, the Chief Researcher in charge of AIDS programs for the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, was shocked by Anthony Fauci’s unconventional claim that antibodies, normally the sign of a robust immune response, should, with HIV, be the signal for impending death. Since “HIV tests” do not in reality detect the elusive virus but only antibodies, there seems to be an Orwellian inversion at work. Kennedy also quotes Dr. David Rasnick, a PhD biochemist who has worked for thirty years in the pharmaceutical biotech field:
Fauci’s fundamental conundrum is that he has told everybody to diagnose AIDS based on the presence of HIV antibodies. With every other disease, the presence of antibodies is the signal that the patient has vanquished the disease. With AIDS, Fauci and Gallo, and now Gates, claim it’s a sign you’re about to die. Think about it; if the objective of an AIDS vaccine is to stimulate antibody production, then success would mean that every vaccinated person would also have an AIDS diagnosis. I mean, this is fodder for a comedy bit. It’s like someone gave the Three Stooges an annual billion-dollar budget!
The nature of AIDS—a syndrome, not a disease—is itself subject to questions, since it was made to encompass a galaxy of some thirty separate well-known diseases, all of which occur in individuals who have no HIV infection. “In the hands of Dr. Fauci’s opportunistic PIs, AIDS became an amorphous malady subject to ever-changing definitions, encompassing a multitude of old diseases in hosts who test positive for HIV.” Nobel Laureate Kary Mullis, the inventor of the PCR tests, pointed out that the PCR was capable of finding HIV signals in large segments of the population who suffered no AIDS symptoms. On the other hand, AIDS commonly occurs in people who test HIV negative, as Geoffrey Cowley documented in a 1992 Newsweek article, followed by Steve Heimoff in the Los Angeles Times.
These very inconsistencies were not a problem for Fauci and his standing army of pharmaceutical mercenaries. Quite the opposite: they opened up Africa’s AIDS bonanza. Researchers funded by Fauci, using PCR tests and murky statistical models, declared that up to 30 million Africans were suffering from AIDS, nearly half the adult population in some nations. While in Western nations, AIDS continued to be a disease of drug addicts and homosexual “poppers” (consumers of the amyl nitrite vasodilator providing relaxation of the anal musculature, packaged into the “popper” container patented by Burroughs Wellcome and advertised in the gay press throughout the AIDS epidemic), mysteriously, in Africa, 59 percent of AIDS cases were women, and 85 percent were heterosexuals.
But in the early 1990s, the character of AIDS changed dramatically with the proliferation of AZT. As they started to give AZT to people who were in fact not even sick but simply positive on the HIV test, AIDS started to look increasingly like AZT poisoning. And the death rate climbed precipitously. According to the Duesbergians, the vast majority of “AIDS deaths” after 1987 were actually caused by AZT. The medication that Dr. Fauci was prescribing to treat AIDS patients actually did what the virus could not: it caused AIDS itself. In 1988, the average survival time for patients taking AZT was four months. In 1997, recognizing the lethal effect of AZT, health officials lowered the dose; the average lifespan of AZT patients then rose to twenty-four months. According to Dr. Claus Köhnlein, a German oncologist, “We virtually killed a whole generation of AIDS patients without even noticing it because the symptoms of the AZT intoxication were almost indistinguishable from AIDS.”
Conclusion
In July 2019, Dr. Fauci made a surprise announcement: he finally had a working HIV vaccine, the potential “nail in the coffin” for the epidemic. He conceded that his new vaccine didn’t prevent transmission of AIDS, but predicted that those who took the jab would find that when they did get AIDS, the symptoms would be much reduced. Kennedy comments:
So confident was Dr. Fauci of the media’s slavish credulity that he assumed, correctly, that he’d never need to answer the many questions raised by this feverish gibberish. That entire odd proposition received zero critical press commentary. His success at slapping lipstick on this donkey and selling it to the world as a Thoroughbred may have emboldened his ruse—a year later—of placing similar cosmetics on the COVID vaccines that, likewise, neither prevent disease nor preclude transmission.
By 2019, the AIDS rope started to wear out. Who still cared about AIDS anyway? The “Covid-19 Pandemic” came as the perfect opportunity for a reset and an update in the pharmaceutical racket. As Winston Churchill reportedly said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste”. With complicit corporate media blacking out the scandalous track record of his white-coat mafia, Fauci emerged, again, as the good doctor, the savior.
“Is it fair to blame Dr. Fauci for a crisis that, of course, has many authors?” asks Kennedy. To some extent, it is.
Under Dr. Fauci’s leadership, the allergic, autoimmune, and chronic illnesses which Congress specifically charged NIAID to investigate and prevent, have mushroomed to afflict 54 percent of children, up from 12.8 percent when he took over NIAID in 1984. Dr. Fauci has offered no explanation as to why allergic diseases like asthma, eczema, food allergies, allergic rhinitis, and anaphylaxis suddenly exploded beginning in 1989, five years after he came to power. On its website, NIAID boasts that autoimmune disease is one of the agency’s top priorities. Some 80 autoimmune diseases, including juvenile diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis, Graves’ disease, and Crohn’s disease, which were practically unknown prior to 1984, suddenly became epidemic under his watch. Autism, which many scientists now consider an autoimmune disease, exploded from between 2/10,000 and 4/10,000 Americans when Tony Fauci joined NIAID, to one in thirty-four today. Neurological diseases like ADD/ADHD, speech and sleep disorders, narcolepsy, facial tics, and Tourette’s syndrome have become commonplace in American children. The human, health, and economic costs of chronic disease dwarf the costs of all infectious diseases in the United States. By this decade’s end, obesity, diabetes, and pre-diabetes are on track to debilitate 85 percent of America’s citizens. America is among the ten most over-weight countries on Earth. The health impacts of these epidemics—which fall mainly on the young—eclipse even the most exaggerated health impacts of COVID-19.
Dr. Fauci has done nothing to advance NIAID’s core obligation of researching the causes of chronic allergic and autoimmune diseases that have mushroomed under his tenure. Instead, Fauci has “reshaped NIAID into the leading incubator for new pharmaceutical products, many of which, ironically, profit from the cascading chronic disease pandemic.” Instead of researching the causes of Americans’ failing health, Dr. Fauci funnels the bulk of his $6 billion budget to the research and development of new drugs and vaccines that are largely responsible for weakening our natural immunity. “Of late, he has played a central role in undermining public health and subverting democracy and constitutional governance around the globe and in transitioning our civil governance toward medical totalitarianism.”
I was reminded of Dr. Knock, the central character of Jules Romains’s famous novel Knock or the Triumph of Medicine, written in 1923. Dr. Knock is a shady medical doctor of dubious competence who professes that “health” is an obsolete and unscientific concept, and that all men are sick and need to be informed about it by their doctor. To advance his plan of converting a whole town into permanent patients, he enlists the help of the school teacher and of the pharmacist, who suddenly sees his clientele booming (watch unforgettable moments of Guy Lefranc’s 1951 film adaptation with Louis Jouvet here and here).
Louis Jouvet as Dr. Knock in 1951
To some extent, however, Fauci is himself the product of a civilizational orientation that could only, in the long run, lead to the tyrannical medical technocracy that is now trying to enslave us. Rather than a new Dr. Frankenstein, Fauci is our own monster coming back after us. Kennedy hints at this vast aspect of the question, pointing to the need for deep questioning. The way Americans and Westerners in general have come to view health care has been shaped by the philosophy of the Rockefeller Foundation: “a pill for an ill.” In the debate between the “miasma theory”—that emphasizes preventing disease by fortifying the immune system through nutrition and by reducing exposures to environmental toxins and stresses—versus the “germ theory”—which blames disease on microscopic pathogens—we have unambiguously opted for the latter. We have signed up for an approach to disease that requires to identify the culpable germ and tailor a poison to kill it. The choice was not forced upon us. We have surrendered responsibility for our health to medical experts and insurance brokers.
As Dr. Claus Köhnlein and Torsten Engelbrecht observe in their book Virus Mania (2007) quoted by Kennedy: “The idea that certain microbes—above all fungi, bacteria, and viruses—are our great opponents in battle, causing certain diseases that must be fought with special chemical bombs, has buried itself deep into the collective conscience.” It is a warlike paradigm, perfectly suited for manufacturing consent on the way to dictatorship. As Kennedy wrote in his preface to Dr. Joseph Mercola and Ronni Cummins, The Truth About Covid-19 (2021), “demagogues must weaponize fear to justify their demands for blind obedience.”
Government technocrats, billionaire oligarchs, Big Pharma, Big Data, Big Media, the high-finance robber barons, and the military industrial intelligence apparatus love pandemics for the same reasons they love wars and terrorist attacks. Catastrophic crises create opportunities of convenience to increase both power and wealth.
Tales of the American Empire has described the Empire’s involvement in the illegal narcotics trade for two centuries. The end of the Vietnam war was a major blow to the opium trade as the American CIA lost access to opium producers in Laos. In addition, cocaine became very popular in the 1970s and reduced the demand for opium. Most cocaine was grown in Bolivia, Peru, and Columbia while transport and distribution were monopolized by two powerful Colombian cartels. The OSS (now CIA) had established political influence in Latin America during World War II and used this to take control of the profitable cocaine trade. The first step was called “Operation Watchtower” to establish a secret air corridor from southern Columbia to Panama.
“Colonel Edward Cutolo Published an Affidavit Exposing Operation Watchtower about the CIA’s Drug Trafficking”; HistoryHeist; March 11, 1980; https://historyheist.com/colonel-edwa…
Last week, I showed up to a nice party with a bottle of Absinthe. I like the stuff but I was also performing an experiment. How long before someone at the party asks if Absinthe causes hallucinations and was thereby banned? It didn’t take long. The question came up repeatedly. What is the ingredient in this that is highly suspect? Oh yes, it’s wormwood. What is wormwood anyway? Is it like heroin?
So it went. And so it has been for the better part of one-hundred years. There is absolutely no medical basis for this at all. Wormwood has been used as a medicinal herb since the ancient world, and there is a great deal of legend surrounding it, but there is zero evidence that it has any hallucinogenic properties at all.
Incredibly, some research suggests that wormwood is possibly an early treatment for Covid that inhibits the reproduction of SARS-CoV-2!
What about the belief that it was banned? It was indeed banned, over most of the Western world since the late 19th century. It was only relegalized for import into the United States in 2007. Now there are micro-distilleries all over the country that make the real thing, the exact drink about which Oscar Wilde wrote:
After the first glass of absinthe you see things as you wish they were. After the second you see them as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world. I mean disassociated. Take a top hat. You think you see it as it really is. But you don’t because you associate it with other things and ideas. If you had never heard of one before, and suddenly saw it alone, you’d be frightened, or you’d laugh. That is the effect absinthe has, and that is why it drives men mad. Three nights I sat up all night drinking absinthe, and thinking that I was singularly clear-headed and sane. The waiter came in and began watering the sawdust.The most wonderful flowers, tulips, lilies and roses, sprang up, and made a garden in the cafe. “Don’t you see them?” I said to him. “Mais non, monsieur, il n’y a rien.”
Kind of makes you want to go out and buy a bottle right now. Fortunately you can, because your right to drink it has been restored. The century-old moral panic is over. However, with that change, some of the cachet has been drained away from this yummy drink, which, as it turns out, is just a drink like any other: if you drink too much, you get drunk. Nothing special here.
