The great statins divide: As go-ahead’s given for one in four adults to be offered heart drug, one doctor says this mass pill-popping is folly…
- NICE has recommended statins be made available to patients with a 10% risk or more of having a heart attack within a decade
- This would see up to 12 million patients taking the drug every day
- Dr Aseem Malhotra believes up to one in five patients suffer side-effects
- He suggests tackling obesity would have a bigger impact on lowering death rates
The man in my consulting room was in his mid-50s and had arrived complaining of severe chest pain. ‘I’ve had it for a while now, doctor,’ he said, grimacing, ‘it won’t go away.’
I glanced at his notes — an angiogram had showed that his heart was fine, while an endoscopy had revealed there was nothing untoward going on in his oesophagus or stomach. Then I asked what drugs he was taking regularly. ‘Well, nothing really?.?.?. just statins.’
That was almost certainly the culprit. I asked him to stop taking them for a fortnight, which, despite protests from his GP, he did and, lo and behold, two weeks later the patient was pain-free.
I recommended he embrace the so-called Mediterranean diet and exercise a little more, and he went away a happy and healthy middle-aged man.
If NICE (the National Institute for Clinical Excellence) gets its way, that scenario could be needlessly played out in GP surgeries and hospital consulting rooms hundreds of thousands of times a year. It would mean 12 million of us taking a little pill before bed, five million more than take statins today.
That’s five million more patients for the NHS to keep an eye on, five million more people who, despite the fact many will be in good health, have been well and truly ‘medicalised’ and face the prospect of spending the rest of their lives on daily medication.
In making its recommendation, NICE seems to be siding firmly with the drug companies and relying on industry- sponsored statistics which consistently under-report — some would even say hide — the risk of side-effects.
These statistics will tell you that perhaps one in 10,000 patients taking statins will suffer severe muscular pain as a side-effect.
In contrast, reliable data from the real world, published recently in the British Medical Journal and backed up by anecdotal evidence from my experience as a cardiac physician, suggests that the real figure for serious side-effects associated with statin use is closer to one in five.
In other words, if NICE succeeds in turning five million middle-aged and predominantly healthy men and women into statin-popping patients, then one million of them will be back — just like my fiftysomething patient — in surgeries and consulting rooms, complaining of side-effects that, as well as muscle pain, include digestive problems, short-term memory loss, erectile dysfunction, sleep disorders, cataracts (mainly in women) and even type 2 diabetes.
The drug companies will tell you how cheap statins are — just 10p a day — but that completely ignores the costs of the follow-up appointments and hospital investigations that patients suffering from such side-effects will require.
With even NICE admitting that 140 people will have to take statins to prevent just one of them having a heart attack or stroke, that’s 139 people taking them for no good reason, running the risk of unpleasant side-effects in the process while all the time taxpayers pick up the ever-growing bill for looking after them.
But NICE also seems to be ignoring serious doubts about how effective statins are.
Yes, they can lower cholesterol levels (they work by inhibiting an enzyme that produces cholesterol in the liver), but real-world data show they have absolutely no effect on either overall death rates or rates of serious illness.
The advocates of statins will point to falling death rates from heart attacks and strokes in recent years but many clinicians — myself included — believe that death rates are falling not because of the increased use of statins, but because of the decrease in smoking (a smoker is 50 per cent more likely to die from a heart attack than a non-smoker who’s had a heart attack) and more effective intervention in Accident and Emergency.
Good medicine involves the right treatment being given to the right patient at the right time, and I’m the first to admit that statins have an important role to play when it comes to the care of patients who have either had heart attacks or have been diagnosed with heart disease.
But giving them to millions of reasonably healthy people is not only medically dubious, it also risks sending out entirely the wrong message to those who, as they approach middle-age, ought to be giving very serious thought to their own diet and lifestyle.
The next big decrease in deaths from heart attacks won’t be brought about by doling out statins but by doing battle with the biggest — and still growing — health problem that we, in common with other Western nations, face: obesity.
Being overweight and having a poor diet causes more serious health problems than alcohol and smoking put together, with obesity associated with such serious conditions as type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, cancer and cardiovascular disease.
My biggest worry about statins is that people will see them as a magic pill that allows them to tuck into three pizzas a night and umpteen hamburgers with impunity. But they aren’t. People who want to take care of their health, need to make changes themselves.
It’s not that difficult. The Mediterranean diet simply involves more olive oil, more nuts, two to three portions of oily fish a week and lots of fruit and vegetables, while cutting out refined sugars and carbohydrates (so no white bread, rice or pasta) and processed foods laden with fats and salt.
