If you were online last year around this time, your social media timeline was likely flooded with an endless stream of stories and memes featuring bats.
The coronavirus was just gaining steam back in January of 2020 and rumors were swirling that the virus started because Chinese people ate “bat soup.”
While most of the bat-themed stories and memes were outlandish, the Worldwide Health Organization (WHO) did admit that Covid-19 and bats are most likely ancestrally linked. However, that’s where they say the connection ends. WHO still claims the origins of Covid-19 remain a mystery.
Until now…
A bombshell investigative report from Fox News host Steve Hilton has shed all-new light on the origins of Covid-19, and according to the report, it has nothing to do with bat soup and everything to do with Dr. Fauci and ferrets.
Yes, ferrets.
Ferrets are those adorable-looking furry little weasels that many Americans keep as pets… and Dr. Fauci is that annoying little weasel Americans can’t get rid of.
And when these two weasels finally came together inside a research lab in Wuhan, China, something unthinkable occurred — a deadly and destructive pandemic was created and unleashed upon the world.
That’s what Steve Hilton is claiming in his new investigation into the origin of the Coronavirus pandemic.
However, the story of Covid-19 doesn’t start in Wuhan, China. It actually began about ten years ago in a Netherlands research lab.
An innovative epidemiological study took place at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands. Researchers were looking to discover different ways respiratory viruses reacted in humans. Scientists used ferrets in their study because ferrets have similar pulmonary structures to humans, with well-developed respiratory bronchioles and submucosal glands.
Specifically, researchers wanted to know if a non-airborne virus could be mutated in order to become a contagious airborne disease.
So, in order to find this out, researchers injected the ferrets with a flu virus and after a series of tests, they discovered that yes, non-airborne viruses could be manipulated to become much stronger and spread via respiratory droplets.
The findings were groundbreaking and this study paved the way for an entirely new type of scientific genomics research called “gain-of-function.”
The point of gain-of-function research was to replicate in a lab what had been done with the ferrets in the Netherlands — to take a virus and manipulate and mutate it to make it “stronger” in order to see if it will “gain new function.”
On the surface, it sounds a bit ghoulish and almost “Frankenstein-like,” but imagine the advances medical research could make in the field of virus testing and vaccines simply by recreating these viruses in a lab.
Gain-of-function research was based on the philosophy, “keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.”
However, when you keep your enemies that close, you run the risk of getting burned.
Creating these ungodly strong and highly contagious viruses for research purposes could lead to an accidental or nefarious catastrophe of epic proportions.
But even so, and despite the danger, many in the scientific community believed the potential for progress outweighed the tremendous risks involved.
Dr. Anthony Fauci was one of those people.
The gain-of-function research quickly spread to labs all over the world and the money was flowing in from all corners of the globe, including the United States.
According to a Newsweek piece written in 2019, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Fauci-led National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), committed $3.7 million dollars to research bats and coronaviruses in China over a six-year period.
It’s worth noting that in the Newsweek piece US intelligence backtracked from their earlier claims that the coronavirus outbreak occurred “naturally,” and conceded that the pandemic “might” have started from a leak in the Wuhan lab.
But this new research wasn’t just about bats. It went deeper and darker than that. As a matter of fact, Dr. Fauci was among the first to fund the controversial gain-of-function ferret research in Wuhan, China. Fauci was so committed to the controversial work that back in 2011 he wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post, entitled, “A Flu Virus Risk Worth Taking,” where he vigorously defended gain-of-function research.
But something very interesting took place right before Obama’s moratorium on gain-of-function took effect.
Dr. Fauci had commissioned a study to assess the risk of new coronaviruses emerging from wild animals. Fauci wanted to see what viruses could infect animals and humans. The directive behind the research and written in the project summary was gain-of-function manipulation.
But the Obama admin was getting cold feet about the program.
While many in the scientific community (like Fauci) were very excited by gain-of-function research, the more popular it became, the more scrutiny it received, and significant security issues were being raised. Eventually, the controversy got to be too much and in 2014 the United States pulled the plug.
NPR reported that the Obama administration was concerned about any research that could make the viruses more dangerous, so they wanted to stop and review studies to see if they could make these germs capable of causing more disease or spreading easily through the air.
Gain-of-function studies, or research that improves the ability of a pathogen to cause disease, help define the fundamental nature of human-pathogen interactions, thereby enabling assessment of the pandemic potential of emerging infectious agents, informing public health and preparedness efforts, and furthering medical countermeasure development. Gain-of-function studies may entail biosafety and biosecurity risks; therefore, the risks and benefits of gain-of-function research must be evaluated, both in the context of recent U.S. biosafety incidents and to keep pace with new technological developments, in order to determine which types of studies should go forward and under what conditions.
In light of recent concerns regarding biosafety and biosecurity, effective immediately, the U.S. Government (USG) will pause new USG funding for gain-of-function research on influenza, MERS or SARS viruses, as defined below. This research funding pause will be effective until a robust and broad deliberative process is completed that results in the adoption of a new USG gain-of-function research policy 1 . Restrictions on new funding will apply as follows: New USG funding will not be released for gain-of-function research projects that may be reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses such that the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route. The research funding pause would not apply to characterization or testing of naturally occurring influenza, MERS, and SARS viruses, unless the tests are reasonably anticipated to increase transmissibility and/or pathogenicity. [PHE.gov]
But Dr. Fauci didn’t stop funding gain-of-function.
