If you can read only one article about international relations theory, it should be Columbia Professor Robert Jervis’ “Hypotheses on Misperception.” Jervis died last week, but his work explains recent Russia and NATO tensions.
In the past month, an alleged “build-up” of Russian military forces close to Ukraine has led to numerous claims that Moscow is planning to invade its neighbor. To head off this supposed danger, Western states have this past week threatened President Vladimir Putin’s government with “massive consequences” if it orders an offensive.
The Kremlin has consistently denied it is preparing an attack, and instead has demanded NATO pledge that it will not expand any further to the east. Ukraine’s long-held ambitions to join the bloc, it says, would cross a “red line” and would provoke a stern response.
In the West, Russian complaints about NATO expansion evoke little sympathy. The bloc is a purely defensive organization, goes the argument. Besides which, it is said, the alliance’s only borders with Russia consist of two short strips of land, along the Estonian/Latvian and Norwegian frontiers. Given Russia’s size, this hardly poses a severe threat, it is claimed.
Against this, others note that NATO’s aircraft are just a few minutes from the country’s second city, St. Petersburg. When the Soviet Union placed rockets in Cuba in the early 1960s, it was enough to make the US threaten war. One can hardly expect the Russians to react with complete equanimity.
In his celebrated “Hypotheses on Misperception,” Jervis noted that we all need to “develop an image of others and of their intentions,” but that this image is often faulty. Jervis drew up 13 hypotheses to explain why. A number of them are very relevant to the current crisis of Russian-Western relations.
The first problem, says Jervis, is that “decision makers tend to fit incoming information into their existing theories and images.” Furthermore, “there is an overall tendency for decision-makers to see other states as more hostile than they are.” Put these together and you have a toxic cocktail: if your existing theory is that another state is hostile, you will interpret any information you receive about that state in such a way as to confirm its hostility.
It’s easy to see how this fits the current state of Russian-Western relations. Each side has a negative image of the other, and each therefore interprets the other’s behavior in the worst possible way. For Russia, NATO expansion is a threat; the Maidan revolution in Ukraine was a plot engineered by the West; and so on. For NATO, the “annexation” of Crimea was the first step in a Russian plan of aggression against Europe, and Russian military exercises are not really exercises but a preliminary to a massive invasion of Ukraine.
Of course, there are other perfectly innocent explanations for all these things, but as Jervis comments, “actors tend to overlook the fact that evidence consistent with their theories may also be consistent with other views.” The Russian “build-up” of troops near Ukraine is much more likely to be a warning to Ukraine not to launch an assault on rebel Donbass than to be a preparation for an invasion. But the fact that it is consistent with Western perceptions of Russia as aggressive is enough to mean that this more realistic theory is never even considered.
This in turn reveals another problem. A lot of international politics is about signaling, but as Jervis points out, “when messages are sent from a different background of concerns and information than is possessed by the receiver, misunderstanding is likely.”
Take, for instance, NATO’s plans for missile defense systems in Europe. These are notionally a response to the threat of Iranian ballistic missiles. Russia, though, is worried that these systems might weaken its own deterrent capability, making it less able to retaliate in the event of a strike and tipping the scales of mutually assured destruction. To Russia, NATO’s concerns about Iran are ridiculous. But to NATO, Russia’s concerns are equally silly. The two sides thus end up talking past each other.
Or take another example. By deploying its forces near Ukraine, Moscow is signaling Kiev not to assault Donbass. But the message the West is getting is a different one: Russia is poised to attack. Likewise, the West thinks that by sending troops to the Baltic States, and threatening Russia with “massive consequences,” it is deterring Russian “aggression.” But the message that Moscow is getting is that the West is hell-bent on a confrontation. The signals sent are not the signals received.
What makes matters worse is that, as Jervis says, “when people spend a great deal of time drawing up a plan or making a decision, they tend to think that the message about it they wish to convey will be clear to the receiver.” Similarly, “when actors have intentions that they do not try to conceal from others, they tend to assume that others accurately perceive those intentions.”
In line with this, NATO and Russia assume that because they think that their message is clear, the other must understand it. If the other is acting otherwise, the only logical conclusion is that it is pretending not to understand, in order to justify its own hostile actions.
Since NATO thinks that it should be clear to everyone that it is a defensive organization, if Moscow insists on viewing it otherwise, that is further proof of Russia’s aggressive intentions. And likewise, since Russia thinks it is obvious that it has no intention of invading Ukraine, if NATO is saying the opposite, it must be because it is looking for an excuse to take action against Moscow.
To counter this, Jervis suggests that decision-makers should be aware of their own biases, avoid tying their policies to specific theories, and be more willing to examine situations from a variety of angles. None of this is exactly rocket science, but it does point us towards what’s wrong. Rather than being open to different views, we have become locked in a theory of ourselves as innately good and those with whom we disagree as innately evil.
As a result, we exaggerate threats, misinterpret signals, and fail to recognize that the signals we send are likely to be misunderstood. When others respond differently to how we desire, it reinforces our vision of them as hostile, causing more exaggeration, more misinterpretation, and so on ad infinitum. Jervis showed us how we got on this vicious cycle. It’s now up to us to find a way off.
Paul Robinson is a professor at the University of Ottawa. He writes about Russian and Soviet history, military history and military ethics, and is author of the Irrussianality blog.
December 15, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | European Union, NATO, Russia, Ukraine, United States |
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Two recent reports by the New York Times highlight some of the US’ manifold crimes in Syria, murdering untold numbers of Syrian civilians over the years, under the pretext of fighting the Islamic State.
They exposed a 2019 US bombing in Baghuz, eastern Syria, which killed 70 civilians, and that this was but one of numerous instances, with the Delta Force routinely launching “reckless airstrikes” while purportedly fighting ISIS.
Stating the obvious: had the wanton and repeated mass murder of civilians been committed by Syria or Russia, it would have been in headlines, ad nauseum… because the legacy media genuinely cares about the Syrian people. But, since the crimes were committed by the US, we’ll neither see outrage nor crocodile tears. In fact, it’s pretty shocking that the New York Times, a noted apologist for American Imperialism which has promoted outright fabrications about Syria over the years, has deigned to report honestly on actual war crimes in the country.
In April 2019, Airwars (and Amnesty International) reported that, “at least 1,600 civilians died in Coalition strikes on the city of Raqqa in 2017 during the battle to evict so-called Islamic State – ten times the number of fatalities so far conceded by the US-led alliance, which had admitted 159 deaths to April 24th.”
It noted that, “most of the destruction during the battle for Raqqa was caused by incoming Coalition air and artillery strikes – with at least 21,000 munitions fired into the city over a four-month period. The United Nations would later declare it the most destroyed city in Syria, with an estimated 70% laid waste.”
Along with reporting from Syria since 2014, I’ve keenly followed news on the subject and, unless my memory betrays me, I don’t recall overwhelming media outrage following this report.
In November, former United Nations Weapons Inspector and former Marine Corps Intelligence Officer, Scott Ritter, wrote: “The Battle of Raqqa became a template for all future anti-ISIS operations involving the SDF and the US going forward. By the time the mopping up operations around Baghuz were conducted, in March 2019, there was in place a seamless killing machine which allowed the US to justify any action so long as it was conducted in support of an SDF unit claiming to be in contact with ISIS.”