As for exercise, I’m not talking about training for a marathon — a brisk 20-minute daily walk will do great things for your cardiac health.
Make those sort of lifestyle changes and — whatever NICE says — you won’t need those statins at all.
April 7, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular |
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A question needs to be asked. Were the novel experimental drug treatments for SARS-CoV-2 viral infections that Anthony Fauci, the CDC and FDA advocated for and funded responsible for worsening the contagion and countless deaths?
However, at that time there were plenty of studies confirming there were pre-existing safe, inexpensive medications known to have highly effective antiviral properties to treat Covid-19 patients. Among these were ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine (HCQ).
There were also specific nutrients such as vitamin D and zinc, known to strengthen the immune system against viral infection and yet there was no recommendation from the government about the benefits of proper nutrition. So why did Fauci along with other federal health officials choose to intentionally ignore the scientific evidence and rather condemn these repurposed drugs? In Fauci’s case, over a year and half into the pandemic, he continued to lie outright on CNN that “there is no clinical evidence whatsoever that [ivermectin] works.”[1] And could millions have been saved if these generic medications were prescribed rather than the feds doing nothing but recommending social isolation and quarantines as the world awaited an experimental Covid-19 vaccine to enter the market?
To date, between ivermectin and HCQ alone, there have been 670 published studies, analyses and papers involving over 9,800 scientists and over 682,000 patients supporting the use of these drugs over and beyond those the FDA has approved under Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) statutes. Despite this, four years later, the FDA continues to fiercely deny ivermectin’s and HCQ’s efficacy and safety under proper administration. Why this blatant cover-up?
Every CDC effort to approve a novel drug treatment for SARS-CoV-2 infections has been a dismal failure. Aside from monoclonal antibody therapy, only three anti-Covid-19 drugs have been approved under an EUA in the United States. None met their promised expectations from either the manufacturer or our federal health agencies. With their poor efficacy rates, safety profiles and a black box warning slapped upon Pfizer’s anti-Covid-19 drug Paxlovid, the CDC is scrambling to find new viable alternatives in the pharmaceutical pipeline. Bloomberg amplifies the fake Covid-19 treatment crisis by lamenting that repurposed drugs such as ivermectin are gaining global popularity as “the world needs effective Covid drugs.”[2]
Shortly after the pandemic was formally announced, the FDA recommended the cheap over the counter anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine but then quickly reversed its decision after Fauci publicly announced the future arrival of Gilead Sciences’ novel intravenous drug Remdesivir. The FDA’s and European Union’s approvals of Remdesivir baffled many scientists, according to the journal Science, who questioned its therapeutic value and kept a close watch on the drug’s clinical reports about a “disproportionally high number of reports of liver and kidney problems.”[3] Even an earlier Chinese study published in The Lancet found that remdesivir had no impact on the coronavirus. The Science article notes that the “FDA never consulted a group of outside experts that it has at the ready to weigh in on complicated antiviral drug issues.”[4] Six months before remdesivir received EUA approval, Anthony Fauci had already hailed the drug as a major breakthrough that would establish a new “standard of care” in Covid-19 treatment.[5]
Today, remdesivir is being increasingly recognized as a debacle in antiviral therapeutic care. Even the WHO released a “conditional recommendation against the use of remdesivir in hospitalized patients, regardless of disease severity, as there is currently no evidence that remdesivir improves survival and other outcomes in these patients.” An Italian study observed a 416 percent increase in hepatocellular injuries among hospitalized Covid-19 patients treated with Remdesivir.[6] And a smaller Taiwanese study of hospitalized unvaccinated patients reported a 185 percent higher mortality during late remdesivir treatment.[7]
Earlier this year, Pfizer’s novel oral Covid-19 medication Paxlovid was given an FDA black box warning for clinically significant adverse reactions that can potentially be fatal. Because the company does not permit independent random-controlled trials to investigate its drug, other than retrospective studies, we only have Pfizer’s own data to rely upon. Nevertheless, The Lancet published a study by a team of Chinese scientists at Shanghai Jiao Tong School of Medicine that managed to look at Paxlovid’s use among critically ill patients hospitalized with Covid-19. The study reported a 27 percent higher risk of the infection progressing, a 67 percent increased risk in requiring ventilation, and 10 percent longer stays in ICU facilities.[8]
Paxlovid is a combination of a novel SARS-CoV-2 protease inhibitor and the HIV protease inhibitor ritonavir. The FDA approved Paxlovid under a EUA with the claim it was safe. However, on the government’s HIV.gov website for ritonavir it is clearly stated that the drug “can cause serious life-threatening side effects. These include inflammation of the pancreas (pancreatitis), heart rhythm problems, severe skin rash and allergic reactions, liver problems and drug interactions.”[9] Perhaps due to the drug’s serious side effects, it is no longer used solely against HIV, but rather is given in smaller doses as a booster for AZT-related drugs. Being highly toxic, ritonavir is also not recommended for pregnant women and has been shown to interfere with hormone-based birth control efficacy.