That little weasel kept digging…
Fauci kept the research alive by cleverly subcontracting the work out to a New York group called Eco-Health Alliance, led by Zoologist Peter Daszak. Daszak’s claim to fame is discovering the link between bats and SARS.
Fauci paid the three-plus-million dollars to Eco-Health Alliance and the research continued.
But here’s the wildest part…
According to Steve Hilton’s bombshell report, Eco-Health then turned around and subcontracted the gain-of-function portion of Fauci’s research back to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Hilton says the paperwork from Wuhan has a “reference number” attached that leads directly back to the funds Fauci paid to Eco-Health Alliance.
All roads lead back to Wuhan, and Fauci is driving the car.
It’s no secret that Fauci funded the Wuhan lab, there’s been a lot of reporting on his “general funding.” However, Steve Hilton’s bombshell report uncovered gory details about the specific work that was being done which nobody has reported on thus far.
According to the Wuhan paperwork that Mr. Hilton downloaded, the lab collected bat feces from a cave in China and discovered many cases of novel Coronavirus in the samples. Researchers analyzed and sequenced their genetic information, then built new viruses off of those samples and infected human cells with them. That research revealed that their man-made viruses could actually behave exactly like a natural virus.
But it’s what researchers unlocked that is the most terrifying of all.
According to the report, the lab’s creation and research of the virus unlocked a very specific “gateway” into the human body. And even more curious and creepy is that the Covid-19 virus that we’re dealing with today has those exact same gateway characteristics.
Do you believe in coincidences? I don’t…
The Covid-19 virus sticks to cells 10-20 times stronger than the SARS virus did, and this is what makes Covid-19 so incredibly contagious.
Take a look at what happens when Covid enters the body:
Coronavirus enters the body through the nose, mouth, or eyes. Once inside the body, it goes inside healthy cells and uses the machinery in those cells to make more virus particles. When the cell is full of viruses, it breaks open. This causes the cell to die and the virus particles can go on to infect more cells.
The viruses created during the Wuhan research are not exactly the same as the Covid-19 virus we’re dealing with today. However, as Mr. Hilton points out, the research that was done confirmed that Covid-19 could be manufactured in a lab using the same techniques that were developed in Dr. Fauci’s project.
In addition, Fauci’s project continued for another three years.
Today’s Covid virus is different than any other “natural” virus we’ve seen in the past. Natural viruses become more contagious over time as they naturally mutate, but today’s virus already had that feature “built-in” right out of the gate.
The paperwork from Dr. Fauci’s project explains how researchers swapped viruses from bats and other animals in order to make more infectious viruses to study.
And even more curious was what Chinese Virologisst Shi Zhengli said — she explained that the “backbone” of this Covid-19 virus matches other man-made viruses from the Wuhan lab library.
According to Steve Hilton, experts say that Covid-19 looks like two different strains from bats, and another unidentified animal… possibly the ferret again?
The question is this — can something like Covid-19 happen naturally? And if so, why does it look and act so similarly to man-made viruses from just a few years before, many of which are from Dr. Fauci’s personal disease vault?
More coincidences? They’re really piling up now.
I don’t believe in coincidences, but I also don’t know how Covid came to be or how it was unleashed on the world. But I do think that Steve Hilton’s investigation is the most in-depth and compelling that we’ve seen thus far. It definitely puts Fauci in the thick of things in a very precarious way, and it opens the door to a lot more questions.
Personally, I find it very hard to believe that all of this groundbreaking research was going on without Obama’s knowledge. He’s a man that loves to “weaponize” things. That’s what his entire legacy consists of — weaponized IRS, Intel, and media.
Was Dr. Fauci hiding the research from Obama, or were Obama and Dr. Fauci hiding the research from everyone else? And after all of this information we just digested, is it so far-fetched to ask if Dr. Fauci’s project and research were used later for something horribly nefarious in order to regain power?
Or was everything just one big coincidence?
All good questions and the American people deserve answers.
This is the video that outed Dr. Fauci’s gain-of-function research, and right now, everything he’s worked for hinges on whether or not Americans see this video and demand answers. If that happens, Fauci is likely done for.
ALL THE EVIDENCE.
FAUCI MONEY / ECOHEALTH ALLIANCE / GAIN OF FUNCTION VIRUS RESEARCH / WUHAN INSTITUTE.
All the cover ups, even the reason for the Mink cull. All here. Steve Hilton investigates origins of COVID-19, links to US commissioned research. https://t.co/xI7Gq7m6gG
It’s been an open secret, ever since Dr. Michael Mann used “Mike’s Nature Trick” to “hide the decline” by covering up some inconvenient tree ring data in the hockey stick climate graph, that climate alarmists will go to almost any length to only show the public the “crisis side” of climate data.
The National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) has been the keeper of U.S. wildfire data for decades, tracking both the number of wildfires and acreage burned all the way back to 1926. However, after making that entire dataset public for decades, now, in a blatant act of cherry picking, NIFC “disappeared” a portion of it, and only show data from 1983. You can see it here.
Fortunately, the Internet never forgets, and the entire dataset is preserved on the Internet Wayback machine and other places, despite NIFC’s ham-handed attempt to disappear the data.
Why would they do this you ask? The answer is simple; data prior to 1983 shows that U.S. wildfires were far worse both in frequency and total acreage burned. By disappearing all data prior to 1983, which just happens to be the lowest point in the dataset, now all of the sudden we get a positive slope of worsening wildfire aligning with increased global temperature, which is perfect for claiming “climate change is making wildfire worse.” See figure 1 below for a before and after comparison of what the data looks like when you plot it.
