Planetary Association for Clean Energy, Inc. is an NGO in Special Consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations (ECOSOC) New York / Geneva / Vienna / Addis Ababa
Vaccine Mandates Violate the Right to Informed Consent
On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared pandemic status for COVID-19, the disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Governments responded by implementing unprecedented “lockdown” measures globally with no clear exit strategy apart from the stated goal of rapidly developing a vaccine. Concurrently, advocates of this hypothetical solution have called for lawmakers to make COVID-19 vaccinations compulsory.
However, compulsory vaccination violates the right to informed consent, one of the most fundamental ethics in medicine and a human right recognized under international law, including the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 1966, the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights of 2005, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and its Optional Protocol of 2006 and under internationally recognized agreements such as the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences International Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical Research Involving Human Subjects of 2002, and the World Medical Association Declaration Of Helsinki of 1964, revised in 2013.
The United Nations (UN) and WHO are legally obligated to uphold the right to informed consent yet have instead been complicit in violating it.
For example, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) praised the Maldives government for passing a law in November 2019 that effectively outlawed the exercise of the right to informed consent by threatening parents with prosecution for non-compliance with public vaccine policy.
In January 2020, two articles in The BMJ (formerly British Medical Journal ) revealed that the WHO had been sponsoring a malaria vaccine trial that included 720,000 children in three African countries without having ensured that the prior informed consent of the parents had been obtained. Most egregiously, parents had not been informed that earlier trials had found the vaccine to be associated with an increased risk of childhood mortality, particularly among girls.
WHO also promotes the diphtheria, tetanus, and whole-cell pertussis (DTP) vaccine in global vaccination campaigns, despite the best available scientific evidence showing it to be associated with an increased rate of childhood mortality. While the vaccine may protect against the target diseases, it appears to detrimentally affect the immune system in a way that makes children more vulnerable to other diseases. This “non-specific effect” has been found to be true for non-live vaccine generally
WHO is aware of the evidence, but has dismissed it on the grounds that it comes from observational studies, which are prone to selection bias. However, WHO accepts the findings of observational studies showing beneficial non-specific effects of measles vaccination.
Additionally, the members of the WHO committee tasked with reviewing the evidence had conflicts of interest, including three having ties to GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), one of the manufacturers of DTP vaccines and the manufacturer of the experimental malaria vaccine.
WHO also receives funding from vaccine manufacturers, including GSK, Sanofi, and Merck. The single largest source of funding for WHO presently is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which promotes vaccines while holding investments in vaccine manufacturers including GSK, Sanofi, and Merck.
The public is repeatedly assured by public health officials and the media that “vaccines are safe and effective”, but in the absence of randomized placebo-controlled trials comparing long-term health outcomes, including mortality, between vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals, that statement is not justifiable. Vaccines do not undergo such trials before licensing. Nor are whole vaccine schedules studied for safety. With respect to the routine childhood vaccine schedule recommended by the United States of America (US) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Institute of Medicine in 2013 observed that “studies designed to examine the long-term effects of the cumulative number of vaccines or other aspects of the immunization schedule have not been conducted.”
There are many legitimate concerns about vaccines in addition to their non-specific effects. Policymakers do not consider the opportunity costs of vaccination, such as the superiority of immunity acquired naturally compared to that conferred by vaccination.
For example, studies have found that having a flu shot annually could increase the risk of infection with novel influenza strains, as well as with non-influenza viruses, in part due to the lost opportunity to acquire the cross-protective, cell-mediated immunity conferred by infection.
A complementary hypothesis is the phenomenon of “original antigenic sin”, whereby the first experience of the immune system with an antigen determines future responses. Priming the immune system with antigen components of the influenza vaccine could potentially cause a mismatched antibody response to strains that the vaccine is not designed to protect against, thereby increasing the risk of infection as compared to an immune response in which naive T and B cells are instructed to fight off the infecting virus.
This phenomenon might help explain an increased risk of serious dengue infection among Filipino children who received the dengue vaccine and who had not already experienced a prior infection. This finding led the Philippines to the withdrawal of the vaccine, which the government had implemented into its childhood schedule upon the recommendation of WHO, despite earlier data having indicated that the vaccine might cause precisely that outcome.
A related hypothesis is that of “antibody dependent enhancement” (ADE), whereby vaccine-induced antibodies, instead of protecting the individual from subsequent infection, enhance the infection and thereby increase the risk of severe disease.
Attempts to develop a vaccine for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS) were impeded by this phenomenon, whereby vaccinated animals were found to be at increased risk of viral infection. This past experience has raised concerns about the potential for ADE with vaccines under development for SARS-CoV-2.
As another example of opportunity cost, surviving measles is associated with a reduced rate of all-cause mortality in children, and this survival benefit appears to more than offset measles deaths in populations with a low mortality rate from acute measles infection.
Additionally, measles infection has been observed to cause regression of cancer in children and has been associated with a decreased risk of numerous diseases later in life, including degenerative bone disease, certain tumours, Parkinson’s disease, allergic disease, chronic lymphoid leukaemia, both non-Hodgkin lymphoma and Hodgkin lymphoma, and cardiovascular disease.
Other infections have also been associated with health benefits, such as a reduced risk of leukaemia among children who experience Haemophilus influenzae type b infection during early childhood.
There is also the potential for mass vaccination to put evolutionary pressure on pathogens, as has been seen with the diphtheria, tetanus and acellular pertussis (DTaP) vaccine, and the emergence of pertussis strains lacking pertactin, a key antigen component of the vaccine. According to CDC, such strains “may have a selective advantage in infecting DTaPvaccinated persons.”
Population effects of vaccination must be considered in addition to their effects on individuals. Data suggest that the varicella (chicken pox) vaccine has not been cost-effective but has rather increased health care costs due to the inferiority of vaccine-conferred immunity. This is because mass vaccination appears to have shifted the risk burden away from children, in whom it is generally a benign illness, and onto adolescents and adults, who are at greater risk of complications. Due to the loss of immunologic boosting from repeated exposures, elderly people who had chicken pox as children are at greater risk of shingles. But rather than reconsider existing recommendations, policymakers respond to this problem by recommending a shingles vaccine for the elderly
In the US, many parents are concerned that manufacturers of vaccines recommended by CDC for routine use in childhood enjoy legal immunity from injury lawsuits because this represents a disincentive to pharmaceutical companies in terms of developing safer and more effective means of disease prevention. The Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) of the US government effectively shifts the financial burden for vaccine injuries away from the industry and onto taxpaying consumers.
Another major problem is that policymakers treat vaccination as a one-size-fits-all solution to disease prevention, when the science is unequivocal in establishing that a risk-benefit analysis must be carried out for each vaccine and each individual. Not everyone is at the same risk from the target disease, and not everyone is at the same risk of harm from the vaccine.
For example, children with a mitochondrial disorder may be at increased risk of vaccine injury. In one case adjudicated under the VICP, the US government acknowledged that vaccinations can cause brain damage manifesting as symptoms of autism.
In a 2018 interview, the director of the CDC Immunization Safety Office acknowledged the possibility that vaccines could cause autism in genetically susceptible children but stated that it was “hard to predict who those children might be.”
Legislators do not have the specialized knowledge required to conduct the necessary risk/benefit analysis of the individual. Only the individual, or in the case of a child, the parents, possess that knowledge.
All vaccines carry risks. Compulsory vaccination constitutes a gross violation of the right to informed consent. Governments urgently need to orient health policies towards protecting rather than violating this human right.
The 1991 Gulf war is remembered as a great war. In reality, worldwide sanctions would have forced Iraq to peacefully withdraw. The Gulf war cost billions of dollars, killed or sickened a million people, left the region much worse off, assisted Iran, and caused a worldwide economic recession.
“Gulf War Documents: Meeting between Saddam Hussein and US Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie”; Wikileaks/Global Research; March 5, 2012; https://www.globalresearch.ca/gulf-wa…
Stephen C. Pelletiere’s Jan 31, 2003 New York Times OpEd on the evidence that Iran was responsible for the gassing of 5000 Kurds at Halabja, not Iraq: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/31/op…
“Overwhelming Force – What happened in the final days of the Gulf War?”; Seymour Hersh; New Yorker; May 22, 2000; http://cryptome.org/mccaffrey-sh.htm
“Lucky War; Third Army in Desert Storm”; Richard M. Swain; US Army Command and General Staff College Press; 1994; https://history.army.mil/html/bookshe…
… As it turns out, 9/11 may not prove to be the most long-lasting and world-changing false flag event to take place in the fall of 2001. The anthrax attacks that followed on the heels of “the day that changed everything” may in fact have more to say about the COVID-1984 world in which we find ourselves.
Viewers of my recent work on COVID-911 will already know about one of the remarkable “coincidences” linking the anthrax attacks of 2001 with the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2. Namely, that both events were preceded by a “simulation” that mirrored the real-life incident—Dark Winter in the case of the anthrax attacks and Event 201 in the case of the current scamdemic—complete with fake news segments dramatizing the real-life emergencies that would unfold on our tv screens months later. As you will also know, those events weren’t just co-hosted by the same organization (the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security), but actually featured some of the same players who would go on to lay the groundwork for and participate in the US government’s COVID-19 response.
