The 20th anniversary of September 11, 2001 is a particularly somber one, not just because of the horrific nature of events of that day reaching its second-decade milestone, but because of how little we seem to have learned in that amount of time.
The fear and trauma generated by the events of 9/11 were used by the U.S. national security state and its civilian allies to great effect to divide the American population, to attack independent reporting as well as independent thought, to gut the anti-war movement, and to normalize the U.S. government’s overt and persistent degradation of the country’s Constitution. This, of course, is in addition to the illegal U.S. occupations and drone wars in the Middle East and elsewhere that were also born out of this event.
The true beneficiaries of 9/11
As a nation, the U.S. populace has failed to grapple with these realities, and many others, in the two decades since the Twin Towers and WTC Building 7 fell. Far from bringing any benefit to the alleged masterminds of the event, the results of 9/11 instead overwhelmingly favored the ambitions of a powerful faction within the U.S. national security state that had long sought to bring the dissident-elimination efforts it spent decades implementing abroad – from the Phoenix Program in Vietnam to Operation Condor in South America – home to roost.
As a result, the response of the U.S. government to the attack supposedly launched by those “who hate us for our freedom” was to work to reduce our freedoms and civil liberties. Now, 20 years on, the sophisticated “War on Terror” apparatus has been fully turned into a “War on Domestic Terror,” with many of those who once opposed the war on terrorism abroad now cheering on the ratcheting up of its domestic equivalent.
Yet, the domestic terror apparatus being swiftly created and implemented very clearly targets individuals and ideologies on both sides of the political divide. It is also extremely vague, essentially leaving it up to those holding the reins of political power – whether Democrat, Republican or something else – to decide who is “terrorist” and who is not. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was Joe Biden back in the mid-1990s who introduced legislation that would have given the president sole and unappealable authority to define what constitutes “terrorism,” a fact that was omitted from media coverage of last year’s presidential campaign and the past several months of his presidency.
A crisis of courage
It seems clear at this point that one of the key reasons the U.S. continues to hemorrhage its remaining civil liberties, either as a result of the new “War on Domestic Terrorism” or as a response to COVID-19, is that it is undergoing a crisis of conscience and courage in grappling with not just the true nature of the events of 9/11 itself, but with the orthodoxy over the “official story” of those events.
Even two decades after the fact, it is still deemed too controversial or unthinkable to question whether the official story is an accurate portrayal of the events that transpired on and led to that day. This is despite the fact that the official story itself, presumably the same story told by the 9/11 Commission report, has been labeled incomplete, and unable to answer major questions about that day, by its very authors. In addition, the official story relies heavily on testimony obtained through extreme torture, meaning it is of questionable accuracy.
Many of those who have been quick and vocal to point out the lies of the U.S. government when it comes to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and other consequences of the War on Terror have been unable to even consider that the official story of 9/11 may not be legitimate and may indeed have been dealt from the same pack. This may be for a variety of reasons, including a strong desire to not be de-legitimized by their peers as bearers of the “conspiracy theorist” smear and an unwillingness to face a political reality where U.S. government officials may have been complicit in a deadly attack on American soil. In those two examples, however, the failure of such individuals, particularly in media, to even consider that there may be more to the story boils down to a desire for self-preservation in the case of the former and preservation of a particular worldview in the case of the latter. Yet, in both cases, the casualty is the truth and the cause is cowardice.
By failing as a society to thoroughly examine the events of 9/11 and why those events occurred, the American public has shown the powers that be that their desire to preserve a “safe” worldview — and to preserve their own careers, in the case of certain professional classes — is enough to keep people from questioning world-altering events when they emerge. Those powers are well aware of this refusal and have been using it to their advantage ever since.
The poison remains in our system
Today, with the COVID-19 crisis still dragging on, we are similarly immersed in a situation where nuance and facts are being cast aside, militantly in some cases, in favor of the establishment narrative. Is everyone who chooses not to take this particular vaccine a “conspiracy theorist” and “anti-vaxxer”? Does it really make sense to so dramatically divide the public into groups of vaccinated and unvaccinated through a new ID system when the vaccine claims to reduce the severity of illness but not to stop disease transmission? Should those that question the motivation of politicians, powerful pharmaceutical corporations and mainstream media “experts” be censored from expressing those views online?
You do not need to agree with those who hold such views, but what is wrong with hearing what they have to say and debating their evidence with your own? We are losing the ability to have rational public discourse about these issues — and losing it swiftly, at a speed comparable to what took place in the aftermath of 9/11, when questioning the motives of the Bush administration, U.S. intelligence agencies and other groups, as well as their proposed responses and “solutions,” was deemed “unpatriotic” and even “treasonous” by some. Calls were made to strip an entire class of Americans of their freedom for merely sharing the same ethno-religious identities as those we were told attacked us, and many went along with it. Freedom became treated as a privilege only for certain groups, not as a right, and this insidious fallacy has reared its head yet again in recent months in relation to the COVID-19 vaccine debate and also the war on domestic terror.
Our pandemic of fear
Though the failure to consider explanations for 9/11 that deviate from the official story can be called cowardice, the most enduring lesson 20 years on from 9/11 is perhaps that fear was and remains the most powerful tool that has been consistently used to whittle down our freedom and civil liberties. While the divide-and-conquer strategies have raged on from 9/11 to the present, the largest wealth transfers in history have occurred, creating an unaccountable and ultra-wealthy super-elite that dominates an ever-growing underclass.
The march towards this de facto neo-feudalism certainly didn’t begin on or after 9/11, but our collective failure to grapple with the narrative orthodoxies of that day have prevented us from fully understanding the big picture of that event as well as many subsequent and similarly consequential events. For too long, the desire to preserve our self-image, our reputation, and the worldview we are taught in school has all too often made hard, difficult truths a casualty.
In order to truly understand the War on Terror, the domestic surveillance state and our current reality, we must accept that we were lied to about 9/11. We must ask the hard questions and accept hard truths. We must put an end to the 20-plus-year-long pandemic of fear over “invisible enemies,” fear that has pushed us to surrender the very freedoms that we are told we are protecting.
The United States, and much of the world, is quickly becoming an unrecognizable and authoritarian dystopia. We cannot wait another two decades to grapple with the difficult questions and realities that arose after 9/11 and persist into the present. We will either be remembered as a country that took freedom and liberty for all seriously or we will be remembered as a nation of cowards who, driven by fear, were willing to deprive this group, then that group, of their freedom — before losing that freedom entirely.
Whitney Webb has been a professional writer, researcher and journalist since 2016. She has written for several websites and, from 2017 to 2020, was a staff writer and senior investigative reporter for MintPress News. She currently writes for her own outlet Unlimited Hangout and contributes to The Last American Vagabond and MintPress News
TWO decades after 9/11, which was eleven years to the day after President George H W Bush delivered his famous ‘new world order’ speech, the historical significance of both events is now much clearer.
Two decades of permanent ‘most favoured nation’ trading status for China has produced the largest transfer of wealth, technology, manufacturing capacity and markets in human history, and destroyed the American industrial economy.
Two decades of the ‘War on Terror’ and the cancerous growth of a global surveillance state has destroyed Western liberty and obliterated civil rights.
Two decades of the corporate internet, social media and smartphones has lobotomised Western culture, destroyed key Western institutions, engineered a rolling mass psychosis and transferred regional political and economic power to Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
Two decades of the occupation of Afghanistan, then Iraq, drone war and collateral murder in Pakistan, attacks on Libya, Syria and Yemen has destroyed the authority of the United States and its allies to the point where the senile winner of a crooked election mumbling prepared talking points inside a fortified Capitol is the nominal leader of what was once called the free world.
Before 9/11 it was still almost possible to believe America’s idealised story of itself. Today the USA can be compared to the most corrupt regimes in history, and may even be the most corrupt, given the scale of corruption now possible.
Gangster states, which are merely criminal rather than sadistic and depraved, now look at the United States with justified disgust.
But America is also no longer really America, just as Britain is no longer really Britain. Both are no more than holding companies of a global commercial conglomerate hostile to national power as a barrier to global domination, just as developing national power in an earlier era was determined to weaken regional power.
All this was accelerated after 9/11 through the imposition of a war whose structural outcome, if not objective, was the demolition of the democratic West, and it is now being accelerated yet further via the pandemic.
Once again shock propaganda has been used to declare a state of emergency and enable the seizure of power from the people to State and transnational organs. Here, too, a highly profitable permanent war has been declared against an invisible enemy with no definable conditions of victory, or even coherently stated aims.
Again, the winners are the same global political, economic and security elites who consolidated after 9/11 by destroying the independence and competence of the institutions over which they had acquired control in the process of converting them into instruments of domination.
Here too, beyond a lingering and misplaced respect for institutional authority, the plausibility-effect produced by endless, mantra-like repetition, and the production of irrelevant distractions, the official story remains unpersuasive.
In the days which followed 9/11 questions were already being asked about the relationship between the official story, the actual pattern of the evidence and a series of imponderables, and they have continued to be asked.
What is without question is that one hour after the attack in New York, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak had identified the likely perpetrator as Osama Bin Laden (Bin Laden would later deny any involvement) and called for the declaration of a global ‘war against terror’ extending beyond the perpetrators of 9/11 itself to confront terror generally.
The paradigm was adopted wholesale by George Bush in a speech to Congress nine days later. ’Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda,’ Bush said, ‘but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.’
Islam itself was not the enemy, we were told. Al Qaeda had only ‘hijacked’ Islam for the purpose of ‘remaking the world and imposing its radical beliefs on people everywhere’.