Figure 1: Comparison of the before and after erasure NIFC dataset showing acres burned. The blue trend line goes from a negative trend to a positive one when cherry picked data is used.
Clearly, wildfires were far worse in the past, and clearly, now the data tells an entirely different story when showing only data post-1983. The new story told by the sanitized data is in alignment with the irrational screeching of climate alarmists that “wildfires are driven by climate change”.
This wholesale erasure of important public data stinks, but in today’s narrative control culture that wants to rid us of anything that might be inconvenient or doesn’t fit the “woke” narrative, it isn’t surprising.
Interestingly, the history on the Internet Wayback Machine shows how NIFC rationalized this erasure of important public data.
Back in June 2011 when this data was first presented by NIFC publicly, it was simply presented “as-is”. They say only this:
Figures prior to 1983 may be revised as NICC verifies historical data.
In 2018, they added a new caveat, saying this:
The National Interagency Coordination Center at NIFC compiles annual wildland fire statistics for federal and state agencies. This information is provided through Situation Reports, which have been in use for several decades. Prior to 1983, sources of these figures are not known, or cannot be confirmed, and were not derived from the current situation reporting process. As a result the figures prior to 1983 should not be compared to later data.
According to the Internet Wayback Machine, that caveat first appeared on the NIFC data page somewhere between January 14 and March 7 of 2018.
It seems they received some blowback from the idea that their data, when plotted, clearly showed wildfires to be far worse in the past, completely blowing the global-warming-climate-change-wildfire connection out of the water.
Prior to 1983, the federal wildland fire agencies did not track official wildfire data using current reporting processes. As a result, there is no official data prior to 1983 posted on this site.
Not only is that a lie of omission, it is ridiculous. Their agenda seems very clear. When the data was first published, they only advised the public that some data prior to 1983 might be “… revised as NICC verifies historical data”.
There was no published concern that the data might be invalid, or that we shouldn’t use it. Besides, the data is very simple; a count of the number of fires and the number of acres burned. How hard is that to compile and verify as accurate?
What’s worse is that this data has been trusted for decades in almost every news story about any wildfire that ever occurred in the U.S. In virtually every news story about a wildfire, the number of acres burned it THE NUMBER the press uses in the story, without it, there is no scale of the severity of the fire. Similarly, for every story about “what a bad wildfire season we’ve had”, the press cites the number of fires as well as the acreage burned.
And now, after decades of that data being provided to the press and the public, and nearly a decade of NIFC making it publicly available on their website, they want us to believe that it is now unreliable data?
Seriously, just how hard is it to count the number of fires that have happened and the number of acres burned?
What NIFC is doing is essentially labeling every firefighter, every fire captain, every forester, and every smoke jumper who has fought wildfires for decades as being untrustworthy in their assessment and measurement of this critical, yet very simple fire data. I’ll take data from people on the fire scene over government bureaucratic doublespeak every day of the week and twice on Sundays.
This whole affair is outrageous. But what is even more outrageous is that NIFC isn’t at all transparent as to the reason for the change. They essentially say “The data prior to 1983 is no good, trust us”. There is no citation of a study, no methodology given, no rationale for the removal. That’s not science, that’s not statistics, that’s not even sensible, but that is what is happening.
Plotting the entire NIFC dataset (before it was partially disappeared) gives us some hints as to why this has been done, and how wildfire and weather patterns have been inextricably linked for decades. Note figure 2 below, combining the number of fires and number of acres burned. See the annotations that I have added.
Figure 2: Plot of the entire NIFC wildfire dataset, with acreage burned in amber, and total number of fires in a given year in blue. Annotations show major weather events in the U.S.
Clearly, what NIFC has done by saying data prior to 1983 is “unreliable” and disappearing it is not just hiding important fire history, but cherry picking a data starting point that is the lowest in the entire record to ensure that an upwards trend exists from that point.
Cherry picking, suppressing evidence, or the fallacy of incomplete evidence is the act of pointing to individual cases or data that seem to confirm a particular position while ignoring a significant portion of related and similar cases or data that may contradict that position.
And by choosing the lowest point in the record for total fires, 1983, and making all data prior to that unavailable, NIFC ensures that any comparison between fires and climate change over the last 38 years always shows an upward trend and correlation with rising temperature.
It seems to me that NIFC very likely caved to pressure from climate activists to disappear this inconvenient data. By erasing the past data, NIFC has become untrustworthy. This erasure is not just unscientific, it’s dishonest and possibly fraudulent.
For posterity, the entire dataset from NIFC (including pre-1983) is available here in an Excel (.xlsx) file:
Big thanks to Geoffrey Kell who sent me this to share – four OUR CHILDREN.
NOTE: My extensive research and interviewing / video/sound editing and much more does require support – please consider helping if you can with monthly donation to support me directly, or one-off payment: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=69ZSTYXBMCN3W
TIME after time, we hear the following lament from lockdown sceptics: ‘I’ve looked into data on Covid and the lockdown and it’s clear that government measures have been wildly disproportionate, but my relatives refuse to look at the data or listen to reasonable argument. Why?’
The answer seems to be partly temperament, partly historical.