But those “coincidences” really only scratch the surface of the anthrax false flag. The real story of the anthrax attacks is much bigger than we can do justice to here, but it includes:
The revelation in the pages of the New York Times that the US government was running an illegal biological weapons program that was working to—among other things—genetically engineer weaponized anthrax (a revelation that was published on September 4, 2001, but quickly overshadowed by other events).
The death of Vladimir Pasechnik, a microbiologist who had worked on the Soviet germ warfare program weaponizing anthrax and other biological agents before defecting to Britain in 1989, who was hired by Britain to conduct his own research into anthrax antidotes at the UK’s secretive Porton Down bioweapon laboratory, and who died just weeks after the anthrax attacks took place.
The murder of Dr. David Kelly, who debriefed Pasechnik after his defection and offered him the job at Porton Down, and who had told his friend that he was going to write a book exposing what he knew about the bioweapons program before “killing himself” on Harrowdown Hill.
But for today, it serves merely to note that the anthrax attacks were indeed a false flag attack. In those first chaotic days of the attack, ABC’s Brian Ross began reporting from his “anonymous well-placed sources” that the anthrax spores contained traces of bentonite, a “troubling chemical additive” that just happened to be a ” a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons program.” Of course, this turned out to be a complete lie (a lie that Ross has never clarified or retracted to this day).
As was later confirmed, the spores in question were actually derived from the Ames strain, a strain of anthrax whose virulence makes it the “gold standard” for research into the bacterium by the biological warriors at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. This made the attack almost certainly an inside job (although, it should be noted, the Ames strain is available to researchers in a number of laboratories around the world, including Porton Down).
Inevitably, the FBI “Amerithrax” investigation into the deadly anthrax letters—the largest investigation in the history of the Bureau—set its sights on a series of “lone wolves.” After failing to even bring charges against “person of interest” Steven Hatfill—a bioweapons expert who was awarded nearly $6 million in taxpayer money after years of harassment—and ultimately landed on Bruce Ivins, a patsy who conveniently killed himself before ever even being charged for the monumental crime that was ultimately blamed on him.
The anthrax false flag killed multiple birds with one stone:
It associated the terror attack of 9/11 with a subsequent bioterror attack that was quickly connected to Saddam Hussein and Iraq. That association was still strong in the minds of many Americans (some who may still have erroneously blamed Iraq for the attack) during the build up to the Iraq War in 2002 and 2003.
As Whitney Webb points out in her exhaustive report on the event, the anthrax attack also saved Bioport, the crony-connected DoD contractor that supplied the US military with the highly controversial Anthrax vaccine. Facing growing concerns about the safety and efficacy of their vaccine, Bioport faced financial ruin . . . until the anthrax attacks happened and demand for their questionable product skyrocketed. Later rebranding as Emergent Biosolutions, the company benefited from the largesse of the Gates-backed Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness, and, as Webb notes, the company “is now set to profit from the Coronavirus (Covid-19) crisis.”
And, it also gave a gigantic shot in the arm to another major wing of the military-industrial complex: the “biodefense” sector. With the signing of the Biological Weapons Convention in 1972, biological weapons development was forced underground. Of course, it still went on, but now it was carried out under the mantle of “defense.” After all, one could never trust that those damn *Insert Bogeyman Here* would really get rid of their bioweapon stockpiles, and one needed to create bioweapons in order to understand how to protect against them. But such research was necessarily sidelined and shrouded in secrecy.
Before the anthrax attacks, bioweapons research had been sidelined and shrouded in secrecy. After the attacks, however, the US government—and indeed every government in the world—had a perfect excuse to vastly expand its biological weapons programs in the name of “biological security.” As Jonathan King, a professor of microbiology at MIT, explains:
“[The] response to the anthrax attacks and the bioterrorism initiative has been to launch a nationwide, billion-dollar campaign to ‘defend us’ from unknown terrorists. But the character of this program is roughly as follows: You say, ‘Well, what would the terrorists come up with? What’s the nastiest, most dangerous, most difficult-to-diagnose, difficult-to-treat microorganisms that we can think of. Well, let’s go bring that organism into existence so that we can figure out how to defend against it.’ The fact of the matter is, it’s indistinguishable from an offensive program in which you would do the same thing.”
Thus we get such innovations as the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology’s reconstruction of the 1918 Spanish flu from the tissue of a victim buried in the Alaska permafrost. Or the USAID-funded 2015 research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that weaponized bat-derived coronavirus in experiments that even other molecular biologists warned was presenting the world with a “clear and present danger.” (Oh, and the USAID funding for the research was technically illegal at the time, but who’s keeping track, hey?)
The long story short is that we have indeed arrived at another, potentially even more dangerous era of false flag attack. At this point it isn’t the scary bearded Muslim suicide bombers who we are supposed to be afraid of, though. It’s scary bearded Muslim biologists. Or something like that. Maybe it’ll be the Russkies. Or the ChiComs. Or some shadowy terror group that arises from nowhere and starts claiming responsibility for Bill Gates’ threatened “Pandemic II.”
The point is that bioterrorism is now very much on the table and don’t think for a second that the globalists won’t resort to more spectacular bioterror attacks to keep the current biosecurity hysteria going.
The ridiculous Skripal affair and its even more absurd low-budget sequel (the Navalny hoax) are just a taste of what we are likely to see in the near future. We may scoff at the amateur theatrics of these false flag test runs, but it would be the same as someone in 1993 dismissing the first World Trade Center bombing as a ridiculous, bungled FBI op, instead of the first taste of much bigger attacks to come.
Conclusion
They say forewarned is forearmed, and I think that adage is especially apt when it comes to the subject of false flag attacks. The entire reason that these operations have been used by country after country for centuries is that they are so effective. And they are only effective because throughout those centuries the general public was unable to wrap their minds around a trick so devious and downright evil.
“But why would the government attack itself?” is not just the question of a brainwashed simpleton; it’s the question of an innocent and trusting soul who could never in a million years imagine doing something so underhanded.
But this is not 1800. It’s not even 2000. It’s 2020. The world has cottoned on to the trick.
Now we have to completely break the spell that governments have cast over the public. In the event of every spectacular terror attack (biological or otherwise), we have to take the history of false flag operations into account and put the government at the top of the list of suspects. When enough of the population has adjusted their thinking in this way, the trick will have lost its effectiveness and the globalists will have to abandon it altogether.
The only question is: Can we wake enough of the public up to these false flag tricks before Gates and his ilk get their “Pandemic II?”
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Considering how much misinformation is currently floating around in the area of health and medicine, I thought it might be useful to write an article about how to read and understand scientific studies, so that you can feel comfortable looking at first hand data yourselves and making your own minds up.
Ethical principles
Anyone can carry out a study. There is no legal or formal requirement that you have a specific degree or educational background in order to perform a study. All the earliest scientists were hobbyists, who engaged in science in their spare time. Nowadays most studies are carried out by people with some formal training in scientific method. In the area of health and medicine, most studies are carried out by people who are MD’s and/or PhD’s, or people who are in the process of getting these qualifications.
If you want to perform a study on patients, you generally have to get approval from an ethical review board. Additionally, there is an ethical code of conduct that researchers are expected to stick to, known as the Helsinki declaration, which was developed in the 1970’s after it became clear that a lot of medical research that had been done up to that point was not very ethical (to put it mildly). The code isn’t legally binding, but if you don’t follow it, you will generally have trouble getting your research published in a serious medical journal.
The most important part of the Helsinki declaration is the requirement that participants be fully informed about the purpose of the study, and given an informed choice as to whether to take part or not. Additionally, participants have to be clearly informed that it is their right to drop out of a study at any point, without having to provide any reason for doing so.
Publication bias
The bigger and higher quality a scientific study is, the more expensive it is. This means that most big, high quality studies are carried out by pharmaceutical companies. Obviously, this is a problem, because the companies have a vested interest in making their products look good. And when companies carry out studies that don’t show their drugs in the best light, they will usually try to bury the data. When they carry out studies that show good results, however, they will try to maximize the attention paid to them.
This contributes to a problem known as publication bias. What publication bias means is that studies which show good effect are much more likely to get published than studies which show no effect. This is both because the people who did the study are more likely to push for it to be published, and because journals are more likely to accept studies that show benefit (because those studies get much more attention than studies that don’t show benefit).
So, one thing to be aware of before you start searching for scientific studies in a field is that the studies you can find on a topic often aren’t all the studies. You are most likely to find the studies that show the strongest effect. The effect of an intervention in the published literature is pretty much always bigger than the effect subsequently seen in the real world. This is one reason why I am skeptical to drugs, like statins, that show an extremely small benefit even in the studies produced by the drug companies themselves.
There have been efforts in recent years to mitigate this problem. One such effort is the site clinicaltrials.gov. Researchers are expected to post details of their planned study on clinicaltrials.gov in advance of beginning recruitment of participants. This makes it harder to bury studies that subsequently don’t show the wanted results.
Most serious journals have now committed to only publish studies that have been listed on clinicaltrials.gov prior to starting recruitment of participants, which gives the pharmaceutical companies a strong incentive to post their studies there. This is a hugely positive development, since it makes it a little bit harder for the pharmaceutical companies to hide studies that didn’t go as planned.