In subsequent years this vague and ambiguous distinction would be used to support the extension of police state surveillance not just of rapidly growing Muslim populations across the West (to monitor evidence of dangerous radicalization) but also anyone articulating suspicion towards Muslims. By 2019 more ‘Right-wingers’ than Islamic activists were being referred to the Prevent programme. Last month the Department of Homeland Security issued a bulletin implying that if Americans question and challenge the COVID shot mandates, they are now considered potential ‘Domestic Violent Extremists’.
In truth, Bush and his associates and masters had hijacked Al-Qaeda and Islam for the purpose of imposing their own radical agenda. Spun between a belligerent discourse of Islamofascism and a police discourse of Islamophobia, a schizoid and insulting fantasy of a liberal Islam became the object of a new imperialism in the stated cause of Western values, and in reality enacting their destruction.
Just as recent calls to ‘Save the NHS’ have served to camouflage the liquidation of the NHS, the rhetoric of ‘nation-building’ efforts to extend Western democracy across the world have, in reality, destroyed democracy everywhere.
Even as mass Muslim immigration into the West accelerated following their destruction of their countries, a steady drumbeat of slaughter and atrocity in London, Madrid, Paris and elsewhere, staged by actors invariably known to intelligence agencies, maintained a climate of hostility and madness to the benefit of the occupational elites. The language of permanent terror bled into a culture (what is a safe space but a refuge from a world of terror?) as a psychologically brutalized population regressed into a cloying “thoughts and prayers” martyrology, in fact promoted or exploded into murderous psychosis, combining in cases like Usman Khan, who shortly before his London Bridge rampage attended a conference on criminal rehabilitation as a rehabilitated criminal. https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-indoctrination-of-the-justice-system/ (The Millwall supporter who helped to disarm him, Roy Larner, was later added to terror watchlist.)
In February 2007, when former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski denounced before the Senate ‘a historical, strategic and moral calamity . . . driven by Manichaean impulses and imperial hubris’, the full extent of the damage was not yet clear. What now is clear is that the War on Terror was a weapon directed against the West itself which has succeeded beyond all expectations.
Whether through a conscious plan or what Hegel called the cunning of reason, the West has been destroyed. What now exists is a shadow West, which still speaks as if it was the West for camouflage, but in the service of completely different goals. It is not a coincidence that the characters promoted and rewarded for their participation in the War on Terror have either remained in place or returned to play a role in the pandemic: from their perspective there has been no error. What has materialised over the last thirty years, and especially the last eighteen months, is a new system of power, which although still defined within the context of the history of the nation-state, represents its ultimate destruction.
As well as dentistry, sport has played a big, happy part of my life. Athletics, cross country and squash mainly but also many other competitive sports. So I was relieved to find that, following a long spell on the NHS waiting list, I wouldn’t need a hip replacement after all. I’d used the waiting time to do as much research on hip physio as possible and found that my mobility was improving steadily and significantly. My experience and knowledge of sports injuries through intense training and competing for my country had definitely helped.
When I sat down with the consultant for the assessment of my hip I described the progress made and how keen I was to avoid, or at least put off, an operation. The consultant orthopaedic surgeon seemed happy with my attitude and said that nothing would improve on my original hip and that, no matter how bad the hip looked on the X-ray, as long as I could function and manage the pain, I should avoid surgical treatment and continue with my physio and general health measures. Happy days!
This experience reminded me of my own profession (including its history) and the training involved and how medical science has responded to Covid.
In the early years of training we were taught about the ‘old’ treatments and how advances in technology had changed the way we removed decay and designed restorative work (fillings, crowns and bridges etc.). After qualifying and through the years this theme continued. Restorative work involves working out how little, if any, healthy tooth tissue you can get away with removing. All our technology and materials still can’t beat the real thing.
Prevention of the causes of gum disease and tooth decay through education is therefore the most important aspect of dentistry in my opinion. Appropriately frequent monitoring (check-ups) – and treatment as a last resort.
These principles could equally be applied to just about every branch of medicine including infectious diseases and our immune systems. When Covid emerged the panic that set in should not have perverted previous scientific evidence regarding lockdowns, mask wearing, social distancing, testing and recording of ‘cases’. Equally, the panic should not have rushed the medical profession into vaccination. All the evidence was clear from the start that our immune systems were not broken save for the very elderly and vulnerable and the already severely ill. Those that fitted this description were very much in the minority (representing a tiny fraction of the world’s population) and may even have had undiagnosed compromised immune systems.
A few months ago I noticed that someone who had always said ‘hello’ or nodded politely as we passed in the street or in the shopping centre was turning away every time we neared each other. After a few weeks of this happening I asked him if there was anything the matter and he said it was because I hadn’t had the vaccine. He immediately turned away again and I didn’t attempt to respond.
I like to think that those of us who have refused the vaccine aren’t extreme conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, troublemakers, or ignorant and selfish. We just want to be as careful as we should be in deciding on any medical treatment. We don’t want to try something we might later regret. We don’t want to be pressured into any particular decision and we don’t want to fix something that’s not broken!
It is impossible to overemphasize the importance of this book. It is a tour de force that blows away twenty years of U.S. government lies and obfuscations about the mass murders of September 11, 2001, the foundational event of recent times that claimed thousands of victims whose relatives still cry out for truth and justice.
Reading Unanswered Questions will roil you to the depths of your soul and illuminate your mind as author Ray McGinnis presents fact after fact backed up by almost one thousand endnotes and twelve years of meticulous research. There is nothing speculative about this book. It is not a “conspiracy theory.”
McGinnis ingeniously and brilliantly documents those murders through the eyes of victims’ relatives and their decades-long, agonizing efforts to seek honest answers from the U.S. government. To have their simple and obvious questions answered. To know the truth about why their loved ones died and who killed them.
Their struggles have been met with cruel indifference from four presidents (Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden), three New York City mayors (Giuliani, Bloomberg, and de Blasio), the 9/11 Commission, and so many others in positions of authority who have turned deaf ears to their cris de coeur. The corporate mass media have rubbed salt in their wounds as they have stage-managed the lies and coverups. And controlled opposition operatives have played slick games to direct attention away from the heart of the matter.
The families’ search for answers to their questions have been either ignored or answered with lies and dissimulation piled upon dissimulation to protect the guilty. McGinnis is their champion. He insists on answers.
He powerfully unfurls layer upon layer of facts and the government’s fictions in a timeline that brings us to the twentieth anniversary of these atrocities. While reading it, one cannot help but think of the thousands of innocent victims of that terrible day and their suffering families, and the millions of innocent victims throughout the world who have been murdered by the U.S. government in the name of 9/11. The “war on terror” has been waged by a government that continues to refuse to tell the truth about who the “terrorists” were on September 11, 2001.
By refusing to answer the families’ questions and thereby hypothetically claiming the Fifth Amendment for fear of incriminating themselves, government officials have ironically incriminated themselves.
For McGinnis is like a prosecuting attorney who works not for the state but for the people. He forces the issue by asking the questions his clients want answered. Like them, he is persistent and requests answers to a litany of interrogations that are met with silence. The government’s stonewalling is deafening, and readers – who are the jury – are left to decide the case partially based on those non-answers, often justified under the sham of “national security” or just plain arrogance. When answers are forthcoming, they are incomplete and disingenuous.
Seventy per cent of the questions the Family Steering Committee asked the 9/11 Commission were left unanswered in The 9/11 Commission Report. Those that were answered raised more questions than they answered.
But the reason that this book is so powerful is because McGinnis answers the questions that the government does not. And so his title – Unanswered Questions – is ironically false while also being true.
This should in no way put off those who still cling to the official story. For McGinnis is exceedingly fair in assessing and presenting the facts and readily admits when there are disagreements.
While focusing on a core group of bereaved families called The Family Steering Committee who are insistent on answers, a group that includes four New Jersey widows known as “The Jersey Girls” whose husbands died in the Twin Towers, he includes many others and does not shy away from saying when they are at odds. The only way a fair-minded person can assess the book is to read it. And if you don’t read it and you have bought the government’s official fabrications or are still sitting on the fence, you are in flight from truth. This book demands attention.
As far as I know, while there have been many excellent books critiquing the government’s account of 9/11, led by about a dozen extraordinary works by David Ray Griffin, and many books supporting the government’s explanation led by The 9/11 Commission Report, Unanswered Questions is the first to approach the subject from the perspective of the questions asked by the relatives of the victims.
For many people, the murders of that day are abstract, although they naturally stir the human emotions of pity, fear, and terror. But from a distance, for they are now fading into history and are not personal. For some, there may have been a catharsis with The 9/11 Commission Report which they no doubt never read although it was said to be a “best-seller.” That would be fake catharsis, for such fiction fails to tell the truth since it was written by people blind in mind and ears as well as in their eyes. But then again, who reads Sophocles or Aeschylus any longer? Better to read The New York Times, Slate magazine, Time, The New Republic, The Nation, etc., all of which effusively praised the 9/11 Commission Report when it was released. As McGinnis reports, “The New York Times called the Report ‘an uncommonly lucid, even riveting narrative’ and an ‘improbable literary triumph.’” This is simply propaganda.
But let us take a look inside Unanswered Questions, a genuine non-fiction book motivated by a deep compassion for the victims and a scholar’s dedication to the truth. It is divided into four parts, each containing multiple chapters.
“Part One: From Grief to Advocacy” is the briefest and introduces the reader to firefighters, first responders, and family members who lost loved ones in the calamity. We learn how their grief turned to advocacy when they formed many groups to channel their energies. We learn how President Bush and his minions (or was Bush the minion and others like Cheney in charge?) opposed establishing a special commission to probe into the events of September Eleventh and how when his opposition was overcome he had the audacity to try to name Henry Kissinger to head the 9/11 Commission and how this was stopped. Finally, McGinnis tells us how the families’ questions were greatly expanded after discovering Paul Thompson’s extraordinary Internet timeline with its vast numbers of links to news reports that was later published as The Terror Timeline.