The irony of the history here is that it was precisely the dire warnings, first issued in French medical journals in the mid 19th century, that created the vast demand for absinthe all over Europe and America. Dangerous drink? Bring it on. The British medical journals seemed to agree that absinthe was highly dangerous, citing this strange experiment from 1869:
The question whether absinthe exerts any special action other than that of alcohol in general, has been revived by some experiments by MM. Magnan and Bouchereau in France. These gentlemen placed a guinea-pig under a glass case with a saucer full of essence of wormwood (which is one of the flavouring matters of absinthe) by his side. Another guinea-pig was similarly shut up with a saucer full of pure alcohol. A cat and a rabbit were respectively enclosed along with a saucer each full of wormwood. The three animals which inhaled the vapours of wormwood experienced, first, excitement, and then epileptiform convulsions. The guinea-pig which merely breathed the fumes of alcohol, first became lively, then simply drunk. Upon these facts it is sought to establish the conclusion that the effects of excessive absinthe drinking are seriously different from those of ordinary alcoholic intemperance.
You can imagine, then, why that generation of artists, poets, playwrights, and literary gadabouts immediately seized on this drink and caused it to be the most fashionable in the land, spreading the plague of absinthism far and wide. Paintings, poetry, music were written in homage to the great muse of the green fairy. No doubt that people believed it, just as Dumbo thought it was the feather that made him fly.
At the height of the absinthe mania in France, 5:00pm became known as “the green hour.” The French were drinking 5 times as much absinthe as wine. The French producers were shipping all over the world. It became the world’s most notorious drink.
Here we have a classic case: science speaks of danger, daring people jump on the trend, moralists get outraged, government acts. That is precisely the situation that lasted for 100 years until it became rather obvious that absinthe is just a normal liquor.
The reason it gained the reputation for making people insane – Vincent Van Gogh, for example – is that highly fashionable people were drinking far too much. It was a classic fallacy: post hoc ergo propter hoc. A confusion of cause and effect. That was enough to effect a century of prohibition.
Here is another article from The Lancet in 1873 about the vast multitudes of “victims of absinthe.”
Originally the only important ingredient in its composition, besides alcohol, was the essential oil of absinthium, or wormwood; and though, doubtless, this added something to the mischievous effects of the liquor, it would be impossible to trace to it, or to the other comparatively trivial ingredients, the more serious of the special results which are now observed to occur in the victims of absinthe. An analysis recently made at the Conservatoire des Arts shows that the absinthe now contains a large proportion of antimony, a poison which cannot fail to add largely to the irritant effects necessarily produced on the alimentary canal and the liver by constant doses of a concentrated alcoholic liquid. As at present constituted, therefore, and especially when drunk in the disastrous excess now common in Paris, and taken frequently upon an empty stomach, absinthe forms a chronic poison of almost unequalled virulence, both as an irritant to the stomach and bowels, and also as a destroyer of the nervous system.
Science has spoken. What can you do but ban it? That didn’t happen until 1915 (the same few years in which every terrible trend in politics happened, from income taxation to central banking).
By then, the drink became associated with elaborate rituals that survive to this day, such as the slow-drip fountain that pours over a special steel spoon that holds a sugar cube. So far as I can tell, the ritual is entirely for show (if you want a bit of sweet in your drink, just add simple syrup) but it’s also enormously fun to reenact the faux-decadence of the absinthe generation. Even now, Amazon offers many absinthe fountains, most in the Victorian style of course.
The war on absinthe – this won’t surprise you – created the opposite of its intended effect. It raised the status of the drink and created a completely unwarranted hysteria in both directions: overconsumption followed by bans followed by speakeasy indulgence. Can you think of anything else, perhaps, that has fit that general model? Marijuana perhaps? Liquor in general? Tobacco? Politically incorrect speech?
Bans stemming from moral panics never seem to end, and people never seem to learn from this classic example. But in this case, the bans gradually came to an end. We’ve lived a full fifteen years of Absinthe freedom. And sure enough, with that freedom has come a bit of blase attitude toward it. Now it sits on the shelf in the liquor store as just another cocktail mixture, alongside the elderflower liqueurs and peach schnapps. It is said to be favored by people on the Keto diet because of its low-carb, low-sugar content.
And yet, to this day, you will still find people who drink it only with great apprehension and with some anticipation that they will soon not be themselves once it is tasted. Drink enough of it, and it will become true. The same is the case with gin, tequila, and rum.
There is surely another lesson here. Science has long served to back public panic, and that panic usually involves some fear of physical and moral corruption. We saw it with Absinthe, and then alcohol Prohibition. We saw it with AIDS. And we’ve lived through it with Covid and all the variants (Omicron!), as a naive public held closely to the words of Anthony Fauci, as the nation’s poet-prophet of a respiratory virus held court for two years, with changing instructions and never-ending insight about the need for all of us to upend our lives to control the invisible enemy.
It’s my habit, and maybe it should be yours, to celebrate every bit of freedom we gain back from the armies of authoritarians who wield the power of the state to improve our health and our lives. It took one hundred years, but they finally got their mitts off this one market. The research suggesting wormwood as a Covid treatment merits a visit from the green fairy as soon as possible.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown.
Within hours of the August 25, 2020, shootings in Kenosha, Wisconsin — not days, but hours — it was decreed as unquestioned fact in mainstream political and media circles that the shooter, Kyle Rittenhouse, was a “white supremacist.” Over the next fifteen months, up to and including his acquittal by a jury of his peers on all charges, this label was applied to him more times than one can count by corporate media outlets as though it were proven fact. Indeed, that Rittenhouse was a “white supremacist” was deemed so unquestionably true that questioning it was cast as evidence of one’s own racist inclinations (defending a white supremacist).
Yet all along, there was never any substantial evidence, let alone convincing proof, that it was true. This fact is, or at least should be, an extraordinary, even scandalous, event: a 17-year-old was widely vilified as being a white supremacist by a union of national media and major politicians despite there being no evidence to support the accusation. Yet it took his acquittal by a jury who heard all the evidence and testimony for parts of the corporate press to finally summon the courage to point out that what had been Gospel about Rittenhouse for the last fifteen months was, in fact, utterly baseless.
A Washington Post news article was published late last week that was designed to chide “both sides” for exploiting the Rittenhouse case for their own purposes while failing to adhere carefully to actual facts. Ever since the shootings in Kenosha, they lamented, “Kyle Rittenhouse has been a human canvas onto which the nation’s political divisions were mapped.” In attempting to set the record straight, the Post article contained this amazing admission:
As conservatives coalesced around the idea of Rittenhouse as a blameless defender of law and order, many on the left just as quickly cast him as the embodiment of the far-right threat. Despite a lack of evidence, hundreds of social media posts immediately pinned Rittenhouse with extremist labels: white supremacist, self-styled militia member, a “boogaloo boy” seeking violent revolution, or part of the misogynistic “incel” movement.
“On the left he’s become a symbol of white supremacy that isn’t being held accountable in the United States today,” said Becca Lewis, a researcher of far-right movements and a doctoral candidate at Stanford University. “You see him getting conflated with a lot of the police officers who’ve shot unarmed Black men and with Trump himself and all these other things. On both sides, he’s become a symbol much bigger than himself.”
Soon after the shootings, then-candidate Joe Biden told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that Rittenhouse was allegedly part of a militia group in Illinois. In the next sentence, Biden segued to criticism of Trump and hate groups: “Have you ever heard this president say one negative thing about white supremacists?
Valuable though this rather belated admission is, there were two grand ironies about this passage. The first is that The Post itself was one of the newspapers which published multiple articles and columns applying this evidence-free “white supremacist” label to Rittenhouse. Indeed, four days after this admission by The Post‘s newsroom, their opinion editors published an op-ed by Robert Jones that flatly asserted the very same accusation which The Post itself says is bereft of evidence: “Despite his boyish white frat boy appearance, there was plenty of evidence of Rittenhouse’s deeper white supremacist orientation.” In other words, Post editors approved publication of grave accusations which, just four days earlier, their own newsroom explicitly stated lacked evidence.
The second irony is that while the Post article lamented everyone else’s carelessness with the facts of this case, the publication itself — while purporting to fact-check the rest of the world — affirmed one of the most common falsehoods: namely, that Rittenhouse carried a gun across state lines. The article thus now carries this correction at the top: “An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Kyle Rittenhouse brought his AR-15 across state lines. He has testified that he picked up the weapon from a friend’s house in Wisconsin. This article has been corrected.”
It continues to be staggering how media outlets which purport to explain the Rittenhouse case get caught over and over spreading utter falsehoods about the most basic facts of the case, proving they did not watch the trial or learn much about what happened beyond what they heard in passing from like-minded liberals on Twitter. There is simply no way to have paid close attention to this case, let alone have watched the trial, and believe that he carried a gun across state lines, yet this false assertion made it past numerous Post reporters, editors and fact-checkers purporting to “correct the record” about this case. Yet again, we find that the same news outlets which love to accuse others of “disinformation” — and want the internet censored in the name of stopping it — frequently pontificate on topics about which they know nothing, without the slightest concern for whether or not it is true.
Those who continue to condemn Rittenhouse as a white supremacist — including the author of ThePost op-ed published four days after the paper concluded the accusation was baseless — typically point to his appearance at a bar in January, 2021, for a photo alongside members of the Proud Boys in which he was photographed making the “okay” sign. That once-common gesture, according to USA Today, “has become a symbol used by white supremacists.” Rittenhouse insists that the appearance was arranged by his right-wing attorneys Lin Wood and John Pierce — whom he quickly fired and accused of exploiting him for fund-raising purposes — and that he had no idea that the people with whom he was posing for a photo were Proud Boys members (“I thought they were just a bunch of, like, construction dudes based on how they looked”), nor had he ever heard that the “OK” sign was a symbol of “white power.”
Rittenhouse’s denial about this once-benign gesture seems shocking to people who spend all their days drowning in highly politicized Twitter discourse — where such a claim is treated as common knowledge — but is completely believable for the vast majority of Americans who do not. In fact, the whole point of the adolescent 4chan hoax was to convert one of the most common and benign gestures into a symbol of white power so that anyone making it would be suspect. As The New York Timesrecounted, the gesture has long been “used for several purposes in sign languages, and in yoga as a symbol to demonstrate inner perfection. It figures in an innocuous made-you-look game. Most of all, it has been commonly used for generations to signal ‘O.K.,’ or all is well.”
But whatever one chooses to believe about that episode is irrelevant to whether these immediate declarations of Rittenhouse’s “white supremacy” were valid. That bar appearance took place in January, 2021 — five months after the Kenosha shootings. Yet Rittenhouse was instantly declared to be a “white supremacist” — and by “instantly,” I mean: within hours of the shooting. “A 17 year old white supremacist domestic terrorist drove across state lines, armed with an AR 15,” was how Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) described Rittenhouse the next dayin a mega-viral tweet; her tweet consecrated not only this “white supremacist” accusation which persisted for months, but also affirmed the falsehood that he crossed state lines with an AR-15. It does not require an advanced degree in physics to understand that his posing for a photo in that bar with Proud Boys members, flashing the OK sign, five months later in January, 2021, could not serve as a rational evidentiary basis for Rep. Pressley’s accusation the day after the shootings that he was a “white supremacist,” nor could it serve as the justification for five consecutive months of national media outlets accusing him of the same. Unless his accusers had the power to see into the future, they branded him a white supremacist with no basis whatsoever — or, as The Post put it this week, “despite a lack of evidence.”
A 17 year old white supremacist domestic terrorist drove across state lines, armed with an AR 15.
He shot and killed 2 people who had assembled to affirm the value, dignity, and worth of Black lives.
The only other “evidence” ever cited to support the rather grave accusation that this 17-year-old is a “white supremacist” were social media postings of his in which he expressed positive sentiments toward the police and then-President Trump, including with the phrase “Blue Lives Matter.” That was all that existed — the entirety of the case — that led the most powerful media outlets and politicians to stamp on this adolescent’s forehead the gravest accusation one can face in American culture. This is really the heart of the matter: this episode vividly demonstrates how cheapened and emptied and cynically wielded this “white supremacist” slogan has become. The oft-implicit but sometimes-explicit premise in liberal discourse is that everyone who deviates in any way from liberal dogmais a white supremacist by definition.
