The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) advisory committee today endorsed Pfizer’s COVID vaccine for children ages 5 to 11, despite strong objections raised during the meeting by multiple scientists and physicians.
The vote passed with 17 supporting it and one abstention.
Before the shots can be rolled out, the FDA will have to formally authorize the vaccine, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) must also weigh in with its own recommendations — but the Biden administration’s announcement last week that it has already ordered 68 million doses of the pediatric vaccine suggests Pfizer’s request will sail through.
According to the FDA website, as of Oct. 25, the agency had received 139,470 comments from the public prior to today’s meeting — a number federal officials described as strikingly high.
As he opened the meeting, Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER), said, “I want to acknowledge the fact that there are strong feelings that have clearly been expressed by members of the public both for and against” authorization.
The dose for younger children would be one-third the strength given to people 12 and older, with two shots given three weeks apart.
Based on CDC data presented during the meeting, among children 5 to <12 years of age, there have been approximately 1.8 million confirmed and reported COVID cases since the beginning of the pandemic, and only 143 COVID-related deaths in the U.S. through Oct. 14.
In this same age group, there were 8,622 COVID-related hospitalizations through Sept 18.
“This translates to cumulative incidence rates of approximately 6,000 and 30 per 100,000 for confirmed COVID cases and COVID-related hospitalizations, respectively, among children 5 to <12 years of age,” Pfizer’s application said.
Children with underlying medical conditions, such as asthma, diabetes and obesity, made up two-thirds of severe COVID cases.
Pfizer provided safety data on two study cohorts of children ages 5 to 11, both of roughly equal size. The first group was followed only for about two months, the second for only two-and-a-half weeks.
The two-month cohort included 2,268 children ages 5 to 11. Of the 2,268 children, 1,518 received the vaccine and 750 received a placebo. Each received two shots spaced three weeks apart.
Pfizer’s study found its vaccine was about 91% effective against symptomatic COVID in children, based on 16 cases of COVID in the placebo group and three cases in the vaccinated group over the brief follow-up period.
Most side effects occurred within a couple of days and included pain at the injection site, fatigue, headache, muscle pains and chills, Pfizer said.
According to Pfizer, the number of participants in the current clinical development program was “too small to detect any potential risks of myocarditis associated with vaccination.”
Long-term safety of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine “to evaluate long-term sequelae of post-vaccination myocarditis/pericarditis” in participants 5 to <12 years of age will not be studied until after the vaccine is authorized for children,” Pfizer’s application noted.
Pfizer data insufficient, kids’ risk of vaccine injury greater than COVID risk, experts say
Experts raised concerns over the lack of safety and efficacy data presented by Pfizer for use of its COVID vaccine in younger children, and they pointed to increasing safety signals based on reports to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
They also questioned the need to vaccinate children — whose risk of dying from COVID is “almost nil” — at all.
According to Dr. Meryl Nass, member of the Children’s Health Defense Scientific Advisory Panel, Pfizer once again did not use all of the children who participated in the trial in their safety study.
“Three thousand children received Pfizer’s COVID vaccine, but only 750 children were selectively included in the company’s safety analysis,” Nass said. “Studies in the 5-11 age group are essentially the same as the 12-15 group — in other words, equally brief and unsatisfying, with inadequate safety data and efficacy data, with no strong support for why this type of immuno-bridging analysis is sufficient.”
Nass said, “All serious adverse events were considered unrelated to the vaccine.”
During the meeting and in its FDA application, Pfizer argued children should be vaccinated to prevent SARS-CoV-2 transmission, yet the company did not assess asymptomatic transmission.
Dr. Ofer Levy, a VRBPAC member, asked for evidence that Pfizer’s vaccine prevents transmission.
Dr. William Gruber, senior vice president of Pfizer Vaccine Clinical Research and Development, said they did not assess whether the vaccine prevents transmission, but said there is evidence the vaccine prevents transmission in adults.
When questioned further, Gruber was unable to cite specific evidence to back his assertion.
Steve Kirsch, founder of the COVID-19 Early Treatment Fund, asked the panel how they could do a risk-benefit analysis with Pfizer’s COVID vaccine if they did not know the CDC’s VAERS under-reporting factor (URF).
Kirsch asked:
“How can you do a risk-benefit of analysis of COVID vaccines if you don’t know the URF? This is extremely, extremely important. You have been assuming it has been one. It is not one. Using a URF of 41, which is calculated using CDC methodology, we find over 300,000 excess deaths in VAERS. If the vaccine didn’t kill these people, what did?”
“How many Americans have to die before you pull the plug?” Kirsch asked.
Kirsch also questioned the panel on why Maddie de Garay’s severe adverse reaction to the Pfizer vaccine, which left her paralyzed, was not reported by the company to the FDA.
Dr. Jessica Rose, viral immunologist and biologist, told the panel EUA of biological agents requires the existence of an emergency and the nonexistence of alternate treatment.
“There is no emergency and COVID-19 is exceedingly treatable,” Rose said.
In a peer-reviewed study co-authored by Rose, myocarditis rates were significantly higher in people 13 to 23 years old within eight weeks of the COVID vaccine rollout.
In 12- to15-year-olds, Rose said, reported cases of myocarditis were 19 times higher than background rates.
“In an act of censorship, this paper has been temporarily removed and it has now been killed without criticism of the work,” Rose said, noting the timing of the removal was strange.
Rose said tens of thousands of reports have been submitted to VAERS for children ages 0 to 18.
Rose explained:
“In this age group, 60 children have died — 23 of them were less than 2 years old. It is disturbing to note that “product administered to patient of inappropriate age was filed 5,510 times in this age group. Two children were inappropriately injected, presumably by a trained medical professional, and subsequently died.”
Dr. Josh Guetzkow, a senior lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said expanding the EUA to children is unnecessary, premature and will do more harm than good.
Guetzkow said there is no emergency for children, especially healthy ones whose risk of severe illness and death is “almost nil.”
Guetzkow said kids with pre-existing conditions and prior COVID infections were not included in Pfizer’s study, so including them in the EUA is negligence.
“Pfizer’s trial is woefully underpowered to detect specific safety concerns, such as myocarditis, just like the adolescent study was, and if they weren’t able to detect an unexpected safety concern there, they wouldn’t be able to here,” Guetzkow said.
Guetzkow said:
“In Pfizer’s study, only .5% of controls were dropped due to important protocol violations, versus 3% in the treatment group. The odds of that happening by chance are 1 in 10,000. This deviation is poorly explained with no ITT analysis. The study is not double-blind and may be subject to bias. Most VSD safety monitoring programs have not reported results, why not wait?”
Guetzkow said, “from CDC reports, we can expect that for every 18 child hospitalizations prevented, at least 43 will end up in the hospital for all causes following vaccination,” yet, the “FDA’s risk-benefit analysis only counts myocarditis hospitalization.”
“Why ignore the V-safe data, and shouldn’t FDA verify Pfizer’s efficacy and immunobridging analysis first?” he asked.
Guetzkow said VAERS shows alarming safety signals, which cannot be attributed to increased vaccination, simulated reporting or COVID infections.
“We calculated the ratio of adverse events reported per million Pfizer vaccinations to reports per million flu vaccinations among teenagers to see what to expect in children. Serious events are reported 51% more often for Pfizer, deaths 47 times, life-threatening conditions 49 times,” Guetzkow said.