“Part Two: Family Steering Committee Statements to the 9/11 Commission” examines how the 9/11 Commission was a setup from the start, not even close to being an impartial investigation. It began with the naming of Philip Zelikow as the Director. Zelikow had deep ties to the Bush administration and its neocons. He had been a member of Bush’s transition team. Even “Richard Clarke, chairman of the ‘Counterterrorism Security Group,’ said ‘the fix is in’” when Zelikow was appointed. Zelikow completely controlled the investigation and the final report despite many conflicts of interest. He essentially wrote the report before the hearings commenced. He had authored a book with Condoleezza Rice and was an advocate for preemptive war that was used to attack Iraq in early 2003, etc. His appointment was a sick joke, and the Family Steering Committee called for his immediate resignation but was rebuffed just as quickly by Chairman Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton. As a result, the final report ended being a fictional account authored by Zelikow (who has now been named to head a Covid-19 commission).
This section also covers the lies told by Mayor Rudy Giuliani when he testified. Three hundred and forty-three FDNY members were killed that day, heroes who didn’t have to die. Giuliani’s testimony so outraged the families of first responders that their fury was uncontained. McGinnis tells us:
They held up signs that read ‘lies’ and ‘liar.’ Family Steering Committee member Sally Regenhard held up a sign that read ‘FICTION.’ She hollered, ‘My son [Christian Regenhard, a probationary firefighter] was not told to get out! He would’ve gotten out! My son was murdered, murdered because of your incompetence and radios that didn’t work!
McGinnis captures the increasing anger felt by family members throughout this section as the final report was rammed through despite their protests.
“Part Three: The Family Steering Committee’s Unanswered Questions” is the heart of the book. It contains eleven chapters devoted to questions addressed to NORAD, the FAA, the CIA/SEC/FBI, Mayor Giuliani, President Bush, the Port Authority/WTC/City of New York, Vice President Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld but never answered. Over a thousand questions were posed to the 9/11 Commission to aid the investigation. McGinnis writes:
The questions were intended to direct the focus of the inquiry, and ask those most directly involved what led to the failures that day. They understood that it would not be the FSC members themselves asking the questions. Instead, they would be posed to witnesses by 9/11 commissioners in public hearings, or asked by Commission staff behind closed-door proceedings.
Some of these questions were directed at the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). One question the FSC asked the 9/11 Commission was: ‘Why weren’t NORAD jets able to intercept the hijacked planes if they were airborne within eight minutes of notification?’
NORAD had an extremely successful history of intercepting errant aircraft, and a part of their mission was “surveillance and control of the [domestic] territorial airspace “ in the U.S. and Canada. Nevertheless, on September 11, 2001 none of the hijacked aircraft were intercepted even though they were allegedly being flown by inexperienced and incompetent hijackers who, according to experts, could never fly such massive commercial airliners into the World Trade Towers or the Pentagon. Government witnesses either lied about the systemic failures to intercept the planes, omitted important details, or gave contradictory stories. Of course, they were then promoted. And although there was an unprecedented number of war games being “coincidentally” held on September 11, none of the 9/11 Commissioners asked any witnesses about them.
It was clear that all the questions about the failure to intercept the planes would not be answered, but McGinnis makes it obvious that their non-answers were indeed answers by omission, for in this section and all the others, he makes sure the questions are indeed answered and the cumulative effect is devastating. He does this not simply by expressing his own opinions but by quoting others and always giving sources.
In a similar vein, the FSC wished to know from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) why these hijacked planes were able to evade all of the highly sophisticated radar? McGinnis says, “The 9/11 Commission concluded that NORAD had failed to do its job on September Eleventh; NORAD’s decisions impaired the FAA radar operator’s conduct.” Of course the radar questions were linked to the war games issue and since the war games questions were never asked, these massive failures were explained away in gobbledygook worthy of the Three Stooges.
Mindy Kleinberg, a FSC member whose husband Alan died in the North Tower, told the Commission that its theory of luck was bullshit, although she phrased it more diplomatically:
With regard to the 9/11 attacks, it has been said that the intelligence agencies have to be right 100% of the time and the terrorists only have to get lucky once. This explanation for the devastating attacks of September 11, simply on its face, is wrong in its value. Because the 9/11 terrorists were not just lucky once; they were lucky over and over again… Is it luck that aberrant stock trades were not monitored? Is it luck when 15 visas were awarded on incomplete forms? Is it luck when Airline Security screenings allow hijackers to board planes with box cutters and pepper spray? Is it luck when emergency FAA and NORAD protocols are not followed? Is it luck when a national emergency is not reported to top government officials on a timely basis? To me luck is something that happens once. When you have this repeated pattern of broken protocols, broken laws, broken communication, one cannot still call it luck.
Comically, The 9/11 Commission Report concluded that, as McGinnis notes, “The reason for the attacks was due simply to a [U.S. government] failure of imagination.”
In regard to foreknowledge of the attacks, the families asked the CIA, the SEC, and the FBI for the names of the individuals and financial institutions who placed “put” orders on American and United Airlines in the three weeks prior to 9/11.
This involved the number three man at the CIA, CIA Executive Director Alvin “Buzzy” Krongard, former Vice Chairman of the board at Bankers Trust that had been acquired by Deutsche Bank through which many of these suspect stock trades passed. This insider trading that anticipated the 9/11 attacks was connected to a security firm named Stratesec that provided security to Dulles Airport, the World Trade Center, and United Airlines, and to Wirt Walker III, a business partner of the president’s brother, Marvin Bush. Walker III was a board member of the Carlyle Group that was in turn connected to the bin Laden and Bush families.
Despite these and other highly suspect connections, the “9/11 Commission wasn’t interested in exploring leads about possible foreknowledge of the attacks.” Nor were they interested in the strange matter of Larry Silverstein, who had already owned World Trade Center Building 7, but who obtained a 99-year lease on the Twin Towers two months before the attack and who insisted that insurance cover a terrorist attack for $3.5. billion dollars. Silverstein was later awarded $4.55 billion when it was determined that there had been two suicide attacks.
Silverstein later claimed that there was agreement to “pull” (a controlled demolition term) Building 7, which happened at 5:20 PM that day despite never having been hit by a plane. Questions about the collapse of Building 7 were of course never answered, but the videos of its collapse are available for all to see with their own eyes. An excellent film about Building 7, Seven by Dylan Avery, should be seen by all. Seeing is believing, and what any objective observer can only conclude is that the building was taken down by controlled demolition, which the government denies.
Which brings us to other key questions that the FSC asked, McGinnis explores, and that went unanswered: Why did President Bush enter a Sarasota, Florida elementary classroom, stay there as the attacks unfolded, and not immediately return to Washington, D.C.? Why did he enter that classroom at 9:03 AM and remain there for fifteen minutes when it was clear the U.S. was under a terrorist attack? Why was he, unlike Dick Cheney, not immediately taken out of the building by the Secret Service but was allowed to sit and read to children and not depart the building until 9:34 A.M.?
“The vice president was reported by President Bush’s personal secretary as being ‘seized by arms, legs, and his belt and physically’ carried out of his office at 9:03 A.M. Cheney was taken to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center below the White House, where Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta saw him prior to 9:25 A.M.” Yet Bush stayed to read a book when colleagues of the Secret Service agents protecting him had already been evacuated from the largest Secret Service Field Office in WTC 7.
“However,” writes McGinnis, “on December 4, 2001, President Bush made the following statement at a Town Hall meeting about the moment – 9:01 a.m. – that he said he learned about the attack. ‘And I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower – the television was obviously on, and I used to fly myself, and I said, “That’s one terrible pilot.” And I said, “It must have been a horrible accident.” But I was whisked off there – I didn’t have much time to think about it.’”
You can’t make this stuff up, yet it’s offered to the public and the victims’ families as acceptable. Bush was informed that a second plane had hit the South Tower by Andrew Card who came into the classroom and whispered in his ear. But three months later he claims he saw on television the first plane hit the North Tower when no one could have seen it since video of the first plane hitting the building at 8:46 A.M. was not available until much later.
These ridiculous discrepancies and other questions the FSC wished the 9/11 Commission to ask Bush under oath in sworn public testimony went unasked and unanswered. Instead, as McGinnis writes:
But, the meeting with Bush and Cheney took place in secret on April 29, 2004. It was not held under oath. No transcript was made available of their conversation with the commissioners. Nothing was learned about why the president remained at an elementary school during the attacks. Nothing was learned about what the president knew regarding foreign intelligence agencies forewarning the U.S. Nothing was learned about why the president had authorized America to prepare for war against Afghanistan in the days and weeks prior to the attacks of September 11.
Nor was anything learned about why Pentagon brass suddenly cancelled flights scheduled for September 11. Nothing about who warned them and why.
Essentially all the key questions the families asked were not answered. But McGinnis answers them, including those addressed to Cheney, Rumsfeld, Giuliani, the CIA, and the Port Authority/WTC/City of New York. By using the documented records against them, he does the job the 9/11 Commission refused to do. He unravels the lies, circumlocutions, and straightforward propaganda used to hide the truth, including the following:
Cheney’s deceptions about when he got to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center and what he was doing there and his orders to his young assistant about the hijacked plane headed toward the capitol.
Rumsfeld with his lies about not knowing anything about the World Trade Center attacks until fifteen minutes before the Pentagon was hit and why the Pentagon was not defended.
Giuliani and the obvious controlled demolition of Building 7 at 5:20 P.M. and the lies about the faulty telephones the firefighters carried.
Since this is not meant to be a book about a book but a book review, I will stop there. I would be remiss, however, if I failed to mention “Chapter 22: The Missing Accounts: FDNY.”