Within this rubric, perhaps the most decisive “evidence” that one is a white supremacist is that one supports the Republican Party and former President Trump — i.e., that half of the voting electorate in the U.S. at least are white supremacists. A subsidiary assumption is that anyone who views the police as a necessary, positive force in U.S. society is inherently guilty of racism (it is fine to revere federal policing agencies such as the FBI and other federal security forces such as the CIA, as most Democrats do; the hallmark of a white supremacist is someone who believes that the local police — the ones who show up when citizens call 911 — is a generally positive rather than negative force in society).
An illustration of how casually and recklessly this accusation is tossed around occurred last year, shortly after the George Floyd killing, when my long-time friend and colleague, Intercept journalist Lee Fang, was widely vilified as a racist and white supremacist, first by his own Intercept colleague, journalist Akela Lacy, and then — in one of the most stunningly mindless acts of herd behavior — by literally hundreds if not thousands of members of the national press, including many who barely knew who Lee was but nonetheless were content to echo the accusation (that Lee is himself not white is, of course, not an impediment, not even a speed bump, on the road to castigating him as a modern-day KKK adherent). As Matt Taibbi wrote in disgust about this shameful media episode:
Writing in New York Magazine, Jonathan Chait documented that “Lacy called him racist in a pair of tweets, the first of which alone received more than 30,000 likes and 5,000 retweets.”
What was the evidence justifying Lee Fang’s conviction by mob justice of these charges? He (like Rittenhouse) has expressed the view that police, despite needing reforms, are largely a positive presence in protecting innocent people from violent crime; he suggested that resorting to violence harms rather than helps social justice causes; and he published a video interview he conducted with a young BLM supporter, who complained that many liberals only care when white police officers kill black people but not when black people in his neighborhood are killed by anyone who is not white.
Now-deleted tweets from Intercept reporter Akela Lacy, accusing her Intercept colleague Lee Fang of being a racist, June 3, 2020.
That such banal and commonly held views are woefully insufficient to justify the reputation-destroying accusation that someone is a white supremacist should be too self-evident to require any explanation. But in case such an explanation is required, consider that polls continually and reliably show that the pro-police sentiments of the type that caused Rittenhouse, Fang, and so many others to be vilified by liberal elites as “white supremacists” are held not only by a majority of Americans, but by a majority of black and brown Americans, the very people on whose behalf these elite accusers purport to speak.
For years, polling data has shown that the communities which want at least the same level of policing if not more are communities composed primarily of Black, Brown and poor people. It is not hard to understand why. If the police are defunded or radically reduced, rich people will simply hire private security (even more than they already employ for their homes, neighborhoods and persons), and any resulting crime increases will fall most heavily on poorer communities. Thus, polling data reliably shows that it is these communities that want either the same level of policing or more — the exact view which, if you express, will result in guardians of elite liberal discourse declaring you to be a “white supremacist.” Indeed — according to one Gallup poll taken in the wake of the George Floyd killing, when anti-police sentiment was at its peak — the groups that most want a greater police presence in their communities are Black and Latino citizens:
In the wake of anger over the Floyd and Jacob Blake cases, several large liberal cities succeeded in placing referendums on the ballot for this year that proposed major defunding or restructuring of local police. They failed in almost all cases, including ones with large Black populations such as Minneapolis, where Floyd died, precisely because non-white voters rejected it. In other words, expressing the same views about policing that large numbers of Black residents hold somehow subjects one to accusations of “white supremacy” in the dominant elite liberal discourse.
What all of this demonstrates is that insult terms like “white supremacist” and “racist” and “white nationalist” have lost any fixed meaning. They are instead being trivialized and degraded into little more than discourse toys to be tossed around for fun and reputation-destruction by liberals, who believe they have ascended to a place of such elevated racial enlightenment that they are now the sole and exclusive owners of these terms and thus free to hurl them in whatever manner they please. It is not an overstatement to observe that in elite liberal discourse, there are literally no evidentiary requirements that must be fulfilled before one is free to malign political adversaries with those accusatory terms. That is why editors at The Washington Post published an op-ed proclaiming Rittenhouse was plagued by “deeper white supremacist orientation” just four days after its news division explicitly concluded that such an accusation “lacks evidence” — because it it permissible to accuse people of racism and white supremacy without any evidence needed.
It is inherently disturbing and destructive any time a person is publicly branded as something for which there is no evidence. That is intrinsically something we should collectively abhor. But this growing trend in liberal discourse is not just ethically repellent but dangerous. By so flagrantly cheapening and exploiting the “white supremacist” accusation from what it should be (a potent weapon deployed to stigmatize and ostracize actual racists) into something far more tawdry (a plaything used by Democrats to demean and destroy their enemies whenever the mood strikes), its cynical abusers are draining the term of all of its vibrancy, potency and force, so that when it is needed, for actual racists, people will have tuned it out, knowing that is used deceitfully, recklessly and for cheap entertainment.
A similar dynamic emerged with accusations of anti-semitism and the weaponization of it to demonize criticisms of Israel. It is, of course, true that some criticisms of the Israeli government are partially grounded or even largely motivated by anti-semitism — just as it is true that some championing of the local police or support for Trump grows out of racist sentiments. But the converse is just as true: one can vehemently criticize the actions of the Israeli government the same as any other government without being driven by an iota of anti-semitism (indeed, many of the most vocal critics of Israel are proudly Jewish), in exactly the same way as one can be highly supportive of the local police or Donald Trump without an iota of racism (a proposition that should need no proof, but is nonetheless highlighted by the uncomfortable fact that growing numbers of non-whites support both Trump and the police). But the cynical, manipulative weaponization of anti-semitism accusations to smear all critics of Israel has rendered the accusation far weaker and more easily dismissible than it once was — exactly as is now happening to the accusatory terms “white supremacist” and “white nationalist” and “racist,” which are being increasingly understood, validly so, not as a grave and sincere condemnation but a cheap tactic to be applied recklessly, for the tawdry entertainment one derives from public rituals of reputation-destruction.
BBC, Nov. 22, 2020
Ever since his acquittal, Rittenhouse has made a series of public statements directly at odds with the dark, hateful image constructed of him by the national press over the last sixteen months, while he was forced to remain silent due to the charges he faced. He has professed support for the Black Lives Matter movement, argued that the U.S. is plagued by structural racism, and suggested that he would have suffered a worse fate if he had been Black. The same people who are smugly certain that his entire character and soul was permanently captured by that fleeting moment in a bar when he was seventeen and flashed an “okay” symbol — and who are certain that his denials that he knew what it meant or with whom he was posing are false — have, of course, scoffed at these recent statements of his as self-serving and insincere, even though they offer far greater insight into Rittenhouse’s actual views on questions of race than anything thus far presented.
But that is the point. The political and media faction that casually and recklessly brands people as “white supremacists” the way normal people utter “excuse me” while navigating a large crowd have no interest at all in whether the accusation is true. They are devoted to reducing everyone whose political ideology diverges from their own to their worst possible moment — no matter how long ago it happened or how unrepresentative of their lives it is — in order to derive the most ungenerous and destructive meaning from it. It is a movement that is at once driven by rigorous rules resulting in righteous decrees of sin and sweeping denunciations, yet completely bereft of the possibility of grace or redemption.
And its most cherished weapon is accusing anyone who they decide is an enemy or even just an adversary of being a white supremacist, a white nationalist, a racist — to the point where these terms now sound more like reflexively recited daily prayer slogans than anything one needs to take seriously or which has the possibility to engage on the merits. For fifteen months, it was gospel in political and media circles that Kyle Rittenhouse was a “white supremacist terrorist” only for The Washington Post to suddenly announce that this claim persisted “despite a lack of evidence.”
But that lack of evidence really does not matter, which is why that announcement by The Post received so little notice. Under the rules of this rotted discourse, evidence is not a requirement to affirm this accusation. All that is needed is an intuition, a tingly sensation, and — above all else — the realization that hurling the accusation will yield some personal or political advantage. Like all cynical weapons, it worked for awhile, but is rapidly running out of efficacy as its manipulative usage becomes more and more visible. The term is still needed as a tool to fight actual racism, but those who most vocally and flamboyantly proclaim themselves solemnly devoted to that cause have rendered that tool virtually useless, thanks to their self-interested misuse and abuse of it.
In a sense, I can’t believe I’m writing this article. From a scientific perspective, this issue has been firmly settled. The answer is very clearly “NO!”. And yet, if I google “is saturated fat unhealthy?”, then seven of the top nine results proclaim with great certainty that “yes, it is”.
Here’s what the NHS says to people living in the UK: “Too much saturated fat can increase the amount of cholesterol in the blood, which increases your risk of developing heart disease.”
And here’s what the US government tells its citizens: “Eating too many foods high in saturated fats can be bad for your health. By replacing saturated fats with unsaturated fats, you may lower your risk of getting heart disease.”
To be fair, the US government doesn’t sound quite as confident as the UK health authorities. There’s a lot of “can” and “may” in that sentence. Which is actually a bit funny, when you consider that it was the US government that got the whole world to cut down on saturated fats in the first place.
Interestingly, none of the self-appointed fact checking organizations that have sprung up in recent years has yet tried to pull the NHS or the US government off the internet for spreading misinformation.
The claim that saturated fat is unhealthy originated with physiologist Ancel Keys in the mid-part of the twentieth century. He initially believed that cholesterol in the diet was what caused heart disease. Unfortunately, he soon noticed that feeding people cholesterol had no effect whatsoever on the cholesterol levels in their blood streams. So he was forced to abandon that line of thinking. On doing some further research, he noticed that increasing the proportion of saturated fat in the diet did however appear to increase cholesterol somewhat.
This led him to develop the diet-heart hypothesis, which basically says the following: Saturated fat in the diet leads to increased cholesterol levels in the blood stream, which causes heart disease. So it’s a two part hypothesis. As I’ve already discussed before on this blog, the second part of the hypothesis has been disproven – cholesterol in the blood stream does not cause heart disease.
But what about the first part? Even if not through the intermediate action on cholesterol, saturated fat might still somehow be unhealthy. Ancel Keys claimed to have evidence that high levels of saturated fat in the diet correlates with heart disease. This evidence came from a very shaky observational data set called the “Seven Countries Study”, in which Keys presented results from relatively small, hand-picked cohorts in seven countries, which appeared to show a correlation between saturated fat intake and heart disease (and ignored data from a bunch of other countries where no such correlation could be seen).
But it’s now more than forty years after the Seven Countries Study was published, and there is thus no reason to rely any longer on what Ancel Keys claimed to have found. We can instead look at the wealth of data that’s been produced since then.
Let’s start with what the observational data show. A meta-analysis was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2010 that sought to find if the prospective cohort studies that had been carried out up to that point supported the notion that saturated fat causes heart disease.
A meta-analysis is a pooled analysis, where you take a bunch of studies and add their results together, to get a higher degree of statistical accuracy. A prospective cohort study is a study where you find two groups of people that vary in some significant respect, for example in terms of how much saturated fat they eat, and then follow them over time to see what happens – it’s generally considered to be the highest quality type of observational study, although it doesn’t reach the level of quality of a randomized controlled trial, because it isn’t able to get rid of confounding effects to the level that a randomized trial can (if you need to brush up on scientific method in the health sciences, read this).
Why are we even bothering to look at observational studies at all then, instead of just jumping straight to randomized trials? Because observational studies are easier to do, so there are more of them, and they can gather a lot more data. While a randomized trial with a few thousand people is huge, an observational study with a few thousand people is tiny. Additionally, as mentioned, the initial recommendation to eat less saturated fat was based on a single observational study, and quite a small one at that (the Seven Countries Study included less than 13,000 people – “Seven Countries” makes it sound much bigger than it was). So it’s interesting to see if the vast mass of observational data that we have today bears out the initial findings of the Seven Countries Study.