The US strikes were apparently meant to be portrayed as “self-defense” protecting US proxies on the ground, a feeble excuse for the slaughter that occurred. Yet, what Syria, with the aid of allies, has been doing the past ten years has literally been self-defense: defending the country against the death squads supported and funded by the West, the Gulf, Turkey and Israel in their war on Syria.
Were such death squads to descend on Western cities, they would almost immediately be eviscerated. This scenario is highly unlikely given that the terrorists are tools of the West, but this illustrates the hypocrisy of the situation: Syria has been doing its utmost to restore security to the nation, via strategic warfare against terrorist factions, as well as reconciliation deals enabling Syrian armed men among the foreign terror groups to lay down their weapons and return to civilian life. Simultaneously, the US, their allies, and the terrorists they support, have wantonly murdered Syrian civilians and wreaked destruction on the country.
Referring to the New York Times reports, RT reported recently that former Pentagon and State Department adviser Larry Lewis, who co-authored a 2018 DoD report on civilian harm based on classified casualty data, said the rate was “10 times that of similar operations he tracked in Afghanistan.’ … and that, when interviewed by the New York Times, Gen. Townsend blamed any civilian casualties on “the misfortunes of war.”
Funny how that works. When Syria is actually fighting terrorism, they are condemned. When the US is fake fighting terrorism and slaughtering civilians, it’s just a “misfortune of war.”
It should be no surprise to any thinking person that the US has committed untold war crimes in Syria (and many other countries) during its illegal presence in the country. Still, even with ample documentation of these crimes, the US is not held accountable. Completing this unjust scenario, the US and allies have repeatedly hurled unfounded accusations of chemical weapons attacks and Russian war crimes, providing no evidence and generally relying on unnamed sources or the al-Qaeda-affiliated White Helmets.
I wrote about this last year, noting, “A UN-mandated report, which accuses Russia of war crimes in Syria, heavily relies on anonymous sources and lacks evidence, but also smacks of deliberate disinformation that is halting the eradication of terrorism in Idlib.”
Emphasizing that this report was based on testimonies taken in Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon or by phone, I noted, “I scoured the 24 pages of the report, but even in the annexes I could find no transparent and credible sources, only the following vague terms repeatedly referred-to: Witnesses, civilians, NGO rescuers, medical teams, first responders, flight spotters, and early warning observers.”
In the relentless propaganda against Syria, and Russia, that report got a lot of traction in regime-change media. The recent reports on US crimes in Syria? Not so much.
Some days ago, the Twitter account @USEmbassySyria tweeted about the US standing firm in its commitment to human rights and the rights of women. A ludicrous tweet given the US’ support for terrorists who quash human rights and imprison and rape women.
It is also worth mentioning that Twitter account represents a non-existent entity: in their push for human rights for Syrians (as they bomb and murder Syrians or starve them with sanctions), the US Embassy in Syria long ceased to exist, as did most embassies involved in the plan to put extremist terrorists in power.
In a world where Israel can daily imprison and slaughter children and other Palestinians, and Saudi Arabia can wage war on Yemen while beheading its own civilians, the crimes of the US (and allies) in Syria are sadly not surprising. Nor are they new. The US has a decades-long history of attempting regime-change in Syria.
But seriously? Syria and Russia are to blame in this upside-down world…?
Eva Bartlett is a Canadian independent journalist and activist. She has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Palestine (where she lived for nearly four years).
December 15, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Illegal Occupation, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | New York Times, Syria, United States |
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Under the Trump administration, the Counter Network Division, a special unit within Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency, used government databases intended for terrorist tracking to investigate 20 US-based journalists, Yahoo News revealed on Saturday.
CBP is the largest federal law enforcement agency in the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The bombshell revelation prompted ire among US news organisations, with AP’s executive editor, Julie Pace, urging DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to explain why the agency ran the name of an AP reporter through its databases. In its statement, the CBP claimed that the agency “does not investigate individuals without a legitimate and legal basis to do so.” However, according to AP, “this appears to be an example of journalists being targeted for simply doing their jobs, which is a violation of the First Amendment.”
Are US Federal Probes Turning Into Paranoia?
“The Department of Homeland Security has pretty much summed up America’s authoritarian drift since its creation in the wake of 9/11,” says Daniel Lazare, an independent journalist, author, and writer.
Lazare mocks the newly revealed operation, carried out by the Counter Network Division’s Jeffrey Rambo in 2017 and dubbed “Operation Whistle Pig,” adding that “the particulars of the case are less interesting than the general trend, which is toward greater and greater paranoia.” To illustrate his point the independent journalist refers to the FBI’s Operation Crossfire Hurricane into alleged Trump-Russia collusion which turned out to be what CNN described as a “big nothing burger”.
He also cites the US intelligence community and mainstream media attempts to depict New York Post’s allegations about Hunter Biden as “Russia disinformation.” Lazare also posits what he refers to as vain efforts by the Democrat-run US House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack as a means of steering public attention away from a question of “whether FBI or CIA informants helped egg on the insurrection.”
“So while the DHS has promised to call off its bloodhounds with regard to the AP, my sense is that paranoia will merely take on new forms as it continues to metastasize,” the writer says. “The problem can only get worse.”
Why US Federal Agencies are Tracking Independent Journalists
“Operation Whistle Pig” is just one of numerous surveillance efforts carried out by US federal agencies against journalists, notes former Department of Defence veteran analyst Karen Kwiatkowski.
“Utilising national technical means to track journalists, access their metadata to determine and identify their anonymous or protected sources, and using domestic law enforcement capabilities to monitor, pressure and prosecute journalists into revealing their sources has been done for more than just the previous administration,” Kwiatkowski says, referring to similar ops under the Obama administration.
In particular, the veteran DoD analyst refers to Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter James Risen, who was persecuted under the Obama administration over his refusal to reveal confidential sources. In February 2015, Risen called the Obama administration “the greatest enemy of press freedom.” Additionally, the Obama cabinet and also subsequent US administrations have targeted WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, seeking his extradition to the US.
Earlier this year, a scandal erupted over allegations of spying on Fox News host Tucker Carlson. In June the journalist claimed, citing an unnamed whistleblower within the US government, that the National Security Agency (NSA) was monitoring his electronic communications and had planned to leak them to the press to take his show off of the air for “political reasons.”
“This is increasingly standard practice for US administrations,” Kwiatkowski suggests. “However, in the case of US citizens, without FISA Court authorization, this kind of surveillance and targeting remains illegal and unconstitutional.”
While the US government usually justifies its conduct as matters of “national security,” in reality, according to the Pentagon veteran, it is protecting “government security” by chasing those who are leaking factual information that the US leadership finds “embarrassing”.
She refers to ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s revelation with regard to National Security Agency’s global spying programmes; Chelsea Manning’s exposure of Pentagon war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, and WikiLeaks bombshells, including Vault 7, which detailed CIA hacking techniques and cyber-tools.
“Avoiding political embarrassment, and controlling a certain political narrative is, for most people in Washington DC, more important and more compelling than national security,” she stresses.
While mainstream journalism in the US “is well moderated and normally serves to promote the government narrative of whatever subject, be it health, national security or science and technology,” there are alternative media sources that occasionally manage to gain audience and traction, she offered.
Ironically, according to Kwiatkowski, US government agencies are keeping an eye on dissenting news sources and independent journalists akin to Washington’s Cold War-era rivals, whom the US leadership used to scold for their own lack of press freedom.