It is part of Part Four: Acceptance And Dissent that leads to McGinnis’s conclusion. Whatever one’s position on the events of September 11, it is generally accepted that firefighters and first responders are objective and brave in the extreme. Of the emergency workers who responded to the call to help save the people in the Twin Towers, the vast majority who lost their lives in attempting to save their fellow human beings were firefighters – 343 of them perished that day. They were doing their duty. So their surviving colleagues’ testimonies are priceless and beyond dispute. They had absolutely no reasons to lie. McGinnis tells us:
On September 11, 2001, Thomas Von Essen, the fire commissioner of New York City, ordered that oral histories be gathered from first responders, firefighters, and medical workers. He wanted to preserve the accounts of what they experienced at the World Trade Center. In the weeks and months following 9/11, 503 oral histories were taken. However, they were not released to the public. The 2002 mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, refused.
The Family Steering Committee asked the 9/11 Commission why, but the Commission refused to answer their question. After a law suit, the oral histories that run to 12,000 pages were released. They contain copious accounts of explosions going off in the Towers before the Towers collapsed.
FDNY firefighter John Coyne, who was in the South Tower, recalls how he had called his father and said:
I finally got through to my father and said ‘I’m alive. I just wanted to tell you, go to church, I’m alive. I just so narrowly escaped this thing.’ He said, ‘Where were you? You were there?’ I said, ‘Yeh, I was right there when it blew up.’ He said, ‘You were there when the planes hit?’ I said, ‘No, I was there when it exploded, the building exploded.’ He said, ‘You mean when it fell down?’ I said, ‘No, when it exploded.’ … I totally thought it had been blown up. That’s just the perspective of looking at it, it seemed to have exploded out.
Captain Karin DeShore, who was standing outside, said she saw a sequence of orange and red flashes coming from the North Tower:
Initially it was just one flash. Then this flash…kept popping all around the building and that building started to explode … These popping sounds and the explosions were getting bigger, going up and down and the all around the building.
Keith Murphy: “There was tremendous damage in the lobby… like something had exploded out… a distant boom sounded like three explosions.”
Assistant Commissioner Stephen Gregory: “I saw low-level flashes… [at] the lower level of the building. You know when they demolish a building?”
Explosions were being reported everywhere and by reporters as well. Researchers Graeme MacQueen and Ted Walter viewed 70 hours of television coverage and found that most reporters were saying the Towers came down as a result of explosions and demolition. Take a look here.
There were explosions reported in the sub-basements before the planes hit. William Rodriguez, who was in the sub-basement of the North Tower and heard and felt very loud multiple explosions, told this to 9/11 Commission staff and this never appeared in The 9/11 Commission Report.
The evidence for explosives planted in the Towers and Building 7 is overwhelming but was completely discounted by the 9/11 Commission and the mass media complicit in its coverup. In fact, the demolition of Building 7 at 5:20 P.M was not worthy of a mention in the best-selling report. It should be obvious to any objective thinker that if these building were wired for explosives and were brought down via controlled demolition, then this could not have been done by Osama bin Laden or his followers but only by insiders who were granted secret access to these ultra-high security buildings.
Bob McIlvaine, whose son Bobby died in the North Tower, has persevered for twenty years to expose the lies surrounding September 11. McGinnis reports on his 2006 interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation host Evan Solomon:
I believe 100% that the US orchestrated 9/11 with the help of other agencies around the world… There’s people within the US that knew it happened, that planned this to happen.
To Solomon’s question “You think your son was therefore murdered by Americans?” McIlvaine replied, “absolutely.”
He is joined by many others, including Matt Campbell, a British citizen and family member, whose brother Geoff Campbell died on the 106th floor of the North Tower. Matt Campbell and his family have recently demanded a new inquest based on a 3,000 page scientifically-backed dossier claiming the buildings were blown up from within.
After reading Unanswered Questions, you very well might believe it too.
Learning about the determination of such stalwart souls as McIlvaine, Campbell, the FSC, and so many others to extract truth and justice from a recalcitrant and guilty government is inspirational. They will never give up. Nor should we.
There is no doubt that this extraordinary book will answer many questions you may or may not have had about the mass murders of September 11, 2001.
So don’t turn away.
It will break your heart but restore your faith in what a writer dedicated to the truth can do for those family members who have so long sought the bread of truth and were handed stones of silence.
In their ongoing grief, Ray McGinnis has handed them the gift of a bitter solace. He has answered them.
He has also given the public an opportunity to see the truth and demand an independent investigation forthwith.
Welcome to New World Next Week – the video series from Corbett Report and Media Monarchy that covers some of the most important developments in open source intelligence news. This week:
Families Issue Statement Over MSM Smear Job: “We are not conspiracy theorists… We are family members seeking the truth about the murder of our loved ones.”
While the mainstream media has, by and large, dismissed the theory that SARS-CoV-2 was created and leaked from a high-security biocontainment lab in Wuhan, China, a number of high-ranking U.S. officials are sticking to it, and there’s probably good reason for this.
On the whole, if the virus was actually a natural occurrence, a series of improbable coincidences would have had to transpire. Meanwhile, a series of highly probable “coincidences” point to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) being the most likely source, and to dismiss them as a whole simply doesn’t make sense.
Media Struggle to Prop Up Unproven Zoonotic Theory
I first mentioned that the outbreak had the hallmarks of a laboratory escape in an article we posted February 4, 2020. On the upside, some members of the media are now finally starting to inch toward more honest reporting on this — probably because U.S. officials keep leaning that way.
That doesn’t mean some aren’t still trying to defend the official narrative. Take The New York Times, for example. The original headline of its March 26, 2021, article about Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, read: “Ex-CDC Director Favors Debunked Covid-19 Origin Theory.”1
Three days later, that headline was toned down to: “The CDC’s Ex-Director Offers No Evidence in Favoring Speculation That the Coronavirus Originated in a Lab,”2 with a correction notice noting that the earlier headline “referred incorrectly to a theory on the origins of the coronavirus. The theory is unproven, not debunked.”
Well, the truth is, all other theories are equally unproven — and are riddled with far more holes. The theory that the virus arose through natural mutation, for example, looks like Swiss cheese in comparison to the lab-leak theory.
In a February 16, 2021, article3 in Independent Science News, molecular biologist and virologist Jonathan Latham, Ph.D., and Allison Wilson, Ph.D., a molecular biologist, reviewed the evidence for a laboratory origin and the reasons why a zoonotic origin “will never be found.” I also summarized their review in March 2021 article, which explains that:
The chance of a person from Wuhan being patient zero is approximately 1 in 630, based on calculations that take into account the population size of Wuhan, the global population and the fact that coronavirus-carrying animals are found virtually all over the world
Taking into account that there are 28 Alpha- and Beta-coronavirus species with members that affect humans, the chance of Wuhan hosting a SARS-related coronavirus outbreak is 17,640 to 1
No credible theory for natural zoonotic spillover has been presented, to date
There are at least four distinct lab origin theories, including the serial passage theory (which proposes the virus was created by serial passaging through an animal host or cell culture). There’s also a variety of evidence for genetic manipulation
A third theory is that SARS-CoV-2 is the result of vaccine development, and the fourth is the Mojiang miners passage theory, which proposes a precursor to SARS-CoV-2 sickened the miners, and once inside these patients, it mutated into SARS-CoV-2
No matter which way you look at it, the half-baked idea brought forth by the World Health Organization’s investigative team, that the virus somehow naturally evolved in some unknown part of the world and then piggy-backed into Wuhan on top of frozen food, is held together by even fewer facts.
Among the more compelling “coincidences” that hint at lab-origin are the facts that the WIV has admitted storing and working with bat coronaviruses collected significant distances away from the lab, and that it’s the only biosafety lab in China that studies human coronaviruses. These viruses include RaTG13,4 the closest known ancestor to SARS-CoV-2, obtained from miners who fell ill with severe respiratory illness after working in a Mojiang mine in 2012.
WHO COVID Report ‘Totally Flawed’
In a March 30, 2021, opinion piece in The Washington Post,5 Josh Rogin accurately points out that the WHO’s report6 on the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is so flawed, “a real investigation has yet to take place.” We simply cannot count that report as the result of a true investigative effort.
“Determining the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus should have nothing to do with politics,” he writes.7 “It is a forensic question, one that requires thorough investigation of all possible theories, and one that should encompass both the scenario that the virus jumped from animals to humans in nature as well as one related to human error in a Wuhan lab.
But a fatally flawed investigation by the World Health Organization and Chinese officials and experts only muddies the waters, and it places the WHO further at odds with the U.S. government and the Biden administration.”
As noted by Rogin and many others, the investigation was far from independent and transparent, as China was allowed to select its members, who then relied on their Chinese counterparts when it came to data collection. It’s no surprise then that this team decided the natural origin theory is the most credible, while the lab-accident theory is summarily dismissed as unworthy of further consideration and study.
In a March 25, 2021, CNN interview,8 Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated, “We’ve got real concerns about the methodology and the process that went into that report, including the fact that the government in Beijing apparently helped to write it.” Rogin adds:9
“Specifically, declassified U.S. intelligence, confirmed by Blinken’s own State Department,10 alleges that the WIV was conducting undisclosed research on bat coronaviruses, had secret research projects with the Chinese military, and failed to disclose that several lab workers got sick with COVID-like symptoms in autumn 2019.”
Someone’s Not Telling the Truth
According to the WHO report, the labs “were well-managed, with a staff health monitoring program with no reporting of COVID-19 compatible respiratory illness during the weeks/months prior to December 2019.” “In other words, the WHO is saying the U.S. intelligence is wrong,” Rogin writes.11
Not a word is mentioned in the report about U.S. government claims that the WIV engaged in the very research required to create a novel coronavirus with the specific affinity to infect human cells.