Peer review
Once a study is finished, the researchers will usually try to get it published in a peer-reviewed journal. The first scientists, back when modern science was being invented in the 1600’s, mostly wrote books in which they described what they had done and what results they had achieved. Then, after a while, scientific societies started to pop up, and started to produce journals. Gradually science moved from books to journal articles. In the 1700’s the journals started to incorporate the concept of peer-review as a means to ensure quality.
As you can see, journals are an artifact of history. There is actually no technical reason why studies still need to be published in journals in a time when most reading is done on digital devices. It is possible that the journals will disappear with time, to be replaced by on-line science databases.
In recent years, there has been an explosion in the popularity of “pre-print servers”, where scientists can post their studies while waiting to get them in to journals. When it comes to medicine, the most popular such server is medRxiv. The main problem with journals is that they charge money for access, and I think most people will agree that scientific knowledge should not be owned by the journals, it should be the public property of humankind.
Peer-review provides a sort of stamp of approval, although it is questionable how much that stamp is worth. Basically, peer-review means that someone who is considered an expert on the subject of the article (but who wasn’t personally involved with it in any way) reads through the article and determines if it is sensible and worth publishing.
Generally the position of peer-reviewer is an unpaid position, and the person engaging in peer-review does it in his or her spare time. He or she might spend an hour or so going through the article before deciding whether it deserves to be published or not. Clearly, this is not a very high bar. Even the most respected journals have published plenty of bad studies containing manipulated and fake data because they didn’t put much effort in to making sure the data was correct. As an example, the early part of the covid pandemic saw a ton of bad studies which had to be retracted just a few weeks or months after publication because the data wasn’t properly fact checked before publication.
If the peer reviewer at one journal says no to a scientific study, the researchers will generally move on to another, less prestigious journal, and will keep going like that until they can get the study published. There are so many journals that everything gets published somewhere in the end, no matter of how poor quality.
The whole system of peer-review builds on trust. The guiding principle is the idea that bad studies will be caught out over the long term, because when other people try to replicate the results, they won’t be able to.
There are two big problems with this line of thinking. The first is that scientific studies are expensive, so they often don’t get replicated, especially if they are big studies of drugs. For the most part, no-one but the drug company itself has the cash resources to do a follow-up study to make sure that the results are reliable. And if the drug company has done one study which shows a good effect, it won’t want to risk doing a second study that might show a weaker effect.
The second problem is that follow-up studies aren’t exciting. Being first is cool, and generates lots of media attention. Being second is boring. No-one cares about the people who re-did a study and determined that the results actually held up to scrutiny.
Different types of evidence
In medical science, there are a number of “tiers” of data. The higher tier generally trumps the lower tier, because it is by its nature of higher quality. This means that one good quality randomized controlled trial trumps a hundred observational studies.
The lowest quality type of evidence is anecdote. In medicine this often takes the form of “case reports”, which detail a single interesting case, or “case series”, which detail a few interesting cases. An example could be a case report of someone who developed a rare complication, say baldness, after taking a certain drug.
Anecdotal evidence can generate hypotheses for further research, but it can never say anything about causation. If you take a drug and you lose all your hair a few days later, that could have been caused by the drug, but it could also have been caused by a number of other things. It might well just be coincidence.
After anecdote, we have observational studies. These are studies which take a population and follow it to see what happens to it over time. Usually, this type of study is referred to as a “cohort study”, and often, there will be two cohorts that differ in some significant way.
For example, an observational study might be carried out to figure out the long term effects of smoking. Ideally, you want a group that doesn’t smoke to compare with. So you find 5,000 smokers and 5,000 non-smokers. Since you want to know what the effect of smoking is specifically, you try to make sure that the two cohorts are as similar as possible in all other respects. You do this by making sure that both populations are around the same age, weigh as much, exercise as much, and have similar dietary habits. The purpose of this is to decrease confounding effects.
Confounding is when something that you’re not studying interferes with the thing that you are studying. So, for example, people who smoke might also be less likely to exercise. If you then find that smokers are more likely to develop lung cancer, is it because of the smoking or the lack of exercise? If the two groups vary in some way with regards to exercise, it’s impossible to say for certain. This is why observational studies can never answer the question of causation. They can only ever show a correlation.
This is extremely important to be aware of, because observational studies are constantly being touted in the media as showing that this causes that. For example a tabloid article might claim that a vegetarian diet causes you to live longer, based on an observational study. But observational studies can never answer questions of causation. Observational studies can and should do their best to minimize confounding effects, but they can never get rid of them completely.
The highest tier of evidence is the Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT). In a RCT, you take a group of people, and you randomly select who goes in the intervention group, and who goes in the control group.
The people in the control group should ideally get a placebo that is indistinguishable from the intervention. The reason this is important is that the placebo effect is strong. It isn’t uncommon for the placebo effect to contribute more to a drug’s perceived effect than the real effect caused by the drug. Without a control group that gets a placebo it’s impossible to know how much of the perceived benefit from a drug that actually comes from the drug itself.
In order for an RCT to get full marks for quality, it needs to be double-blind. This means that neither the participants nor the members of the research team who interact with the participants know who is in which group. This is as important as having a placebo, because if people know they are getting the real intervention, they will behave differently compared to if they know they are getting the placebo. Also, the researchers performing the study might act differently towards the intervention group and the control group in ways that influence the results, if they know who is in which group. If a study isn’t blinded, it is known as an “open label” study.
So, why does anyone bother with observational studies at all? Why not always just do RCT’s? For three reasons. Firstly, RCT’s take a lot of work to organize. Secondly, RCT’s are expensive to run. Thirdly, people aren’t willing to be randomized to a lot of interventions. For example, few people would be willing to be randomized to smoking or not smoking.
There are those who would say that there is another, higher quality form of evidence, above the randomized controlled trial, and that is the systematic review and meta-analysis. This statement is both true, and not true. The systematic review is a review of all studies that have been carried out on a topic. As the name suggests, the review is “systematic”, i.e. a clearly defined method is used to search for studies. This is important, because it allows others to replicate the search strategy, to see if the reviewers have consciously left out certain studies they didn’t like, in order to influence the results in some direction.
The meta-analysis is a systematic review that has gone a step further, and tried to combine the results of several studies in to a single “meta”-study, in order to get a higher amount of statistical power.
The reason I say it’s both true and not true that this final tier is higher quality than the RCT is that the quality of systematic reviews and meta-analyses depends entirely on the quality of the studies that are included. I would rather take one large high quality RCT than a meta-analysis done of a hundred observational studies. An adage to remember when it comes to meta-analyses is “garbage in, garbage out” – a meta-analysis is only as good as the studies it includes.
There is one thing I haven’t mentioned so far, and that is animal studies. Generally, animal studies will take the form of RCT’s. There are a few advantages to animal studies. You can do things to animals that you would never be allowed to do to humans, and an RCT with animals is much cheaper than an RCT with humans.
When it comes to drugs, there is in most countries a legal requirement that they be tested on animals before being tested on humans. The main problem with animal studies is several million years of evolution. Most animal studies are done in rats and mice, which are separated from us by over fifty million years of evolution, but even our closest relatives, chimps, are about six million years away from us evolutionarily. It is very common for studies to show one thing in animals, and something completely different when done in humans. For example, studies of fever lowering drugs done in animals find a seriously increased risk of dying of infection, but studies in humans don’t find any increased risk. Animal studies always need to be taken with a big grain of salt.
Statistical significance
One very important concept when analyzing studies is the idea of statistical significance. In medicine, a result is considered “statistically significant” if the ”p-value” is less than 0,05 (p stands for probability).
This gets a little bit complicated, but please bear with me. To put it as simply as possible, the p-value is the probability that a certain result was seen even though the null hypothesis is true. (The null hypothesis is the alternative to the hypothesis that is being tested. In medicine the null hypothesis is usually the hypothesis that an intervention doesn’t work, for example that statins don’t decrease mortality).
So a p-value of 0,05 means that there is a 5% or lower chance that a result was seen even though the null hypothesis is true.
One thing to understand is that 5% is an entirely arbitrary cut-off. The number was chosen in the early twentieth century, and it has stuck. And it leads to a lot of crazy interpretations. If a p-value is 0,049 the researchers who have carried out a study will frequently rejoice, because the result is statistically significant. If the p-value is on the other hand 0,051, then the result will be considered a failure. Anyone can see that this is ridiculous, because there is actually only a 0,002 (0,2%) difference between the two results, and one is really no more statistically significant than the other.
Personally, I think a p-value of 0,05 is a bit too generous. I would much have preferred if the standard cut-off had been set at 0,01, and I am sceptical of results that show a p-value greater than 0,01. What gets me really excited is when I see a p-value of less than 0,001.
It is especially important to be sceptical of p-values that are higher than 0,01 considering the other things we know about medical science. Firstly, that there is a strong publication bias, which causes studies that don’t show statistical significance to “disappear” at a higher rate than studies that do show statistical significance. Secondly, that studies are often carried out by people with a vested interest in the result, who will do what they can to get the result they want. And thirdly, because the 0,05 cut-off is used inappropriately all the time, for a reason we will now discuss.