How US Government Agencies are Surveilling Americans
It’s not only journalists who are being surveilled by US government agencies, however, as a FISA compliance review written in November 2020 and declassified on 26 April 2021 revealed that the FBI used the NSA’s massive electronic troves for warrantless searches of US citizens’ information, despite having been previously censured by a court for such activities.
In May 2021, Democratic Senator Ron Wyden raised an alarm over what he described as the Pentagon’s warrantless spying on US citizens. The DoD reportedly used various software tools that used location data harvested from common apps installed on peoples’ phones. Wyden’s investigation also “confirmed the warrantless purchase of Americans’ location data by the Internal Revenue Service, Customs and Border Protection, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Defence Intelligence Agency,” according to the senator’s letter, addressed to Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III.
That same month, CNN reported that the Biden administration was considering using private firms to surveil “suspected domestic terrorists” online under the pretext that the DHS and the FBI, are limited in how they can monitor citizens online without a warrant. An unnamed source said to be familiar with the matter told the broadcaster that outside entities hired by federal authorities would be able to “legally” infiltrate private groups to gather vast amounts of information.
December 15, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | CIA, DHS, FBI, Human rights, NSA, United States |
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State-sponsored/MSM supported medical tyranny is the new abnormal throughout the US/West and elsewhere worldwide.
I’m greatly indebted to numerous truth-telling medical and scientific experts for teaching me what I’ve learned about all things flu/covid — a medical education I never imagined getting pre-2020 but got since then on this most cutting edge of all issues.
To my great dismay, intelligent people I know are oblivious to reality on what’s crucial to know — believing rubbish fed them daily from official, MSM, and other disreputable sources instead of what’s scientifically indisputable.
Protecting and preserving public health and freedom depend on enough committed people rising up against what’s going on — slaying it before it slays us.
Relief won’t come judicially or legislatively.
On all issues mattering most, positive change never comes top down, only bottom up by committed people demanding no less.
The anti-public health/anti-freedom scheme was planned well before its rollout early last year.
As explained time and again, it’s all about wanting maximum numbers of unwanted people eliminated worldwide, along with transforming free and open societies into ruler/serf ones for survivors.
It’s a draconian new world order fit only for privileged interests at the expense or all others.
It’s what no one anywhere should tolerate, a tyrannical world that’s unsafe and unfit to live for the vast majority worldwide — the worst of all possible worlds.
Things don’t have to be this way.
Ordinary people have power to rise up against injustice, defy unjustifiable rules, disrupt best laid plans of dark forces and achieve positive change by their actions.
History proves it. Years of anti-war activism helped end a decade of US aggression in Southeast Asia — a pyrrhic victory as things turned out because anti-war activism waned.
The same applies to moving from chattel to wage slavery, from Jim Crow to its modern-day version, from freedom to mass incarceration, from healthcare as it should be to toxic mass-jabbing with unparalleled genocide in mind.
Governance of, by and for entrenched interests in the US/West and elsewhere is too debauched to fix.
The same goes for MSM guardians of wealth, power and privilege.
Scattered reforms won’t work. Transformational change is needed.
The only solution is popular revolution. Anything less assures no change of unacceptable same old, same old.
Wealth, power and privileged interests are enemies of ordinary people everywhere.
Collective defiance is needed to turn things from what’s destructive of the general welfare to what’s beneficial.
Former Pfizer vice president, its chief scientist for allergy and infectious diseases, co-founder of Doctors for (flu/covid) Ethics, Dr. Michael Yeadon, is on the right side of history for this most crucial of all issues.
Commenting on what’s gone on since early last year, he said the diabolical scheme has nothing to do with protecting us, everything to do with establishing “totalitarian control.”
Fundamental freedoms are being abolished incrementally.
Things began by denying refuseniks free access to restaurants and other places where large numbers gather.
Widespread use of freedom-destroying health passports may follow as a requirement to stay free from societal isolation altogether.
Yeadon compared the above to “dropping a cancerous cell into your body (that) grows and metastasizes and then it kills you.”
“(T)hat’s what” health passports are all about if instituted.
“So don’t tolerate them anywhere,” Yeadon stressed.
Once instituted, metastasizing will “regulate access to essential services like food, money, fuel, trains and things like that.”
“You’ll never get rid of (them). We’ve got to stop (what’s going on) beforehand.”
Otherwise we’ll “lose the ability to decide where to be at any time.”
Health passports will “regulate entry and exit from almost any controlled space, possibly even including your own home.”
“You’ll be required to keep your passport up to date by being fully jabbed” — meaning forever-jabbed one or more time annually.
The more toxic jabs gotten, the sooner your end time will arrive, most likely very unpleasantly from painful and/or debilitating disease(s).
Getting informed from reliable independent sources, getting motivated and enraged enough to no longer tolerate what’s going on is the only way to halt it once and for all.
“(I)t’s us” on our own against the diabolical scheme. We alone can and must stop it.
The alternative is deeply entrenched tyranny, a permanent new abnormal, dystopia no one should tolerate.
Jabs are vehicles of mass-extermination.
Pharma profiteers and Big Government backers “are the most ruthless of all corporate entities,” Dr. Vernon Coleman stressed, adding:
It’s been known since last year that mass-jabbing “cause(s) heart trouble, strokes, neurological problems,” and other serious health issues.
Coleman believes that most jabbed individuals will be “lucky to last five years.”
Individuals taking them “should be considered suicidal or certified insane.”
“Life expectation is going to fall dramatically – and not just because the quality of health care is deteriorating daily.”
“I honestly find it difficult to believe that there are people around who are so brainwashed and so terrified by the lies they’ve heard that they will accept as many jabs as they are offered.”
The power of repetition, especially on propaganda TV, gets most people — including intelligent ones — to believe almost anything no matter how scientifically or otherwise untrue.
With minimal effort, anyone connected online can learn enough about what’s going on from reliable, independent sources to know we’re being scammed by US/Western and other governments, Pharma and their MSM press agents.
Getting mad as hell, rising up and refusing to take it any more is the only way to beat the diabolical scheme.
Nothing else can work.
December 15, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Human rights |
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It’s the 13th December 2021. In my video dated 11th December I detailed some of the health problems which face the gullible folk who have succumbed to the lies and misinformation shared so widely and enthusiastically by governments, the medical establishment and the mainstream media.
In that video, entitled ‘Here’s why most of the jabbed will die early’ I mentioned my fear that the jabbed might suffer brain damage as a result of the covid-19 jab.
That fear was real, as I will show in this video.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/LdgWQ1tIO8qV/
It has been established that there is much that no one yet knows about the covid-19 jabs and the eagerness of the Medicines and healthcare products regulatory agency in the UK to licence a product about which information appeared to be lacking has never been adequately explained. We do know however that, as I was the first to reveal, the MHRA received a huge sum of money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – which has financial links with jab producers such as Pfizer.
As far as the effect on the brain is concerned the big question is, can the lipid nanoparticles carry the mRNA jab across the blood brain barrier?
The blood brain barrier is a semi permeable barrier of cells which prevent some substances in the blood from crossing into the protective fluid around the central nervous system.
It is vital to know if this happens because if it does then all bets are off as to what might happen to the brain.
And after all, liquid nanoparticles are already used to deliver other drugs across the blood brain barrier.
If the LNPs carry the mRNA jab into the brain then the neurons, the brain cells, might be marked as foreign by the body’s immune system. And as more booster jabs are given the problem will get worse.