Recently, Shi Zhengli, who heads bat coronavirus research at the WIV, spoke at a Rutgers University seminar, calling the WIV’s research “open” and “transparent.” Former deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger disagrees. In an interview with Lesley Stahl on “60 Minutes,” he said:12
“There was a direct order from Beijing to destroy all viral samples — and they didn’t volunteer to share the genetic sequences. There is a body of research that’s been taking place, conducted by the Chinese military in collaboration with the WIV, which has not been acknowledged by the Chinese government.
We’ve seen the data. I’ve personally seen the data. We don’t know [why the military were in that lab]. It is a major lead that needs to be pursued by the press, certainly by the WHO.”
As noted by Pottinger, Shi published studies showing how bat coronaviruses were manipulated to render them more infectious to humans, and the U.S. government has in the past received reports of safety concerns due to lax standards at the WIV.
“They were doing research specifically on coronaviruses that attach to the ACE2 receptors in human lungs just like the COVID-19 virus,” Pottinger told Stahl.13 “It’s circumstantial evidence. But it’s a pretty potent bullet point when you consider that the place where this pandemic emerged was a few kilometers away from the WIV.”
US State Department Suspects Lab Leak
In a March 21, 2021, interview with Sky News Australia,14 David Asher, former lead investigator for the U.S. State Department’s task force that looked into the origins of COVID-19, also stated that the data they collected “made us feel the Wuhan Institute was highly probably the source of the COVID pandemic.”
According to Asher, three workers at the WIV who worked with the RatG13 coronavirus — the closest relative to SARS-CoV-2 identified to date — appear to have actually been the first cluster of cases of COVID-19. They fell ill with symptoms consistent with COVID-19 as early as October 2019. At least one of the workers required hospitalization.
He also pointed out there is evidence in the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 suggesting it’s been synthetically altered. It has the backbone of a bat coronavirus, combined with a pangolin receptor and “some sort of humanized mice transceptor.” “These things don’t naturally make sense,” Asher said, adding that experts around the world agree that the odds of this configuration occurring naturally are “very low.”
Another troubling indicator that something was amiss at the WIV was the Chinese government’s taking down of a WIV database in September 2019. According to the Chinese, this was done because of “thousands of hacking attempts.”
However, Asher pointed out many other databases were taken offline around the same time as well.15 The Chinese even tried to remove data posted in a European database containing viral sequencing from patients exhibiting COVID-19-related symptoms. Interestingly, those sequences included adenovirus, which is a vaccine vector. This, Asher said, could indicate that SARS-CoV-2 is part of a vaccine developed in response to a biological weapon.
In an earlier article16 by The Sun, Asher is quoted saying the WIV “was operating a secret, classified program,” and that “In my view … it was a biological weapons program.” He stops short of accusing China of intentional release, however, which also would not make sense from a bioweapon point of view. Instead, he said he believes it was a weapon vector that, during development, “somehow leaked.”17
A March 27, 2020, assessment report by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency also concluded SARS-CoV-2 was likely an accidental release from an infectious diseases laboratory, but stops short of calling it a biological weapon.18 Asher also told Sky News19 he’s never seen a more systematic cover-up, and The Sun 20 quotes him as saying that “Motive, cover-up, conspiracy, all the hallmarks of guilt are associated with this.”
Former FDA Commissioner Weighs in on Lab Origin
March 28, 2021, former FDA commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb, now a board member of Pfizer (producer of one of the COVID vaccines), weighed in on the origin of the pandemic in a “Face the Nation” interview, saying:21
“It looks like the WHO report was an attempt to try to support the Chinese narrative … You know, the lab leak theory doesn’t seem like a plausible theory unless you aggregate the biggest collection of coronaviruses and put them in a lab, a minimum-security lab in the middle of a densely-populated center and experiment on animals, which is exactly what the Wuhan Institute of Virology did.
They were using these viruses in a BSL-2 lab and, we now know, infecting animals. So that creates the opportunity for a lab leak. It might not be the most likely scenario on how this virus got out, but it has to remain a scenario. And I think at the end of the day, we’re never going to fully discharge that possibility. What we’re going to have here is a battle of competing narratives.”
WHO Enters Damage Control Mode
In response to growing critiques, WHO director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and 13 other world leaders have joined the U.S. government in expressing “frustration with the level of access China granted an international mission to Wuhan.” As reported by The Washington Post, March 30, 2021:22
“Ghebreyesus said in a briefing to member states … that he expected ‘future collaborative studies to include more timely and comprehensive data sharing’ — the most pointed comments to date from an agency that has been solicitous toward China through most of the pandemic.
He said there is a particular need for a ‘full analysis’ of the role of animal markets in Wuhan and that the report did not conduct an ‘extensive enough’ assessment of the possibility the virus was introduced to humans through a laboratory incident …
The United States, Britain, South Korea, Israel, Japan and others issued a joint statement23 … expressing concern. ‘Together, we support a transparent and independent analysis and evaluation, free from interference and undue influence,’ it reads …
Tedros said24 … that mission team members raised concerns to him about access to raw data needed for the report … ‘The team reports that the first detected case had symptom onset on the 8th of December 2019. But to understand the earliest cases, scientists would benefit from full access to data, including biological samples from at least September 2019,’ he said.”
WHO Investigation Team Accused of Spreading Disinformation
In a March 2020 interview with Independent Science News,25 molecular biologist Richard Ebright, Ph.D., laboratory director at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology and member of the Institutional Biosafety Committee of Rutgers University and the Working Group on Pathogen Security of the state of New Jersey, called out the members of the WHO-instigated investigative team as “participants in disinformation.”
Ebright was one of 26 scientists who signed an open letter26 demanding a full and unrestricted forensic investigation into the origins of the pandemic, published in the Wall Street Journal and French Le Monde, March 4, 2021. When asked to describe the shortcomings of the WHO-China team’s investigation, he responded:
“A credible investigation would have had Terms of Reference that: 1) Acknowledged the possibility of laboratory origin, 2) Ensured access of investigators to records, samples, personnel, and facilities at the Wuhan laboratories that handle bat SARS-related coronaviruses,
3) Enabled collection of evidence, not mere meet-and-greet photo-ops, 4) Authorized an investigation of months, not mere days, and 5) A credible investigation also would have had conflict-of-interest-free investigators, not persons who were subjects of the research and/or closely associated with subjects of the investigation …
It is crucial that any team reviewing the issues include not only research scientists, but also biosafety, biosecurity, and science policy specialists.”
Ebright, who has repeatedly called the WHO mission “a charade,” stated that “its members were willing — and, in at least one case, enthusiastic — participants in disinformation.” Importantly, the terms of reference for the investigation were prenegotiated, and did not include even the possibility of a laboratory origin. He’s also highly critical of the inclusion of Peter Daszak, whose conflicts of interest alone are enough to invalidate the investigation.
“Daszak was the contractor who funded the laboratory at WIV that potentially was the source of the virus (with subcontracts from $200 million from the US Department of State and $7 million from the US National Institutes of Health), and he was a collaborator and co-author on research projects at the laboratory,” Ebright noted.
What Do We Know?
While another signer of the open letter, Dr. Steven Quay, claims to have calculated27 the lab-origin hypothesis as having a 99.8% probability of being correct, Ebright is unwilling to assign relative probabilities to either theory. Rather, he insists a truly thorough forensic investigation and analysis is what is required, as there is biological evidence going in both directions. He explains:
“The genome sequence of the outbreak virus indicates that its progenitor was either the horseshoe-bat coronavirus RaTG13, or a closely related bat coronavirus.
RaTG13 was collected by Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2013 from a horseshoe-bat colony in a mine in Yunnan province, where miners had died from a SARS-like pneumonia in 2012, was partly sequenced by WIV in 2013-2016, was fully sequenced by WIV in 2018-2019, and was published by WIV in 2020.
Bat coronaviruses are present in nature in multiple parts of China. Therefore, the first human infection could have occurred as a natural accident, with a virus passing from a bat to a human, possibly through another animal. There is clear precedent for this. The first entry of the SARS virus into the human population occurred as a natural accident in a rural part of Guangdong province in 2002.
But bat coronaviruses are also collected and studied by laboratories in multiple parts of China, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Therefore, the first human infection also could have occurred as a laboratory accident, with a virus accidentally infecting a field collection staffer, a field survey staffer, or a laboratory staffer, followed by transmission from the staffer to the public.
There also is clear precedent for this. The second, third, fourth and fifth entries of the SARS virus into human populations occurred as a laboratory accident in Singapore in 2003, a laboratory accident in Taipei in 2003, and two separate laboratory accidents in Beijing in 2004.
At this point in time, there is no secure basis to assign relative probabilities to the natural-accident hypothesis and the laboratory-accident hypothesis. Nevertheless, there are three lines of circumstantial evidence that are worth noting.
1. First, the outbreak occurred in Wuhan, a city of 11 million persons that does not contain horseshoe-bat colonies; that is tens of kilometers from, and that is outside the flight range of, the nearest known horseshoe-bat colonies. Furthermore, the outbreak occurred at a time of year when horseshoe bats are in hibernation and do not leave colonies.
2. Second, the outbreak occurred in Wuhan, on the doorstep of the laboratory that conducts the world’s largest research project on horseshoe bat viruses, that has the world’s largest collection of horseshoe-bat viruses, and that possessed and worked with the world’s closest sequenced relative of the outbreak virus …
3. Third, the bat-SARS-related-coronavirus projects at the Wuhan Institute of Virology used personal protective equipment (usually just gloves; sometimes not even gloves) and biosafety standards (usually just biosafety level 2) that would pose very high risk of infection of field-collection, field-survey, or laboratory staff upon contact with a virus having the transmission properties of SARS-CoV-2.”
Who’s Qualified to Opine on Viral Origin?