The state and its proxies
As Gawain Towler reported in TCW yesterday, researchers discovered that lockdown sceptics are more likely to assess data critically, want to examine sources and are resistant to mass-media narratives. (Incidentally, the report writers considered these traits to be bad.) This tells us that the less inquisitive tend to accept arguments from authority with fewer (or no) doubts. Since 1945, with the comforting (or suffocating) mantra ‘from cradle to grave’, the British people have been lulled into complacency. They expected the state to educate, police, care for them, treat their health, pension them and bury them. Over decades, responding to the British state with such trust has been deleterious to the nation (as distinct from the state) by loosening bonds within nation, family and community, but it has not necessarily been dangerous to individuals. Today, under Covid lockdown, the state’s imposition of forced isolation and idleness – and its campaign of fearmongering – reveals the state’s reckless disregard for individuals’ welfare.
Exactly when the state transitioned from being essentially benign to mainly malign depends on your perspective. Peter Hitchens might state that it became irreversible in 1997 with the election of Blair’s Labour Party or with the adoption of progressivism by David Cameron around 2009. Perhaps the slippage towards serfdom was inherent in the Fabian principles of 1945. Regardless, years of Blair’s invasive paternalism and Tory reluctance to let go of the levers of nudge politics and social behaviourism paved the way for the hysterical safetyism of Covid lockdown.
Things change. The British state is not what it was; the BBC is no longer the respected broadcaster which attempted to be impartial and inclusive; the Sun and the Daily Telegraph cannot be described as politically or socially conservative – nor can the Anglican Church or the Conservative Party, complete with the globalist slogan of ‘build back better’. The frog has well and truly been boiled, incrementally. Supposed beacons of conservativism, tradition and neutrality have been in the hands of progressives and activists for some time now.
Where government ends and private corporations begin is unclear. The massive sums pumped into newspapers and broadcasters to advertise lockdown promulgations and spread fear propaganda has kept newspapers solvent. The press is now an arm of government, as seen in its near-universal support for the principles of lockdown and mask-wearing. Small firms were closed while giant ones stayed open; no one could buy shoes from a shop but they could order them via Amazon. Government-enforced suppression of market competition led to a massive wealth transfer to mega corporations. Meanwhile, Big Tech suppresses criticism of Covid measures.
Corporate partners do the bidding of the government not simply due to pressure or money: civil servants and corporate management share outlooks and goals. There is no conspiracy per se, just a convergence of interests and outlooks. The managerial elite of the civil service, police, judiciary, NHS, schools, universities, major political parties, the Church of England, mainstream press, NGOs and mega corporations see the British population as in need of their stewardship.
Lessons from behind the Iron Curtain
I lived in the territory of the former GDR and often talked to Germans about their experiences of communism. They told me there was an official culture (where everyone knew what the acceptable line was) and an informal culture (where one could tell the truth among friends). Of course, in a state riddled with informants, one could never be entirely sure of one’s safety, but the evident falsity of claims made by the state and the failure of socialism (except for the senior Party members) showed anyone who wanted to apply objectivity that they lived in a system that was both hostile and crumbling. They knew that schools and the Ernst Thälmann Pioneer Organisation were for the benefit not of children but of the Party. They understood that the state was lying to them and that the media could not be trusted.
Our sense of normality is established between the ages of 15 and 25. So if you ask someone in their 60s about the probity of the BBC, they will be reaching back to the 1970s or 1980s to recall not facts but how they felt. That BBC is long gone but it is painful to admit such a loss. In Britain, older people, authoritarian-inclined individuals and youngsters fired by idealism view the state and its adjuncts as essentially beneficial. To admit that, as in the GDR, the state works for its own interests above ours is a difficult pill to swallow. Many compatriots and family members close their eyes and ears in an attempt to deny the frightening possibility that authorities in which they have placed their faith do not care about their welfare and are prepared to impose arbitrary, ineffective and cruel policies.
We need to treat all arms of the British state with the suspicion that residents of the GDR had for their state. We must withhold our trust until it has been earned by anyone in a position of power.
To use an old cliché, “the cat is out of the bag.”
For perhaps the first time since the COVID Plandemic started at the beginning of 2020, Americans who get most of their information solely through the corporate media, which is heavily funded by Big Pharma, got a dose of reality on just what exactly has been going on for the past 16 months or so, thanks to Tucker Carlson, and his 45-minute interview with Dr. Peter McCullough last week on his “Tucker Carlson Today” show on Fox News.
Dr. Peter McCullough is well-known to most Health Impact News readers, as we have featured his testimony before the Texas Senate as well as the U.S. Congress in previous articles. See:
Viewers of this Fox Network program learned that there is, in fact, a worldwide conspiracy to suppress effective treatments for COVID patients in favor of experimental COVID injections.
To be sure, neither Tucker nor Dr. McCullough used the politically explosive term “conspiracy,” but they used other terms that communicate the exact same thing.
Dr. McCullough, for example, throughout the interview when referring to why other doctors and health agencies were not educating the public about effective early treatments that have been proven to save lives, used the term “group think,” and kept saying that “something is up” worldwide, to the point where Tucker kept pressing him to state why he thought this was happening.
Dr. McCullough eventually replied: “This is the goal of investigative reporters to figure out.”
Because to discuss the “why” this is happening was not the focus of this interview, and would have led to discussions about Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, their ties to eugenics and establishing a New World Order, etc. – topics beyond the expertise of Dr. McCullough.
To his credit, however, Dr. McCullough did allude to some of these things by bringing up the Nuremburg Code, and how doctors today are violating it.
But this interview was focused clearly on one single question: Why is nobody discussing COVID treatment protocols outside of the new experimental “vaccines”?
And Tucker was brilliant in this interview.
First, he chose the correct person to discuss this, Dr. Peter McCullough.