The worry is that brain cells might be targeted and killed by cytotoxic T cells.
It has now been established that mRNA has been found in all human tissues except the kidney. It has been found in heart, lung, liver, testicles – and brain. A Japanese study, for example, showed that the vaccine does end up in the brain.
Also worrying is the fact that researchers have called for studies to investigate any relationship between jabs and acute CNS demyelination.
How much damage will this do?
How long will it take before brain damage can be identified?
I don’t have the foggiest idea.
And nor does anyone else.
In a normal experiment with a new drug, doctors would be looking and checking all the possible problems before releasing the drug for widespread use.
But the covid-19 jabs are being rolled out to billions without any one having the faintest idea what will happen.
If you have been jabbed, the first certainty seems to be that the mRNA vaccine will enter your brain.
The second certainty is that the more covid jabs you have, the more dangerous this will be.
How many of your brain cells will die is something only time will tell. And children, of course, will be more vulnerable because they are more vulnerable anyway and because they are likely to live longer.
Some experts, advisors and regulators will tell you that the risks are small. But how can they know that? And what is small? They told us that the blood clotting problems were small.
In my view, having one of these jabs is the equivalent of taking a huge dose of LSD and waiting to see what happens. And hoping that you’re not going to end up like Peter Green for example.
And, remember, the covid-19 jabs don’t stop you getting covid-19 and they don’t stop you passing it on. According to the NHS’s own guidelines in the UK you can still get or spread covid-19 even if you have had three jabs.
The choice about whether or not to be jabbed should be yours.
But governments want to make these jabs compulsory.
You can find links to more information on my websites www.vernoncoleman.com and www.vernoncoleman.org
If this jab were being given for a lethal disease with a 50% mortality rate then the risks might be worth taking. It’s not and they’re not.
Thank you for watching an old man in a chair. And thanks to Brand New Tube and to Muhammad Butt. Please subscribe to my channel on Brand New Tube and spread my videos about on other platforms such as Rumble, Brighteon, Odysee and Bitchute. My thanks to everyone who does this. Put this video on Twitter and Facebook too. If you get your wrist slapped regard it as a war injury. Please do translations too. All the papers and so on that I refer to can easily be found on the internet. If I give you all the links I’ll never do anything else. We do put up transcripts of the videos on both websites and when possible we add important links.
For the record, this channel has not been monetised – none of my videos ever has been. There are no ads, no sponsors and no requests for funds on videos or websites.
Don’t forget to watch my friend Dr Colin Barron’s amazing videos which are always fantastic and often incredibly funny. And visit his website www.colinbarron.co.uk
Read www.theLightpaper.co.uk for all the news considered too truthful to print by the mainstream media. An amazing 200,000 copies are distributed. That’s a bigger circulation than The Guardian. Make sure you get hold of a copy of `We are the 99%’ recorded by Darren and the Daz Band which is the anthem for the Resistance Movement. It’s vital it’s the Christmas Number One. There is a link to it on both my websites. And visit and astandinthepark.org which will give advice on how and where to stand in a park.
Please visit my own websites www.vernoncoleman.org and www.vernoncoleman.com. www.vernoncoleman.com is more old fashioned but contains hundreds of articles on animal issues, politics and much else in addition to health. You can find free books on both sites and brand new stuff is added every weekday. There are hundreds of original articles to read and, of course, the feature detailing vaccine damage is updated every week. New articles are added most days.
Vernon Coleman’s Wednesday Review will, God willing, appear here every Wednesday at 7pm. If it doesn’t then either something has happened to me or the video has been suppressed as has so much of my work these days.
We all need to pray for the truth to be shared by the many, not just the few. Whatever your religion you need to pray because the people running this fraud respect only lies but, in the way that vampires fear sunlight, they fear the truth – it is your government’s greatest enemy and our only weapon. Finally, although it may feel like it at times, please remember that you are not alone. More and more people are waking up and once they are awake they don’t go back to sleep. – which means our numbers are growing daily.
If we are going to win this war then we have to fight hard and with determination and passion and the truth. Remember, this is primarily a propaganda and media war.
Distrust the government, avoid mass media and fight the lies.
Thank you for watching an old man in a chair.
The EMA covid-19 data leak, and what it tells us about mRNA instability
Summary of the public assessment report for covid-19 vaccine Pfizer/BioNTech
Assessment Report – Covid-19 Vaccine Moderna
Concerns of lipid nanoparticle carrying mRNA vaccine into the brain: what to make of it?
RNA vaccines and their lipids
Vernon Coleman’s no 1 bestselling book Endgame explains the awful truth behind the covid fraud and the global warming fraud – and explains where we are heading. Endgame is available from Amazon as a paperback and an eBook.
More at vernoncoleman.org
December 15, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | COVID-19 Vaccine |
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TO:
- Professor Lim, Chairman, JCVI COVID-19 subcommittee
- Dr June Raine, Chief Executive, MHRARt
- Hon Sajid Javid, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care
- Professor Chris Whitty, Chief Medical Officer for England
- Sir Patrick Vallance, Government Chief Scientific Adviser
- Dr Jenny Harries, Chief Executive, UKHSA
Dear Professor Lim, Dr Raine, Mr Javid, Professor Whitty, Sir Patrick Vallance & Dr Harries,
URGENT RE:
- (I) latest government guidance re myocarditis
- (II) decision to offer a second dose of Pfizer to 12-15s
- (III) reckless disregard for the benefits of natural immunity in children
As a group of senior scientists and clinicians, we wrote to you only two weeks ago regarding your decision to offer a second dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine to 16-17-year-olds despite lack of detailed safety data. We still await a reply, but are compelled to write again after this week’s UKHSA publication of guidance on myocarditis, coinciding with your latest unexpected advice to widen the age range for the second dose to include 12-15 year-olds. We also still awaiting a reply as to why the JCVI continue to recommend vaccination for those children who already have naturally-acquired immunity and for whom there is no possibility of any benefit from the COVID-19 vaccines.
I. Myocarditis guidelines
The following statements (in italics) from the UKHSA document require urgent clarification regarding our points (in red).
- “myocarditis and pericarditis following vaccination is usually mild or stable and most patients typically recover fully without medical treatment”
This unsubstantiated assertion is not compatible with the statement made in the bullet point below. Unless these children had cardiac MRI scans and follow-up, it is impossible to state that they ‘typically recover fully’
- “myocarditis – significant left ventricular (LV) fibrosis has been described in a high percentage of children admitted to hospital, with a small percentage of these having non-sustained ventricular tachycardia (VT)”
According to the authors, these children were not clinically distinguishable from children in other case series, also with an apparently ‘mild’ clinical course. The concerning findings on MRI were only discovered because the authors thoroughly investigated all children with serious VAEs.
- “no follow-up data is available yet on hospitalised patients”
This point undermines the claim made in the first bullet point.
- “the long-term consequences of this condition secondary to vaccination are yet unknown, so any screening recommendations need to be balanced against the frequency and severity of the disease with the aim to prevent complications, in particular of myocarditis (arrhythmias, long term myocardial damage or heart failure)”
As Pfizer have admitted, the children’s trials are too small to look for myocarditis, but long term studies are in progress due to report in 2025 Recommendations in paediatric patients: Why was there no consultation with the RCPCH?
- “Where appropriate, the patient should be seen face to face and this assessment should include their vital signs.”
When would it be ‘inappropriate’ to see face to face and check vital signs, in a child with any of the concerning symptoms listed?