Guetzkow asked the panel to look at the data on COVID vaccines compared to flu vaccines. Pointing to the data on reproductive organs, Guetzkow asked, “why would we expect children to take these risks to protect adults?”
There are more than 900 types of adverse events reported after Pfizer vaccination that have never been reported after flu vaccines, including 11 cases of multisystem-inflammatory syndrome (MS-C) that occurred without previous history of COVID infection, Guetzkow said.
He added that if the panel was considering authorizing Pfizer’s COVID vaccine to prevent MS-C — as Pfizer’s application suggested as one of the reasons they should — the panel should reconsider.
During another part of the meeting, Julia Barnes-Weise, director of the Global Healthcare Innovation Alliance Accelerator, said pharmaceutical companies have concerns.
“One of them is, especially for a not-yet-approved vaccine, that they could be held liable for any injury that that vaccine seems to have caused,” Barnes-Weise said.
In a preliminary analysis last week, FDA reviewers said protection would “clearly outweigh” the risk of a very rare side effect in almost all scenarios of the pandemic, PBS News Hour reported.
Children’s Health Defense (CHD) said yesterday it would take legal action against the FDA if it granted EUA for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for children 5- to 11- years old.
In a letter signed by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., CHD chairman and chief legal counsel, and Nass, Kennedy and Nass wrote:
“CHD will seek to hold you accountable for recklessly endangering this population with a product that has little efficacy but which may put them, without warning, at risk of many adverse health consequences, including heart damage, stroke, and other thrombotic events and reproductive harms.”
Megan Redshaw is a freelance reporter for The Defender. She has a background in political science, a law degree and extensive training in natural health.
PHARMACOVIGILANCE: the practice of monitoring the effects of medical drugs after they have been licensed for use, especially in order to identify and evaluate previously unreported adverse reactions.
Pages 34-35 of the FDA review of Pfizer’s data for the 5-11 year olds provides the pretense of truly caring about identifying and quantifying adverse events from the vaccine. Just look at all the “activities” Pfizer and its partner must do. Well, of course they have to do them, since their clinical trial was so underpowered (not enough subjects) and only ran 2 months for about half the kids and 2.5 weeks for the rest. Duh?
Not only that, but Pfizer presented its data to FDA on October 6, and FDA already had completed its review and written its 39 page report by October 23, 17 days later. Fast work. But then again, we are only talking about the health of 28 million elementary school kids. And millions more overseas whose countries follow FDA advice.
And lest I forget, we are also talking about their education, because it seems they won’t be able to attend school soon, if unjabbed. Gavin Newsome said so. And a bill is being introduced in the District of Columbia for the same purpose.
Clearly, the stakes are pretty low, so a pretend Pfizer clinical trial and a pretend FDA review are good enough, right?
Below is part of FDA’s presentation. What is missing is the most important information, revealed in an Aug 23 letter from FDA. And that is, that the trials FDA demands Pfizer undertake to find out how dangerous its vaccines actually are, will not be reported to FDA until 2024 and 2025–presumably after most of the world’s children have already received 2 or 4 or 6 or 8 doses.
9 PHARMACOVIGILANCE ACTIVITIES
Pfizer submitted a revised Pharmacovigilance Plan (PVP) to monitor safety concerns that could be associated with BNT162b2 in individuals 5-11 years of age. The PVP includes the following safety concerns:
• Important Identified Risks: anaphylaxis, myocarditis, and pericarditis
• Important Potential Risks: Vaccine-associated enhanced disease (VAED), including vaccine-associated enhanced respiratory disease (VAERD).
Pfizer-BioNTech plans to conduct passive and active surveillance to monitor the postauthorization safety for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, including: 35
• Mandatory reporting by the Sponsor under the EUA for the following events to VAERS within 15 days: SAEs (irrespective of attribution to vaccination); COVID-19 disease resulting in hospitalization or death; multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS)
• Adverse event reporting in accordance with regulatory requirements for the licensed vaccine, COMIRNATY
• Additionally, following approval of COMIRNATY, the Sponsor was also asked to submit reports of myocarditis and pericarditis as 15-day reports to VAERS.
• Periodic safety reports containing an aggregate review of safety data including assessment of AEs; vaccine administration errors, whether or not associated with an AE; and newly identified safety concerns.
• Post-authorization observational studies, that would be modified to encompass the evaluation of children 5-11 years of age include active surveillance safety studies using large health insurance claims and/or electronic health record database(s):
– Study C4591009: A non-interventional post-approval safety study of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine in the United States
Objective: To assess the occurrence of safety events of interest, including myocarditis and pericarditis, in the general U.S. population of all ages, pregnant women, the immunocompromised, and persons with a prior history of COVID-19 within selected data sources participating in the U.S. Sentinel System.
– Study C4591021: Post-conditional approval active surveillance study among individuals in Europe receiving the Pfizer-BioNTech Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Vaccine
Objective: To assess the potential increased risk of AESIs, including myocarditis/pericarditis, after being vaccinated with at least one dose of the PfizerBioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine.
– Study C4591021 Substudy: Substudy to describe the natural history of myocarditis and pericarditis following administration of COMIRNATY
Objective: To describe the natural history of post-vaccination myocarditis/pericarditis, including recovery status, risk factors, and/or identification of serious cardiovascular outcomes within one year of myocarditis/pericarditis diagnosis among individuals vaccinated with BNT162b2 as well as individuals not vaccinated with a COVID-19 vaccine.
– Study C4591036: Prospective cohort study with at least 5 years of follow-up for potential long-term sequelae of myocarditis after vaccination (in collaboration with Pediatric Heart Network [PHN]). Working title: Myocarditis/pericarditis follow-up study within the Pediatric Heart Network
Objective: To characterize the clinical course, risk factors, resolution, long-term sequelae, and quality of life in children and young adults <21 years with acute postvaccine myocarditis/pericarditis. Pfizer-BioNTech also plans to include vaccine effectiveness analyses among individuals 5-11 years of age in Study C4591014 entitled “Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 BNT162b2 Vaccine Effectiveness Study Kaiser Permanente Southern California.”
1. We cannot vaccinate ourselves out of the Covid problem. Mass vaccination is forcing the virus to produce variants, which escape any protection provided by the jab (see here for a report covering 68 countries). Instead, the vaccine should be offered only to those most vulnerable, such as the very elderly.
2. It is especially wrong to give it to children. They are at almost zero risk from Covid but subject to a real risk of damage from this particular vaccine, unrecognised during its development.
3. Cheap and effective treatment is available which keeps the vast majority of patients out of hospital. Health officials and regulators should support doctors who want to use these treatments, and to educate patients in how to strengthen their responses to the virus.*
4. Lockdowns and official fear-inducing propaganda have blighted the lives of millions, especially children, and must never be repeated.
The discussion is a must view for concerned individuals. It offers a completely different perspective from that of the NHS chiefs now calling for booster jabs and the return of Covid restrictions.
These edited contributions give a flavour of the discussion:
Dr Robert Malone, key architect of the mRNA technology that made possible the most commonly used Covid vaccines: ‘The virus is evolving very rapidly. This is akin to what happens if you overuse antibiotics. With universal vaccination, we’re driving towards an endpoint of vaccine-resistant mutants. The vaccines need to be used intelligently.
‘This set of vaccines that we have right now are gene therapy-based, and they have a common problem: they only have one antigen. It’s the spike antigen. When they were developing them, they didn’t realise the spike was biologically active. No fault of theirs. Everybody was in a rush.