The 0,05 limit is only really supposed to apply when you’re looking at a single relationship. If you look at twenty different relationships at the same time, then just by pure chance one of those relationships will show statistical significance. Is that relationship real? Almost certainly not.
The more variables you look at, the more strictly you should set the limit for statistical significance. But very few studies in medicine do this. They happily report statistical significance with a p-value of 0,05, and act like they’ve shown some meaningful result, even when they look at a hundred different variables. That is bad science, but even big studies, published in prestigious journals, do this.
That is why researchers are supposed to decide on a “primary end-point” and ideally post that primary end-point on clinicaltrials.gov before they start their study. The primary end-point is the question that the researchers are mainly trying to answer (for example, do statins decrease overall mortality?). Then they can use the 0,05 cut-off for the primary endpoint without cheating. They will usually report any other results as if the 0,05 cut-off applies to them too, but it doesn’t.
The reason researchers are supposed to post the primary endpoint at clinicaltrials.gov before starting a trial is that they can otherwise choose the endpoint that ends up being most statistically significant just by chance, after they have all the results, and make that the primary endpoint. That is of course a form of statistical cheating. But it has happened, many times. Which is why clinicaltrials.gov is so important.
One thing to be aware of is that a large share of studies can not be successfully replicated. Some studies have found that more than 50% of research cannot be replicated. That is in spite of a cut-off which is supposed to cause this to only happen 5% of the time. How can that be?
I think the three main reasons are publication bias, vested interests that do what they can to manipulate studies, and inappropriate use of the 5% p-value cut-off. That is why we should never put too much trust in a result that has not been replicated.
Absolute risk vs relative risk
We’ve discussed statistical significance a lot now, but that isn’t really what matters to patients. What patients care about is “clinical significance”, i.e. if they take a drug, will it have a meaningful impact for them. Clinical significance is closely tied to the concepts of absolute risk and relative risk.
Let’s say we have a drug that decreases your five year risk of having a heart attack from 0,2% to 0,1% . We’ll invent a random name for the drug, say, “spatin”. Now, the absolute risk reduction when you take a spatin is 0,1% over five years (0,2 – 0,1 = 0,1). Not very impressive, right? Would you think it was worth taking that drug? Probably not.
What if I told you that spatins actually decreased your risk of heart attack by 50%? Now you’d definitely want to take the drug, right?
How can a spatin only decrease risk by 0,1% and yet at the same time decrease risk by 50%? Because the risk reduction depends on if we are looking at absolute risk or relative risk. Although spatins only cause a 0,1% reduction in absolute risk, they cause a 50% reduction in relative risk (0,1 / 0,2 = 50%).
So, you get the absolute risk reduction by taking the risk without the drug and subtracting the risk with the drug. You get the relative risk reduction by dividing the risk with the drug from the risk without the drug. Drug companies will generally focus on relative risk, because it sound much more impressive. But the clinical significance of a drug that decreases risk from 0,2% to 0,1% is, I would argue, so small that it’s not worth taking the drug, especially if the drug has side effects which might be more common than the probability of seeing a benefit.
When you look at an advertisement for a drug, always look at the fine print. Are they talking about absolute risk or relative risk?
How a journal article is organized
In the last few decades, a standardized format has developed for how scientific articles are supposed to be written. Articles are generally divided in to four sections.
The first section is the “Introduction”. In this section, the researchers are supposed to discuss the wider literature around the topic of their study, and how their study fits in with that wider literature. This section is mostly fluff, and you can usually skip through it.
The second section is the “Method”. This is an important section and you should always read it carefully. It describes what the researchers did and how they did it. Pay careful attention to what the study groups were, what the intervention was, what the control was. Was the study blinded or not? And if it was, how did they ensure that the blinding was maintained? Generally, the higher quality a scientific study, the more specific the researchers will be about exactly what they’ve done and how. If they’re not being specific, what are they trying to hide? Try to see if they’ve done anything that doesn’t make sense, and ask yourself why. If any manipulation is happening to make you think you’re seeing one thing when you’re actually seeing something else, it usually happens in the method section.
There are a few methodological tricks that are very common in scientific studies. One is choosing surrogate end points and another is choosing combined end points. I will use statins to exemplify each, since there has been so much methodological trickery in the statin research.
Surrogate end points are alternate endpoints that “stand in” for the thing that actually matters to patients. An example of a surrogate end point is looking at whether a drug lowers LDL cholesterol instead of looking at the thing that actually matters, overall mortality. The use of the surrogate end point in this case is motivated by the cholesterol hypothesis, i.e. the idea that cholesterol lowering drugs lower LDL, which results in a decrease in cardiovascular disease, which results in increased longevity.
By using a surrogate end point, researchers can claim that the drug is successful when they have in fact shown no such thing. As we’ve discussed previously, the cholesterol hypothesis is nonsense, so showing that a drug lowers LDL cholesterol does not say anything about whether it does anything clinically useful.
Another example of a surrogate endpoint is looking at cardiovascular mortality instead of overall mortality. People don’t usually care about which cause of death is listed on their death certificate. What they care about is whether they are alive or dead. It is perfectly possible for a drug to decrease cardiovascular mortality while at the same time increasing overall mortality, so overall mortality is the only thing that matters (at least if the purpose of a drug is to make you live longer).
An example of a combined end point is looking at the combination of overall mortality and frequency of cardiac stenting. Basically, when you have a combined end point, you add two or more end points together to get a bigger total amount of events.
Now, cardiac stenting is a decision made by a doctor. It is not a hard patient oriented outcome. A study might show that there is a statistically significant decrease in the combined end point of overall mortality and cardiac stenting, which most people will interpret as a decrease in mortality, without ever looking more closely to see if the decrease was actually in mortality, or stenting, or a combination of both. In fact, it’s perfectly possible for overall mortality to increase and still have a combined endpoint that shows a decrease.
Another trick is choosing which specific adverse events to follow, or not following any adverse events at all. Adverse events is just another word for side effects. Obviously, if you don’t look for side effects, you won’t find them.
Yet another trick is doing a “per-protocol analysis”. When you do a per-protocol analysis, you only include the results from the people who followed the study through to the end. This means that anyone who dropped out of the study because the treatment wasn’t having any effect or because they had side effects, doesn’t get included in the results. Obviously, this will make a treatment look better and safer than it really is.
The alternative to a per-protocol analysis is an “intention to treat” analysis. In this analysis, everyone who started the study is included in the final results, regardless of whether they dropped out or not. This gives a much more accurate understanding of what results can be expected when a patient starts a treatment, and should be standard for all scientific studies in health and medicine. Unfortunately per-protocol analyses are still common, so always be vigilant as to whether the results are being presented in a per-protocol or intention to treat manner.
The third section of a scientific article is the results section, and this is the section that everyone cares most about. This is just a pure tabulation of what results were achieved, and as such it is the least open to manipulation, assuming the researchers haven’t faked the numbers. Faking results has happened, and it’s something to be aware of and watch out for. But in general we have to assume that researchers are being honest. Otherwise the whole basis for evidence based medicine cracks and we might as well give up and go home.
To be fair, I think most researchers are honest. And I think even pharmaceutical companies will in general represent the results honestly (because it would be too destructive for their reputations if they were caught outright inventing data). Pharmaceutical companies engage in lots of trickery when it comes to the method and in the interpretation of the results, but I think it’s uncommon for them to engage in outright lying when it comes to the hard data presented in the results tables.
There is however one blatant manipulation of the results that happens frequently. I am talking about cherry picking of the time point at which a scientific study is ended. This can happen when researchers are allowed to check the results of their study while it is still ongoing. If the results are promising, they will often choose to stop the study at that point, and claim that the results were “so good that it would have been unethical to go on”. The problem is that the results become garbage from a statistical standpoint. Why?
Because of a statistical phenomenon known as “regression to the mean”. Basically, the longer a scientific study goes on for and the more data points that end up being gathered, the closer the result of the study is to the real result. Early on in a study, the results will often swing wildly just due to statistical chance. So studies will tend to show bigger effects early on, and smaller effects towards the end.
This problem is compounded by the fact that if a study at an early point shows a negative result, or a neutral result, or even a result that is positive but not “positive enough”, the researchers will usually continue the study in hopes of getting a better result. But the moment the result goes above a certain point, they stop the study and claim excellent benefit from their treatment.
That is how the time point at which a study is stopped ends up being cherry picked. Which is why the planned length of a study should always be posted in advance on clinicaltrials.gov, and why researchers should always stick to the planned length, and never look at the results until the study has gone on for the planned length. If a study is stopped early at a time point of the researchers’ choosing, the results are not statistically sound no matter what the p-values may show. Never trust the results of a study that stopped early.
The fourth section of a scientific article is the discussion section, and like the introduction section it can mostly be skipped through. Considering how competitive the scientific research field is, and how much money is often at stake, researchers will use the discussion section to try to sell the importance of their research, and if they are selling a drug, to make the drug sound as good as possible.
At the bottom of an article, there will generally be a small section (in smaller print than the rest of the study) that details who funded the study, and what conflicts of interest there are. In my opinion, this information should be provided in large, bright orange text at the top of the article, because the rest of the article should always be read in light of who did the study and what motives they had for doing it.