Dr. Peter McCullough is a consultant cardiologist and Vice Chief of Medicine at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, TX. He is a Principal Faculty in internal medicine for the Texas A & M University Health Sciences Center.
Dr. McCullough is an internationally recognized authority on the role of chronic kidney disease as a cardiovascular risk state with over 1000 publications and over 500 citations in the National Library of Medicine.
He is the most published scientist in the history of his field.
Anyone in the corporate media who wants to now label Dr. McCullough as a “quack” will be basically shooting themselves in the foot.
Dr. McCullough is not anti-vaxx, and neither is Tucker Carlson.
When you watch this interview, you will see two people who have been educated to believe in the medical system, but who obviously see that something is not right with the way the entire world has responded to COVID, where hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. have died needlessly, because they were told to go home with COVID-19, because there was no treatment for it, when in fact there were successful treatments.
That lie has now been exposed to MILLIONS of people worldwide, thanks to the audience of Tucker Carlson.
People have asked me why Tucker Carlson is all of a sudden telling the truth about the COVID Plandemic, and if he is “controlled opposition.”
I don’t think so, after watching this interview. I think he is like the many other honest doctors in the field of medicine, like Dr. McCullough, who although they believe in vaccines and pharmaceutical products, recognize that there are evil people with evil intentions running this COVID show, and their consciences will no longer allow them to be silent.
Tucker Carlson has one of the highest rated shows on Cable TV. He is obviously putting his own career on the line to expose this, choosing to follow the truth wherever it leads, no matter what it is going to cost him.
One of things that impressed me the most about this interview, was that even though Fox News is mostly a Right Wing/Conservative/Republican platform, partisan politics NEVER entered the discussion. Just good, solid journalism.
This is a NON-PARTISAN issue that affects EVERYONE!
Students looking forward to getting back to college are getting letters from 100 to 200 colleges notifying them of a new prerequisite: getting fully vaccinated against COVID-19. As one letter states, this is because of our “our continued desire to protect the health and safety of our community.” This includes high-risk individuals in the surrounding community or wherever the students go in the “mass migration” at the end of the semester, according to the American College Health Association (ACHA).
The main purpose of the requirement is not to protect the students themselves. Of all COVID deaths, only about 0.1% have been in 15-to-24-year-olds. Yet young people can suffer death or serious disability after getting the jab. (Authorities point out that it is not necessarily because of the jab.) According to a controversial independent analysis, the aggressive Israeli vaccination campaign killed more than 200 times as many young persons as the coronavirus itself could have killed during the same 35-week period.
One of the commenters on the ACHA’s recommendation wrote: “It is perfectly reasonable for a society to expect its members, *all* of its members, to take up such risks on behalf of everyone. Unless you plan on putting a bullet in your own head on your thirty ninth birthday, one day *you* will be that elderly person who benefits disproportionately from universal vaccination. To not accept that risk now, yet expect that protection later, would make you a hypocrite.”
So much for the parental instinct to protect children—instead of using or sacrificing them!
We do not know the precise number of post-vaccine “adverse events,” because of incomplete reporting, or the percentage that were caused by the jab and not coincidental. But one can see the number and types of events reported to the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) or the more user-friendly British Yellow Card system. These include death, clotting or bleeding problems, paralysis, blindness, and miscarriages (213 in VAERS as of today).
The long-term adverse events cannot yet be known. The prospect of most concern to the young women calling our office is infertility. There is no evidence that the products currently available cause infertility. And also no evidence that they don’t. There are plausible reasons to worry. Viral spike protein has been found in placentas from mothers who gave birth after having COVID. And the spike protein itself, without any virus, can attach to the lining of blood vessels and many tissues, and even cross the blood-brain barrier, and wreak havoc.
Getting your own body to make spike protein is what these genetically engineered products do.
Concerning fertility, the one relevant animal experiment, in 1,273 Sprague-Dawley rats, showed a numerically lower pregnancy rate, but within the facility’s historical range. The rats were not injected in early pregnancy when organs are forming, to check for birth defects.
There are thousands of reports of menstrual irregularities, though these are not officially recognized as side effects, and many things including anxiety can affect the menstrual cycle. There are worries disseminated in social media but debunked by fact-checkers that menstrual problems and other effects can result from contacts with vaccinated persons.
The vaccine-induced spike proteins are supposed to stay attached to your cells and cause your body to make antibodies that will recognize the virus. Can they be shed into the environment and picked up by others by contact or inhalation? I don’t know of a mechanism. But it seems odd to me that the Pfizer experimental trials not only excluded women who were or might soon become pregnant, but also required men to abstain or use a condom for 28 days post injection. Just FDA bureaucracy and “abundance of caution”?
There is no abundance of caution in forcing this product onto students entering their prime reproductive years. No concern about “reproductive rights.”
It is unlawful to use coercion to gain acceptance of products available only through an Emergency Use Authorization, but colleges are confident of quick FDA approval, even though trials won’t be complete until 2022 or 2023.
So, what can students do? Be cheerful or reluctant participants in a massive uncontrolled experiment and hope for the best? Seek an exemption? Or pause their education plans—and outrageous tuition?
There are “help wanted” signs everywhere. For learning, there are libraries, and more on-line opportunities will spring up. A college degree may be unnecessary or can wait. The biological window for having a family will close. How much risk of infertility should young people take?