- “If patients have mild symptoms, they do not require referral to secondary care at this point.”
How would you expect a GP to determine whether myocarditis was ‘mild’ in the absence of an ECG and a Troponin level? How does such an approach match up with rigorous post-marketing surveillance of a vaccine still under emergency use authorisation?
(II) Decision to offer a second dose of Pfizer to 12-15s
There has been no new follow-up data disclosed since the JCVI decision to offer only one dose to 12-15s regarding the outcome for children with vaccine-induced myocarditis. The suggestion that the MHRA has seen no new adverse event reports of myocarditis, is perhaps not surprising given that the UK has not proceeded to a second dose known to be associated with a greatly increased risk. How does the JCVI look at the concerns outlined in the government’s own myocarditis guidance and reconcile them with their duty of care to First do no Harm?
A systematic study from Hong Kong linking all vaccinations to health records has revealed myocarditis occurring 1 in 2,680 in young males after their second dose of Pfizer, and they have now dropped the second dose from their schedule. The latest FDA data similarly report 1 in 5000 for males age 16-17. How is it ethical to recommend a second dose to this cohort knowing the risks to the individual will far outweigh any benefits?
How will effective pharmacovigilance and real-time data be obtained on every child admitted with a diagnosis of myocarditis by vaccine status? How many child fatalities have you factored in as acceptable collateral damage resulting from your decision to recommend the second dose of this vaccine for a condition which poses no significant threat to this age group? The answer surely must be zero.
III. Naturally acquired immunity in children
Perhaps most pressing of all, why does the JCVI continue to disregard the obvious benefits of naturally acquired immunity? This has now been conclusively shown in adults to be much longer lasting and robust than that following vaccination . It is already known that children have good crossover immunity from previous coronaviruses, with excellent T-cell function. And it is widely recognised that their strong innate immune systems are the reason for Covid-19 being extremely mild in children. It is estimated that in England, 5.47 million 5-14-year-olds have already had SARS-CoV-2 infection (which represents 79% of the population of this age group). An international meta-analysis of re-infections post natural infection reported only 577 cases of reinfection from 22 countries over a 15-month period, including only 10 deaths, with not a single death in younger adults let alone in children. Numerous other publications have affirmed that naturally acquired immunity is robust, comprehensive and long-lasting.
Therefore, for the 80% of children who are already immune, there can be no benefit from vaccination and only the potential for serious or even life-threatening harm. For the 20% not yet infected, there are still unanswered questions about the potential for vaccination to interfere with the ability to mount a broad robust and long-lasting immunity and we risk committing these children to the theatre of ever more frequent boosters, each with its own risk of injury, which now seems to be the future for adults. Indeed, this becomes even more important with the new omicron variant. There is no point in vaccinating children with a vaccine which will cause immune imprinting to the Wuhan variant and will impede their ability to make antibodies to the new variants as they present.
We contend that any practitioner who chooses to vaccinate a child in the knowledge that they have recovered from SARS-CoV-2 infection, is in breach of their professional duty of care to put their patient’s best interest first. In addition. failure of the practitioner to disclose the full contents of the UKHSA Myocarditis guidance to the patient and parent would constitute a failure to obtain fully informed consent. See GMC Good Medical Practice Guidelines.
Yours sincerely,
- Dr Rosamond Jones, MD, FRCPCH, retired consultant paediatrician
- Professor Anthony J Brookes, Department of Genetics & Genome Biology, University of Leicester Professor David Livermore, BSc, PhD, Professor of Medical Microbiology, University of East Anglia
- Professor Angus Dalgleish, MD, FRCP, FRACP, FRCPath, FMed Sci, Professor of Oncology, St Georges Hospital, London
- Dr Theresa Lawrie, MBBCh, PhD, Director, Evidence-Based Medicine Consultancy Ltd, Bath
- Dr Clare Craig, BMBCh, FRCPath, Pathologist
- John Collis, RN, Retired specialist nurse practitioner
- Professor Keith Willison, PhD, Professor of Chemical Biology, Imperial, London
- Professor Richard Ennos, MA, PhD. Honorary Professorial Fellow, University of Edinburgh Professor John Fairclough FRCS FFSEM retired Honorary Consultant Surgeon
- Lord Moonie, MBChB, MRCPsych, MFCM, MSc, House of Lords, former parliamentary under- secretary of state 2001-2003, former consultant in Public Health Medicine
- Dr Roland Salmon, MBBS, MRCGP, FFPH, former Director, Communicable Disease Surveillance Centre, Wales
- Dr John Flack, BPharm, PhD. Retired Director of Safety Evaluation, Beecham Pharmaceuticals 1980-1989 and Senior Vice-president for Drug Discovery 1990-92 SmithKline Beecham
- Dr Alan Mordue, MBChB, FFPH. Retired Consultant in Public Health Medicine & Epidemiology
- Dr Geoffrey Maidment, MD, FRCP, retired consultant physician
- Dr Helen Westwood MBChB MRCGP DCH DRCOG, General Practitioner
- Mr James Royle, MBChB, FRCS, MMedEd, Colorectal surgeon Dr Elizabeth Evans MA(Cantab), MBBS, DRCOG, Retired Doctor Dr Emma Brierly, MRCGP, General Practitioner
- Katherine MacGilchrist, BSc (Hons), MSc, CEO/Systematic Review Director, Epidemica Ltd.
- Dr Alan Black, MBBS, MSc, DipPharmMed, retired pharmaceutical physician
- Mr Anthony Hinton, MBChB, FRCS, Consultant ENT surgeon, London
- Dr Greta Mushet, MBChB, MRCPsych, retired Consultant Psychiatrist in Psychotherapy
- Dr Kulvinder Singh Manik MBChB, MRCGP, MA(Cantab), LLM, Gray’s Inn
- Dr Rohaan Seth, Bsc (hons), MBChB (hons), MRCGP, Retired General Practitioner
- Mr Ian F Comaish, MA, BM BCh, FRCOphth, FRANZCO, Consultant ophthalmologist
- Dr Sarah Myhill, MBBS, Dip NM, Retired GP, Independent Naturopathic Physician
- Dr Christopher Exley, PhD, FRSB, Retired professor in Bioinorganic Chemistry
- Dr David Critchley, BSc, PhD, 32 years in pharmaceutical R&D as a clinical research scientist. Dr Gerry Quinn, PhD. Postdoctoral researcher in microbiology and immunology
- Dr Jonathan Engler, MBChB, LlB (hons), DipPharmMed
- Dr Mark Bell, MBChB, MRCP(UK), FRCEM, Consultant in Emergency Medicine
- Dr Zac Cox, BDS, LCPH, Holistic Dentist, Homeopath
- Dr Elizabeth Burton, MBChB, retired general practitioner
- Margaret Moss, MA (Cantab), CBiol, MRSB, Director, The Nutrition and Allergy Clinic, Cheshire
- Julia Annakin, RN,
- Dr Noel Thomas, MA, MBChB, DCH, DObsRCOG, DTM&H, MFHom, retired doctor
- Immunisation Nurse Specialist
- Dr Fiona Martindale, MbChB, MRCGP, GP in out of hours
- Dr Branko Latinkic, BSc, PhD, Molecular biologist
- Dr Jason Lester, MRCP, FRCR, Consultant Clinical Oncologist.