‘But now it’s time to take a breath and say, “Hey, does this really make sense?” We don’t have to be just Left or Right, pro- or anti-vaccine. There’s a middle ground. We, as a community, need to protect people at high risk, not just here in our community, in our states; in my opinion, we need to protect the elders throughout the world. We don’t need to hoard all the vaccine for people that don’t really need it.
‘I’m not an anti-vaxxer, I’m a guy who’s spent the majority of my adult life developing vaccines. This is a technology platform that has enormous promise. And right now it’s in its infancy. The safety of the underlying technology is not yet fully demonstrated.
‘People did what they did in good faith and focused on a protein that they thought was fully safe – spike. But now, over a year later, we know that in the virus, this protein is responsible for much of the disease – the pathology in your vascular endothelial cells [blood vessel linings], the coagulation. And it’s unfortunate that this particular protein, in what appears to be a biologically active form, was used in these vaccines.’
Dr Richard Urso, ophthalmologist, Texas: ‘When people say, “They died of Covid”, they died of an inflammatory, thrombotic disease. They didn’t die from the virus running through their body. There’s a bunch of drugs that can be used for the purpose of inflammation in this disease. There’s a bunch of drugs for thrombosis. Hopefully at some point we’ll have a really good, early treatment that’s directed to the virus itself. Right now we have other, very effective treatments.
‘About 330 children have died of Covid in a year and a half [under-19s in the US]. Typically, about 50,000 children a year die – many from drownings, from car accidents. You need to look at that as you look at the risk to children. And do they spread? – No, at least seven different studies show that children spreading to adults is close to zero.’
Dr Brian Tyson, family doctor, California, who has successfully treated more than 6,000 Covid patients and now finds children are getting sick from typical winter illnesses, rather than Covid: ‘With treatment started from day 1 to 7, I have had zero deaths. From treatment started from day 7 to 14, I have four – two died the same day they showed up at the clinic, and two died in hospital.
‘Under that data Dr Urso was talking about, not one healthy child died from Covid-19. It was children who had four or five risk factors – morbid obesity being number one, diabetes number two, weakened immune system number three; kids on chemotherapy and things like that. So yes, they’re going to have opportunistic infections, but that’s no different than would normally take out these kids anyway, unfortunately.’
Dr Heather Gessling, family doctor, Missouri: ‘My numbers exactly match up with Brian’s. I’ve treated about 1,500 and I’ve had one death, because there was some delay in treatment.’
Dr Mark McDonald, child psychiatrist, Los Angeles: ‘Fear has been the driving force of this pandemic from the very beginning. What’s driving the fear now is propaganda. I see kids all day long. The developmental stage that children need to go through – babies, toddlers, young adults – is being foreclosed on them.
‘Brown University department of paediatrics published a study that found babies born after January 1, 2020, have an IQ drop of 20 points. Why? They don’t see faces. They don’t play. They don’t have exposure to friends. They don’t go to school. They’re basically locked in their homes, looking at their parents for a year and a half. And their brains have not developed.
‘My concern is that we are building a generation of young people who are so traumatised that they will never fully recover. They’re always going to be scarred emotionally.
‘I don’t mean to be depressing. I mean to be alarming, so everyone can finally say, “Stop!” We’ve got to stop the damage, and then figure out what to do about it.’
Dr Gessling: ‘I think “Stop the damage!” means to acknowledge what we have done wrong. We should reverse all the measures that have been implemented. Patients, families, parents, should take it upon themselves to feel empowered. We need to get back to the basics, because we’ve done this wrong for so long.
‘One of the books we all had in medical school was Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine. This is what we have forgotten: “Many specific host factors influence the likelihood of acquiring an infectious disease: age, immunisation history, prior illnesses, level of nutrition, pregnancy status, coexisting illnesses and perhaps emotional state – all have some impact on the risk of infection after exposure to a potential pathogen.” All we have done is focus on one of those: immunisation history.
‘The ability to provide early, effective treatment should make us feel empowered. We should not feel afraid any more.’
Dr Pierre Kory, pulmonary and critical care specialist; founding member and president, the Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance; co-author of two Covid prevention and treatment protocols: ‘My hopes are that more and more attention is going to be paid to early treatment strategies, especially now the vaccinated are getting sick. Many people were led to believe that if you get your vaccine, we’re going to end this thing, you don’t have to worry about it, you can carry on with your lives.
‘But guess what? My colleagues are talking about even scarier variants that are coming. And so we need more tools to fight this. The positive message is, we have them, and they can handle any variant that comes at us. We just need to get that message out. I don’t believe anybody has died who’s had effective early treatment.’
Dr John Littell, family doctor, Florida: ‘What we’re seeing now is that patients are getting early treatment with ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine and a host of other medications, because of this free exchange of ideas in this group of physicians and others around the world.
‘Dr Tyson, Dr Gessling and myself are family physicians, OK? So we’re the folks who have been in those front lines getting the phone calls in the middle of the night from concerned parents. And what you’ve just heard from Dr Kory and from us is that is that if you take the right preventive treatment, you’re approaching zero per cent mortality.’
Dr Kory: ‘If we have effective treatments, why aren’t they being recognised and disseminated across the world? I think we’re up against two forces.
‘The first is that in general, our health agencies are suffering what’s called regulatory capture. They’re largely driven by financial interests that are making sure that the solution to the pandemic is one that is profitable. Vaccines are profitable.
‘The other, somewhat overlapping challenge is that in academia, in the last ten years, there’s been this increasing belief that the only proof of efficacy of a drug has to come out of a large, double-blind, randomised controlled trial. You have to make the diagnosis – everyone has to have a positive test; they have to have symptoms; they have to be enrolled, consented, randomised, and then the drug is delivered. Each one of those steps takes time. So it’s often very delayed, and under-dosed – they’re using doses that I was using six months ago.’
Dr Ryan Cole, medical director, Cole Diagnostics, Idaho, who has done more than 100,000 Covid tests in the past year: ‘Covid is a clotting disease. When we give a spike protein [through the vaccine], that is an active biologic molecule. We chose the wrong molecule, which causes disease.
‘So what do I see under the microscope? We see clotting under the skin, in the lungs, in the blood vessels, in the brain – not from the virus, but from the spike from the vaccine itself.
‘Now consider the numerator and the denominator. Are most people going to be fine? Yes. And I want to emphasise that.
‘[But] in our data from around the world, from the United States, from the UK, from EudraVigilance in Europe, we have seen more death and damage from this one medical product than all other vaccines combined in the last several decades, in just a short, eight-month window of time. It has done more damage than any other medical product, therapy, shot, modality, of anything we’ve ever allowed to stay on the market to this point.
‘Do I mean to sound alarmist? No, I’m being factual. And when I look at it under the microscope and I see the parts of people – or people that are no longer with us – the damage and the disease is caused by that spike protein. It is present.
‘A virus is a humanitarian issue. When we divide ourselves in thought and don’t listen to science any more, we’re going down the wrong paths.
‘We are forgetting what our amazing immune system does. How many of you had chickenpox when you were a kid? And how many of you have ever had it again? Did you need a shot? No. Grandma had measles – has grandma ever had it again? No, because her immune system works.
‘Half of kids in the US have already had Covid. We’re not antibody testing – we’re treating everybody with this terrible oppression of, “You’ve got to wear a mask . . . you’ve got to stay home if somebody in your classroom tests positive.” It denies basic science.
‘Under age 50 with no co-morbidities, your chances of dying from this disease are about nil, and if you get early treatment they are even closer to nil. So if you are a Covid recoverer, you don’t need a shot.