In conclusion, focus on the method section and the results section. The introduction section and the discussion section can for the most part be ignored.
Final words
My main take-home is that you should always be skeptical. Never trust a result just because it comes from a scientific study. Most scientific studies are low quality and contribute nothing to the advancement of human knowledge. Always look at the method used. Always look at who funded the study and what conflicts of interest there were.
I hope this article is useful to you. Please let me know if there are more things in terms of scientific methodology that you have been wondering about. I will try to make this article a living document that grows over time.
Sebastian Rushworth, M.D. is a practicing physician in Stockholm, Sweden. I studied medicine at Karolinska Institutet (home of the Nobel prize in medicine).
Evidence that a cheap, over-the-counter anti-malarial drug costing £7 combats Covid-19 gets trashed. Why? Because the pharmaceutical giants want to sell you a treatment costing nearly £2,000. It’s criminal.
A few years ago, I wrote a book called ‘Doctoring Data’. This was an attempt to help people understand the background to the tidal wave of medical information that crashes over us each and every day. Information that is often completely contradictory, viz ‘Coffee is good for you… no, wait it’s bad for you… no, wait, it’s good for you again,’ repeated ad nauseam.
I also pointed out some of the tricks, games and manipulations that are used to make medications seem far more effective than they truly are, or vice versa. This, I have to say, can be a very dispiriting world to enter. When I give talks on this subject, I often start with a few quotes.
For example, here is Dr Marcia Angell, who edited the New England Journal of Medicine for over 20 years, writing in 2009:
“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgement of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as editor.”
Have things got better? No, I believe they’ve got worse – if that were, indeed, possible. I was recently sent the following email about a closed-door, no-recording-allowed discussion, held in May of this year under no-disclosure Chatham House rules:
“A secretly recorded meeting between the editors-in-chief of The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine reveal both men bemoaning the ‘criminal’ influence big pharma has on scientific research. According to Philippe Douste-Blazy, France’s former health minister and 2017 candidate for WHO director, the leaked 2020 Chatham House closed-door discussion was between the [editor-in-chiefs], whose publications both retracted papers favorable to big pharma over fraudulent data.
The email continued with a quote from that recording: ‘Now we are not going to be able to … publish any more clinical research data because the pharmaceutical companies are so financially powerful today, and are able to use such methodologies, as to have us accept papers which are apparently methodologically perfect, but which, in reality, manage to conclude what they want them to conclude,’ said The Lancet’s editor-in-chief, Richard Horton.”
A YouTube video where this issue is discussed can be found here. It’s in French, but there are English subtitles.
The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet are the two most influential, most highly resourced medical journals in the world. If they no longer have the ability to detect what is essentially fraudulent research, then… Then what? Then what, indeed?
In fact, things have generally taken a sharp turn for the worse since the Covid-19 pandemic struck. New studies, new data, new information is arriving at breakneck speed, often with little or no effective review. What can you believe? Who can you believe? Almost nothing would be the safest course of action.
One issue has played out over the past few months, stripping away any remaining vestiges of my trust in medical research. It concerns the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine. You may well be aware that Donald Trump endorsed it – which presents a whole series of problems for many people.
However, before the pandemic hit, I was recommending to my local NHS trust that we should look to stock up on hydroxychloroquine. There had been a great deal of research over the years strongly suggesting it could inhibit the entry of viruses into cells, and that it also interfered with viral replication once inside the cell.
This mechanism of action explains why it can help stop the malaria parasite from gaining entry into red blood cells. The science is complex, but many researchers felt there was good reason for thinking hydroxychloroquine may have some real, if not earth-shattering, benefits in Covid-19.
This idea was further reinforced by the knowledge that it has some effects on reducing the so-called ‘cytokine storm’ that is considered deadly with Covid-19. It’s prescribed in rheumatoid arthritis to reduce the immune attack on joints.
The other reason for recommending hydroxychloroquine is that it’s extremely safe. It is, for example, the most widely prescribed drug in India. Billions upon billions of doses have been prescribed. It is available over the counter in most countries. So, I felt pretty comfortable in recommending that it could be tried. At worst, no harm would be done.
Then hydroxychloroquine became the center of a worldwide storm. On one side, wearing the white hats, were the researchers who’d used it early on, where it seemed to show some significant benefits. For example, Professor Didier Raoult, of the Institut Hospitalo-universitaire Méditerranée Infection, in France:
“A renowned research professor in France has reported successful results from a new treatment for Covid-19, with early tests suggesting it can stop the virus from being contagious in just six days.”
Then came this research from a Moroccan scientist at the University of Lille:
“Jaouad Zemmouri … believes that 78 percent of Europe’s Covid-19 deaths could have been prevented if Europe had used hydroxychloroquine… Morocco, with a population of 36 million [roughly one tenth that of the US], has only 10,079 confirmed cases of Covid-19 and only 214 deaths.
“Professor Zemmouri believes that Morocco’s use of hydroxychloroquine has resulted in an 82.5 percent recovery rate from Covid-19 and only a 2.1 percent fatality rate, in those admitted to hospital.”
Just prior to this, on May 22, a study was published in The Lancet, stating that hydroxychloroquine actually increased deaths. It then turned out that the data used could not be verified and was most likely made up. The authors had major conflicts of interest with pharmaceutical companies making anti-viral drugs. In early June, the entire article was retracted by Horton.
Then a UK study came out suggesting that hydroxychloroquine did not work at all. Discussing the results, Professor Martin Landray, an Oxford University professor who is co-leading the Randomised Evaluation of Covid-19 Therapy (RECOVERY) trial, stated:
“This is not a treatment for Covid-19. It doesn’t work. This result should change medical practice worldwide. We can now stop using a drug that is useless.”
The study has since been heavily criticized by other researchers, who state that the dose of hydroxychloroquine used was potentially toxic. It was also given far too late to have any positive effect. Many of the patients were already on ventilators.
This week, I was sent a pre-proof copy of an article about a study that will be published in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases. Its author has found that hydroxychloroquine “significantly” decreased the death rate of patients involved in the analysis. The study analyzed 2,541 patients hospitalized in six hospitals between March 10 and May 2 2020, and found 13 percent of those treated with hydroxychloroquine died and 26 percent of those who did not receive the drug died.
When things get this messed up, I tend to look for the potential conflicts of interest. By which I mean, who stands to make money from slamming the use of hydroxychloroquine, which is a generic drug that’s been around since 1934 and costs about £7 for a bottle of 60 tablets?
In this case, first, it’s those companies who make the hugely expensive antiviral drugs such as Gilead Sciences’ remdesivir, which, in the US, costs $2,340 for a typical five-day course. Second, it’s the companies that are striving to get a vaccine to market. There are billions and billions of dollars at stake here.
In this world, cheap drugs such as hydroxychloroquine don’t stand much chance. Neither do cheap vitamins, such as vitamin C and vitamin D. Do they have benefits for Covid-19 sufferers? I’m sure they do. Will such benefits be dismissed in studies that have been carefully manipulated to ensure they don’t work? Of course. Remember these words: “Pharmaceutical companies are so financially powerful today, and are able to use such methodologies, as to have us accept papers which are apparently methodologically perfect, but which, in reality, manage to conclude what they want them to conclude.”
Unless and until governments and medical bodies act decisively to permanently sever the financial ties between researchers and Big Pharma, these distortions and manipulations in the pursuit of Big Profit will continue. Just please don’t hold your breath in anticipation.
Malcolm Kendrick is a doctor and author who works as a GP in the National Health Service in England. His blog can be read here and his book, ‘Doctoring Data – How to Sort Out Medical Advice from Medical Nonsense,’ is available here.
What: On 25 September, 1997, Israelis from the Mossad spy agency attempted to assassinate Palestinian political leader Khaled Meshaal in Amman, the capital of Jordan. The brazen attempt on the life of the then 41-year-old head of the Hamas Political Bureau sparked a diplomatic row which threatened to wreck the newly-signed peace deal between Jordan and Israel. The crisis ended with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu making a number of humiliating concessions.
Where: Amman, Jordan.
When: 25 September, 1997.
What happened?
In an attempt to cripple the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas, Netanyahu, then in his first term as prime minister, authorised the assassination of Meshaal. The little-known Palestinian leader was born in 1956 in Silwad, which was then in the Jordanian administered West Bank. In 1967, Meshaal’s family and 300,000 other Palestinians were expelled from their homes by Israeli occupation forces in a second wave of ethnic cleaning that came to be known as the Naksa (Setback). Netanyahu is said to have personally picked Meshaal from a number of Hamas operatives for Mossad agents to kill. The attempt on Meshaal’s life came in the wake of a series of suicide bombings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
A six-member Mossad team arrived in Amman a week before the assassination using false Canadian passports. The plan was clear: kill the exiled Hamas leader using a lethal toxin without leaving any trace of the killers. The idea was that after the toxin had been administered covertly, Meshaal would go about the rest of his day as normal and then, when tiredness overcame him, he would take a nap, never to wake up again; he was expected to die within 48 hours.