- Dr Sam White, MBChB MRCGP, General Practitioner, Functional medicine practitioner
- Dr Holly Young, BSc, MBChB, MRCP, Consultant Palliative Care Medicine
- Dr David Bramble, MB ChB, MRCPsych, MD, Retired Consultant Child & Adolescent Learning Disability
- Dr. Scott Mitchell, MBChB, MRCS, Associate Specialist, Emergency Medicine
- Dr Peter Chan, BM, MRCS, MRCGP, General Practitioner, Functional medicine practitioner
- Dr Stefanie Williams, Dermatologist
- Dr Andrew Isaac, MB BCh, Physician, retired
- Dr Christina Peers, MBBS, DRCOG, DFSRH, FFSRH, Menopause specialist
- Dr Michael D Bell, MBChB, MRCGP, retired General Practitioner
- Dr Livia Tossici-Bolt, PhD, NHS Clinical Scientist
- Dr Carmen Wheatley, D Phil, Orthomolecular Oncology
- Dr Ruth Wilde, MB BCh, MRCEM, AFMCP, Integrative & Functional Medicine Doctor
- Dr David Morris, MBChB, MRCP(UK), General Practitioner
- Dr Jayne LM Donegan, MBBS, DRCOG, DCH, DFFP, MRCGP, HMA, Integrative Medicine practitioner
- Dr Franziska Meuschel, MD, ND, PhD, LFHom, BSEM, Nutritional, Environmental and Integrated Medicine
- Dr Andrew Isaac, MB BCh, Physician, retired
December 14, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | COVID-19 Vaccine |
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Governments around the world have encouraged and enforced a new form of segregation based on vaccine status. This is not only dangerously inhumane; there is no scientific basis for this.
There seems to be an underlying presumption here that the unvaccinated are unclean (regardless of natural immunity) and their presence will spread disease. What if, however, existing studies reveal that there is little to no difference between the COVID vaccinated and unvaccinated in terms of becoming infected, harboring the virus (viral load in the oral and nasopharynx), and transmitting it?
As it relates to Omicron, two recent small but interesting preliminary studies show that 80% of the omicron cases were double vaccinated. Wilhelm et al. reported on reduced neutralization of SARS-CoV-2 omicron variant by vaccine sera and monoclonal antibodies. “in vitro findings using authentic SARS-CoV-2 variants indicate that in contrast to the currently circulating Delta variant, the neutralization efficacy of vaccine-elicited sera against Omicron was severely reduced highlighting T-cell mediated immunity as essential barrier to prevent severe COVID-19.” Further, the CDC has reported on the details for 43 cases of COVID-19 attributed to the Omicron variant. They found that “34 (79%) occurred in persons who completed the primary series of an FDA-authorized or approved COVID-19 vaccine ≥14 days before symptom onset or receipt of a positive SARS-CoV-2 test result.”
As it relates to the vaccinated and unvaccinated being similar in terms of infection, viral load, and transmission capacity, and thus no underlying evidence to separate them societally, we specifically focus on and present (and based largely on Delta variant data) the body of evidence.
1) Salvatore et al. examined the transmission potential of vaccinated and unvaccinated persons infected with the SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant in a federal prison, July-August 2021. They found a total of 978 specimens were provided by 95 participants, “of whom 78 (82%) were fully vaccinated and 17 (18%) were not fully vaccinated…clinicians and public health practitioners should consider vaccinated persons who become infected with SARS-CoV-2 to be no less infectious than unvaccinated persons.”
2) Singanayagam et al. examined the transmission and viral load kinetics in vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals with mild delta variant infection in the community. They found that (in 602 community contacts (identified via the UK contract-tracing system) of 471 UK COVID-19 index cases were recruited to the Assessment of Transmission and Contagiousness of COVID-19 in Contacts cohort study and contributed 8145 upper respiratory tract samples from daily sampling for up to 20 days) “vaccination reduces the risk of delta variant infection and accelerates viral clearance. Nonetheless, fully vaccinated individuals with breakthrough infections have peak viral load similar to unvaccinated cases and can efficiently transmit infection in household settings, including to fully vaccinated contacts.”
3) Chia et al. reported that PCR cycle threshold (Ct) values were “similar between both vaccinated and unvaccinated groups at diagnosis, but viral loads decreased faster in vaccinated individuals. Early, robust boosting of anti-spike protein antibodies was observed in vaccinated patients, however, these titers were significantly lower against B.1.617.2 as compared with the wildtype vaccine strain.”
4) Israel, 2021 looked at Large-scale study of antibody titer decay following BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine or SARS-CoV-2 infection, and reported as “To determine the kinetics of SARS-CoV-2 IgG antibodies following administration of two doses of BNT162b2 vaccine, or SARS-CoV-2 infection in unvaccinated individuals…In vaccinated subjects, antibody titers decreased by up to 40% each subsequent month while in convalescents they decreased by less than 5% per month. Six months after BNT162b2 vaccination 16.1% subjects had antibody levels below the sero-positivity threshold of <50 AU/mL, while only 10.8% of convalescent patients were below <50 AU/mL threshold after 9 months from SARS-CoV-2 infection.”
5) In the UK COVID-19 vaccine Surveillance Report for week #42, it was noted that there is “waning of the N antibody response over time” and “that N antibody levels appear to be lower in individuals who acquire infection following 2 doses of vaccination.” The same report (Table 2, page 13), shows that in the older age groups above 30, the double vaccinated persons have greater infection risk than the unvaccinated, presumably because the latter group include more people with stronger natural immunity from prior Covid disease. See also UK PHE reports 43, 44, 45, 46 for similar data.
6) In Barnstable, Massachusetts, Brown et al. found that among 469 cases of COVID-19, 74% were fully vaccinated, and that “the vaccinated had on average more virus in their nose than the unvaccinated who were infected.”
7) Riemersma et al. found “no difference in viral loads when comparing unvaccinated individuals to those who have vaccine “breakthrough” infections. Furthermore, individuals with vaccine breakthrough infections frequently test positive with viral loads consistent with the ability to shed infectious viruses.” Results indicate that “if vaccinated individuals become infected with the delta variant, they may be sources of SARS-CoV-2 transmission to others.” They reported “low Ct values (<25) in 212 of 310 fully vaccinated (68%) and 246 of 389 (63%) unvaccinated individuals. Testing a subset of these low-Ct samples revealed infectious SARS-CoV-2 in 15 of 17 specimens (88%) from unvaccinated individuals and 37 of 39 (95%) from vaccinated people.”
8) Ignoring the risk of infection, given that someone was infected, Acharya et al. found “no significant difference in cycle threshold values between vaccinated and unvaccinated, asymptomatic and symptomatic groups infected with SARS-CoV-2 Delta.”
9) Gazit et al. out of Israel showed that “SARS-CoV-2-naïve vaccinees had a 13-fold (95% CI, 8-21) increased risk for breakthrough infection with the Delta variant compared to those previously infected.”