‘The shot can damage the hearts of children. There are more children who’ve had myocarditis – and there’s never such a thing as mild myocarditis. That’s inflammation of the heart. Once you get inflammation, you get scarring. Those kids’ hearts are damaged for life. Kids have died of heart attacks after the shot, and there are more kids that have had myocarditis than have died from Covid. Kids aged zero to 18 survive this virus at a statistical 100 per cent – 99.997 per cent. So why are we punishing kids for a virus they survive?’
*For up-to-date guides to home treatment of Covid, see here and here.
IT’S OFFICIAL: Most of the UK’s vaccinated population are suffering far higher rates of infection than the unvaccinated, and it is getting worse by the day.
The UK’s Health Security Agency publishes detailed Covid statistics, which, for the last 7 weeks, have been tabulated by age-group and vaccination status. This now allows important questions to be answered.
The Agency says most vaccinated suffer substantially higher rates of infection, and their latest chart provides a snap-shot:
All of the UK’s 30-and-over vaccinated now endure far higher rates of infection than their unvaccinated counterparts. But as a snap-shot, this tells us nothing of how this arose, or how it may yet develop. Here we re-present the agency’s data in a time-series, to promote better understanding of the trends and implications.
The UK has vaccinated its population mostly in age order, from oldest to youngest, and very recently began vaccinating its under-18-year-old cohort. Being the UK’s most freshly vaccinated, they exhibit a very high degree of resistance to Covid infection: –
This very recently vaccinated cohort benefits from a 90% improvement in their infection rates, meaning their case incidence is 10 times better than that of their unvaccinated counterparts. This is impressive, and leads us to ask how long this high degree of protection might last?
The answer, unfortunately, seems to be not very long:
The previous UK age-group to be vaccinated was the 18–29-year-old cohort, of which half was fully vaccinated by some 9 weeks ago. While still doing better than the unvaccinated of their age, they have nevertheless lost the greater part of their relative resistance to infection. If they continue their trajectory, week 12 will see that benefit completely gone.
The earlier vaccinated age-group was the 30–39 cohort. Half was fully vaccinated around week 27, and by week 39 (again some 12 weeks later) had lost their enhanced infection resistance. For at least for these two cohorts, it would seem their vaccine induced resistance reduced to zero in under 3 months.
Unfortunately, it does not stop there; Following the data shows the vaccinated descend well into negative territory, which may prompt us to ask how all earlier vaccinated cohorts are now doing?
In terms of vulnerability to infection, the answer is not so well:
The entire 40-79 vaccinated cohort is deeply negative, now below minus 50%, meaning they suffer more than double the infection rate of their unvaccinated counterparts, and there is no obvious end in sight; Given the consistent and strongly negative continuing trend for all adult cohorts, it is impossible to guess where or when these trajectories might bottom out.
But does the trend result from increased vulnerability amongst the vaccinated, or is improved resistance developing amongst the unvaccinated? The answer appears to be both:
Unvaccinated adults are enjoying significantly lowered infection rates, but the vaccinated are very clearly headed in the opposite direction:
This begs the question: Why should the vaccinated suffer mounting infection rates, while case-rates of the unvaccinated both declined and are lower? Surely, we should expect the vaccinated to do better – certainly no worse?
Yet, for all but one adult cohort, the exact opposite is true, and even for them, it seems likely for not much longer:
It has been suggested infection amongst the unvaccinated has induced robust natural immunity leading towards their herd-immunity. That may well be a factor, but, as we have seen, the vaccinated have similarly been infected, and at least for the 40-79 cohort, at much higher rates. Why should this not benefit the vaccinated as well?
Are we to understand infection after vaccination may not produce similar broad immunity?
Vaccination is intended to alter subsequent immune response to infection, which is, of course, the whole point; It is conceivable this altered response may mute the development of broad long-lasting immunity that otherwise typically results from natural infection. That might then leave the vaccinated more open to re-infection, and might help explain these results. But this remains speculation, we simply do not know today.
What we do know from the UK data, is that anyone vaccinated more than few months ago is at greatly higher risk of Covid infection, and is therefore greatly more likely to be infected than their unvaccinated counterparts.
Much has been said and written to show the vaccinated are equally capable of transmitting Covid. But because their symptoms are often muted, they are also more likely to be out and about; add this to escalating infection rates, and there can be little doubt the vaccinated now constitute by far the greatest Covid transmission risk.
In light of this, vaccine passports are clearly senseless; They are nothing more than an invitation to infection, for which no justification can now possibly remain.
Before I address President Biden’s decision last Friday to continue the national-security establishment’s cover-up of its November 22, 1963, regime-change operation in Dallas, I wish to make one thing perfectly clear: I am not Nostradamus.
Yes, I fully realize that I repeatedly predicted that Biden would never order the release of those 60-year-old assassination-related records that the CIA has steadfastly been keeping secret from the American people. (See here and here.) But that prediction doesn’t make me Nostradamus.
In fact, any reasonable person who has studied the Kennedy assassination could have easily made the same prediction. There has got to be a good reason why the CIA does not want people to see those 60-year-old secret records. That’s why they didn’t disclose them during the era of the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s. That’s why they demanded that President Trump continue keeping them secret in 2017. That’s why they demanded that Biden extend the secrecy.
After all, think about it: If Donald Trump, who the national-security establishment loathed, buckled and surrendered to the CIA’s demand for continued secrecy, it’s a no-brainer that Biden, who is owned lock, stock, and barrel by the national-security establishment, would do the same.
It’s probably worth recalling the candid words of U.S. Senator Charles Schumer: “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” Undoubtedly, Trump, Biden, and the National Archives were all fully aware of the truthfulness of Schumer’s decision in granting the CIA its demand for continued secrecy.
At the risk of belaboring the obvious, those 60-year-old secret records obviously contain incriminating evidence — evidence that consists of more pieces to the puzzle pointing to a regime-change operation in Dallas.
After all, as I have repeatedly pointed out, the notion that the release of 60-year old records could constitute a grave threat to “national security” is nonsensical on its face. Is there anyone who really believes such nonsense?
There can be no doubt that the release of those long-secret records would constitute a grave threat to the CIA, the Pentagon, and the rest of the national-security establishment. But that’s different from constituting a threat to “national security,” whatever meaning one places on that nebulous, meaningless term.
But that’s what Biden stated in his decision last Friday. Biden cited that time-honored term that has become the most important term in the political lexicon of the American people in our time: “national security.”
That’s not all he said. He said that the COVID-19 pandemic had interfered with the National Archives’s ability to coordinate with the CIA, the Pentagon, and other national-security agencies to ascertain whether those records really do constitute a threat to “national security.”
That’s just plain silly. It reminds me of the kid who claimed that his dog ate his homework.
In the 1990s, the CIA and the Pentagon had to set forth the reasons why they wanted another 25 years of secrecy for those records. In 2017, they again had to set forth the specific reasons to Trump as why they were demanding that Trump grant them another five years of secrecy.
Nothing has changed. There are no new reasons for continued secrecy. All that the National Archives needed to do is make a copy of those previously cited reasons and send them to Biden. How in the world could the COVID-19 pandemic have impeded doing that? It couldn’t have. It just another ruse to continue the coverup — and a ridiculous one at that.
Now, let me make something else very clear. I’m not suggesting that those records contain a CIA or Pentagon confession of wrongdoing. From the very start of the CIA, when it began specializing in the dark arts of state-sponsored assassinations and cover-ups, its policy was to never put any of its assassination plots into writing.