On the morning of the assassination attempt, two of the six agents moved into position to deliver a lethal dose of toxin — identified later as fentanyl — as Meshaal entered his office. The other four Israeli agents are said to have been deployed around the block either as drivers or as lookouts.
The Mossad agents delivered the toxin using an aerosol device and fled from the scene. One of Meshaal’s bodyguards gave chase and managed to apprehend the assassins after some hand to hand combat. Their capture was to have major ramifications.
What happened next?
Hours after the arrest of the two agents by the Jordanian authorities, the Israelis hatched a plan to diffuse the situation. With the diplomatic consequence of his actions dawning on Netanyahu, he attempted to conceal the botched assassination attempt from the rest of the world. He dispatched Mossad head Danni Yatom to plead with King Hussain of Jordan for the agents’ release. Yatom’s pre-emptive disclosure and plea for help from the Jordanian monarch exploded in Israel’s face, sparking a diplomatic crisis with the Hashemite Kingdom, which had normalised relations with the Zionist state three years earlier.
While the Israelis tried frantically to keep a lid on the botched plot, Meshaal’s health deteriorated. The toxin had done its job and within 48 hours he would be dead. King Hussain warned Israel that if the Hamas leader died, the Mossad agents would be hanged as murderers. The King had gone out on a limb to sign a peace treaty with Israel against the wishes of his people, so he called US President Bill Clinton to enlist his support. It was said that US anger was such that no one within the normally pro-Israel White House was willing to make Netanyahu’s case for him. “This man is impossible,” Clinton is reported to have said upon hearing that the Israeli Prime Minister had authorised the assassination attempt with little regard for Jordanian sovereignty, and thus endangered the fragile peace treaty.
Having been stonewalled by Netanyahu for the antidote to the toxin at the first time of asking, an angry King Hussein relayed his message through Clinton, insisting that the Israelis must deliver a vial of the antidote, which was the only way to save Meshaal’s life. “If Meshaal dies, the peace treaty dies with him,” he insisted. With the US applying pressure, Israel had no choice but to comply. A light aircraft delivered the antidote.
The indignity for Netanyahu did not end there. The two Mossad agents were still under arrest facing a death sentence and the Israeli Embassy in Amman, in which the other four members of the six man Mossad team had taken refuge, was surrounded by Jordanian security forces. In exchange for allowing them to leave Jordan, King Hussain was determined to exact a heavy price. He demanded a prisoner exchange, which was agreed.
Under the deal, Israel released the ailing Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the quadriplegic founder and spiritual leader of Hamas who was one of the most notable Palestinians in its prisons, along with 70 other Palestinian prisoners.
Meshaal was saved with just hours to spare. His reputation grew within the Palestinian resistance movement as “the man who wouldn’t die”. He became the leader of Hamas when Israel assassinated Yassin in 2004.
Meanwhile, a chastened Netanyahu was forced to apologise. His act of contrition came two days later when he arrived in Amman to pledge that Israel would not make another attempt on Meshaal’s life. This was not the end for the humiliated Israeli Prime Minister. He lost his bid for re-election in 1999, after which he retired temporarily from politics.
Manal A., 6, shares the story of Israeli authorities demolishing her family’s home in East Jerusalem. Israeli forces regularly demolish Palestinian homes that are built without permits, which are nearly impossible to obtain.
On August 20th, Russian opposition figure and self-styled “anti-corruption” activist Alexei Navalny fell seriously ill while in mid-flight from Tomsk, Siberia to the Russian capital. The Moscow-bound plane was abruptly re-routed to make an emergency landing in the Siberian city of Omsk where the anti-Kremlin politician was subsequently hospitalized for suspected poisoning and placed in a medically-induced coma. Two days later, Navalny was airlifted to Germany in an evacuation arranged by a Berlin-based “human rights” NGO at the request of Pussy Riot spokesman Pyotr Verzilov. His transport on a medically-equipped plane with German specialists was permitted by the Russian authorities who now stand accused of culpability in the alleged attack, all in the midst of the ongoing pandemic.
While the Russian doctors in Omsk (who saved Navalny’s life) maintain they did not find any evidence of chemical weapons substances in his system, upon examination the German government quickly announced that its military lab had discovered “unequivocal evidence” Navalny was poisoned by a Soviet-era Novichok nerve agent and demanded an explanation from the Kremlin — without providing any of said evidence to Moscow or the public, of course. Despite being the supposed victim of an extremely deadly military-grade nerve agent, three weeks later Navalny came out his comatose state and off ventilation, defiantly vowing a return to Russia. Was he ever tested for COVID-19? At this point it seems more likely than this propaganda stunt we are expected to believe.
It is unconvincing precisely because it follows a pattern of improbable events questionably attributed to the Kremlin. As many have noted, the incident strikingly resembles the alleged March 2018 poisoning in Salisbury, England of disgraced former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, visiting from Moscow which caused a similar diplomatic row. Skripal, who had been a double agent for MI6 and served ten years imprisonment for high treason, was exiled to the UK after his sentence in a spy-swap between Russia and Britain in 2010. While residing in southern England, Skripal was reportedly in close contact with a security consultant who worked for the author of the salacious but fabricated dossier on U.S. President Donald Trump’s alleged ties to Russia, former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele — and may have even been the source of its unverified contents.
Skripal and his daughter were discovered unconscious on a park bench, but were said to have been initially contaminated hours earlier by the extremely fast-acting substance applied to the door handle of his residence. Similarly, Alexei Navalny is said to have been contaminated by a water bottle in his hotel room, not in the tea he drank at the Tomsk Bogashevo airport cafe before boarding his flight as originally believed. How is the elapsed time in both of these cases possible? The toxin in Navalny’s case was also not discovered until examination in Germany, meaning a bottle laced with a chemical warfare agent was transported all the way to Berlin? None of those who came to Navalny’s aid or treated him suffered any noxious effects, unlike the Skripals where multiple police officers at least showed minor symptoms. Still, both Navalny and the Skripals fully recovered from their supposed exposure to an extremely lethal toxin considered even more deadly than sarin or VX gas. After their release from the hospital, the Skripals immediately went into hiding which has left the enormous questions surrounding the incident still unresolved two years later. However, the damage was already done as the UK government immediately blamed Moscow and more than 100 Russian diplomats were expelled by Britain and its Western allies.
Months later in June 2018, two British nationals were the victims of an accidental poisoning (one fatally) after they discovered a discarded but unopened perfume bottle containing the same poisonous agent. Then that September, Scotland Yard released CCTV footage of two Russian men alleged to be GRU military intelligence agents in Salisbury at the time of the attack. However, no verifiable evidence was ever provided by the British government showing that the two were responsible, though it was conveniently claimed that the would-be culprits clumsily left vestiges of the fatal chemical agent in their hotel room. So, not only is Russian intelligence incapable of carrying out successful assassinations, but carelessly unable to cover their tracks? The premise was already absurd enough but made even more fanciful by Britain’s refusal to comply with the Chemical Weapons Convention in providing Moscow with requested samples of the toxin which purportedly poisoned the treasonous ex-spook and his daughter. Thus far in the Navalny case, Germany is following the same script.
What a coincidence that the attack comes just as Nord Stream 2, the second line of the massive natural gas pipeline under construction from Russia to Germany opposed by the U.S. and several NATO allies, is near completion. Suddenly, the diplomatic fall-out has put the controversial project in limbo, with Chancellor Angela Merkel and the German government under pressure from Washington to withdraw from the project which would increase Russian influence on Europe’s energy infrastructure and rival the U.S.’s costlier exports. As pointed out by Die Linke’s Dietmar Bartsch, where were the calls to halt the purchase of Saudi oil imports after the grisly murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi? It is clear that the Anglo-Americans are simply desperate to halt the resurgence of Moscow on the international stage, threatening their German counterparts with sanctions as the final sections of the pipeline conveying Russian gas across the Baltic Sea is being constructed. The attack on Navalny could not occur at a more auspicious time for the Atlanticists and a worse time for Moscow.
The notion that Russian President Vladimir Putin would try to assassinate an opposition figure who holds a minuscule 2% support amongst the population, far behind other opponents nonexistent to Western media but the one who just so happens to be favored by Washington, is contrary to any reason or common sense. Not to mention, at the exact moment it would jeopardize a project essential to Russia’s economic growth and frugality, as the pipeline would link Moscow with Western Europe bypassing neighboring transit countries such as the Ukraine (also opposed to Nord Stream 2) which have costly transit fees. Is it really the Russian government who stands to massively benefit from this fiasco? The answer to “cui bono?” could not be more clear: U.S., Saudi and Emirati oil and gas interests, not the Kremlin. Russia was also recently the first nation to develop a COVID-19 vaccine candidate with its Sputnik V registered in August, an international competition that has been heavily politicized by Washington which is eager to cast aspersions on Moscow’s accomplishment. Meanwhile, Germany is also the one Western European country where Washington’s anti-Russian propaganda is falling flat, as recent polls consistently show that the vast majority of Germans don’t see Russia as a threat, likely a result of their high rate of media literacy.