With the exception of the impending departure of U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan, if it occurs, the White House seems to prefer to use aggression to deter adversaries rather than finesse. The recent exchanges between Secretary of State Tony Blinken and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi at a meeting in Alaska demonstrate how Beijing has a clear view of its interests which Washington seems to lack. Blinken initiated the acrimonious exchange when he cited “deep concerns with actions by China, including in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyber attacks on the United States, economic coercion toward our allies. Each of these actions threaten the rules-based order that maintains global stability. That’s why they’re not merely internal matters, and why we feel an obligation to raise these issues here today.” He then threatened “I said that the United States relationship with China will be competitive where it should be, collaborative where it can be, adversarial where it must be” before adding “I’m hearing deep satisfaction that the United States is back, that we’re reengaged with our allies and partners. I’m also hearing deep concern about some of the actions your government is taking.”
The Chinese Foreign Minister responded sharply, rejecting U.S. suggestions that it has a right to interfere in another country’s domestic policies, “I think we thought too well of the United States, we thought that the U.S. side will follow the necessary diplomatic protocols. The United States does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength. We believe that it is important for the United States to change its own image, and to stop advancing its own democracy in the rest of the world.” Yi had a point. Ironically, most of the world believes that the U.S. represents a greater threat to genuine democracy than does either China or Russia.
In another more recent interview Blinken has accused the Chinese of acting “more aggressively abroad” while President Biden has claimed that Beijing has a plan to replace America as the world’s leading economic and military power. U.S. United Nations envoy Linda Thomas-Greenfield has also delivered the same message that Washington is preparing to take no prisoners, pledging to push back against what she called China’s “authoritarian agenda” through the various agencies that make up the UN bureaucracy. Indeed, the United States seems trapped in its own rhetoric, finding itself in the middle of a situation with China and Taiwan where warnings that Beijing is preparing to use force to recover its former province leave Washington with few options to support a de facto ally. Peter Beinart in a recent op-ed observes how the White House has been incrementally increasing its diplomatic ties with Taiwan even as it both declares itself “rock solid” on defending while also maintaining “strategic ambiguity.”
China understands its interests while the U.S. continues to be bewildered by Beijing’s successful building of trade alliances worldwide. Meanwhile Russian President Vladimir Putin, reputedly an excellent chess player, is able to think about genuine issues in three dimensions and is always at least four moves ahead of where Biden and his advisers are at any time. Biden public and video appearances frequently seem to be improvisations as he goes along guided by his teleprompter while Putin is able to explain issues clearly, apparently even in English.
A large part of Biden’s problem vis-à-vis both China and Russia is that he has inherited a U.S. Establishment view of foreign and national security policy options. It is based on three basic principles. First, that America is the only superpower and can either ignore or comfortably overcome the objections of other nations to what it is doing. Second, an all-powerful and fully resourced United States can apply “extreme pressure” to recalcitrant foreign governments and those regimes will eventually submit and comply with Washington’s wishes. And third, America has a widely accepted leadership role of the so-called “free world” which will mean that any decision made in Washington will immediately be endorsed by a large number of other nations, giving legitimacy to U.S. actions worldwide.
What Joe Biden actually thinks is, of course, unknown though he has a history of reflexively supporting an assertive and even belligerent foreign policy during his many years in Congress. Kamala Harris, who many believe will be succeeding Biden before too long, appears to have no definitive views at all beyond the usual Democratic Party cant of spreading “democracy” and being strong on Israel. That suggests that the real shaping of policy is coming from the apparatchik and donor levels in the party, to include the neocon-lite Zionist triumvirate at the State Department consisting of Tony Blinken, Wendy Sherman and Victoria Kagan as well as the upper-level bureaucracies at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies, which all support an assertive and also interventionist foreign policy to keep Americans “safe” while also increasing their budgets annually. Such thinking leaves little room for genuine national interests to surface.
Biden’s Secretary of State Tony Blinken is, for example, the perfect conformist bureaucrat, shaping his own views around established thinking and creating caveats to provide the Democratic Party leadership with some, though limited, options. Witness for example the current White House attitude towards Iran, which is regarded, along with Russia, as a permanent enemy of the United States. President Biden has expressed his interest in renegotiating a non-nuclear proliferation treaty with the Iranians, now being discussed by diplomats without direct contact in Austria. But Blinken undercuts that intention by wrapping the talks in with other issues that are intended to satisfy the Israelis and their friends in Congress that will make progress unlikely if not impossible. They include eliminating Iran’s alleged role as a regional trouble maker and also ending the ballistic missile development programs currently engaged in by the regime. The downside to all of this is that having a multilateral agreement to limit Iranian enhancement of uranium up to a bomb-making level is very much in the U.S. interest, but it appears to be secondary to other politically motivated side discussions which will derail the process.
A foreign and national security policy based on political dogma rather than genuine interests can obviously generate some disconnects, unlike in Russia or China, where redlines and national interests are clearly understood and acted upon. To cite yet another dangerous example of playing with fire that one is witnessing in Eastern Europe, the simple understanding that for Russia Belarus and Ukraine are frontline states that could pose existential threats to Moscow if they were to move closer to the west and join NATO appears to be lacking. The U.S. prefers to stand the question on its head and claims that the real issue is “spreading democracy,” which it is not. Policy makers in Washington might consider what Washington would likely do if Mexico and Canada were to be threatened with foreign interference that might bring about their joining a military alliance hostile to the United States.
The American Establishment-driven foreign policy thinking clearly has trouble in accommodating the obvious understanding that the U.S. actually becomes more vulnerable every time it interferes in China’s trade practices or gives the green light for alliances like NATO to expand. Expansion of the national security policy components often brings in another client state that rarely has anything whatsoever to contribute and which, on the contrary, becomes a burden, relying for their own security on overstretched American military resources. In return, the expansion itself guarantees that a hostile and genuinely threatened Russia will take steps of its own to counter what it sees as a potential grave threat to its own security and national identity.