What I am saying though is that the records undoubtedly contain incriminating circumstantial evidence that further fills out this particular regime-change mosaic. If I had to predict what that would be, I would say it most likely relates to the operation in Mexico City, where accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was supposed to have met with Soviet and Cuban officials.
That part of the regime-change operation clearly went awry, including, for example, producing a photograph of a man who was supposed to be Oswald in Mexico City but who clearly was someone else. Or a tape-recording of a man who was supposed to be Oswald talking to one of those embassies and clearly was the voice of someone else.
In the 1970s, when two young lawyers, Dan Hardway and Ed Lopez, were investigating the Kennedy assassination for the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations, they were pressing the CIA for its records relating to Mexico City. In response, the CIA called out of retirement a loyal CIA agent named George Joannides. His job? To block Hardway and Lopez from getting to those records.
That’s not the only place that Joannides pops up in the JFK assassination. Immediately after the assassination, a group called the DRE published a press release advertising Oswald’s communist bona-fides arising out of his time in New Orleans shortly before his trip to Mexico City.
More than 30 years later, it would be discovered that the DRE was a secret CIA front organization that the CIA was secretly funding with very generous amounts of U.S. taxpayer money . And take a wild guess who the CIA agent was who was monitoring and controlling the DRE. That would be the same George Joannides who was called out of retirement in the 1970s to block Hardway and Lopez from accessing those secret Mexico City records. For more on Joannides see FFF’s book Morley v. CIA: My Unfinished JFK Investigation by former Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley.
Biden extended the time for continued secrecy for those long-secret CIA assassination-related records to December 2022. I strongly advise everyone not to hold your breath. I make the following prediction: When that date rolls around, Biden will decree more secrecy, perhaps because his dog has eaten all the records.
A Pakistani taxi driver will leave US detention at Guantanamo Bay after 17 years behind bars. Mistaken for a wanted terrorist, the man suffered horrific torture in American custody, despite never being charged with any crime.
Ahmed Rabbani’s release was announced on Friday by Reprieve, a human rights NGO. Rabbani had been unanimously cleared for release by the prison’s Periodic Review Board, made up of senior officials from six US agencies, including the State Department and Department of Homeland Security.
Rabbani’s journey through the underbelly of the US’ post-9/11 security infrastructure began in Karachi, Pakistan, in 2002. Mistaken for wanted terrorist Hassan Ghul, the taxi driver was arrested by Pakistani authorities outside Ghul’s apartment complex and sold to American personnel in the country.
Information gleaned from an associate of Rabbani arrested on the same day was used to arrest several suspected Al-Qaeda operatives, including a supposed member of Osama Bin Laden’s security detail. However, Rabbani was never charged with any crime, and is not believed to be involved in terrorism.
Nevertheless, he spent more than 545 days after his arrest being tortured in a CIA ‘black site’ in Afghanistan. The torture inflicted there on Rabbani was detailed in the US Senate’s 2014 torture report, and included long periods of being shackled with his hands outstretched over his head, an agonizing position that led Rabbani to try to cut off his own hand to end the pain.
Testimony from multiple detainees held in the same CIA prison describes permanent darkness, cells flooded with excrement and infested with vermin, beatings, sleep deprivation, being buried in simulated graves, being stripped naked and doused with cold water, and being denied bathing facilities for months on end.
According to Reprieve, Rabbani’s interrogators knew that “they had the wrong man,” but tortured him anyway. After more than a year in the CIA facility, Rabbani was transferred to the Guantanamo Bay detention camp on US territory in Cuba. He would spend the next 17 years there, without a charge or trial date.
His case attracted international attention, and in 2018, Rabbani wrote an op-ed published in the Los Angeles Times describing physical and sexual abuse by guards, force-feeding, and repeated hunger strikes to protest the conditions of his imprisonment. At the time of the op-ed, Rabbani said that he was suffering from “stomach problems so acute that I cannot consume hard food without vomiting blood,” and was being denied digestible food.
Conditions in Guantanamo chipped away at Rabbani’s mental health. “There is no morning and no evening,” he wrote. “There is only despair.”
“Ahmed’s clearance is long overdue,” said Reprieve attorney Mark Maher. “For those of us who have supported him, the feeling is one of relief, tempered with sadness for all he has lost… but we won’t celebrate until he is back with his family in Pakistan and able to hug his 19-year-old son for the first time.”
Of the 780 people detained in Guantanamo Bay since the facility opened in 2002, 732 have been transferred elsewhere or released, 38 remain there, and nine have died in custody. President Joe Biden has promised to close the notorious prison before he leaves office, a promise that was made, but not kept, by his former boss Barack Obama.
I find myself in the position that I must use an alias for fear of reprisal. Those days may be quickly coming to an end, as hospitals are denying requests for vaccine exemptions with impunity. I will likely soon be out the door, with nothing to lose. Even if I survive this round, if the “pandemic” continues, it won’t be long before I am shelved like a can of spam.
Doctors need to be called out. From early in the pandemic, it was like a mass hypnosis or forgetfulness of everything we had learned in medical school. Immune system knowledge was shelved and replaced by government dictates. The thought of early outpatient treatment with “off label” drugs that could modulate the immune system was forbidden. We essentially told patients that they had to go home and wait until they were sick enough to be hospitalized, then treatment would begin. Imagine telling all diabetics that there is no metformin, Glucophage, or insulin. Would we really wait until patients are in diabetic ketoacidosis, and then treat them only at the hospital? It is medical malfeasance of a grand scale.
We physicians gave up our training and our reasonable medical thought process. The reasons are multiple. First, it was the easy way out. Second, many of us are employed and fear reprisal. Third, despite what the public thinks, we physicians are not bold leaders, we tend to be sheep, and are afraid of having an entire institution ostracize us or our colleagues to think us crazy.
As we got to the point of vaccine rollout, doctors were not using the scientific method, questioning and challenging prevailing hypotheses. They kept their heads down, closed clinics, converted to telemedicine, and pushed only the jab.
I had conversations with doctors who are supposed experts in virology and immunology denying the lasting immunity of natural infection. Conversations about natural immunity:
“I have antibodies.”
“But they will wane.”
“But I have memory cells.”
Dumbfounded look.
Really, are these the leaders we want?
Other conversations about the safety of vaccines:
“The vaccine is safe.”
“No, we would have shut down any trial in the past after even 100 deaths.”
“This is more serious.”
“But the survival rate is about 99.6%.”
“It’s killing people.”
“So is the vaccine”
“You can’t believe VAERS.”
“It was set up to help protect the public, and if anything, it is underreporting side effects.”
“You’re a conspiracy theorist.”
Or conversations about early treatment
“You must get the vaccine, it is the only “proven” treatment, there are no other treatments.”
“Really, ivermectin has eradicated COVID in India, parts of Mexico, Japan….”
“It is a horse dewormer.”
“It won a Nobel Prize in medicine, is a WHO essential drug, and has been around for decades with a great safety profile.”
“No, only the vaccine works.”
“But it is failing”
“You are a denier and a conspiracy theorist.”
“Sigh….”