When asked “What would you say to the scientists who declined to comment on the open letter because it does not come from virologists?” Ebright responded:28
“The claim is unsound. There were virologists among the signers of the Open Letter. There even were coronavirologists among the signers of the Open Letter. More important, COVID-19 affects every person on the planet. Not just virologists …
Microbiologists and molecular biologists are as qualified as virologists to assess the relevant science and science policies. Virology is a subset, not a superset, of microbiology and molecular biology. The sequencing, sequence analysis, cell culture, animal-infection studies and other laboratory procedures used by virologists are not materially different from the procedures used by other microbiologists and molecular biologists.”
Is Gain-of-Function Research Ever Justifiable?
Clearly, getting to the bottom of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is crucial if we are to prevent a similar pandemic from erupting in the future. If gain-of-function research was in fact involved, we need to know, so that steps can either be taken to prevent another leak (which is not likely possible) or to dismantle and ban such research altogether for the common good.
As long as we are creating the risk, the benefit will be secondary. Any scientific or medical gains made from this kind of research pales in comparison to the incredible risks involved if weaponized pathogens are released, and it doesn’t matter if it’s by accident or on purpose. This sentiment has been echoed by others in a variety of scientific publications.29,30,31,32
Considering the potential for a massively lethal pandemic, I believe it’s safe to say that BSL 3 and 4 laboratories pose a very real and serious existential threat to humanity.
Historical facts tell us accidental exposures and releases have already happened, and we only have our lucky stars to thank that none have turned into pandemics taking the lives of tens of millions, as was predicted at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Seeing how scientists have already figured out a way to mutate SARS-CoV-2 such that it evades human antibodies, having a frank, open discussion about the scientific merits of this kind of work is more pertinent than ever before.
If SARS-CoV-2 really was the result of zoonotic spillover, the easiest and most effective way to quash “conspiracy theories” about a lab origin would be to present compelling evidence for a plausible theory. So far, that hasn’t happened, and as noted by Latham and Wilson, the most likely reason for that is because the virus does not have a natural zoonotic origin, and you cannot find that which does not exist.
Summary
Ideally, we need to reevaluate the usefulness of the WHO. Strong evidence indicates it is heavily influenced, if not outright controlled by Bill Gates. On the whole, it seems it would be far wiser to decentralize pandemic planning from the global and federal levels to the state and local levels. Both medicine and government work best when individualized and locally applied.
Sadly, even though this is clearly the best strategy for successfully addressing any truly serious infectious threat, the likelihood of this happening is very close to zero.
This is largely due to decades of careful planning by the technocrats that have carefully placed their surrogates in virtually every arena of global government, finances and media, which allows them to easily dictate their propaganda campaigns and censor or deplatform virtually anyone who disagrees and seeks to provide a balanced counter-narrative.
Somewhere a brilliant but troubled biotech engineer is doing CRISPR in his garage. He has all he needs: a computer, a fridge, a centrifuge, some animal cages, and an assortment of microorganisms in tubes, which he has labeled and stored until he’s ready. Today he will use a gene-editing technique to make a deadly, fast-spreading bacterium. Oh, and he plans to unleash it upon the world tomorrow. He just needs to make a few finishing touches.
Why is he doing this?
Maybe he’s gone mad. Maybe he’s lonely and wants to get revenge on the world. Maybe he read Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto and thinks humans are a plague. In some sense, it doesn’t matter. Out of a thousand other brilliant gene researchers, he has broken bad. And nobody really knows what he’s working on in that garage. He is as invisible to his neighbors as he is to the girls he likes.
What on earth are we going to do about this young man?
How do we stop people like him from unleashing mass death?
And if we are going to stop him, who is the “we?”
Today, more and more people have access to technological means to wreak havoc on the world. As more people have access to exponential technologies, some subset of them could be out there in the dark working on the next existential threat.
So what are we going to do?
Reasonable Regulations
For most people, the answer is linear, even logical: regulation. It’s plausible enough. Certain kinds of activities are riskier than others, so ordinary people are going to have to trust and empower authorities to provide regulatory oversight. Sounds simple. Advocates of this kind of regulation are not arguing that risky research should be banned. As we stipulated in our own scenario, 999 out of 1,000 are not monsters at all but up to good things. Some of their work will be welcome medical breakthroughs.
So maybe some people should be allowed to engage in activities that create existential risks. Otherwise, such activities should be tightly controlled by regulators in licensed, transparent environments. And, of course, government ought to supply that regulatory oversight; or so goes that rationale.
Turnkey Totalitarianism
A handful of people have begun to study existential threats like the ones described above. One such individual is philosopher Nick Bostrom who in the policy summary of his “The Vulnerable World Hypothesis”, writes:
“In order for civilization to have a general capacity to deal with “black ball” inventions of this type, it would need a system of ubiquitous real-time worldwide surveillance. In some scenarios, such a system would need to be in place before the technology is invented.”
After a unipolar surveillance regime is put in place, Bostrom thinks that dangerous materials that could go to the development of existential threats would have to be supplied by a “small number of closely monitored providers.”
So, we get ubiquitous surveillance plus tight regulation, which some such as privacy policy analyst Julian Sanchez have referred to as “turnkey totalitarianism.” The question before us then, is, would it work?
Regulating the Regulators
In a separate article titled “Fawning Over Fauci,” I suggested the media better investigate a situation that is not very different from the one I imagined in the opening vignette. However, the major difference is that there wasn’t some kid in a garage in this real-world scenario. There were government-sanctioned scientists in a research center — The Wuhan Institute of Virology — who used largesse dispensed by our own government.
Indeed, one of the best ways to provide oversight in various research endeavors is to control the funding sources for such research. I have suggested that it is plausible that the infectious diseases branch of the National Institutes of Health (NIH/NIAID), run by none other than Anthony Fauci, was responsible for funding research into zoonotic viruses of the sort that includes Covid-19.
In other words, without Fauci and his agency’s regulatory failure, there might have been no pandemic.
Let’s assume that Anthony Fauci and the functionaries at the NIAID presided over the funding of dangerous research, which was to be tightly controlled and regulated (if not outright banned). Let’s stipulate that such research did lead to a pandemic that has already killed millions of people. And as the virus mutates, it evades not only vaccines, but all manner of bureaucratic mandates. It could soon be endemic.
In this scenario, though, all of the criteria for reasonable regulation ought to have been satisfied. Yet we still got mass death. In other words, there was neither a mad scientist nor a monstrous incel, at least not as far as we know. It could have been as simple as bureaucratic incompetence combined with negligence at one of the labs serving at the NIH’s behest.
For now, I’ll leave aside questions about whether or to what extent the Chinese government knew about the research and could have co-opted it for nefarious purposes. Despite the Communist Party’s sorry track record, the most likely explanation is that this was a terrible accident. We simply can’t say. Nor are we ever likely to find anything but lies coming out of Beijing (or Washington for that matter).
But one thing is clear: there is currently no way to regulate the regulators. Instead, we have no choice but to live with them. Otherwise, they are entirely unaccountable. They alone hold power to take such enormous risks, presumably in the name of science.
The Problem of Power
When it comes to the idea of government, most people suffer from both a great blind spot and a failure of imagination.
The blind spot is a refusal to believe the state is itself the greatest of all existential threats to humanity. Whether in Hollywood’s depiction of corporate baddies or general concerns about gigantism, most people can’t or won’t appreciate the fact that nation-states hold all the records for mass killing. Compare individuals and corporations to that record. It ain’t even close. Yet most people want desperately to believe the state’s job is to protect us. Unicorn governance. Again, the state is the greatest source of violence in human history.
The failure of imagination lies in a widespread inability to see how it might be possible for humanity to mitigate existential threats without the linear model of state control. Whether we’re talking about “reasonable regulation” or “turnkey totalitarianism,” the linear model originates in Hobbes’s Leviathan rationale, which holds most people in its thrall. Simply put, the Leviathan rationale prompts us to entrust a powerful monopoly to protect us and work in our interests.
But then, somehow, we have to oblige that powerful monopoly to stay in its place. The problem is, it rarely does. As Edmund Burke wrote:
In vain you tell me that [government] is good, but that I fall out only with the Abuse. The Thing! The Thing itself is the abuse! Observe, my Lord, I pray you, that grand Error upon which all artificial legislative Power is founded. It was observed, that Men had ungovernable Passions, which made it necessary to guard against the Violence they might offer to each other. They appointed Governors over them for this Reason; but a worse and more perplexing Difficulty arises, how to be defended against the Governors?
Checks and balances last for a while. But as soon as they fail, the proxies of that powerful monopoly seize yet more power. Any remaining checks and balances are crushed under Leviathan’s weight, well, unless Leviathan can no longer swim in an ocean of red ink. By then, it might be too late.
The Nihilism of the Vulnerable World
Thinkers such as Nick Bostrom aren’t wrong about the world’s vulnerability to exponential technologies in the hands of bad actors. What they too often forget is that politics selects for arrogance and sociopathy. Politicians and technocrats are no angels, despite how badly we might wish them to be. Even if we find the occasional wise leader to hold the ring, the ring invariably gets passed along. There is always a sociopath waiting. And that’s why the upshot of Turnkey Totalitarianism is deeply problematic, even though there are evil geniuses among the citizenry. Acknowledging all this threatens to leave us in nihilism. After all, wasn’t it very likely a small group of government technocrats and regulators who unleashed the Covid-19 pandemic?
My friend and mentor, entrepreneur Chris Rufer reminds us that the best defense against violence isn’t a panopticon or a global superstate.
“The best defense against violence is to minimize the number of people in the world who are willing to use it,” Rufer said. And I think he’s right.
I suspect it can’t hurt to have more people of basic morality checking up on each other, too. I admit, though, that preemptive morality can only reduce the number of black balls in the existential threat bucket. But that’s something. So we must start to think of morality not as a set of abstract rules but rather as an active, continuous practice to be set alight in everyone.