Dr Alexander holds a PhD. He has experience in epidemiology and in the teaching clinical epidemiology, evidence-based medicine, and research methodology. Dr Alexander is a former Assistant Professor at McMaster University in evidence-based medicine and research methods; former COVID Pandemic evidence-synthesis consultant advisor to WHO-PAHO Washington, DC (2020) and former senior advisor to COVID Pandemic policy in Health and Human Services (HHS) Washington, DC (A Secretary), US government; worked/appointed in 2008 at WHO as a regional specialist/epidemiologist in Europe’s Regional office Denmark, worked for the government of Canada as an epidemiologist for 12 years, appointed as the Canadian in-field epidemiologist (2002-2004) as part of an international CIDA funded, Health Canada executed project on TB/HIV co-infection and MDR-TB control (involving India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Afghanistan, posted to Kathmandu); employed from 2017 to 2019 at Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) Virginia USA as the evidence synthesis meta-analysis systematic review guideline development trainer; currently a COVID-19 consultant researcher in the US-C19 research group
December 14, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights |
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Yesterday, in a statement to Parliament on the UK’s planned “vaccine passport”, Health Secretary Sajid Javid admitted the NHS Pass would require three shots for you to be considered “fully vaccinated”.
“Once all adults have had a reasonable chance to get their booster jab, we intend to change this exemption to require a booster dose,”
While many of us predicted this would be the case, it is the first time any British politician has actually said it out loud, and in front of parliament too.
This incredibly cynical “evolving definition” of “fully vaccinated” is not a new phenomenon, and is not isolated to the UK either.
Israel changed their definition of “fully vaccinated” to include the booster months ago. New Zealand’s ministry of health is “considering” doing the same, as is Australia.
The EU isn’t far behind either, with proposals in place to make travel dependent on having a third dose.
The US hasn’t formally adopted a new definition yet, but you’d have to be blind not to see the signs. Just yesterday the LA Times headlined:
Should the definition of ‘fully vaccinated’ be changed to include a booster shot?
An article on Kaiser Health News asks the same thing.
Tony Fauci is quoted in the Independent as saying it’s only a matter of time before the definition is updated:
“It’s going to be a matter of when, not if” getting a booster shot will be considered being “fully vaccinated,” Dr Fauci said.
Opinion pieces are already appearing asking “is it safe to hangout with the boosted”? (This headline was so unpopular, the Atlantic changed it only a couple of hours after it was published).
All in all it seems pretty clear that, by the time 2022 rolls around, most of the Western world will require three shots in order to qualify as “fully vaccinated”.
It’s also clear that this won’t stop at three. Already, just last week, Pfizer were claiming they may need to “move up the timeline” for a fourth vaccine dose.
This change is being blamed on Omicron, with articles warning the “new variant” can “hit” the vaccinated. Fortune reports:
Omicron is making scientists redefine what it means to be ‘fully vaccinated’ against COVID
So, the third (and maybe fourth) doses are (allegedly) for Omicron…but that model can extend to perpetuity. In order to go to five, six or seven they’ll only need to “discover” more “new variants”.
It will just keep going and going.
But there is good news in all this, every time the powers-that-shouldn’t-be change the rules in the middle of the game, it’s a chance to knock people out of their media-induced hypnosis.
There are promising signs that millions of already-vaccinated will reject the booster. We can build on that.
So tell your single and double jabbed friends, try to open their eyes to the path they are starting down.
They may consider themselves “fully vaccinated”, but the government doesn’t, and never will.
December 14, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights |
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mRNA vaccine protection from Covid is far weaker than natural immunity and declines very fast, according to a new study of almost 6 million people in Israel.
During the summer Covid wave, more than 140,000 Israelis who had been vaccinated but not received a booster shot became infected with Covid. Put another way, in just two months, about 1 out of every 20 vaccinated Israelis became infected with Sars-Cov-2.
Natural immunity – the protection following infection and recovery – lasts much longer, the study shows.
In fact, people who had already had Covid once had better protection from the virus more than a year later than people who had been vaccinated only three months before.
The gap was even larger in cases of severe infection.
Vaccinated people were more than five times as likely to develop severe infections than people with natural immunity. Only 25 out of roughly 300,000 Israelis with natural immunity developed severe Covid infections in the summer wave – compared to almost 1,400 vaccinated Israelis.
The difference did not result from gaps in age between vaccinated and recovered people. People over 60 benefitted even more from natural immunity relative to vaccination than did younger people.
The study also showed that giving people who had natural immunity a vaccine dose did little to lower rates of infection for them, raising the question of why they should ever be vaccinated.
Finally, the study offered a disturbing signal that vaccination may ultimately interfere with the development of lasting immunity in people who are infected after being vaccinated.
A booster shot did lower the risk of infection about to the level of peak protection from natural immunity – but because the study ended in September, it is impossible to know how long that protection may last.
All these findings come out of a database of Covid infections among almost 6 million Israelis in August and September, at the peak of the fourth Covid wave in Israel. The database contains information on essentially every Israeli over age 16 who was fully vaccinated or had previously had a Covid infection.
The paper, “Protection and waning of natural and hybrid COVID-19 immunity,” is currently available as a preprint at:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.04.21267114v1.full.pdf
Oddly, the paper’s title does not mention waning of vaccine immunity, although the figures it presents make the severity of the problem clear. Such shyness is common among researchers presenting bad news about Covid vaccines – they will offer the data, but not highlight it.
Israel has exclusively used the Pfizer mRNA vaccine, began mass vaccinations before almost any other country, and has an excellent health care database. As a result, it has among the best information on the effectiveness of the shots. It offers far more complete data than the United States.
The vaccine failure over the summer in Israel – following apparent success in the spring – has presaged a similar pattern across the United States and Europe, and a similar desperate campaign for boosters.
In this paper, the researchers examined infection rates among five different groups of Israelis – those with natural immunity, those who had received boosters, those who were vaccinated but had not received boosters, those with natural immunity who had also received a vaccine, and those who had become infected after being vaccinated.
The researchers specifically excluded unvaccinated Israelis without natural immunity from the comparison because Israel has very few of them and they are “unrepresentative of the overall population.”
In other words, the researchers explicitly denied the validity of the comparison that vaccine advocates make when they compare Covid rates among vaccinated and unvaccinated people in places with high vaccination rates (a point I have been trying to make for months).
The researchers found that the highest rates of infection by far came in people who had been vaccinated at least six months before. They had a nearly 3 percent chance of being infected per month (the researchers present the figure as 89 per 100,000 “person-days.”)
Those people were four times as likely to be infected as newly vaccinated people. They were also seven times as likely to be infected as people who had natural immunity from an infection six to eight months before, and three times as likely as those who had natural immunity from an infection more than year before.
A single vaccination dose in people with natural immunity temporarily produced strong protection, the researchers found. But after six months, the advantage had faded to within the margin of statistical error. In other words, so-called hybrid immunity hardly appeared to exist after six months – natural immunity was once again providing the protection.
Nor did vaccination appear to stop severe disease.
Nearly every case of severe disease in the database – almost 1,400 of the roughly 1,600 cases – came in vaccinated but unboosted people. Boosters did appear to reduce severe disease significantly. Again, though, the study covered less than two months after the booster program began, when boosters should be at peak effectiveness.
Finally, the study showed that people who had been vaccinated and then been infected and recovered were actually more likely to be infected again six months later than those who had only “pure” natural immunity.
That finding, though based on a small number of cases, adds to worrying data that mRNA vaccination may actually wrong-foot our immune systems in the long run and make it harder to build lifelong protection against Covid.
December 14, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine |
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Russiagate is the biggest scandal in American history.
Nothing comes close in size, scope or harm to the republic than the years-long effort to cripple Donald Trump’s presidency by claiming he conspired with an enemy state to steal the 2016 election and then do its bidding as commander-in-chief.