Lately, it has been all about getting 100% of the population jabbed. For what reason? I am not sure, and some of the more detailed and investigated theories scare me. I shudder to think. But last year’s heroes are being labeled selfish and villainous for not getting the vaccine. Hospital systems have abandoned their community’s health and ignored early successful outpatient treatment in favor of huge government subsidies for inpatient and ICU treatment. The success of these treatments was not great, but that is another article. Now we have the same hospital systems turning their backs on their own employees. Basically, health providers have a choice, get shot, or get fired. How does that help? Both vaxxed and unvaxxed can spread the virus, so it doesn’t help anyone. It only helps the hospital to get more government money by meeting quotas.
I, for one, will remember that when we faced a real crisis, the hospitals and many physicians chose money and profit over their own community’s best interest. Perhaps it is time for groups of physicians to get back to running their own healthcare clinics and hospitals. We used to have a code of ethics. We used to put patients first. Not anymore.
As for physicians, those who are blindly following the government edicts are culpable in a moral atrocity. Bullying and deriding patients who chose to refrain from this still experimental therapy is an abomination. (You will say it isn’t experimental anymore, to which I would say that just because the government broke its own rules regarding approval, doesn’t make it legal or right). Patients have sincere beliefs for making their choice. Respect their thoughts. Do you yell as much at smokers, drinkers, fornicators, drug abusers, etc? No, I think not. I think you chose to fit in because it gives you a sense of righteousness.
And going so far as to encourage vaccination in children and pregnant women is crazy. There is blood on the hands of any physician who does this. With children, there is no benefit to the vaccine, only harm. They would serve themselves and society better with natural immunity. The vaccine hasn’t been studied on women and their babies. It is pregnancy category X (unknown) but being pushed wholesale on these poor women without proper studies. Shame on you, doctors who are doing this. I certainly have lots to answer for when I meet my maker, but this is on another level.
I beg physicians to get back to basics, remember all the epidemiology and immunology that bored us to tears in school. Investigate the real literature and take a stand. Society needs us to do this. Even if you have been vaccinated, help those who are fighting for their lives. Stand up against this forced vaccine tyranny. Support those who have legitimate reasons for declining the jab. If you don’t stand up now, who will stand up for you when you are faced with your choice of yet another booster or your job.
We see unprecedented use of ‘unprecedented’ today. Yes, it applies to putting entire nations under house arrest. Yes, it applies to the near-universal wearing of masks (more accurately muzzles). Yes, it applies to needing a passport to be normal. But perhaps the entire phenomenon we are experiencing is not unprecedented.
Let us look back in time to 380, when Rome became the superspreader of Christianity by making it their empire’s official religion. Within 100 years the Roman Empire collapsed but despite the death of its host, Christianity survived and for over 1000 years the head of the Catholic Church was the most powerful figure in all of Europe.
Most rulers of nations, then and now, have one core raison d’être, which is to protect us from other versions of themselves. But the Catholic Church would tolerate no other versions. Its Pope reigned supreme, having spiritual authority over kings, dukes, princes and local overlords. As the Lord’s Prayer tells us “…thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Your local priesthood conveyed the will to be done on earth, working hand in glove with the local lord, whose temporal power was recognised by God’s official mouthpiece, the Pope.
You may ask how the church came to have and maintain such power. The answer is simple: faith and fear.
They had agents throughout the land, with a church in every town. The priest class, from archbishops down to parish priest, were the most highly-educated and respected sector of society. The priesthood was a sought-after secure profession, and people had faith in the truth of what the priest told them. It was often sound advice they could find nowhere else. The church had a near monopoly on education, with part of the core curriculum being God and creation, Jesus and miracles, sin and salvation, as well as good deeds, forgiveness, and useful guidance. Most priests were good people, people of faith, and following their advice was the passport to Heaven.
Then there is the fear. The devil can manifest anywhere in the world, tempting people to stray from the path of righteousness. The devil can be lurking unseen within any one of us, prompting urges that God wants us to supress. We must be on our guard from those he may have corrupted. We must follow the priest’s advice to avoid the fearsome prospect of Hell.
Believers knew that if they behaved badly during their 50 or so years of this existence, they would suffer a miserable and horrific existence in Hell, forever – like eternity. What a terrifying prospect! This was the picture the church taught and most people absolutely believed what they were told by the highly educated priests. Bastards, born out of wedlock, were a product of sin and not welcome in society. Those who missed church on Sunday were avoided. Just speaking with these dangerous people could infect one with sinful thoughts.
Not all the ‘common’ people bought into the church’s teachings or went to priests for advice on things spiritual or material. Some chose a more direct spiritual interface with the living world. Many were women who also practiced unlicensed healing, whether through herbs or ‘occult’ practices invoking natural energies of the earth and human body. Tens of thousands of these women were burned, drowned or tortured to death as witches, for their deviant beliefs.
Of course, being a God-fearing church goer did not stop people from being sinners but at least you were trying and could confess your sins to the priest, do some penance and be forgiven. Without that escape clause, the ungodly sinner was doomed to Hell.
Those who wrote or spoke publicly in contradiction of the church’s teachings were guilty of heresy and their books burned and banned, as well as the heretic at times. To speak disrespectfully of things holy was considered blasphemy, punishable as a serious crime, occasionally warranting death. This unfortunate situation still prevails in many Islamic nations, with a religion 600 years younger than Christianity.
The Christian church does not have the power it once held over the minds of those in so-called Western cultures. There are still some who believe in a God who created the Universe in a few days and did it all for the benefit of humankind, before throwing us out of the Garden of Eden. Most, if not indoctrinated early, instinctively reject the idea that we are born with the burden of sin and can only find spiritual truth and salvation through the son of God, whom we crucified. The spiritual credibility of the church has not been helped in recent years by the paedophile scandals surrounding its priesthood.
Today we are witnessing a new “religion” taking hold and this one has nothing to do with spirituality, yet has spread faster than any before. It has gripped the minds of billions across the planet and is also powered by faith and fear, with an enemy as invisible as Hell and the Devil himself. Curiously, it has had its greatest success to date in the ‘West,’ perhaps filling the fear vacuum that has been created in the world’s traditionally Christian cultures.
Today’s priesthood is embodied in the medical industry, staffed by highly trained professionals with secure careers, for whom the public has high regard. Just as we once needed priests to act as intermediaries to God, we now need trained doctors as intermediaries to our bodies and guardians of our health. Many people are sadly out of touch with their mortal frame and have unquestioning faith in doctors knowing best – the high priests of health.
The medical establishment does not like competition for its services, doing whatever it can to ban or denigrate healing practices other than their own, whether herbs or naturopathy, prayer or acupuncture, homeopathy or reiki. Theirs is the only true path to health, and all other routes are portrayed as fraught with danger.
We do not know how well organised Christians were before the Romans assimilated them – before Christian belief was standardized and regulated at the Council of Nicaea. We do know that before the healing profession was dominated by the World Health Organisation, The Centre for Disease Control, and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation, there was full medical freedom of choice for the individual. In 1880 there were more homeopaths in the USA than allopathic doctors, while mechanics earned more than either of them. It is no accident that the WHO, CDC, and GAVI are largely funded by the pharmaceutical industry, and headed by their chosen men and women. They have become today’s equivalent of the Vatican during its 1000 years of dominance. They claim a monopoly on truth and woe betide those who question or counter it.
Notable physicians, respected virologists, vaccine designers, even a Nobel Prize winner have countered the official narrative and lost their positions, been discredited and denounced. They are denied any further involvement in the hospitals, clinics and practices spread across the land as thickly as were early chapels, churches and cathedrals. Popular speakers, performers and entertainers have had their bookings cancelled for refusing to be vaccinated, or for questioning the push to global vaccination. We could view these outspoken characters as being excovidicated from the medical and media establishments.