And we must practice morality even as we admit to ourselves that the risks of our extinction will never be zero.
Max is also co-founder of the event experience Future Frontiers and founder of Social Evolution, an organization dedicated to liberating humanity and solving social problems through innovation.
Unfortunately there’s a problem with this narrative: it is itself misinformation. Bizarrely and ironically, universities are propagating an untrue conspiracy theory while simultaneously claiming to be defending the world from the very same.
The visualization above comes from “The Rise and Fall of Social Bot Research” (also available in talk form). It was quietly uploaded to a preprint server in March by Gallwitz & Kreil, two German investigators, and has received little attention since. Yet their work completely destroys the academic field of bot research to such an extreme extent that it’s possible there are no true scientific papers on the topic at all.
The authors identify a simple problem that crops up in every study they looked at. Unable to directly detect bots because they don’t work for Twitter, academics come up with proxy signals that are asserted to imply automation but which actually don’t. For example, Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Project – responsible for the first paper in the diagram above – defined a bot as any account that tweets more than 50 times per day. That’s a lot of tweeting but easily achieved by heavy users, like the famous journalist Glenn Greenwald, the slightly less famous member of German Parliament Johannes Kahrs – who has in the past managed to rack up an astounding 300 tweets per day – or indeed Donald Trump, who exceeded this threshold on six different days during 2020. Bot papers typically don’t provide examples of the bot accounts they claimed to identify, but in this case four were presented. Of those, three were trivially identifiable as (legitimate) bots because they actually said they were bots in their account metadata, and one was an apparently human account claimed to be a bot with no evidence. On this basis the authors generated 27 news stories and 323 citations, although the paper was never peer reviewed.
In 2017 I investigated the Berkley/Swansea paper and found that it was doing something very similar, but using an even laxer definition. Any account that regularly tweeted more than five times after midnight from a smartphone was classed as a bot. Obviously, this is not a valid way to detect automation. Despite being built on nonsensical premises, invalid modelling, mis-characterisations of its own data and once again not being peer reviewed, the authors were able to successfully influence the British Parliament. Damian Collins, the Tory MP who chaired the DCMS Select Committee at the time, said: “This is the most significant evidence yet of interference by Russian-backed social media accounts aroundthe Brexit referendum. The content published and promoted by these accounts is clearly designed to increase tensions throughout the country and undermine our democratic process. I fear that this may well be just the tip of the iceberg.”
But since 2019 the vast majority of papers about social bots rely on a machine learning model called ‘Botometer’. The Botometer is available online and claims to measure the probability of any Twitter account being a bot. Created by a pair of academics in the USA, it has been cited nearly 700 times and generates a continual stream of news stories. The model is frequently described as a “state of the art bot detection method” with “95% accuracy”.
That claim is false. The Botometer’s false positive rate is so high it is practically a random number generator. A simple demonstration of the problem was the distribution of scores given to verified members of U.S. Congress:
In experiments run by Gallwitz & Kreil, nearly half of Congress were classified as more likely to be bots than human, along with 12% of Nobel Prize laureates, 17% of Reuters journalists, 21.9% of the staff members of UN Women and – inevitably – U.S. President Joe Biden.
But detecting the false positive problem did not require compiling lists of verified humans. One study that claimed to identify around 190,000 bots included the following accounts in its set:
Taken from a dataset shared by Dunn et al.
The developers of the Botometer know it doesn’t work. After the embarrassing U.S. Congress data was published, an appropriate response would have been retraction of their paper. But that would have implied that all the papers that relied upon it should also be retracted. Instead they hard-coded the model to know that Congress are human and then went on the attack, describing their critics as “academic trolls”:
Root cause analysis
This story is a specific instance of a general problem that crops up frequently in bad science. Academics decide a question is important and needs to be investigated, but they don’t have sufficiently good data to draw accurate conclusions. Because there are no incentives to recognize that and abandon the line of inquiry, they proceed regardless and make claims that end up being drastically wrong. Anyone from outside the field who points out what’s happening is simply ignored, or attacked as “not an expert” and thus inherently illegitimate.
Although no actual expertise is required to spot the problems in this case, I can nonetheless criticize their work with confidence because I actually am an expert in fighting bots. As a senior software engineer at Google I initiated and designed one of their most successful bot detection platforms. Today it checks over a million actions per second for malicious automation across the Google network. A version of it was eventually made available to all websites for free as part of the ReCAPTCHA system, providing an alternative to the distorted word puzzles you may remember from the earlier days of the internet. Those often frustrating puzzles were slowly replaced in recent years by simply clicking a box that says “I’m not a bot”. The latest versions go even further and can detect bots whilst remaining entirely invisible.
Exactly how this platform works is a Google trade secret, but when spammers discuss ideas for beating it they are well aware that it doesn’t use the sort of techniques academics do. Despite the frequent claim that Botometer is “state of the art”, in reality it is primitive. Genuinely state-of-the-art bot detectors use a correct definition of bot based on how actions are being performed. Spammers are forced to execute polymorphic encrypted programs that detect signs of automation at the protocol and API level. It’s a battle between programmers, and how it works wouldn’t be easily explainable to social scientists.
Spam fighters at Twitter have an equally low opinion of this research. They noted in 2020 that tools like Botometer use “an extremely limited approach” and “do not account for common Twitter use cases”. “Binary judgments of who’s a “bot or not” have real potential to poison our public discourse – particularly when they are pushed out through the media …. the narrative on what’s actually going on is increasingly behind the curve.”
Many fields cannot benefit from academic research because academics cannot obain sufficiently good data with which to draw conclusions. Unfortunately, they sometimes have difficulty accepting that. When I ended my 2017 investigation of the Berkeley/Swansea paper by observing that social scientists can’t usefully contribute to fighting bots, an academic posted a comment calling it “a Trumpian statement” and argued that tech firms should release everyone’s private account data to academics, due to their capacity for “more altruistic” insights. Yet their self-proclaimed insights are usually far from altruistic. The ugly truth is that social bot research is primarily a work of ideological propaganda. Many bot papers use the supposed prevalence of non-existent bots to argue for censorship and control of the internet. Too many people disagree with common academic beliefs. If only social media were edited by the most altruistic and insightful members of society, they reason, nobody would ever disagree with them again.
The battle lines over mandatory COVID-19 vaccines are now going full steam ahead in the U.S. as the Biden Administration is announcing today that all federal employees must now get a COVID-19 shot as a condition for employment, and that they are eliminating the testing opt-out.
The argument that only COVID-19 shots will end the endless “pandemic” and the lie that hospitals are over 90% full of unvaccinated people are being used as justification for mandatory mass vaccination.
It doesn’t take much research on one’s own to bypass the corporate media and find out that they are lying, and that there are numerous reports that the exact opposite situation is now happening in the U.S. and around the world, which is that the hospitals are full of people who have already been vaccinated with COVID-19 shots and that the ones who have survived are now filling our hospitals.
This is evident from the last release of data into the government Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database, which as of last Friday shows that following COVID-19 shots, there have been 13,911 deaths, 18,098 permanent disabilities, 76,160 ER visits, 56,912 hospitalizations, 2,933,377 injury symptoms, and 14,327 life threatening events.
And these are just the cases that have been reported and that the CDC has allowed to be released to the public. Many healthcare workers have stated that there is pressure from doctors and hospital administrations to NOT relate injuries to the COVID-19 shots and to not report them in VAERS, which one nurse stated takes over 30 minutes to do for a single case and is very time consuming.
We have previously exposed the government’s lies on who it is filling the hospitals today. See:
And just this past week, the Toronto Sun ran a story reporting that more than 100 Ontario youth were sent to the hospital for vaccine-related heart problems.
A report quietly released last week by Public Health Ontario (PHO) tallies the number of people in the province who have presented to hospital with heart inflammation following mRNA vaccination, and it skews heavily towards young people.
As of Aug. 7, there were 106 incidents of myocarditis/pericarditis in Ontarians under the age of 25. That’s slightly more than half of the total of all such incidents. (Full article.)
Here is a video report I put together with testimony from nurses, a doctor, and an occupational therapist explaining what they are currently seeing in the hospitals, so you can hear it yourself from the frontline workers.
MANY of us in the UK who have been writing about the Covid-19 vaccines (and have declined them) have found ourselves fighting what I call ‘data wars’.
Although it is necessary to engage in these wars, in this article I explain why we need an additional tactic to defeat those who are using highly selective scientific data to impose a political will and a ‘new normal’ of social control.
We need to start with the obvious, for which we do not need the nitty-gritty of data, such as this tweet from the editor of TCWDefending Freedom:
As a scientific technical writer, I am very aware that scientific data – and language, terminology, jargon and marketing copywriting – can be used to ‘prove’ almost anything. It is easy to blind people, including scientists, with science.
Much scientific data today is dubious. In our times of huge proliferation of science, the majority of published studies cannot be replicated independently by peers. In other words, published science is not necessarily true. The journal Nature calls this situation a ‘crisis’.
Furthermore, much data that is passed off as science cannot, by its very nature, be replicated and tested, such as so-called behavioural science and data modelling, that we might call crystal-ball science.
Equally concerning is that most scientific experiments fail, and details are hardly ever published, meaning that science does not properly learn from its failures. This is sometimes called ‘publication bias’. Science, of all academic disciplines, is vulnerable to the pressure of ‘publish or perish’. In other words, we must always be cautious of scientists armed with data.
Commerce (not least Big Pharma), government, and the colluding mainstream media can simply pick the scientific data they want to believe or they want the public to believe. At no time has this been more obvious than since early 2020, when large corporations were given political permission and public funding to do ‘warp speed’ science despite, as noted, the knowledge that there was already a crisis of scientific integrity.