The authors of the meta-analysis identified 21 prospective cohort studies, with a total of almost 400,000 participants. That’s a big data set. The studies followed participants for between five and 23 years.
So, what did they find?
The difference in risk of cardiovascular disease between the groups with a high intake of saturated fat and those with a low intake of saturated fat was exactly zero. There was no difference at all. If you look more closely at the different kinds of cardiovascular disease, then you see a slightly increased risk of coronary heart disease in the saturated fat group (7% increased relative risk), but a slightly decreased risk of stroke (21% decreased relative risk). Neither of those differences were statistically significant, however. And in observational data sets, with all the risks of confounding they face, anything less than a halving or doubling of risk should be ignored, since small differences between groups are almost certainly caused by confounding factors.
Let’s move on and look at what the randomized controlled trials show. A Cochrane review was published in 2020 that looked at the ability of a diet low in saturated fat to prevent heart disease and death. 15 trials were identified, with a total of roughly 55,000 participants, and included in Cochrane’s meta-analysis. In most of the trials, the intervention consisted of dietary advice, although a few also provided polyunsaturated fats (so-called “healthy oils”), and told people to replace their lard and butter with them, and one provided participants with complete meal replacements. The trials lasted from two to eight years, with an average duration of five years.
Eleven of the 15 trials measured intake of saturated fats at multiple time points, and could thus confirm that intake of saturated fats decreased in the intervention group as compared with the control group. This is good to know, since if that wasn’t the case then a lack of benefit in terms of heart disease risk could simply be due to not managing to get people to change their diets sufficiently. So we know for certain that saturated fat intake decreased in at least eleven of the fifteen trials. Did this have any meaningful impact on people’s risk of having a heart attack or dying?
No, is the short answer. In the low saturated fat group, 6.4% of participants died, while in the high saturated fat group, 6.2% of participants died. So 0.2% more people died in the low saturated fat group than in the high saturated fat group. As you would expect for such a small difference, it isn’t statistically significant.
After the dark magic known as Mantel-Haenszel weighting (a statistical technique used in meta-analysis in which studies with more precise results are given greater weight), the authors reach the conclusion that it’s actually the other way around, that marginally less people should have died in the low saturated fat group, but the difference still isn’t statistically significant.
So it’s not possible to conclude that a diet high in saturated fat increases overall mortality. What about if we look specifically at heart attacks?
Most heart attacks are not fatal, so it’s possible that an intervention could lower heart attacks without meaningfully impacting overall risk of death. In the low saturated fat group, 3.3% of participants had a heart attack. In the high saturated fat group, 3.1% of participants had a heart attack. So the people in the high saturated fat group actually experienced fewer heart attacks than the people in the low saturated fat group.
Again, after statistical weighting, it appears that there should have been slightly fewer heart attacks in the group with the low saturated fat diet (rougly 0.3% less). Just as before, however, the difference isn’t statistically significant. What that means is that the small difference that was found is within the margin of error.
To conclude, the sum of all the observational and randomized trial evidence now available to us does not allow us to conclude that there is any increased risk of cardiovascular disease or death with increased intake of saturated fat. Considering that the data sets that these conclusions are based on are massive, we can be certain that even if there were a benefit, it would be so tiny as to not be worth bothering with. It is therefore shocking that public health agencies still tell their populations to cut down on saturated fats, instead of focusing on the things that have actually been shown to make a difference.
I’m a voracious reader of Covid books but nothing could have prepared me for Scott Atlas’s A Plague Upon Our House, a full and mind-blowing account of the famed scientist’s personal experience with the Covid era and a luridly detailed account of his time at the White House. The book is hot fire, from page one to the last, and will permanently affect your view of not only this pandemic and the policy response but also the workings of public health in general.
Atlas’s book has exposed a scandal for the ages. It is enormously valuable because it fully blows up what seems to be an emerging fake story involving a supposedly Covid-denying president who did nothing vs. heroic scientists in the White House who urged compulsory mitigating measures consistent with prevailing scientific opinion. Not one word of that is true. Atlas’s book, I hope, makes it impossible to tell such tall tales without embarrassment.
Anyone who tells you this fictional story (including Deborah Birx) deserves to have this highly credible treatise tossed in his direction. The book is about the war between real science (and genuine public health), with Atlas as the voice for reason both before and during his time in the White House, vs. the enactment of brutal policies that never stood any chance of controlling the virus while causing tremendous damage to the people, to human liberty, to children in particular, but also to billions of people around the world.
For the reader, the author is our proxy, a reasonable and blunt man trapped in a world of lies, duplicity, backstabbing, opportunism, and fake science. He did his best but could not prevail against a powerful machine that cares nothing for facts, much less outcomes.
If you have heretofore believed that science drives pandemic public policy, this book will shock you. Atlas’s recounting of the unbearably poor thinking on the part of government-based “infectious disease experts” will make your jaw drop (thinking, for example, of Birx’s off-the-cuff theorizing about the relationship between masking and controlling case spreads).
Throughout the book, Atlas points to the enormous cost of the machinery of lockdowns, the preferred method of Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx: missed cancer screenings, missed surgeries, nearly two years of educational losses, bankrupted small business, depression and drug overdoses, overall citizen demoralization, violations of religious freedom, all while public health massively neglected the actual at-risk population in long-term care facilities. Essentially, they were willing to dismantle everything we called civilization in the name of bludgeoning one pathogen without regard to the consequences.
The fake science of population-wide “models” drove policy instead of following the known information about risk profiles. “The one unusual feature of this virus was the fact that children had an extraordinarily low risk,” writes Atlas. “Yet this positive and reassuring news was never emphasized. Instead, with total disregard of the evidence of selective risk consistent with other respiratory viruses, public health officials recommended draconian isolation of everyone.”
“Restrictions on liberty were also destructive by inflaming class distinctions with their differential impact,” he writes, “exposing essential workers, sacrificing low-income families and kids, destroying single-parent homes, and eviscerating small businesses, while at the same time large companies were bailed out, elites worked from home with barely an interruption, and the ultra-rich got richer, leveraging their bully pulpit to demonize and cancel those who challenged their preferred policy options.”
In the midst of continued chaos, in August 2020, Atlas was called by Trump to help, not as a political appointee, not as a PR man for Trump, not as a DC fixer but as the only person who in nearly a year of unfolding catastrophe had a health-policy focus. He made it clear from the outset that he would only tell what he believed to be true; Trump agreed that this was precisely what he wanted and needed. Trump got an earful and gradually came around to a more rational view than that which caused him to wreck the American economy and society with his own hands and against his own instincts.
In Task Force meetings, Atlas was the only person who showed up with studies and on-the-ground information as opposed to mere charts of infections easily downloadable from popular websites. “A bigger surprise was that Fauci did not present scientific research on the pandemic to the group that I witnessed. Likewise, I never heard him speak about his own critical analysis of any published research studies. This was stunning to me. Aside from intermittent status updates about clinical trial enrollments, Fauci served the Task Force by offering an occasional comment or update on vaccine trial participant totals, mostly when the VP would turn to him and ask.”
When Atlas spoke up, it was almost always to contradict Fauci/Birx but he received no backing during meetings, only to have many people in attendance later congratulate him for speaking out. Still, he did have a convert in Trump himself, but by then it was too late: not even Trump could prevail against the wicked machine he had permissioned into operation.
It’s a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington story but applied to matters of public health. From the outset of this disease panic, policy came to be dictated by two government bureaucrats (Fauci and Birx) who, for some reason, were confident in their control over media, bureaucracies, and White House messaging, despite every attempt by the president, Atlas, and a few others to get them to pay attention to the actual science about which Fauci/Birx knew and care little.
Fortunately, we now have this book to set the record straight. It gives every reader an inside look at the workings of a system that wrecked our lives. If the book finally declines to offer an explanation for the hell that was visited upon us – every day we still ask the question why? – it does provide an accounting of the who, when, where, and what. Tragically, too many scientists, media figures, and intellectuals in general went along. Atlas’s account shows exactly what they signed up to defend, and it’s not pretty.
The cliche that kept coming to mind as I read is “breath of fresh air.” That metaphor describes the book perfectly: blessed relief from relentless propaganda. Imagine yourself trapped in an elevator with stultifying air in a building that is on fire and the smoke gradually seeps in from above. Someone is in there with you and he keeps assuring you that everything is fine, when it is obviously not.
That’s a pretty good description of how I felt from March 12, 2020 and onward. That was the day that President Trump spoke to the nation and announced that there would be no more travel from Europe. The tone in his voice was spooky. It was obvious that more was coming. He had clearly fallen sway to extremely bad advice, perhaps he was willing to push lockdowns as a plan to deal with a respiratory virus that was already widespread in the US from perhaps 5 to 6 months earlier.
It was the day that the darkness descended. A day later (March 13), the HHS distributed its lockdown plans for the nation. That weekend, Trump met for many hours with Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, son-in-law Jared Kushner, and only a few others. He came around to the idea of shutting down the American economy for two weeks. He presided over the calamitous March 16, 2020, press conference, at which Trump promised to beat the virus through general lockdowns.
Of course he had no power to do that directly but he could urge it to happen, all under the completely delusional promise that doing so would solve the virus problem. Two weeks later, the same gang persuaded him to extend the lockdowns.
Trump went along with the advice because it was the only advice he was fed at the time. They made it appear that the only choice that Trump had – if he wanted to beat the virus – was to wage war on his own policies that were pushing for a stronger, healthier economy. After surviving two impeachment attempts, and beating back years of hate from a nearly united media afflicted by severe derangement syndrome, Trump was finally hornswoggled.
Atlas writes: “On this highly important criterion of presidential management—taking responsibility to fully take charge of policy coming from the White House—I believe the president made a massive error in judgment. Against his own gut feeling, he delegated authority to medical bureaucrats, and then he failed to correct that mistake.”
The truly tragic fact that both Republicans and Democrats do not want spoken about is that this whole calamity did indeed begin with Trump’s decision. On this point, Atlas writes:
Yes, the president initially had gone along with the lockdowns proposed by Fauci and Birx, the “fifteen days to slow the spread,” even though he had serious misgivings. But I still believe the reason that he kept repeating his one question—“Do you agree with the initial shutdown?”—whenever he asked questions about the pandemic was precisely because he still had misgivings about it.
Large parts of the narrative are devoted to explaining precisely how and to what extent Trump had been betrayed. “They had convinced him to do exactly the opposite of what he would naturally do in any other circumstance,” Atlas writes, that is
“to disregard his own common sense and allow grossly incorrect policy advice to prevail… This president, widely known for his signature “You’re fired!” declaration, was misled by his closest political intimates. All for fear of what was inevitable anyway—skewering from an already hostile media. And on top of that tragic misjudgment, the election was lost anyway. So much for political strategists.”
There are so many valuable parts to the story that I cannot possibly recount them all. The language is brilliant, e.g. he calls the media “the most despicable group of unprincipled liars one could ever imagine.” He proves that assertion in page after page of shocking lies and distortions, mostly driven by political goals.
I was particularly struck by his chapter on testing, mainly because that whole racket mystified me throughout. From the outset, the CDC bungled the testing part of the pandemic story, attempting to keep the tests and process centralized in DC at the very time when the entire nation was in panic. Once that was finally fixed, months too late, mass and indiscriminate PCR testing became the desiderata of success within the White House. The problem was not just with the testing method:
“Fragments of dead virus hang around and can generate a positive test for many weeks or months, even though one is not generally contagious after two weeks. Moreover, PCR is extremely sensitive. It detects minute quantities of virus that do not transmit infection… Even the New York Times wrote in August that 90 percent or more of positive PCR tests falsely implied that someone was contagious. Sadly, during my entire time at the White House, this crucial fact would never even be addressed by anyone other than me at the Task Force meetings, let alone because for any public recommendation, even after I distributed data proving this critical point.”