It takes a lot of faith to accept being injected with a partially tested new-concept mRNA injection. Taking the second jab could be seen as one’s baptism into the Covidian Church. Like it or not, it is an affirmation and commitment. And unlike the splashing of holy water and utterance of sacred words, it may be difficult to decouple our immune system from the one implanted by Big Pharma. This new system will need an upgrade every 6 months to keep your internal software up to date. Where have we heard this before? What will system crashes look like?
Just as going to church does not prevent God-fearing folk from sinning, taking the injection does not prevent Covid-fearing folk from getting the virus, or from spreading it. But, we are told, if the case is bad enough to need hospitalisation, the sufferer will be less likely to die. Considering that the Covid survival rate, before vaccination began, was over 99.9%, how much the vaccine increases it is, perhaps, a moot point.
In today’s somewhat free society, it is okay to declare that the Queen is a shape-shifting lizard, okay to accuse the Bush family and their associates of taking down the three towers (the twins and WTC 7); okay to accuse Hilary Clinton of running a paedophile ring and drinking an extract of tortured children.
It is decidedly NOT okay to counter the narrative of the BIG PHARMA’ three – to suggest that Covid-9 is not an existential threat; to recommend tested known treatments for it; to disclose that natural immunity is widespread and better than jabs; to publicise the hundreds of thousands of documented adverse reactions to the injection. Those who question or counter the narrative on any level are guilty of (forgive me) ‘blaspharmy.’ Thou shalt not speak against the trinity of the CDC, WHO and GAVI.
Instead of burning books today, they ‘burn’ the online platforms of those who question or challenge the narrative of Big Pharma. YouTube channels are shut down without warning, with all their content removed from view – troves of information that was approved and online for years. Twitter accounts are terminated. Much like the bad old Soviets used to remove people from official photos when they fell out of favour, today Wikipedia entries of repeat blaspharmers can be erased, with Google searches relegating links to 20th places. This all may be more ‘climate-friendly’ than burning books, but does immense harm to the free flow of ideas, the emergence of truth, and the connected feedback loops that power positive evolution.
The parallel has been made with the Papal precedent. There is much of positive value to gain from Christian teachings but they are not and never were the only source of spiritual and moral guidance. Neither is the medical establishment the only viable source of sound and effective advice on healing and health. It’s biggest player, Big Pharma, does exceedingly well out of poor health.
We are at a unique and yes, unprecedented turning point in the story of our species. Do we remain independent human beings, able to freely associate and communicate with each other, how and where it suits us? Do we remain able to choose what we eat, and travel by the means of our choice, all while having primary responsibility for our health and well-being?
Or do we welcome being merged with outside agencies, starting with one that manages our vital immune system with regular injections? Vaccine passports, once established, would (for greater ease) morph into a body implanted chip and soon also serve as door key, passport, credit card, wallet, bus/train ticket, bar tab, membership card – and desirable citizen monitor.
We know how once wild animals were so attracted by regular food and a roof that domestication became possible. Are we sacrificing the last vestiges of personal freedom and privacy to become part of a digitally managed body of people? What are the consequences of this? We do not know, but the ‘religious’ suppression of opposition to its rapid implementation does not bode well. Technology has and can make our lives easier without being under central control by coercive bodies, sometimes headed by psychopathic personalities.
If it looks like an externally managed future is being forcibly rammed down our throats that could well be because it is. What can we do about it? The most powerful tool we have is mass non-compliance, which begins with each and every one of us, including small businesses, and those big ones with customer interests at heart. If enough employers, employees, diners, care workers, café goers, hospitality staff, shoppers and so forth refuse to pretend there is an existential killer on the loose, the scheme will immediately fall apart. And that’s another article…
Yousef A. from Beit Lahiya in the Gaza Strip survived an Israeli airstrike in May 2021 that killed his father and three of his sisters. He is still recovering from his injuries.
Statment By Al-Haq independent Palestinian non-governmental human rights organisation, October 23, 2021:
Al-Haq strongly rejects the designation made by the Israeli Ministry of Defense, on 19 October 2021, of Al-Haq and five fellow Palestinian civil society organisations as “terror organisations,” under Israel’s domestic Anti-Terrorism Law, 2016 and calls for international solidarity and concrete measures to ensure its immediate rescission.
The baseless allegations represent an alarming and unjust escalation of attacks against the Palestinian people in their struggle for freedom, justice and the right to self-determination. Israel’s widespread and systematic smearing of Palestinian human rights NGOs and human rights defenders aims to delegitimize, oppress, silence and drain their work and resources.
Further, the unlawful application of Israel’s domestic law to the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT) serves to entrench the maintenance of its settler-colonial and apartheid regime of institutionalised racial discrimination and domination over the Palestinian people as a whole.
For decades, Al-Haq has struggled to end Israel’s illegal settler-colonial policies and practices which, since 1948, have denied the Palestinian people from exercising their inalienable right to self-determination. Al-Haq is one of the leading Palestinian organizations calling for accountability and an end to Israel’s impunity for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
It is no coincidence that Israel’s recent escalation of punitive measures against Al-Haq and fellow civil society organisations, has come in the immediate aftermath of the opening of an International Criminal Court investigation into Israel’s crimes in the Situation in Palestine. To that end, Al-Haq will tirelessly maintain its efforts to ensure that Israeli perpetrators of mass atrocity crimes are held accountable.
The history of human rights advocacy and defense, from Africa to Latin America and other corners of the globe, have shown that the means and methods of the oppressor have no limits. In striving towards the liberation of Palestine from Israel’s apartheid and settler colonial regime, our work as human rights defenders will not be deterred or silenced. We are confident in the solidarity of our friends and partners around the world in confronting these obstacles placed before us.
The Palestinian struggle is a universal struggle against oppression and the denial of self-determination in the pursuit of justice and the ability to live in dignity. We remain steadfast in advocating for a dignified future for the Palestinian people and the liberation of Palestine from the shackles of Israel’s unlawful colonial rule.
Following his death from Covid-19 earlier this week, former US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s legacy will be examined by many people for many different reasons. Some will eulogise him as one of America’s top diplomats and presidential advisers. Many more, I suspect, will remember him as the man who lied for his country again, and again, and again.
One of the Greek sages, Chilon of Sparta, said we should not speak ill of the dead (what is now the Latin aphorism “De mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est”), a maxim with which I would generally agree. However, it is precisely because of the dead that I am writing these words.
The dead to which I refer come from many nations around the world; countless men, women and children who left this earth in the absence of mercy, a voice or justice. Millions of others have yet to have any sort of closure or peace due to US militarism, wars, interventions and atrocities over many decades. Powell supported, excused and covered up most of them from Vietnam to the present day.
A memorial service for General Powell will be held at the Washington National Cathedral in the US capital next month. The so-called great and good will eulogise the first African American to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and US Secretary of State. My own contribution is not for Powell and the mourners, but for the forgotten survivors who will have been propelled back into very dark places at seeing his name in the headlines this week.
To the Iraqi people, Powell was the man who did the dirty work in arguing the case for a war that created more than a million widows and orphans. Estimates of the number of dead in Iraq continue to be amended. It was Powell who stood before the UN on behalf of President George W Bush in February 2003 and spoke with great authority, using photographs to “prove” that Iraq under Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). This was a lie, and he knew it.