Despite Navalny’s recovery, there are already calls to legislate a ‘Navalny Act’ as a follow-up to the Magnitsky Act, a bipartisan bill previously passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in 2012 under the Obama Administration which sanctioned Russian officials accused of being responsible for the 2009 death of Sergei Magnitsky, an unscrupulous Russian tax lawyer who helped dodgy international financiers like the US-born British tycoon William Browder commit massive tax evasion in Russia. Magnitsky died under mysterious circumstances while in custody awaiting trial for facilitating Browder’s skullduggery and suffering from poor health, with the Russian prison officials first accused of depriving him of medical treatment and then allegedly beating and torturing him to death. The fascinating 2016 documentary The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenesexplores the case from the perspective of Westernized Putin critic and filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov, who through the course of his investigation unexpectedly discovers that the mainstream media narrative of Magnitsky’s death was a fiction concocted by Browder. Suddenly, Nekrasov’s entire perspective on Russia comes into question and the film takes on a metanarrative of the nature of propaganda itself.
What we are being told about Navalny is likely another fairy tale like the implausible story forged by Mr. Browder about the death of the auditor he hired to enrich himself exploiting Russia’s tax loopholes. Incredibly, the American-born investor is the grandson of Earl Browder, the leader of the Communist Party USA during its heyday until his expulsion at the end of World War II. When the wartime US-Soviet alliance fell apart and the Cold War began, the elder Browder proved more loyal to American imperialism than the communist movement and presided over the liquidation of the CPUSA until it was reestablished with his dismissal as General Secretary. Having grown up in a Russian-speaking family, decades later his grandson decided to cash in on the collapse of the former Soviet Union through various investment ventures as manager of the hedge fund Hermitage Capital Management. When Putin succeeded Boris Yeltsin and numerous oligarchs went into exile or landed themselves in prison, Bill Browder was forced to flee the country after defrauding the Russian government of millions with the help of the late Mr. Magnitsky.
One of those banished oligarchs, billionaire media tycoon Boris Berezovsky, also died under dubious circumstances in the UK when he was found hanging in his apartment bathroom in Berkshire, England in 2013. Like Magnitsky, Putin and the Russian government were suspected of involvement in Berezovsky’s death by the media without a shred of evidence, even though his suspicious purported “suicide” actually came shortly after expressing a written willingness to return to Russia and reconcile with Putin — which almost certainly would have been a stroke of good luck for Russian counter-intelligence and a threat to the West, not the Kremlin. Berezovsky had been close with a former agent of the Federal Security Service (FSB, the KGB’s successor), Alexander Litvinenko, a defector renowned for claiming he had been ordered by Putin to assassinate Berezovsky and subsequently lived in the UK as a consultant for British intelligence until his own polonium poisoning in 2006, the first of a series of episodes framing Moscow. Consistently, however, in every one of these cases it is never the Kremlin which stands to gain.
There is a reason Putin consistently polls over 70% in favorability with the Russian people and that is his directing the country away from Western domination under the ruinous neoliberal economic policies of his corrupt and inebriated predecessor Boris Yeltsin which auctioned off the former state-owned assets to foreign investors such as Browder and oligarchs like Berezovsky. Meanwhile, Navalny has a level of support well under 5%, with recent polls placing him behind the Communist Party’s Pavel Grudinin and the ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky. While Navalny’s own rhetoric has shifted over the years, he has controversially maintained his own cozy relationship with ethnic nationalists who make up a significant amount of his right-wing populist base, even co-organizing annual marches dominated by racist skinheads.
Navalny infamously coined the slogan “Stop Feeding the Caucasus!” advocated by xenophobic nationalists calling for the defunding and secession of the Muslim-majority North Caucasus from Russia, while making frequent Islamophobic statements and stoking anti-immigrant sentiments against Central Asians. You would never know this reading Western media who have completely sanitized Navalny’s politics (if they ever address them at all), while they remain obsessed with the perceived ingratiation between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin even though the former’s politics have far more in common with Navalny than the Russian President. Given the U.S. support for far right nationalists in the 2014 anti-Russian coup d’etat in Ukraine, Washington has no qualms about backing fascists to undermine Moscow.
In 1831, Russia’s most famous and revered poet, Alexander Pushkin, composed “To the Slanderers of Russia”, a patriotic ode in response to members of the French parliament who were advocating for a military intervention to assist the Polish uprising against the Russian Empire. Pushkin asserted that the Polish uprising was an inter-slavic “ancient, domestic dispute”, while the Poles considered it an issue of national independence which their European allies were eager to exploit against Moscow. For the great Russian writer, the Polish alliance with the tyrant and invader Napoleon was unforgivable. He also reportedly communicated to General Alexander von Benckendorff, the chief of the Tsarist secret police assigned to censor and surveil him, that the Europeans were still bitter over the failed French invasion of Russia in 1812 and had not yet attacked with weapons but were doing so with “daily mad slander.”
Fast forward nearly 200 years later and little has changed in Russia-West relations. The only thing that has arguably transformed is Russia’s standing on the world stage following the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917 and the Soviet Union almost 75 years later, the latter of which was masterminded by a Polish-born National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, whose Russophobic worldview was a product of the deep-seated “ancient, domestic dispute” Pushkin wrote of a century earlier. Contrary to the Western portrayal of the resurgence of Moscow in the new millennia under Vladimir Putin as neo-tsarist expansionism, post-Soviet Russia is actually a relatively weak capitalist state that has found itself a target of regime change by the West which seeks the colonization and balkanization of Eastern Europe.
The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 caused a spike in oil prices that generated huge profits for Chevron and ExxonMobil, but also had the unintended consequence of benefiting Russia’s state-run oil industry just as Putin was re-nationalizing its energy assets and banishing financial criminals like Browder and Berezovsky. While its strength and influence has certainly been restored, its foreign investments remain low even in the Ukraine where Moscow has been accused of territorial expansion with the so-called “annexation” of Crimea, where the mostly Russian-speaking eastern Ukrainian population actually voted to join its neighbor in a referendum. Russia may no longer be an empire (or communist), but yet it remains in the crosshairs of Western imperialism, whose political leaders and subservient corporate media are still conducting the “mad slander” that Pushkin opined.
Max Parry is an independent journalist and geopolitical analyst. His writing has appeared widely in alternative media. Max may be reached at maxrparry@live.com
The death cult that wants to suppress humanity has issued their warning: the lockdown of the world in the name of the global scamdemic is not the end of this madness. It is only the beginning. Join James for this week’s edition of #PropagandaWatch as he dissects the latest attempt to leverage the climate scam on the back of the COVID scam, and how both of these distractions are being used to indoctrinate the public into the death cult.
In light of increased attention being brought on the activities of US spy planes near China, Beijing has accused the US of disguising them as civilian airliners more than 100 times in 2020 alone, calling the practice a “serious security threat” and warning it poses a danger to actual civilian aircraft.
Several times over the last few weeks, observers have noticed US intelligence aircraft seeming to “disappear” in mid-flight on international flight-tracking programs, only to be replaced by what seems to be a civilian aircraft broadcasting what turns out to be a fake transponder code. These “civilian” aircraft then fly typical spy plane routes, patrolling intensively over an area for several hours, before mysteriously turning back into US spy planes on their return flights.
On September 16, a Chinese government official confirmed those suspicions, saying the US has made the practice routine over the last year.
“It is the old trick of the US military to use a transponder code to impersonate civil aircraft of other countries,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin told reporters last Wednesday.
“According to incomplete data, since the beginning of this year, the US reconnaissance aircraft have electronically impersonated civil aircraft of other countries in the South China Sea for more than a hundred times. This above-mentioned practice is egregious, which has severely violated international aviation rules, disrupted the aviation order and safety in relevant airspace, threatened the security of China and countries in the region. China firmly opposes that,” he said.
“We urge the US side to immediately stop such dangerous, provocative behaviors to avoid accidents in the air and at sea. China will continue work with regional countries to firmly safeguard the freedoms and safety of navigation and overflight in the South China Sea as well as the peace and stability in the region,” Wang added.
The practice has continued since: on September 21, a US Air Force RC-135W Rivet Joint signals intelligence aircraft, built by Boeing and based on a modified version of its 707 passenger aircraft, was spotted using a fake transponder hex code to fly through the South China Sea near China’s Hainan Island and the Paracel Islands, China’s claims of control over which are disputed by Vietnam.
Then on Tuesday, an RC-135S Cobra Ball, an aircraft specialized for observing ballistic missile launches, flew from the US Air Force’s Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, Japan, bound for the Yellow Sea, where it, too, adopted a bogus hex code, as multiple observers confirmed. Hilariously, a KC-135 Stratotanker was even spotted flying out to refuel this aircraft that was supposedly not a US spy plane. The refueler didn’t bother to disguise itself, however.
The South China Morning Post reported on September 19 that an unnamed source had told the paper about a US Air Force E-8C spy plane doing the same thing near the coast of China’s Guangdong Province, which faces the South China Sea. The report did not say when the incident took place. The E-8 is also modified from a Boeing 707 airliner and resembles it closely.
Another observer recorded a US Air Force RC-135U Combat Sent, which collects information on radar arrays, broadcasting a fake hex code in the Black Sea off the coast of Russia’s constituent Republic of Crimea on September 21. It was one of several aircraft watching Russia’s Kavkaz-2020 drills.