The other problem is the wide assumption that more testing (however inaccurate) of whomever, whenever was always better. This model of maximizing tests seemed like a leftover from the HIV/AIDS crisis in which tracing was mostly useless in practice but at least made some sense in theory. For a widespread and mostly wild respiratory disease transmitted the way a cold virus is transmitted, this method was hopeless from the beginning. It became nothing but make work for tracing bureaucrats and testing enterprises that in the end only provided a fake metric of “success” that served to spread public panic.
Early on, Fauci had clearly said that there was no reason to get tested if you had no symptoms. Later, that common-sense outlook was thrown out the window and replaced with an agenda to test as many people as possible regardless of risk and regardless of symptoms. The resulting data enabled Fauci/Birx to keep everyone in a constant state of alarm. More test positivity to them implied only one thing: more lockdowns. Businesses needed to close harder, we all needed to mask harder, schools needed to stay closed longer, and travel needed to be ever more restricted. That assumption became so entrenched that not even the president’s own wishes (which had changed from Spring to Summer) made any difference.
Atlas’s first job, then, was to challenge this whole indiscriminate testing agenda. To his mind, testing needed to be about more than accumulating endless amounts of data, much of it without meaning; instead, testing should be directed toward a public-health goal. The people who needed tests were the vulnerable populations, particularly those in nursing homes, with the goal of saving lives among those who were actually threatened with severe outcomes. This push to test, contact trace, and quarantine anyone and everyone regardless of known risk was a huge distraction, and also caused huge disruption in schooling and enterprise.
To fix it meant changing the CDC guidelines. Atlas’s story of attempting to do that is eye-opening. He wrestled with every manner of bureaucrat and managed to get new guidelines written, only to find that they had been mysteriously reverted to the old guidelines one week later. He caught the “error” and insisted that his version prevail. Once they were issued by the CDC, the national press was all over it, with the story that the White House was pressuring the scientists at the CDC in terrible ways. After a week-long media storm, the guidelines changed yet again. All of Atlas’s work was made null.
Talk about discouraging! It was also Atlas’s first full experience in dealing with deep-state machinations. It was this way throughout the lockdown period, a machinery in place to implement, encourage, and enforce endless restrictions but no one person in particular was there to take responsibility for the policies or the outcomes, even as the ostensible head of state (Trump) was on record both publicly and privately opposing the policies that no one could seem to stop.
As an example of this, Atlas tells the story of bringing some massively important scientists to the White House to speak with Trump: Martin Kulldorff, Jay Bhattacharya, Joseph Ladapo, and Cody Meissner. People around the president thought the idea was great. But somehow the meeting kept being delayed. Again and again. When it finally went ahead, the schedulers only allowed for 5 minutes. But once they met with Trump himself, the president had other ideas and prolonged the meeting for an hour and a half, asking the scientists all kinds of questions about viruses, policy, the initial lockdowns, the risks to individuals, and so on.
The president was so impressed with their views and knowledge – what a dramatic change that must have been for him – that he invited filming to be done plus pictures to be taken. He wanted to make it a big public splash. It never happened. Literally. White House press somehow got the message that this meeting never happened. The first anyone will have known about it other than White House employees is from Atlas’s book.
Two months later, Atlas was instrumental in bringing in not only two of those scientists but also the famed Sunetra Gupta of Oxford. They met with the HHS secretary but this meeting too was buried in the press. No dissent was allowed. The bureaucrats were in charge, regardless of the wishes of the president.
Another case in point was during Trump’s own bout with Covid in early October. Atlas was nearly sure that he would be fine but he was forbidden from talking to the press. The entire White House communications office was frozen for four days, with no one speaking to the press. This was against Trump’s own wishes. This left the media to speculate that he was on his deathbed, so when he came back to the White House and announced that Covid is not to be feared, it was a shock to the nation. From my own point of view, this was truly Trump’s finest moment. To learn of the internal machinations happening behind the scenes is pretty shocking.
I can’t possibly cover the wealth of material in this book, and I expect this brief review to be one of several that I write. I do have a few disagreements. First, I think the author is too uncritical toward Operation Warp Speed and doesn’t really address how the vaccines were wildly oversold, to say nothing of growing concerns about safety, which were not addressed in the trials. Second, he seems to approve of Trump’s March 12th travel restrictions, which struck me as brutal and pointless, and the real beginning of the unfolding disaster. Third, Atlas inadvertently seems to perpetuate the distortion that Trump recommended ingesting bleach during a press conference. I know that this was all over the papers. But I’ve read the transcript of that press conference several times and find nothing like this. Trump actually makes clear that he was speaking about cleaning surfaces. This might be yet another case of outright media lies.
All that aside, this book reveals everything about the insanity of 2020 and 2021, years in which good sense, good science, historical precedent, human rights, and concerns for human liberty were all thrown into the trash, not just in the US but all over the world.
Atlas summarizes the big picture:
“in considering all the surprising events that unfolded in this past year, two in particular stand out. I have been shocked at the enormous power of government officials to unilaterally decree a sudden and severe shutdown of society—to simply close businesses and schools by edict, restrict personal movements, mandate behavior, regulate interactions with our family members, and eliminate our most basic freedoms, without any defined end and with little accountability.”
Atlas is correct that “the management of this pandemic has left a stain on many of America’s once noble institutions, including our elite universities, research institutes and journals, and public health agencies. Earning it back will not be easy.”
Internationally, we have Sweden as an example of a country that (mostly) kept its sanity. Domestically, we have South Dakota as an example of a place that stayed open, preserving freedom throughout. And thanks in large part to Atlas’s behind-the-scenes work, we have the example of Florida, whose governor did care about the actual science and ended up preserving freedom in the state even as the elderly population there experienced the greatest possible protection from the virus.
We all owe Atlas an enormous debt of gratitude, for it was he who persuaded the Florida governor to choose the path of focussed protection as advocated by the Great Barrington Declaration, which Atlas cites as the “single document that will go down as one of the most important publications in the pandemic, as it lent undeniable credibility to focused protection and provided courage to thousands of additional medical scientists and public health leaders to come forward.”
Atlas experienced the worst of the slings, arrows, and worse. The media and the bureaucrats tried to shut him up, shut him down, and body bag him professionally and personally. Cancelled, meaning removed from the roster of functional, dignified human beings. Even colleagues at Stanford University joined in the lynch mob, much to their disgrace. And yet this book is that of a man who has prevailed against them.
In that sense, it is easily the most crucial first-person account we have so far. It is gripping, revealing, devastating for the lockdowners and their vaccine-mandating successors, and a true classic that will stand the test of time. It’s simply not possible to write the history of this disaster without a close examination of this erudite first-hand account.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown.
EARLIER this month Dr Byram Bridle, a Canadian viral immunologist whose faculty at the University of Ontario has disowned him for his repeated assertion that Covid-19 vaccines are not safe, gave a remarkable off-the-cuff interview to a reporter. Bridle starts by explaining the reasons why heavily vaccinated countries are experiencing high case rates, why adverse reactions are not being reported or diagnosed and discusses the overwhelming evidence for ivermectin as an ant-viral treatment for Covid where studies have been conducted correctly.
DR BYRAM BRIDLE: A recent study came out looking at 68 different countries and they plotted on a graph the case rate for Covid-19 and the vaccination rate in the country. And the more vaccinated the country is, the more problems they’re having with Covid-19. So these people have the vaccine. Remember all the antibody titers they’re showing, that’s in the blood, but these people, on average, are quite poorly protected in their upper airways. And it’s not the virus that’s deep down in the alveoli that gets transmitted to other people because of the dead airspace when we exhale. It’s the viral particles that are in the upper airways. So that’s why the vaccinated can spread this just as efficiently as somebody who’s completely unprotected. And so these vaccines on that basis, because they don’t come close to conferring sterilising immunity, they don’t properly protect the upper respiratory tract, they only confer about four and a half months of immunity, it’s absolutely 100 per cent impossible to achieve the goal of herd immunity with these vaccines. 100 per cent impossible.
What I’ve seen way too much of – and it does cause me very serious concern – is we’re seeing people who had cancers that were in remission or that were being well-controlled, and their cancers have gone completely out of control after getting the vaccine. And what we do know with the vaccine is the vaccine causes at least a temporary drop in T-cell numbers and those T-cells are part of our immune system, and they’re the critical weapons that our immune system has to fight off cancerous cells. So there’s a potential mechanism there. And all I can say is I’ve seen . . . I’ve had people contact me with way too many of these reports for me to feel comfortable. I do feel that that’s probably, I would say, my newest major safety concern. And it’s also the one that is going to be by far the most underreported on any adverse event database. Because if somebody’s had a cancer before the vaccine, there’s no way public health officials will ever link it to the vaccine. But what we’re seeing is oncology teams that had pushed the cancers into remission or keeping them well-controlled can no longer control them after the vaccine.
So we know in Canada it’s very upsetting, because in Canada we have a system that will never, never detect problems with these vaccines – that’s why we’ve always had to rely on other countries. Like with the AstraZeneca vaccine, we told Canadians that the AstraZeneca vaccine was 100 per cent safe, despite the fact that 12 European countries had paused the programme to look for potential links to the blood clotting, potentially fatal blood clotting. And we were told as Canadians that we didn’t have to worry because ours was from a . . . they announced that the problem was associated with a single batch from a single production facility in Europe and ours was coming from India and therefore it didn’t apply to us. The European Medicines Agency will tell you that was never the case. And of course, then eventually, after there were Canadians that did die and many that did have to be treated for the blood clots, then we finally admitted that it was a problem.
And that’s how our system . . . our system is never going to work, because this is the thing. First of all, we’re not informing people when they get the vaccine that they’re to report any unusual medical condition up to eight weeks after receiving a dose of the vaccine. And then the attending physician is required to, by law, to report anything unusual. Most physicians are not. And now some of them are . . . many don’t, because they don’t want to contradict the current narrative. And the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario has turned out to be incredibly tyrannical and are crushing many physicians and threatening many who don’t go with this narrow public health narrative. Many also can’t get their submissions done because they’re onerous. So, for example, British Columbia can take up to 40 minutes to submit one of these reports, and you can imagine if there’s an Emergency Room physician who sees five people in a shift that come in with problems and have recently been vaccinated, they can’t afford to spend hours on that shift, reporting it, right?
So there’s many reasons why people aren’t reporting to the physicians, and there are many reasons why the physicians aren’t reporting to the local Medical Officer of Health. And that’s the next step is, if a physician submits it, it doesn’t necessarily go into our database, it goes to the local Medical Officer of Health. This is the thing: the physicians are not supposed to make a determination of whether they think the medical condition that’s occurred after the vaccine is or is not related to the vaccine. They’re not supposed to make that determination. The local Medical Officers of Health are. And as you can imagine, with the huge bias that exists there, the majority of them, we’re seeing unusually high percentages of these reports that do get submitted being rejected at the level of the local Medical Officer of Health. And then from there, the ones that they do approve go to the Public Health Agency of Canada and then they could be filed into our adverse event database. But because of that, because of all the filtering that’s going on, this is the problem. We’re not getting accurate numbers.
So yes, a statistician, of course, could be looking for these. But if you don’t get accurate numbers reported, you can do all the analysis you want, it’s not going to be accurate, right? Your analysis is only as accurate as the data, the raw data you have to work with.
A D-dimer test is definitely a good one to do, because it can be suggestive of micro clots, which could be an indicator of blood clotting. But yeah, we’re finding that most physicians won’t do it. And we’re also finding a shortage, actually, of the blood collection tubes that are needed to do that as well.
Yeah, yeah, no, this is a virus. But ivermectin has clear-cut antiviral properties. For example, it has multiple mechanisms of action, but one is it inhibits the binding of the spike protein on the virus to these receptors that we have on the cells of our lungs. And yeah, what’s interesting is a lot of countries . . . so, that’s what’s frustrating for me as a vaccine developer, I knew that there was going to be no outlet for the vaccines if there were effective early treatment strategies. So I followed the science for the early treatment strategies, and I saw that the studies were flawed early on.