A couple of weeks ahead of his speech, some Algerian refugees were arrested for allegedly producing ricin in Wood Green, North London. The British media splashed with the headlines that anti-terror police had uncovered an Al-Qaida cell poised to unleash the deadly poison on an unsuspecting public. The more lurid reports also claimed that the “ricin factory” contained bomb-making equipment. British Prime Minister Tony Blair — another man with a long-distance relationship with the truth — whipped up a frenzy of hysteria claiming that, “This danger is present and real, and with us now.”
Blair was backed up by Powell in his presentation to the UN Security Council; both men were pushing the case for war against Iraq. Powell cited the London “find” gravely as an “Iraq-linked terrorist network”. Despite the fact that the British government’s chemical weapons research facility at Porton Down knew that there was no ricin in Wood Green in early January 2003, Powell went ahead and peddled his lies regardless. Blair and Powell both appear to have ignored the facts. In a nest of vipers, it’s always difficult to separate one snake from another.
Two years later a very different story emerged during the Old Bailey trial of the Algerian refugees: there was no ricin and no sophisticated Al-Qaida plot. Jury foreman Lawrence Archer was so outraged at what emerged during his seven-month odyssey in court that he co-wrote a book with journalist Fiona Bawdon exposing the lies told by Powell backed up by “shamelessly distorted” words from the British government, media and security agencies.
Powell claimed later to regret his performance at the UN. That didn’t help the Algerians, though, who were held in a high-security prison for more than two years until the case against them in their infamous trial by jury collapsed. The US official knew that there was no ricin plot; indeed, that there was no ricin, so what was the white powder in the vial he waved around so dramatically in the Security Council meeting?
To the people of Vietnam, Colin Powell was the soldier who covered up the war crimes carried out in Mỹ Lai by a unit of US troops who slaughtered 500 civilians. Powell admitted in a 1968 memo that there might have been be “isolated cases of mistreatment”, but in August 1971 he eventually told the truth in a sworn affidavit during the war crimes trial of Brigadier General John Donaldson who, it was alleged, had routinely “killed or ordered the killing of, unarmed and unresisting” Vietnamese civilians from his helicopter.
Powell ingratiated himself in 1985 as a senior assistant to US Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger, when he helped cover up the selling of weapons to Iran so that the Reagan administration could funnel money to the US-backed and funded right-wing Contra counterrevolutionaries in Nicaragua. Weinberger faced five charges related to the so-called Iran-Contra scandal only to be pardoned by President George H.W. Bush before he could be put on trial. It emerged that Powell took part personally in at least one covert weapons sale in exchange for hostages.
He had his finger in many pies in subsequent years which saw the demise of some dictatorships and the rise of others in US military action in Panama, the Philippines, Somalia, Liberia, Bangladesh, Russia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf and the Middle East.
To the Palestinians — and myself, I must add — Powell will always be the man who was treacherous and duplicitous towards them. He lied about Israel’s massacre of Palestinians in the Jenin refugee camp in April 2002.
The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) tried desperately to hide one of its many war crimes committed in the occupied West Bank when its soldiers killed at least 52 Palestinians in the refugee camp between 1 and 11 April at the height of the Second (Al-Aqsa) Intifada. Ariel Sharon’s cowardly troops would have made a quick exit but for the dilemma of how to cover up the killing of so many people. It’s a dilemma that focused the minds of those in charge of so-called Operation Defensive Shield.
As I wrote in MEMO last year, “[They] decided to enforce a siege so tight that no one, despite global protests, could get past Israel’s ring of steel; it was a total lockdown and lasted for weeks while the Israeli government did its best to keep journalists and human rights observers away from the Palestinian city…
“The atmosphere was tense and the UN announced that it was planning to launch an investigation into compelling allegations of Israeli war crimes said to have been committed in the refugee camp. The Israelis did what they do well, and mobilised malleable politicians and government advisers to mislead a gullible media and public.”
The then US Secretary of State Powell was brought in to use calm, authoritative tones at a press conference in Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, which Zionist terrorists blew up in 1946, killing 91 people and wounding 41 others. The irony wasn’t lost on the Palestinians and the watching world.
He claimed to have seen “no evidence” of a massacre. In last year’s article I pointed out: “By 23 April Powell was back in Washington briefing senators: ‘Right now, I’ve seen no evidence of mass graves and I’ve seen no evidence that would suggest a massacre took place.’ He wasn’t lying, of course, because he never went to Jenin, so could not have ‘seen’ the evidence even if he had wanted to.”
I was one of the first journalists on the scene, though, and was in the refugee camp in Jenin on the day that the former general presented his less than honest briefing to the world’s media. The anger and frustration I felt listening to his lies was probably nothing compared with the feelings of the Palestinians in Jenin who told me how their mothers, wives, children and other relatives had been killed before their eyes. I remember seeing a group of Palestinian women tearing at the rubble with their bare, bloodied hands trying to find the bodies of loved ones. The stench of death was overwhelming. Moreover, while Powell said that he saw “no evidence” of a massacre, Human Rights Watch disagreed, and said so when it published a hard-hitting report on what happened in Jenin.
The Jacobin online magazine has published a brutally savage obituary of Powell. “There’s Nothing Honourable or Decent About Colin Powell’s Long List of War Crimes” was the headline. I and millions like me couldn’t agree more. He was buried on Friday morning, but as yet there’s no official tombstone. When it is eventually fixed on his grave, it should be very simple: “Here lies Colin Powell – in death as in life”.
President Joe Biden has ordered the remaining files on President John F. Kennedy’s assassination to remain hidden until next December, citing the coronavirus pandemic. He’s not the first president to delay releasing the files.
In a memo on Friday, Biden wrote that the remaining files concerning the assassination “shall be withheld from full public disclosure” until December 15 next year, nearly 60 years after Kennedy was shot dead as his motorcade rolled through Dallas, Texas.
Biden’s memo states that due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the National Archivist have been prevented from checking in with every agency affected by the files, and can’t determine whether releasing the unredacted documents would impact national security.
Therefore, Biden wrote, “temporary continued postponement is necessary to protect against identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations.”
Some information already deemed appropriate will be released this December, while the remainder will stay secret until at least next December.
Although Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for Kennedy’s murder, he never stood trial as he was shot dead two days later by Jack Ruby. As a result, Kennedy’s murder has spawned countless conspiracy theories, and a majority of Americans still believe that sinister forces were behind the assassination.
These theories have persisted for decades, and in 1992, Congress ruled that all records surrounding the shocking murder “should be eventually disclosed to enable the public to become fully informed about the history surrounding the assassination.” However, multiple administrations since have stalled on this disclosure.
Former President Donald Trump promised via tweet in 2017 to allow the “long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened.” Despite Trump’s promise, a pledge that many thought he’d follow through on due to his status as a political ‘outsider’ in Washington, only a selection of material was released, and some of this material remained redacted.
Whenever the Biden administration releases the rest of these documents, they will at least be easier for the general public to view. At present, the 250,000 or so records released so far are viewable only at NARA’s location in College Park, Maryland. Biden’s memo orders NARA to digitize these files and make them available online.
… At every corner, we are urged to simply believe what we are told. Whether it is about believing Porton Down and MI6 about “novichok”, or believing the White Helmets about Sarin, or believing the FBI about “collusion”, we are presented with no facts, just assertions from authority. Those who question those assertions are deemed “bots” at best or “traitors” at worst.
Well here, fellow traitors, are the Top Ten reasons to question anything and everything the CIA – or any intelligence agency – has ever told you. … Read full article
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