As Sputnik reported, the US spy planes must be turning off their International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) transponders, which broadcast unique information about the aircraft to other planes as well as receivers on the ground in hexadecimal format. They then turn on another transponder, making it look like they’re really another plane in the sky. For many of the US’ intelligence-gathering aircraft, like the RC-135W Rivet Joint and E-8C Joint STARS, the masquerade is only helped by their exterior appearances, which closely resemble a civilian airliner.
Technically this is true. Steffan Watkins, an open-source intelligence researcher based in Ontario, Canada, noted on Twitter that Wilsbach’s statement amounts to an admission, despite his attempts to dissimulate.
“He’s confirming that yes, they do whatever they want in international airspace, because there is no law preventing them from changing their ICAO hex mid-flight,” Watkins wrote. “He’s also right, it wasn’t an isolated occurance; the #USAF has done so many times before. See, as a state aircraft they can do whatever they want. They’re not *breaking* any laws, because they’re above the law, essentially. See how that wordplay works?”
Indeed, the ICAO’s regulations specifically note that they “are not applicable to State aircraft (military, police or customs) in general,” and that “there are no requirements for State aircraft to comply with civil requirements in international airspace,” but also notes that it “requires States to ensure that military aircraft do not endanger civil aircraft.”
Since Malaysia seems to be the nation of choice for US spy planes to disguise themselves as being from, it’s possible Kuala Lumpur could claim the US is unreasonably endangering its civil aircraft by doing so. The southeast Asian nation has historically had close economic ties with China, but in recent years Washington has attempted to drive a wedge between them using their competing claims over parts of the South China Sea.
The Strait of Malacca, which runs between the Malay Peninsula (Malacca) and Sumatra, is the most convenient maritime route to take between the Indian and Pacific oceans. From time immemorial, it has held tremendous significance for international trade. Even back in ancient times, ports sprang up on the shores of the strait that were visited by ships carrying goods from India and China. These ports turned into important regional centers of commerce. In the Middle Ages, the main port on the Strait of Malacca, and the central hub for regional trade, was the city of Malacca, located on the strait that bears its name and the capital of the Malacca Sultanate. In 1511, Malacca was captured by the Portuguese, who attempted to control all the shipping traffic that went through the strait. In 1641, Portuguese Malacca was taken by the Dutch, and in 1795 the British fended off the Dutch to take control. Together, the Netherlands and the British Empire ruled the Strait of Malacca for the following over 100 years. During that time, Malacca waned in importance as a transport hub and trading center, and the British colony of Singapore moved to the foreground. In 1945, Indonesia gained independence from the Netherlands, in 1957 Malaysia gained independence from Great Britain, and then in 1965 Singapore won independence from Malaysia. And now these three countries – Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore – all own the strait together, and earn profit from the stream of vessels that continuously runs through it. At present, virtually all the maritime trade between Europe, Africa, and East Asia runs through the Strait of Malacca: up to 25% of all maritime transport shipments (about 120,000 vessels per year) in the world pass through it.
It goes without saying that such an important section of the seas, which constantly has vessels with valuable cargo running through it, cannot escape the threat of pirate attacks. For many centuries, the Strait of Malacca and the coastal waters of countries in Southeast Asia adjacent to it were swarming with sea raiders. For some tribes that lived in the territory now occupied by modern-day Indonesia, Malaysia, and Cambodia, piracy was often the only source of income.
Nowadays, this phenomenon has become much less frequent, but there are still some areas around the World Ocean where it persists, and the Strait of Malacca is one of those international hotbeds of piracy that have survived. In the 2000’s, up to 40% of all pirate attacks in the world took place in this strait.
Aware of the seriousness of this threat, law enforcement agencies started to patrol the Strait of Malacca not only from those countries located on its shores – Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore – but also from India and Thailand. Thanks to the actions taken by law enforcement, in early 2010s the number of attacks dropped sharply.
Nonetheless, the number of people willing to become involved in piracy, as is often the case, exceeds the number of people available to go on patrols. In addition, every object or manifestation that has a center also has fringes. In keeping with this rule, piracy in Southeast Asia, with the Strait of Malacca as its center, also has the waters of other countries in the region that belong to its fringes. Thanks to the Strait of Malacca, the territorial waters throughout all of Southeast Asia are teeming with merchant ships, so pirate attacks in these waters should be seen as part of the piracy that occurs in the Strait of Malacca. For example, piracy nowadays takes place in Thailand’s coastal waters. In the Gulf of Siam, which laps the shores of that country, each year there are dozens of pirate attacks on vessels, many of which are either traveling toward the Strait of Malacca or leaving it. According to available data, the many raiders that operate in Thai waters include people from Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia, China, and even Bangladesh. After committing attacks in Thai territorial waters, they quickly leave them and take cover in the waters belonging to the other countries that share maritime areas in the Gulf of Siam with Thailand: Cambodia, Vietnam, and Malaysia. Some people believe that the main base for the pirates that ply the waters of the Gulf of Siam is Langkawi, an archipelago located right on the Strait of Malacca near the border that runs between Thailand and Malaysia. These islands are also known for being a center for local contraband. Also, besides the countries along the Strait of Malacca, nowadays pirates actively make their living in the waters of Cambodia and the Banda Sea, located between Indonesia and East Timor.
The pirates that operate in the Strait of Malacca nowadays are both equipped and behave in different ways. For example, villagers along the Indonesian shores of the Strait of Malacca who engage in piracy are chiefly fishermen and boaters with low incomes. They use regular boats, can only afford household machetes in terms of weapons, and their targets are small, weakly protected vessels that do not carry cargo that has any particular value. When capturing those, they basically confine themselves to robbing the crew and stealing any valuable equipment from the ships, and do everything possible to avoid human casualties.
But these are destitute people, and their ambitions are not that high. There are other, more “advanced”, pirates in both Indonesia and other neighboring countries. For example, teams of raiders that rob ships in the Gulf of Siam are equipped with the latest technology: they have large, rigid-hull inflatable boats with powerful engines that would not shy away from commando units from the most advanced countries’ navies, with machine guns installed on the boats, and ordinary soldiers armed with modern firearms. These high-velocity boats can easily overtake slow-moving cargo ships that carry millions of dollars in goods.
And it stands to reason that even in the territorial waters of countries that do not access the Strait of Malacca it is safer for pirates to strike now, and many attacks by pirates equipped with the latest technology continue to take place in the Strait of Malacca itself, since it has the places where they can score the biggest jackpots. The Singapore Strait is one example – it is the narrowest area along the Strait of Malacca, where merchant ships often conglomerate in a peculiar kind of “maritime traffic jam”. Unfortunately, being well-equipped and well-armed, and feeling their substantial superiority in terms of force, these “professional pirates” act much more cruelly than their counterparts from impoverished coastal regions. There are reports that some of the crews on the vessels subjected to attack have been completely slaughtered.
In 2019, there were 53 pirate attacks registered in Southeast Asia. The main platform for piracy remains Indonesia, and it is easy for criminals familiar with the local terrain to take cover in its jungles, and along its winding rivers. However, there is a new, alarming trend involving increased piracy activity in the Philippines.
Piracy in the Strait of Malacca and the waters that lie around its outskirts is a problem that is hundreds of years old. It is apparent that there is no quick fix for it. A large-scale military campaign that covers almost all of Southeast Asia could bring quick results. However, that kind of campaign would also result in much more harm than good. Local countries in the area are unlikely to be able to execute that kind of campaign, each one operating in its own territory, and if foreign military personnel were brought in and conducted a large-scale international military operation, then it is not clear which participating country would end up in a dominant position, and therefore it is also not clear who would gain control over the Strait of Malacca, a strategically important transport artery that all countries worldwide depend upon to some extent. That is why, at least for now, piracy in the Strait of Malacca should be viewed as the lesser of the two evils, and one that the owners of vessels traveling through the strait can reduce to a minimum on their own by setting up individual security systems for each of their vessels.
At one time, the ‘Arab-Israeli Conflict’ was Arab and Israeli. Over the course of many years, however, it was rebranded. The media is now telling us it is a ‘Hamas-Israeli conflict’.
But what went wrong? Israel simply became too powerful.
The supposedly astounding Israeli victories over the years against Arab armies have emboldened Israel to the extent that it came to view itself, not as a regional superpower, but as a global power as well. Israel, per its own definition, became ‘invincible’.
Such terminology was not a mere scare tactic aimed at breaking the spirit of Palestinians and Arabs alike. Israel believed this.
The ‘Israeli miracle victory’ against Arab armies in 1967 was a watershed moment. Then, Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Abba Eban, declared in a speech that “from the podium of the UN, I proclaimed the glorious triumph of the IDF and the redemption of Jerusalem.”
This, in his thinking, could only mean one thing: “Never before has Israel stood more honored and revered by the nations of the world.”
The sentiment in Eban’s words echoed throughout Israel. Even those who doubted their government’s ability to completely prevail over the Arabs, joined the chorus: Israel is unvanquishable.
Little rational discussion took place back then, about the actual reasons why Israel had won, and if that victory would have been possible without Washington’s complete backing and the West’s willingness to support Israel at any cost. … continue
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