For example, a lot of the studies that were being done were being done in countries where things like ivermectin were available over the counter. So in other words, they were testing their treatment group, which was getting a defined amount of ivermectin and comparing it to a control group which had an undefined amount of ivermectin. So essentially comparing ivermectin treatment to ivermectin treatment, right? And then they showed there was no benefit. Well, of course not. If you’re comparing, you know, a treatment group to a treatment group.
And so when the science has been done properly, there’s an overwhelming [body] of scientific data showing that it works. And so even though I love vaccines, I couldn’t help but wonder why we were providing initially this authorisation for interim use, what we call emergency use in the United States, because we had clear, effective early treatments. I have worked with many physicians. These things clearly work. In fact, a lot of the countries that are having the most success, like, for example, a lot of the low income countries have had no choice. I mean, look, they’ve been left to take the leftovers for the vaccines. They can’t afford a lot of expensive treatments. So they have been relying on these effective early treatment strategies using repurposed generic drugs that are really cheap, and they’ve had a huge success.
So, for example, Egypt is a good example. Egypt, you know, Egypt has a three per cent vaccination rate. Three per cent of their eligible population is double vaccinated compared with Canada, which is at around 64 or 66 per cent. And they have 14 cases of Covid-19 per 100,000 people per day on average, whereas we have about 570 cases per day, so vastly higher.
And this is what people are seeing. A recent study came out looking at 68 different countries, and they plotted on a graph the case rate for Covid-19 and the vaccination rate in the country. And the more vaccinated the country is, the more problems they’re having with Covid-19. And when you look at these countries that have low vaccination rates, they’ve been relying on effective early treatment strategies.
So for example, with Egypt, I didn’t realise, but I asked that question to my collaborators, ‘What is Egypt doing right that we’re not doing here in North America?’ They sent me the official treatment protocol for Covid-19. Do you know what the number one thing is that they go to first? [It] is hydroxychloroquine and number two is ivermectin.
And if you look at Israel – Israel has the highest vaccination rate in the world, right? And the Delta variant is completely out of control, which is why they’ve been administering the third dose, why they’ve committed to a fourth dose. And with these numbers I was telling you, so they have the highest vaccination rates. So again, keep this in mind so as to understand – Egypt: three per cent vaccination rate, 14 cases per 100,000 of the population per day. Israel is at over an 80 per cent vaccination rate and has over 5,000 cases right now per day.
So these things work best as an early treatment strategy, so they should be administered. The sooner you administer them, the better the outcome. So we’ve had physicians – and I know these people and they’re good friends of mine – who have been absolutely destroyed for using ivermectin with their patients, and they’ve kept their patients out of the hospital, they’ve kept them out of the ICU. I find this exceptionally frustrating because I keep getting criticised for raising my concerns about the vaccines and harms, and I have physicians coming at me and saying, ‘Well, if only you saw on the front lines what happens to people who die from Covid and how terrible it is.’ And yes, it’s awful, and I feel terrible for all of them. But the other thing that I point out is it’s estimated that more than half the people that have died in this pandemic would be alive today if we had accepted these early treatment strategies. That’s the reality, and I’ve seen it with every physician who has administered this. They talk about our ICUs being overrun, but every physician that I have worked with – and I’ve worked with many who have used these effective treatment strategies – they’ve kept their patients out of the ICU. They don’t go to the ICU and they don’t die.
Do you realise that the way we’ve been treating patients is they go to the hospital and if they aren’t sick enough to go on a respirator, they typically get sent home and it’s, you know, take fluids and some of these other . . . maybe some aspirin. It’s basically what were they like to call in medicine, ‘watchful waiting’, which means, ‘we’re going to do nothing’, right? And you literally have to wait till you’re sick enough to come in and basically be put in the ICU and put on a respirator.
That’s not how you treat disease, right? The earlier you intervene, the better the outcome. And we have these early treatment strategies, and I think it’s no coincidence the only one we’ve approved in Canada is called remdesivir. It does have genuine safety issues and does virtually nothing for Covid-19. But it’s on patent and there’s tons of money that can be made. These other ones are dirt cheap. Ivermectin, you can treat somebody for about a dollar a day. So they’ve been using it to great effect in all these low income countries. But in North America, we’ve refused to adopt these strategies.
And you have to understand, and they even talk about safety issues. Well, one of the things is, so, there’s rare cases of safety issues associated with using the veterinary form, and that’s simply because of calculation errors – people making simple mathematical errors when trying to convert to the human dose. And the reality is that ivermectin is on the list for the World Health Organisation of one of the 50 most needed drugs in the entire world, has an unbelievable safety record. It’s used worldwide to effectively treat all these parasitic diseases. It was approved by Health Canada in 2018 to treat exotic parasitic diseases when Canadians are travelling. And so there’s absolutely no excuse.
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Dr Bridle: My own physician, honestly, criticised me, saying I’m giving out this messaging, talking about patients of hers that died.
I respectfully pointed out that I’m also on the front lines and I’m trying to deal on a daily basis with family members of people who have died from the Covid-19 vaccines. And so I’m seeing these horrible deaths as well on the other side.
And the difference to me is, had they not rejected these effective early treatment strategies, at least half of the patients that died in their practices would be alive today.
So I’m sorry, I don’t have a lot of patience for these physicians. And I’m just going to point out one thing as well that’s important for the general public to know. I usually don’t ever, ever criticise anybody’s expertise in their particular area of work. But we’re in unique times. And so I think the public needs to be aware.
We put a lot of faith in our physicians. The average family physician knows almost nothing about immunology and certainly about vaccines. People forget vaccinology is a sub-discipline of immunology. The average family physician in Canada gets between five and ten lectures in their first year on immunology, of which a tiny fraction of that is going to be dealing with vaccines.
They are not immunologists, they are not vaccinologists and they’re ignoring the vaccinologist here in Canada. They are promoting the vaccines and the reality is they don’t understand the science, and they do not have a deep enough understanding, on average, to understand the science and to understand the debates that are going on.
Interviewer: If information has been deliberately suppressed about these treatments, that would be a crime, seeing that people are dying?
Dr Bridle: Yes. Yes.
Interviewer: Doctor, will we see a national debate, like with top scientists on this subject ever in Canada? Like their side for pro, and our side? Do you think we’ll ever see that in Canada?
Dr Bridle: I and my colleagues have been open to that for months, many months. I would love to see it done. The public should be insisting on it, like the old-fashioned good scientific debates.
I would argue scientists can talk about the science. We can put aside our emotions. We can talk about it respectfully. I would argue what I would like to see happen is have a team – if it’s too big, it gets a little unwieldy – so I’d say between three and five scientists and/or physicians who want to debate both aspects of the Covid-19 policies and then have it moderated by somebody. And it has to be very public.
And that’s what I keep pointing out to the public. People who keep arguing that those of us who have legitimate concerns are wrong, providing misinformation, that we’re lying and that we don’t know what we’re talking about, have to keep asking themselves why then are many of us standing there in the arena like the gladiators of old? We’re standing in the arena, we’re waiting. None of their champions will step forward. None. We’ve tried it.
So we tried this in Ontario with (their Premier) Doug Ford. It was attempted in Alberta. It was attempted in Saskatchewan, where their premiers were also invited to have these open scientific discussions.
Nobody so far – and I know I’ve issued invitations. Every single person who attacks me I invite them to come on and talk publicly. I was even being interviewed once and live in the chat somebody was trolling the whole talk.
It was interesting. The person who was interviewing me stopped and invited the person to come on. They logged off pretty quickly. And that’s what we’re seeing over and over again. It’s remarkable.
I’ve asked thousands of people, not one person, not even one, in all these months has been willing to talk openly, publicly about the science and medicine underlying Covid-19. It’s exceptionally frustrating.
Even my own colleagues at the university who have attacked me, there are 83 of them, about that number, who signed a letter to the public saying that I was lying to the public, providing misinformation.
Do you realise some of these individuals were just down the hallway from me, in the same hallway, just a few doors down? None, not one of them, not one of those people was ever willing to talk to me on the phone, in a Zoom meeting or come to my office – and I have an open door policy and I invited many of them to do so – not one person.
And then, even after they signed that off, saying that I was giving misinformation, I had written a scientific document to outline the science that I’d been talking about, because this was birthed from a short interview that I gave on the radio, where I expressed concerns that the messenger RNA vaccines might be linked to the heart inflammation that was occurring in young people. And then I was attacked on that.
I wrote a document with all the science because, of course, I was not able to deliver all of my scientific arguments in that short interview.
People argued to the public, ‘You realise he only told you half the story.’ And I laugh about that because I say, ‘Well, you’re giving me far too much credit because I didn’t even get to deliver one per cent of the story.’
They’re trying to mean that I didn’t get to the other side of the story. No, there was so much more science, so many more mechanisms of action, of potential harm of these things.
And after I wrote that document, this letter was written by my colleagues. You realise that of those who I was able to get a straight answer from, none of them had even read my science. None of them had even bothered to see what my arguments were for my position. This is what’s happening right now, and the censorship is extreme it’s really unbelievable.
Interviewer: Some of your colleagues, they also said that it doesn’t alter DNA. Would you care to comment on that?
Dr Bridle: Yeah. So when it comes to the DNA, there isn’t sufficient data to … my personal opinion is that it’s not substantially altering the DNA.
All I can tell you is it was thought that human cells did not have a type of protein that’s needed to convert the messenger RNA in the vaccine into DNA. It turns out we do actually have these types of proteins present. So it’s theoretically possible.
Personally, I would think that it’s probably not a substantial issue, but theoretically possible. So as this is theoretically possible, I would argue as a scientist that it would be worthwhile investigating that – doing the research just to alleviate our concerns, people’s concerns, about that.
That’s the thing, people ask these questions and as you see that there’s theoretical possibilities for these happening, that used to be the scientific basis for then conducting the research and definitively answering people’s questions. So many of the questions that you have, I can’t definitively answer because we’ve lost this whole concept of conducting research to address the tough questions.
Interviewer: What I find interesting with what you’re saying is what I’m seeing, very clearly, is you’re confronting a talking point, not a science. And let me illustrate what I mean by that.
You ask a doctor about all this and what’s their answer if you really push them? ‘Well, we’re following the advice of x, y, z and they’re following the science that we trusted?’ Right? You go to the level above them, same thing. You go to the level above them, same thing.
Dr Bridle: We’ve tried, as scientists …
Interviewer: I understand that. You guys will talk to science because you’re working with it. The other side is purposely convoluting science from a talking point.
Dr Bridle: Yes.
Interviewer: I honestly wonder if they have a science. My wife and I survived …
Dr Bridle: Well, at this point I can tell you, as a scientist – that’s why I’m willing to debate anybody on it – they don’t have the science on their side. That’s very clear. And in fact, you no longer need to understand the science, you just need to understand the contradictions that are coming.
Because, this is the thing, the reason why people like Dr Palmer and myself can stand up and talk off the cuff without any script here is because we’re speaking the truth. We’re speaking based on our knowledge, and we don’t have to keep track of a story when we’re speaking the truth.
We don’t have to make sure that what we’re saying today matches what we said at last week’s rally or the one before that. But the public health narrative has become so discombobulated now that they’re constantly contradicting themselves.
And there’s so many examples that I could give you. But let’s take one, for example. I encourage people now to start taking headlines from the mainstream media from months ago, which had people like myself censored, and line them up side-by-side with headlines that they have today.
‘So a great example is this whole issue of the vaccine mandate and the fact that, you know, what are we telling people right now? If you have one dose of the vaccine, you’re lumped in with the unvaccinated. You’re dangerous, you’re the same as somebody who has been unvaccinated, you’re unprotected and you’re going to kill everybody else, right?