Quite simply, America’s national security should dictate that the United States treat China as a competitor rather than an enemy while also disengaging from support and encouragement of Ukraine’s irredentist ambitions as quickly as possible. A recent shipment of offensive weapons to Kiev should become the last such initiative and speeches by American politicians pledging “unwavering support” for Ukraine should be considered unacceptable. Washington should meanwhile reject any clandestine attempts to overthrow Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus and make clear to Vladimir Putin that it will not support any NATO expansion into Eastern Europe, which admittedly was a pledge already made when the Soviet Union collapsed that was subsequently ignored by President Bill Clinton. Thanks to Bill, America is now obligated to defend not only Western Europe but also Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, North Macedonia, the Baltic States and tiny little Montenegro.
In short, United States engagement in complicated overseas quarrels should be limited to areas where genuine vital interests are at stake. In fact, by that standard one should begin to emphasize the security impact of the crisis on America’s southern border, which has a completely different genesis and is being driven by politics. As British statesman Lord Palmerston said in 1848 “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.” The United States government would be very wise to be guided by that advice.
Western countries are developing rules without the consent of the rest of the international community, and are both undermining and circumventing the United Nations. That’s according to Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s Foreign Minister.
Speaking on Wednesday at a joint press conference in Moscow with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Lavrov reiterated Russia’s support for the organization, and criticized those who take individual approaches, instead of using established collective decision-making mechanisms.
In particular, he noted that some countries engage in “illegitimate actions,” such as using force “without the approval by the UN Security Council,” as well as unilaterally imposing sanctions.
“We consider developing certain ‘rules’ behind the back of the greater part of the international community and then imposing them on others as universal norms unacceptable and dangerous practice,” Lavrov explained. “The ‘rules-based order’ concept promoted by our Western colleagues is unrelated to either law or universal morality.”
In his opinion, the idea of ‘rules’ causes damage to the coordinating role of the UN, and has caused an imbalance in the architecture of global governance.
The Foreign Minister also expressed his support for Guterres’ attempts to resolve crises by political and diplomatic means, including through mediation. The UN Secretary-General was visiting Moscow for his annual face-to-face discussions with Russian leadership.
Wednesday was not the first time Lavrov slammed the so-called ‘rules based order.’ Last week, Lavrov accused Western countries of imposing totalitarianism in international relations by forcing their political positions on other countries. In particular, he pointed the finger at the US and the EU, accusing them of turning away from the principles of democracy and multilateralism.
In February, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova echoed the same sentiment, when she accused Western countries of resolving global problems in a private group without inviting both Russia and China.
“Our Western partners seek to resolve issues in a narrow circle and advance decisions that they are comfortable with, which will later be imposed on other members of the international community through the prism of the ‘rules-based world order’,” she said.
Western journalists, always mindful of the limits imposed by the ruling class, have a million ways of minimizing or mystifying Israeli brutality in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, where several Palestinian families are set to be expelled to make way for Jewish settlers.
It’s not so simple as straight-up ethnic cleansing, they declare. There’s a convoluted history to consider, involving Israelis, Palestinians, Ottomans, Englishmen, and Jordanians. The Israeli courts, after all, examined the evidence and determined that the properties in question were Jewish. The Israelis aren’t seizing Palestinian homes at random; they’re engaged in a legal project of urban planning.
The apologists aren’t wrong. The seizures in Sheikh Jarrah, which have been ongoing for two decades, are ratified by the Israeli state. That’s exactly the problem. The Israeli state isn’t a neutral party proffering legal decisions according to impartial, humanistic criteria. The main purpose of the Zionist entity is to dispossess Palestinians. Certainly it has other reasons for being, but its primary function since being dreamed up by European fantasists at the end of the 19th century has been to maraud and plunder. The violence in Sheikh Jarrah isn’t exceptional. It is Zionism distilled to its purest expression.
Palestinians don’t need to respect the institutions of the Zionist state precisely because those institutions negate the Palestinians’ simplest political imperative: existence. Those institutions represent the machinery of colonization. All settler colonies come equipped with a legal apparatus to validate their cruelty. We cannot expect Western pundits and politicians to question the institutional logic so harmful to Palestinians, for their own legitimacy is contingent on the reproduction of state power.
Palestinians will never concede rights of habitation to Israeli courts. Those courts confer to themselves jurisdiction over Palestinian life, but Palestinian claims to life have a much stronger basis: an age-old history in the towns and neighborhoods they inhabit, a culture indivisible from their surroundings, a language of freedom concordant to the beauty of the land. Palestinians know full-well that they belong. Israeli courts produce delusional soliloquies.
The logic underlying land seizure in Sheikh Jarrah is nonsensical to the point of insanity. First of all, the logic tries to deplete observers of empathy. Families live in those homes, actual human beings with complex needs and aspirations. They will be made homeless. We’re asked not to care because those human beings are incidental to the more important project of colonial statecraft. The fate of those families is a nonstory; the settler colony’s wish fulfillment is the natural order of things.