Hence we suddenly see the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ditching its credibility by giving unprecedented licenced approval-to-market of a vaccine still undergoing clinical trials, trials which themselves have been short-cut (such as no blinded control group).
There is much commercial incentive and political pressure now to do novel science, such as novel testing methods and novel vaccines. And there is much disincentive to publish experiments and data on treating Covid-19 with existing treatments. Experts advocating treatments such as ivermectin and asthma inhalers are easily hidden from public view by the mainstream media and by the social media barons.
In the data wars, each side picks its experts. For instance, in the last week of August one could have picked a Japanese report claiming that the Delta variant will acquire complete resistance to the mRNA vaccines, or an Oxford University report telling you that the vaccines are effective against the Delta variant.
Powerful tyrants and sophists in the governments of Canada, USA, Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, Israel etc, have agreed with the most powerful media on which data are to prevail in the new and internationalist political movement sloganised ‘Build Back Better’.
Politicians know they need the approval of the social media barons, who are internationalist, secularist and woke, convinced that the meaning of life is climate change and utopian science, including, in the words of the UK government, ‘genetic engineering and brain-computer interfaces’.
Israel is one of several highly vaccinated nations – with Iceland, Gibraltar and Seychelles – that, despite initial claims of success, now rank amongst the most diseased nations. Common sense, therefore, informs us that the vaccines don’t work, and have not achieved what the vaccine designers, manufacturers and promoters said they would achieve a year ago (including herd immunity). We do not need sophisticated data to make the point. It is obvious that the situation today in Israel is unexpected, and contrary to what Big Pharma and the world’s political leaders told us to expect. We have the right to start asking whether mass vaccination has caused augmented virulence of the virus in their society.
In the meantime, Israeli scientists, politicians and journalists blindly offer data insisting the vaccines are working. We are told that people simply need to be ‘topped up’ with more of the synthetic spike-protein toxin. According to Israeli PM Naftali Bennett, the double-jabbed are now considered unvaccinated (and denied the Green Pass). Worse, Bennett blames ‘vaccine refusers’ for endangering the whole nation. And as the triple-jabbed Israelis find themselves hospitalised with Covid-19, the plan now is quadruple jabbing.
Denial of the obvious in politics and the media typically begins, ‘We always knew the vaccinations were not 100 per cent effective, but . . .’ Then public figures of science – such as the UK’s Jonathan Van-Tam – make spurious, implausible and wildly inconsistent claims such as that the vaccines have saved 100,000 lives, and 60,000 lives, and 10,000 lives. Even the implausible data are inconsistent!
In many advanced nations, we are now witnessing extreme political and intellectual face-saving. Expect more lies. This lack of truth, honour and honesty in public life is extremely dangerous, as I wrote here for TCW Defending Freedom. Science and medicine have lost their integrity. Health authorities have lost their integrity. Politics has lost its integrity. Trust between doctors and patients has become very fragile.
Over the next few months I expect the UK government and its henchmen at Sage to produce data to prove that we need triple jabs, then quadruple jabs . . .
I suggest that it is time for everyone, regardless of profession and expertise, to challenge all this scientific nonsense with truth and common sense.
HERE’S AN ASTONISHING THING about Sweden: you can hardly tell, from looking at its government’s population statistics,1 that it has COVID-19.
It’s astonishing because the entire foundation of the claim underlying the world’s descent into COVID-19 madness and authoritarianism is predicated on two controversial claims: that COVID-19 is unusually deadly, and that coercion and authoritarianism are necessary and effective in controlling it.
And yet here is a country that hasn’t succumbed to madness and authoritarianism. And here is a country in which you can hardly tell that COVID-19 is present.
Discovering Sweden is like discovering intelligent life in the universe after being told there can’t be any. It falsifies COVID’s catastrophic claims, and reveals a great deal about the institutions driving them.
The number of people who die in Sweden, after making some adjustments for “good” and “bad” flu years, increases by about 1,200 every couple of years. That’s partly because the population is increasing, partly because the population is ageing, and partly because the population is changing through immigration. It would have been astonishing if the number of people who died in Sweden in 2020 hadn’t increased.
I say “after making some adjustment for good and bad flu years”, because it’s by obscuring this that COVID catastrophists have weaponised Sweden and, ironically, coerced it into being an element of their narrative.
Flu, like coronaviruses, is a winter seasonal infection. In every country, there are “bad” seasons when relatively many vulnerable people die, and “good” seasons when relatively few do. 2018/19 was a “good” flu season in Sweden.23
Figure 1. Recorded COVID-19 deaths in 2020 were exaggerated by the carryover of vulnerable people from the mild 2018/19 flu season (A), and by either the replacement in 2020 of flu by COVID or miscoding of flu as COVID (B)
Consequently, the cohort of people who were vulnerable to respiratory infection when COVID-19 arrived in 2020 was enlarged by those would have died in an average or bad 2018/19 flu season, but hadn’t (‘A’ in Figure 1 above). Then, after COVID-19 arrived, it replaced flu as the cause of death in the 2019/20 flu-vulnerable cohort (‘B’, above). So the people in groups ‘A’ and ‘B’ who in 2020 would most likely have died of flu, died instead of COVID-19, or were mis-coded as having died of COVID-19.
This is important to understand. The core claim that COVID-19 is especially deadly depends in turn on the implicit claim that its deaths are in addition to normal deaths. No: the majority of its victims die from it instead of flu, cancer, stroke, dementia, heart disease, falling downstairs, or any one of an extended list of things that kill us when we’ve lived longer than the average human lifespan.
This explains why, simultaneously, many people appear to have died from COVID, yet overall death rates are not catastrophic. Here in the UK, the Government advisors estimate that up to two thirds of the fatalities in its vastly inflated prediction of 2020 COVID-19 deaths would have died that year anyway.4 COVID-19 arrived in the UK after an extended period of unusually low mortality: it contributed to a mortality rate in 2020 that was lower than it used to be every single year prior to 2008. In Sweden, you can hardly see it, if at all.
It also partly explains why coercion and authoritarianism have no observable impact on fatal infection rates.5 It’s not the openness of society that kills vulnerable people. It’s their vulnerability to all the other things that still kill them while they are locked down, and that coercion and authoritarianism has no effect on.
Using the same models used to justify imposing mandatory school and business closures, domestic confinement orders, and compulsory masks on UK citizens, UK Government advisors estimated Sweden would suffer 30,000 to 60,000 deaths in 2020 if they didn’t impose the same restrictions. Sweden politely ignored the advice. It didn’t impose “masks”, it didn’t significantly close schools and businesses, and it didn’t impose domestic confinement. At the end of 2020, had recorded 8,800 COVID-19 deaths.
Here’s the impact of those deaths on overall deaths in Sweden, in numbers:
Table 1. When corrected for annual variation in flu deaths, the rise in deaths in 2019/20 was almost identical to the rise in deaths in 2015/6 and 2016/7.
The displacement of flu deaths from 2019 into 2020 is clearly visible. We’ve computed the two year average to accommodate the inter-year variation in flu deaths, and calculated the change in that.6The overall increase in deaths COVID-19 contributed to, relative to the rising trend, is barely distinguishable from noise.
“Once your faith, sir, persuades you to believe what your intelligence declares to be absurd, beware lest you likewise sacrifice your reason in the conduct of your life…Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
— Voltaire, ‘Questions sur les Miracles’
Germans who keep refusing to quarantine could be put in detention centres under new Covid rules
— The Telegraph, 17 January 2021
Let’s remind ourselves of how one leading COVID catastrophists’ newspaper-of-record reports to its readers a death rate rise in Sweden that is barely distinguishable from noise, while inciting a McCarthyist witch-hunt against those who favoured Sweden’s approach:7
Their readers believe absurdities.
On the basis of absurdities like these, the UK Government is finalising plans to inject 12 year old children—without their parents’ consent—with unlicensed medical substances, designed to attack their immature immune systems in ways that are not yet fully understood, with observed but currently unquantified serious side effect risks, so that they can act as human shields for teachers and geriatrics.
It’s an atrocity.
There are no circumstances in a civilised society under which exposing children to harm to protect adults could be justified. But to the extent that it is, it is on the claim that this disease is unusually deadly, and therefore that such atrocities are warranted.
Sweden shows us it is not unusually deadly, and that they are not warranted. They represent for us the ending of “Lord Of The Flies”.8 As exhausted schoolboy Ralph lies on the beach, waiting to have his brains bashed out by the former Head Chorister (who comes to power by promising to slay an imaginary beast), he looks up to see a Naval Officer standing in the surf. Instantly, the children’s descent into madness and chaos is made shatteringly visible, even as the order of the adult world is restored. The spell is broken.
Sweden breaks the COVID-19 spell for us.
We should oppose COVID madness, coercion, and authoritarianism wherever we find it, and fight to rid ourselves of it until it has gone. It has no place in our world.
In the northern hemisphere, the winter seasonal respiratory infection season runs from July to June the following year, hence “2018/19”. Conflating the end of the 2019/20 season with the beginning of the 2020/21 season was one of many tricks that COVID catastrophism employs the UK to magnify the impression of COVID death in 2020.
Is it a perfect measure? Of course not. But it doesn’t need to be. COVID catastrophism makes an extraordinary claim—that we should live permanently under emergency authoritarian rule because this is an especially deadly disease. That claim demands extraordinary evidence—evidence that should “hit you between the eyes”. It doesn’t.
New research suggests that four billion people globally will be overweight in 2050. This trend can be traced back to the ‘low-fat, high-carb’ guidelines first issued in the 70s, and should prompt a major U-turn on dietary advice.
A recent report from the Potsdam Institute predicts that by 2050 there will be four billion overweight people in the world, with one-and-a-half billion of them obese. This is not entirely surprising. The world has been getting fatter for years, and things do not seem to be slowing down.
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