We know from the very get-go, the two-dose regimen was proclaimed to have 95 per cent effectiveness. So, this is the thing, a lot of people who are accepting this current messaging about the ‘one dose doesn’t count’ have forgotten about the one-dose summer.
Remember when Trudeau (the Canadian Prime Minister) was pushing and all we were hearing about was the one-dose summer? So in Canada, the world was watching us in bewilderment and wondering what the basis was for us going from the approved three or four-week interval, depending on whether it was the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, to a four-month interval.
And if you recall, the reason why we could go for the one-dose summer and not worry about getting people two doses is because we were told one dose was 95 per cent effective.
‘A lot of you don’t realise this. If you don’t believe me, you can go on the Health Canada website right now and look. They will have on there that the one dose of the Pfizer vaccine is 95 per cent effective.
So now you have to start asking yourself, using their own messaging: If one dose is 95 per cent effective and two doses is 95 per cent effective, then why are the people with one dose being lumped in with those who are unvaccinated? Why was that OK then, when trying to justify going to a four-month interval, which had no scientific basis?
But now those same people who are sitting with one dose are told, ‘No, no, no. It’s not 95 per cent effective, it’s the equivalent of being unvaccinated altogether.’
This is where we’re getting to. So on that basis alone, that’s what I’m saying is, it’s become blatantly obvious. You don’t have to understand the science. They are not following the science, they’re contradicting themselves over and over and over again.
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DR BYRAM BRIDLE: There’s been a remarkable number of young people who have died for no apparent reason. And in many cases, we can’t confirm their vaccination status. But I’ve been particularly concerned about the number of varsity athletes at our universities who have been dying completely unexpectedly and suddenly. And the only thing that I can tell you – and I don’t know whether they were or were not vaccinated – well, actually, I can’t tell you when they were vaccinated. What I can tell you is that no varsity athlete in Ontario can participate in a varsity team without being vaccinated. They weren’t allowed exemptions.
INTERVIEWER: My point on that example was simply this: if you’re following the science, that first statement that that head doc released would never be said.
BRIDLE: Yes.
INTERVIEWER: You would say, ‘We don’t know.’
BRIDLE: Exactly. That’s exactly, yes.
INTERVIEWER: But that’s the way they’re reporting it tells you . . .
BRIDLE: As you heard from me, yeah.
INTERVIEWER: . . . their complete agenda.
BRIDLE: As you heard from me. I won’t say definitively that it’s because of the vaccine. I’m a scientist, I’m open to that possibility that there is some other underlying condition with any individual case. But there’s too many of these to not investigate properly. Absolutely.
INTERVIEWER: And if anybody’s paying attention, that whole approach should really put your guard up.
BRIDLE: Yes.
INTERVIEWER: You should realise there’s something drastically wrong with public health officials who would talk with that kind of language.
BRIDLE: Yeah, well, look at the language. So, another contradiction is . . . so, for example, at my university, our president hosted the local Medical Officer of Health who declared the whole reason why the vaccine mandate made so much sense is that there is essentially no such thing as a breakthrough infection. And that’s still being claimed by many, although their ability to claim that continues to be eroded. But that was the idea, and they cited like a 0.003 per cent breakthrough infection rate, so essentially zero, meaning you’re completely protected.
And when our President was asked about that recently, she actually created quite a furore on our campus, because she completely contradicted the messaging that they had just given. Well, the reason why, of course, they still have to mask and physically distance is because, hey, you know, it’s well known that people who are vaccinated can still get infected, still get Covid and transmit the virus. And in fact, there’s very good immunological reasons why people who are vaccinated can still transmit the virus and the scientific data that is emerging is showing that they can transmit at least as efficiently as somebody who has no immunity whatsoever.
And the reason is, is because when we put the vaccine in the shoulder, we’re tricking our bodies into thinking that it’s what we call systemic infection. And so, the problem is that is where your body wants to protect the most is the blood, because if a pathogen gets into the blood it can disseminate throughout the whole body. And so we got all these antibodies in the blood.
So, the one place in our respiratory system where these antibodies will spill over into, if you’re trying to protect against a systemic infection, are the lower airways. And that’s because you just think about gas exchange. There’s barely a physical barrier between the alveolar space and the blood vessels to allow that ready air exchange, which also means it’s very easy for a pathogen that gets deep into the lungs – so that would be what we call pneumonia – for that pathogen to get into the blood. So we put antibodies in the lower airways if we think we have a systemic infection. But we aren’t getting proper antibody protection in the upper airways like we would if we were naturally infected. So these people that have the vaccine, yeah, remember all the antibody titers they’re showing, that’s in the blood. But these people, on average, are quite poorly protected in their upper airways. And it’s not the virus that’s deep down the alveoli that gets transmitted to other people, because of the dead airspace when we exhale, it’s the viral particles that are in the upper airways. So that’s why the vaccinated can spread this just as efficiently as somebody who’s completely unprotected.
And so these vaccines, on that basis, because they don’t come close to conferring sterilising immunity, they don’t properly protect the upper respiratory tract. They only confer about four and a half months of immunity. It’s absolutely 100 per cent impossible to achieve the goal of herd immunity with these vaccines. 100 per cent impossible. For these companies it would be such a quick and easy and cheap study to do, and they could definitively rule this problem in or out. And whenever there’s such easy to do research to be done and they won’t do it, that for me is always a red flag.
INTERVIEWER: Yeah, exactly why isn’t that happening?
DR BYRAM BRIDLE: Yes. All I can say is, again, we’re not being provided with accurate data. So it’s hard to answer any of these questions to do with, you know, what’s actually due to COVID, what’s due to other things? And how we’re defining these things is crazy. Like I said, we’re not even defining somebody who’s vaccinated until they’re 14 days out from their second dose. The second dose is serving as a booster, right? And so typically, the immune response would be peaking actually about five to ten days after receiving that. So we’re actually taking people who would theoretically be at the absolute peak of a vaccine-induced immunity, and we’re calling them not fully vaccinated, for example.
And so for example, if people were to die in that time frame, even if it was linked to the vaccine, it’d be linked as somebody who was not fully vaccinated having died. So it’s very difficult with all these kind of nuances that are going on. All I can say really is what we do know is that the problem of Covid, the number of cases has been dramatically overestimated, but to an unknown degree, because of the way we’ve misused the PCR test. And we know that the problems associate with the vaccines have been grossly underestimated, but to an unknown degree.
And so until we have accurate numbers for these – which I can’t see we’re going to have at any time soon unless we completely change the way we’re monitoring these things – we’re not going to be able to come up with accurate assessments as scientists of . . . you know, with these kind of questions. But the issue was at the beginning, or the problem was, people kept arguing that this could have between a 1 and 10 per cent fatality rate, infection fatality rate, meaning for every 100 people who were infected with the virus between 1 and 10 would die. But the thing is, as we never knew what the proper denominator was, how many people were getting infected – we still don’t know, because again, like I mentioned, there’s many of us . . . well, in fact, just right here, there was an individual who has gone now, but showed me his test result. He had had a positive Covid test result almost a year and a half ago, when he showed me his antibody response for the spike protein, it’s higher, way higher than the average person who’s been vaccinated at the peak, at the peak of their antibody response. So there’s somebody who clearly acquired immunity naturally. And we’re not tracking these people at all, because in many cases where people have actually been infected they didn’t even know it and have natural immunity.
We’re running this clinical trial where we’re evaluating natural acquisition of immunity. We’re finding a huge number of people who never realised that they were sick have clear evidence of immunity against this virus. So that means that for those individuals they were infected but this was not a pathogen for them and they recovered without, you know, without developing disease. And so we have no idea – and we now know this is much more common than we accepted at the beginning – but we have no idea just how common, right?
So the point is, we still don’t know the full extent of the denominator. But when it was updated in February, what was published at that time was that the infection fatality rate was 0.15 – so not even 1 per cent like we were being told, but 0.15 per cent – and that was for the entire population. And if you took out those who were 70 years and older, it dropped to 0.05 per cent. So, just to put that into perspective, a bad flu season would be at 0.1 per cent.
So again, if you go out of the high risk, the highest risk demographic, those over 70. And we’re actually dealing with a problem that is less fatal than the annual flu. And especially when we start talking about children – we’ve had one infant in BC who died. We’re, you’re talking about taking these vaccines down now, in the next phase, to five-year-olds and then all the way down to six months of age. And when you start getting down to under ten years of age, virtually nobody has died. And when you look at the flu, it’s far more dangerous for these individuals.
And if you want to look at another one, respiratory syncytial virus, which we live with – far more dangerous to young people. And this is where even pregnant or breastfeeding women are being told, encouraged, to get vaccinated to protect their infants. It’s crazy. It’s all based on this . . . it’s easy to make people feel that infants are very fragile, very fragile human beings, which in some ways they are. But when it comes to SARS-CoV-2, this was presented today: the younger you are, the fewer receptors you express in your respiratory system that this virus can use to latch on to your cells. And in fact, when you get down into the infants, they’re quite resistant to infection with this virus. And that’s why we haven’t been seeing deaths among that population.
So it’s very unusual, with any other infectious disease you always have two peaks: the frail elderly and the very young. And it’s very clear why, because the frail elderly . . . well, as we get older, our immunological function declines so we in essence become somewhat immunosuppressed as we get older. And then on the very young side, our immune systems don’t fully mature until we’re 16 years old. Still, some components of the immune system maturing as young teenagers. So we’re dealing with less mature immune systems, immune systems that aren’t fully mature as we get into the youngest population. So that’s why we usually see these peaks in the oldest and the youngest. But SARS-CoV-2 is not like that, it’s very unusual in the sense that, yes, infants are relatively immature in terms of their immunological functioning, but they’re physically very resistant to infection with this virus.
So this is all crazy to be encouraging breastfeeding women to be vaccinated, to protect their infants. Their infants are already naturally protected. And as we go down and we start vaccinating six-month-old breastfeeding infants, what we’re doing is we’re bypassing the natural protection they have from the virus when we inject these vaccines, where we start getting their body to manufacture the spike protein. And again, I can’t emphasise enough. The spike protein is not the inert target that we were hoping it would be for the immune system. It has all kinds of biological activities in our bodies that can potentially be harmful.
And what people have to understand is that the receptor that that spike protein can bind to in our children and infants is expressed at the same concentration internally as in adults. And that’s because that protein doesn’t exist to serve as a receptor for the virus, it actually exists to serve basic physiological processes such as regulating blood pressure and so on. So, they’re naturally protected from infection from SARS-CoV-2, but when we put the vaccines in, they’re at least as susceptible as adults to all the harms.
BMJ notes we will NEVER have the evidence, vaccine makers structured the trials to avoid proving an all-cause mortality benefit since they know it’s negative
If you are are still in doubt as to whether we are being hoodwinked on the safety and efficacy of the COVID vaccines, this Editorial in the BMJ today should remove all doubt. We are being hoodwinked. And it’s not going to get better. Ever. So we are stuck with a vaccine that is being mandated where most people have no fu*&($#ing clue as to whether it works or not.
Those of us who know how to interpret the safety data from VAERS and other similar systems know full well what is going on, but when we try to warn people, we are being marginalized as spreaders of misinformation. Who’s lying? Well, suffice it to say that no self-proclaimed VAERS expert will agree to a debate.
Note: For those of you upset about the headline, sure, they can argue that the COVID vaccines saved people from dying from COVID. I concede that. But the all-cause mortality (ACM) rate (which nobody is looking at), has always been far greater than the COVID lives saved.
In case you were beginning to feel like your world was becoming a cliché dystopian movie script, don’t feel bad. It appears that at least some of the villains agree with you.