More nonsensically, we’re asked to assign ethnic characteristics to abstractions and inanimate objects. The basis for Israel’s aggression in Sheikh Jarrah (as throughout all of historic Palestine) is repossession of so-called Jewish property. The property, in other words, doesn’t belong to people who happen to be Jewish. The property itself is Jewish—nobody can specify which denomination—and is therefore fit only for a certain kind of inhabitant. The property has some kind of innate disposition. It is apparently capable of worship. It becomes a crass approximation of humanity. Endowing housing units with confessional qualities exemplifies the problem of prioritizing property over sentient life: a dwelling has no utility beyond the project of demographic engineering. Under the Zionist regime, even brick and mortar are sectarian.
The land suffers a similar fate. Zionists conceptualize it as “Jewish,” rendering the natural world a topography of exclusion. In their ruthless schema, land is neither pleasure nor sustenance. It is a commodity. Like all resources in the colonial economy, access is granted (or limited) according to discriminatory criteria, in this case religious identity, as defined by the government. There is no real notion of the commons in Zionism. Public space is deeply personal, demarcated and apportioned based on a crude obsession with genetics. Biology isn’t an impetus to kinship, but a pretext for segregation, rigid and permanent.
Having been anointed Jewish, the land ceases to be dynamic. It is an ideological fabrication with fixed characteristics. It doesn’t seem to bother the chattering classes in the United States that Israel’s sanctified self-image requires an aggressive military apparatus, that it comes to fruition only by tossing innocent people out of their homes and destroying the possibility of a functional civil society. Their own country, after all, was built on the same kind of racialized violence.
Palestinians do not adhere to the correct religion and so they become surplus. Displacement is their natural destiny. The soldiers arrive with batons and sound bombs, with tear gas and live ammunition. They wave court orders explaining that the neighborhood must host a different class of resident. The settlers accompanying the soldiers create a bloody ruckus. Together, soldier and settler unleash hell on people whose primary motivation is to exist. This is what colonizers like to call “democracy.”
The land is Jewish. The houses are Jewish, too. The Palestinians are merely human. There is no place for such creatures in an inhumane society.
This article was originally published in Arabic at Awan.
According to modelling by University of Sydney and ETH Zürich, scaling back total production and placing a cap on maximum wealth would not only save the planet, it would also allow us all to enjoy shorter working weeks and the financial security of a generous universal basic income.
Well-being can be maintained in a degrowth transition. […]
Degrowth focuses on the global North and is defined as an equitable, democratic reduction in energy and material use while maintaining wellbeing. A decline in GDP is accepted as a likely outcome of this transition. […]
“We can still satisfy peoples’ needs, maintain employment and reduce inequality with degrowth, which is what distinguishes this pathway from recession,” Mr Keyßer says.
“However, a just, democratic and orderly degrowth transition would involve reducing the gap between the haves and have-nots, with more equitable distribution from affluent nations to nations where human needs are still unmet — something that is yet to be fully explored.”
A ‘degrowth’ society could include:
A shorter working week, resulting in reduced unemployment alongside increasing productivity and stable economic output.
Universal basic services independent of income, for necessities i.e. food, health care, transport.
Limits on maximum income and wealth, enabling a universal basic income to be increased and reducing inequality, rather than increasing inequality as is the current global trend.
I think it is only fair to give the professors an opportunity to showcase their degrowth theories, by slashing their university funding, so they can demonstrate by example how much happier we would be if we all embraced a permanent reduction in income.
Throughout the pandemic, governments have claimed to be following “the science”. But of course, many aspects of “the science” were never settled.
The WHO, as well as the UK Government, initially told us not to wear face masks. They then decided that face masks were essential. Countries like Australia and New Zealand introduced border controls in early February. Meanwhile, UK scientists were advising against port-of-entry screening. Researchers predicted there would be 96,000 deaths in Sweden by July. But as it turned out, there were less than 6,000.
Of course, many people have been sceptical of “the science” (by which I mean the officially endorsed science) from the very beginning. And of course, they’ve formed communities online with other like-minded persons. (Lockdown Sceptics would be one example of such a community.)
In an unpublished paper, researchers from MIT sought to understand how the users of these communities obtain, analyse, share and curate information. Surprisingly (to them), they found that users place a premium on data literacy and scientific rigour.
The researchers used a mixed methods design. First, they analysed a large sample of pandemic-related tweets sent between January and July 2020. Second, they employed ethnographic methods to study users on “anti-mask” Facebook groups. (Note that they use “anti-mask” as a “synecdoche for a broad spectrum of beliefs: that the pandemic is exaggerated, schools should be reopening, etc.”.)
In their analysis of Twitter data, the researchers found that sceptics “share the second-highest number of charts across the top six communities”, and that they are “the most prolific producers of area/line charts”, while sharing “the fewest number of photos”. They also found that such individuals “often create polished counter-visualizations that would not be out of place in scientific papers”.
In their study of “anti-mask” Facebook groups, the researchers found that users “value unmediated access to information and privilege personal research and direct reading over “expert interpretations”, and that “their approach to the pandemic is grounded in more scientific rigour, not less”.
“Most fundamentally,” the researchers write, “the groups we studied believe that science is a process, and not an institution”. They note:
While academic science is traditionally a system for producing knowledge within a laboratory, validating it through peer review, and sharing results within subsidiary communities, anti-maskers reject this hierarchical social model. They espouse a vision of science that is radically egalitarian and individualist.
According to the researchers, “anti-maskers often reveal themselves to be more sophisticated in their understanding of how scientific knowledge is socially constructed than their ideological adversaries”, and data literacy is a “quintessential criterion for membership within the community they have created”.
Based on these descriptions, one might assume the paper was written by a cadre of undercover sceptics. But the researchers make clear they are “not promoting these views”. Overall, it’s a fascinating study which is worth reading in full.
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