Its notorious predecessors – L’Affaire Lewinsky, Iran-Contra, Watergate, Teapot Dome, Crédit Mobilier, the XYZ Affair – involved relatively small numbers of malefactors engaged in specific acts of illegality and corruption (we still don’t know who, if anyone, planned the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol)
Russiagate, by contrast, is a vast conspiracy involving innumerable powerful forces, including the Democratic Party, NeverTrump Republicans, the Obama administration, the FBI, Department of Justice and the nation’s most prestigious news outlets.
Where previous scandals often ended with public accountability for the perpetrators – Watergate saw the imprisonment of top White House aides and President Nixon’s resignation – and public reforms, Russiagate has produced no such reckoning.
Russiagate began with a kernel of truth: Someone – probably Russians, though we still don’t know for sure – hacked the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s private server. Fearful of what might be released, the Clinton campaign tried to discredit any damaging material by raising dark questions about its source. (Joe Biden executed this same strategy to great effect when he falsely described the evidence of corruption found on his son Hunter’s laptop as “Russian disinformation.”)
In response, the Clinton campaign financed an absurd collection of conspiracy theories involving peeing prostitutes and billion-dollar bribes, the so-called Steele dossier. Its importance cannot be overstated – it was the dossier that linked the Trump campaign to the hacking. No dossier, no collusion theory.
During the summer and fall of 2016, Hillary’s henchmen fed this preposterous concoction to Obama administration officials in the DOJ, FBI, CIA and State Department. Everyone knew it was a political operation: Declassified notes showed that then-CIA Director John Brennan briefed President Obama in July 2016 that Clinton planned to tie Trump to Russia as “a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.”
Clinton staffers – including Jake Sullivan, who now serves as Biden’s national security adviser – tried to interest the mainstream press in its scurrilous accusations, but got little traction because they could not be verified. Instead of laughing it all off as transparent campaign mud-slinging, however, the FBI joined the conspiracy. The bureau took the extreme step of opening a counter-intelligence probe into an ongoing presidential campaign – and its agents perjured themselves to obtain wire-tapping warrants.
Days after the November election, Hillary’s campaign focused on “Russian interference” as a chief reason for her defeat. On Jan. 5, 2017, President Obama, Vice President Biden and other key leaders met with FBI Director James Comey in the Oval Office to discuss Russia-related matters. We do not know what was discussed in that meeting, but the next day, Comey briefed President-elect Trump on some allegations in the Steele dossier. Four days later, on Jan. 10, CNN used that briefing as a news hook to report the collusion conspiracy theories as high-drama news.
Over the next few months and years, current and former officials illegally fed misleading classified material and partisan anonymous quotes to the New York Times, Washington Post, NBC News and other sympathetic press outlets to advance the narrative. Brennan and former National Director of Intelligence James Clapper became a constant presence on cable news, using the top-secret authority of their previous positions to assure the public that collusion was real – although in sworn testimony, Clapper admitted he had not seen such evidence.
Congressional Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Adam Schiff – who falsely claimed to have seen “more than circumstantial evidence” of Trump/Russia collusion – amplified the smears.
The appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller to investigate the fantasy in May 2017 fueled the fire. His effort became part of the scheme: He only looked for evidence that might implicate Trump, ignoring questions about who cooked up the conspiracy theory, how they disseminated it throughout the government and media, and the laws they might have broken in the process.
Despite his best effort, Mueller said he’d found no evidence of collusion when he released his report in April 2019. That should have killed the conspiracy theory and – following the script of previous major scandals – sparked a period of reflection by the government, the media and the American people that asked: How did we get this so wrong?
Such a broad reckoning has not yet happened. DoJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s 2020 report detailing grave abuses in the FBI’s handling of the matter prompted little outcry and no sweeping reform. The recent indictments of Clinton-connected actors filed by Special Counsel John Durham – who is finally doing the work Mueller should have, exposing the malfeasance that actually transpired during the 2016 campaign – have, bizarrely, led partisans to minimize his findings and actually double-down on the debunked collusion narrative. Recent pieces in The Atlantic and New York Times, for example, suggest, without evidence, that “Mueller never definitively got to the bottom of what happened.”
As Aaron Maté recently reported for RealClearInvestigations, many news organizations have refused to correct documented errors in Trump/Russia coverage, including deeply flawed articles thatwere awarded a Pulitzer Prize.
Leading peddlers of the hoax – including Brennan, Clapper, Pelosi, Schiff and Sullivan – have paid no price for their actions. To date, no one has conducted probing interviews with Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama about their roles in the scandal.
Engineered by broad swaths of the government and media, the effort to paint a sitting president as a foreign agent alone makes Russiagate the worst scandal in American history. But it is this second, still ongoing phase – this willful effort to deny what happened, this refusal to hold the perpetrators accountable – that presents the most serious danger to our nation.
If truth and justice don’t matter, what does?
December 14, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | FBI, United States |
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This week’s nationwide annihilation of Biden’s Federal Contractor vaccine mandate at the hands Georgia Federal Judge R. Stan Baker has resulted in a landslide retreat of cowardly mega-corporations from their so-confident bullying of American workers.
Biden’s illegal gamble, the nationwide Federal contractor vaccine mandate, has like his previous Medicare mandate and OSHA if-you-have-100-workers-mandatory-vax mandate been ripped to shreds early on in the courts.
Biden’s mandates have always been a bullying gamble, an admission that they knew they were engaging in illegal acts but that they would continue to use the not-insignificant weapons of the executive branch to blast as much harm as possible until the courts stepped in and noted the obvious: “You can’t do this!”
Cynics – and I sympathize – will say that the courts could have ruled either way so don’t get too excited.
That’s the lesson of the past two years: There is nothing below us as we look down. It takes our breath away. We now understand that our civilization has been built on a pile of sand and any determined entity could tunnel under us as we are distracted by the human necessities of providing for our families and living our finite lives as best as possible.
This horrible reality cannot be unseen.
Previously we viewed our rulers – from dog catcher to president – as malevolent but for the most part at a distance. We never thought they would reach out with their gradually but steadily-acquired iron fist and squeeze the oxygen from our lungs: “Take a shot or starve!”
The Hungarians in early 1918 similarly were shocked that living somewhat silently among them were aliens who would activate themselves at the exact most fertile moment and literally up-end their somnambulant state, imposing “mandates” on their society that included mobile gallows – a crude earlier form of the forced vax.
With the welcome disintegration of this evil government decree – via Judge Baker’s ruling that the contractor mandate is illegal – one by one the mega-corporations also see their position as shifting to the untenable. They are bailing out as fast as possible.
Some 83,000 Florida healthcare workers no longer face being kicked to the street by US government-sponsored terrorism, until this week dutifully enforced by the “free market” prostitutes in bed with the state.
As hero Alex Berenson has reported Thursday, mega corporations in the US are also suddenly looking under themselves and finding that they are alone. No more government guns aimed at the powerless…at least for the time being.
General Electric, 3M, Verizon, and Oracle have in the past day or so hedged their bets and snuck out of bed with the US government: no more vax requirements! We are talking about a large group of people no longer bound by the brotherhood of the needle.
We are winning this for now and should pause to drink it in.
But at the same time we must also look at what has rotted in our civilization that would allow such a force to upend us, to unleash this iron fist once hidden in a velvet glove. Life will never be the same knowing what these people have done to us. They must never be allowed to forget it.
Copyright © 2021 by RonPaul Institute
December 13, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States |
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