Not happy with unsatisfying stories, scripts and narratives that shape our disorganized zeitgeist, Klaus Schwab and other creepy dungeon masters trying to manage the post-covid world have called for a ‘New Narrative’ to shape our 21st century and beyond. Schwab described the World Economic Forum’s Great Narrative Initiative announced on November 11 as a “collaborative effort of the world’s leading thinkers to fashion longer-term perspectives and co-create a narrative that can help guide the creation of a more resilient, inclusive and sustainable vision for our collective future.”
It is no question that this new project is bone chilling, but can it work? Does it have any basis in reality or is the oligarchical high priesthood stage managing this shit show intoxicated by their own self-induced narratives and completely incapable of seeing the seeds of self-destruction they have created for themselves?
Let’s examine this question in a bit of detail.
As far back as we look, recorded history demonstrates myths and stories that shape each culture’s subjective experience trying to make sense of the objective world and the many tenuous challenges that are tossed into our path.
Deep Structure Narratives
An ice age comes to an end and sea levels rise hundreds of feet drowning millions while wiping out coastal cities. As a consequence, flood myths appear across various cultures of the world.
Fires from the sky reflect terrible asteroids striking the earth wrecking havoc on ecosystems and perhaps even inducing volcanism and vast weather anomalies. As a consequence, more myths are created featuring heroes, villains, angels and Gods punishing sinners and rewarding those with virtue.
Throughout history, countless stories have been created by shamans, priests, and poets which have attempted to infuse meaning onto traumatic events induced by either nature or geopolitical strategies. Some classical stories may have even exposed geopolitical evils under the safer terrain of fiction when literal truths were impossible. One instance of this latter case can be found in the Olympian Gods of Homer’s stories who were in all likelihood representative of actual oligarchical families who manipulated never ending wars and exploited the folly and corruption of their chosen chess pieces on the Great Game of ancient Greece.
These stories are a part of the human condition and for the most part, perfectly natural.
However, in our supposedly enlightened secular era, these forms of myths are discarded as the foolish practices of simpler unscientific times.
Science has taught us to believe in logic. Not faith in God or the health of our immaterial souls.
The medieval myths of sea monsters and flat earths beyond which unsuspecting voyagers would meet a terrible fate were superseded for a new set of narratives during the enlightenment period. During this period, pure logic and empiricism were placed upon the new altars where religion once stood and we were told to worship new godheads by the names such as Kant, Locke, Hegel, Bacon and Newton. When Nietzsche proclaimed God to be dead, this was the current of thinkers that supposedly killed him.
The Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore referred to those suffering from this disease of metastasized logic saying: “A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.”
When the foundation of enlightenment logic began to break down under the pressure of reality over a century ago, new narratives taking the form of the Standard Model quantum mechanics began teaching modern man that what appears to be living is in truth, just made up of non living atoms and chemical interactions… and what appears to be ordered form operating with purpose is merely the stochastic motion of atoms devoid of purpose, beauty or even objective truth. We were told that all of this was held together only by a mix of luck (statistical probability) and four fundamental forces created 13.7 billion years ago. All behavior in human life or in nature thus explained away by Darwinian models of survival of the fittest and random mutations. The rise of modern monstrosities like eugenics, and neo-Malthusianism were the sick children of these ghoulish assumptions.
The more we probe behind the impressive veneer of these popular narratives, the more we discover that myths spun by modern day high priests on behalf of political interests have not only continued into our present age, but have continuously adopted new costumes to adapt to our changing world. Those brilliant minds whose discoveries actually overturned old narratives by leaping beyond the domains of inductive/deductive thinking are carefully obscured under mathematical formulas devoid of the spirit and personality of these exceptional individuals (1).
The Political Consequences of False Macro-Narratives
Some political expressions of today’s secular narratives were seen as neocons trotted out in front of cameras broadcasting the message that the two hijacked planes which destroyed three towers on 9/11 was orchestrated by angry Muslims in caves who hated our freedom.
We were told that covid-19 arose from a badly cooked mammal that kissed a bat requiring a total abolition of our constitutional freedoms.
We were told that the protest on January 6, 2021 in Washington D.C. was an insurrection worse than anything the U.S. had seen since the Civil War when 500,000 Americans slaughtered each other for four years.
We are continuously told that Russia has ambitions to undermine democratic elections across the entire free world while China is aiming to subvert western values and impose a global communist government through its imperial New Silk Road.
I could obviously go on for quite some time here, but needless to say, political myth making is an ugly part of life. But while each lie certainly does grave damage, our susceptibility to falling for these falsities is in no way disconnected from our acceptance of those higher meta narratives embedded in those scientific myths that shape HOW our minds move. Every high priest knows that controlling HOW people think is always infinitely more powerful than controlling WHAT they think about any particular thing. This is how the neocon rot grew in the U.S.A over a few generations leading us to today’s multifaceted systemic breakdown crisis.
One of the fathers of the mutant that became neoconservatism was a narrative-building master named Leo Strauss.
Leo Strauss’ Neocon Monstrosity
Working closely with Fabian Society and Frankfurt School agents throughout his career as a teacher in Columbia, New School and the University of Chicago, Strauss preached a perverse interpretation of Plato’s Republic to tens of thousands of devoted students spread across several decades.
Among the highest lessons contained in Strauss’s teachings (at least for a select few among his students) was the idea of the Noble Lie developed by Plato in Book 3 of the Republic. Strauss taught his students that this Noble Lie was the greatest weapon and rightful tool of anyone who found themselves in a position of power to rule over the weak at any time in history.
In true Nietzschean fashion, the narrow definition of “power” as the subordination of the weak to the strong was the only definition permitted by Strauss who taught his students that while Plato preached love of wisdom to the masses, he secretly held a different teaching for those elite among his Academy who would control political power. To these elite few, he gave the name ‘gentlemen’ and ‘Guardians’.
Strauss taught that Plato’s Guardians would control the shadows cast on the cave wall which the plebs shackled to their senses, would believe were the only reality possible. The mandate of these perverse neo-Platonists was to live the ideal not of Socrates, but rather of Thrasymachus whose immoral doctrine Socrates annihilated in the first book of the Republic. Those young neocons learning from their master were taught that the true ‘secret Socrates’ believed, like Thrasymachus, or Callicles (student of Gorgias), was that the highest purpose in life is to attain power, satisfy our lusts and control the shadows in the cave.
While I adore Plato, I would never deny that he was a myth maker.
The stories showcased in his dialogues from the Timaeus, Critias, Theaetetus, Sophist, Statesman, Meno, Laws, Phaedo, Apology, Gorgias, Republic etc… have shaped the minds of some of the greatest historic figures across 2400 years of world history. Renaissance figures like St. Augustine, Ibn Sina, Erasmus, Shakespeare, Benjamin Franklin, Lincoln, Moses Mendelsohn, Pushkin, Martin Luther King Jr., and countless other brilliant souls had their wits sharpened on the stories and lessons contained in Plato’s writings.
But was Plato truly the tyrannical double-speaker portrayed by Strauss and his followers who preached morality for the weak and vice for those who would control the shadows?
To be a true Guardian in Plato’s world meant more than simply getting out of the cave to see with the light of the sun (symbolic for creative reason) and then lord over the masses.
While Nietzscheans like Strauss stop reading at this moment and choose to dominate the slaves using a higher power of thinking reserved only for a select few of the golden collar elite… Plato made it very clear in his Republic and other writings, that the TRUE philosopher (and implicitly true guardian) was obliged to return back into the cave at risk of his or her life in order to help liberate their fellow captives.
Narratives for Freedom or Slavery?
“Every artist, every scientist, every writer must decide now where he stands. The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice”
-Paul Robeson, 1937
The question can now be posed: how do we know which narratives are designed to enslave us, which empower us, and which are benign (like a child’s belief in the tooth fairy or the toy-bearing fat guy who trades gifts for good behavior)?
Since each person’s internal universe interfaces with the external reality through the filter of both logic, senses, imagination, and free will, is it possible that some narratives can uplift and inspire us to be more than we are in the face of impossible odds? Can certain stories sharpen our wisdom and free us from the shackles of sense perception as we are taught to see ever more through the eye of reason and a developed imagination?
When George Washington led a small force of farmers against the world’s largest mercenary force in 1776, was it purely logic that guided them in this statistically impossible fight, or were stories of Christ’s passion animating this seeming irrational drive for freedom? When Syria was beset with foreign sponsored Jihadists and teetered on the brink of the abyss, did stories of the Prophet Mohammed animate their hearts to do the impossible when an easier albeit more slavish road awaited their surrender?
Certainly, history has proven time and again, that a certain type of poetic story can empower us to leap beyond our limitations and gain insights into the deeper truths of the human condition and universal reality itself. Even Shakespeare’s “fictional” stories offer the sensitive soul great universal lessons into humanity and real politic which has served great statesmen for centuries.
A Last Look at Today’s Oligarchical Narrative Builders
Although we can affirm with certainty that some narratives can be good and others evil, is it possible that the oligarchs managing today’s Great Narrative project wish humanity no harm?
Perhaps Lynn Forrester de Rothschild is completely genuine when she launched the Council for Inclusive Capitalism alongside Prince Charles, Mark Carney and a handful of Davos Billionaires representing tens of trillions of dollars of capital in 2014. Helping to transform capitalism into a green, eco friendly, more inclusive system that treats everyone equally is a good thing isn’t it?
When this Council merged with the Vatican in December 2020, Lynn de Rothschild described the event as “a historic new partnership between some of the world’s largest investment and business leaders and the Vatican… joining moral and market imperatives to reform capitalism into a powerful force for the good of humanity.”
This council is even led by “a core group of world leaders” who even call themselves “Guardians” following the title used by Plato 2400 years ago.
These guardians include the CEOs of powerful organizations as State Street, Bank of America, Johnson and Johnson, Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, Merck, British Petroleum, and the Rothschild banking houses. Not exactly the most morally advanced coterie of political heavy weights one could imagine, but still maybe the evil that they have been a part for decades has all been arranged for the sake of a higher good that only the elite may be permitted to know…
Unfortunately for the Davos Guardians, the reality of the New Great Narrative is a world devoid of those very principles that humanity requires to survive and thrive within our creative, reasonable universe. Wielding the power to control a shadow land of dumbed down slaves within a cave might seem impressive for some, but when juxtaposed with the active, creative multipolar paradigm now rising to become a global force for scientific and technological progress, controlling cave dwellers becomes little more than a bleak and pitiful ambition.
And like any parasite which can do naught but kill the very host it needs to suckle on for its very survival, those Davos guardians are likely to meet the same fate as that encountered by Edgar Poe’s impotent, nihilistic oligarch Roderick Usher as his castle crumbled into an abyss.
Note
(1) Some exemplary names of these exceptional individuals include Leonardo Da Vinci, Luca Pacioli, Pierre Fermat, Christian Huygens, Johannes Kepler, Gottfried Leibniz, Max Planck, and Dimitry Mendeleyev (to name but a few).
Whitney Webb returns to the program to discuss her recent work on the “green” transformation of the global financial system. From NACs to GFANZ, Webb and Corbett break down the latest attempt to monopolize the world’s natural resources and how this financial scam represents the next step along the path to the Great Reset, Agenda 2030 and the 4th Industrial Revolution.
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Kennedy is not a newcomer to this frightening dystopia. “My 40-year career as an environmental and public health advocate,” he writes, “gave me a unique understanding of the corrupting mechanisms of ‘regulatory capture,’ the process by which the regulator becomes beholden to the industry it’s meant to regulate.” From the time he entered the vaccine debate in 2005, he realized that “the pervasive web of deep financial entanglements between Pharma and the government health agencies had put regulatory capture on steroids.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), for example, owns 57 vaccine patents and spent $4.9 billion in 2019 buying and distributing vaccines. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) receives 45 percent of its budget from the pharmaceutical industry. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), with its $42 billion budget, owns hundreds of vaccine patents and often profits from the sale of products it supposedly regulates. High-level officials receive yearly emoluments of up to $150,000 in royalty payments on products that they help develop and then usher through the approval process.
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