Paxlovid only received FDA EUA approval in May 2023. At that time, the agency claimed there was no evidence that patients who were treated with the drug rebounded and came down with Covid. However, shortly thereafter this was determined to be untrue.[10] A Harvard analysis found that 21 percent of Paxlovid recipients will remain contagious and likely succumb to a viral rebound compared to only 1.8 percent who did not take the drug.
Merck’s anti-Covid-19 drug molnupiravir (Lagevrio) also has an FDA black box warning for potential fetal harm when administered to pregnant women. Why the drug was ever approved under an EUA seems to be an enigma. The drug’s antiviral activity is based upon a metabolite known as NHC, which for many years has been known to create havoc in an enzyme crucial for viral replication by inserting errors into the virus’ genetic code. The theory is: produce enough errors and the virus kills itself off. However, molnupiravir can cause hundreds of mutations thereby “supercharging” the manufacturing of new Covid-19 viral strains. Moreover, according to a Forbes article, the drug’s mutagenic powers may also interfere with our own body’s enzymes and DNA.[11] Another Forbes article points out that Merck’s clinical trial only enrolled around 1,500 participants, which is far too “small to pick up on rare mutagenic events.”[12]
Molnupiravir has a poor efficacy rate across the board including viral clearance, recovery, and hospitalizations/death (68 percent).[13] One trial, funded by Merck, concluded the drug had no clinical benefit.[14] More worrisome, the drug also has life-threatening adverse effects including mutagenic risks to human DNA and mitochondria, carcinogenic activity and embryonic death.[15]
Each of these drugs have been outrageous cash cows for their manufacturers. Remdesivir is priced at $3,120 per treatment and earned Gilead $5.6 billion in sales for 2021.
Pfizer’s Paxlovid is priced at $1,390 per treatment. Last year, the company’s revenues for its Covid products—Paxlovid and the Comirnaty vaccine—came in at $12.5 billion, and, according to Fierce Pharma, Pfizer wrote off an additional $4.7 billion on its overstocked Paxlovid inventory.[16] Merck’s molnupiravir’s sales for 2022 cashed in almost $5.7 billion. Despite their profits, none of these drugs have been shown convincingly to have measurably lessened the pandemic nor the spread of SARS-CoV-2.
Despite all the attention and medical hype about novel experimental antiviral drugs to treat Covid-19, Anthony Fauci and other federal officials had full knowledge that other FDA-approved drugs existed that could have been quickly repurposed at minimal expense to effectively treat Covid-19 infections. Repurposing existing drugs to treat illness is a common occurrence. The antiparasitic and antiviral drug Ivermectin best stands out. Its effectiveness was observed to be so remarkable and multifaceted that researchers started to investigate its potential.
The mainstream media, including many liberal news sources who pride themselves on their independence, continue to channel the voices of Anthony Fauci, the CDC and FDA to demonize ivermectin and other generic drugs for treating Covid-19 and to reduce hospitalization and deaths. This propaganda campaign, however, has completely ignored the large body of medical literature that shows ivermectin’s statistically significant efficacy against symptomatic and asymptomatic SARS-2 infections.
Originally developed for veterinarian use, in 1987, the FDA approved ivermectin for treating two parasitic diseases, river blindness and stronglyoidiasis, in humans. Since then an enormous body of medical research has grown showing ivermectin’s effectiveness for treating other diseases. Its broad range of antiviral properties has shown efficacy against many RNA viruses such avian influenza, zika, dengue, HIV, West Nile, yellow fever, chikungunya and earlier severe respiratory coronaviruses. It has also been shown to be effective against DNA viruses such as herpes, polyomavirus, and circovirus-2.[17]
Unsurprisingly, ivermectin’s inventors Drs. William Campbell and Satoshi Omura were awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine.
It has been prescribed to hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Given its decades’ long record of in vitro efficacy, it should have been self-evident for Fauci’s NIAID, the CDC and the WHO to rapidly conduct in vivo trials to usher ivermectin as a first line of defense for early stage Covid-19 infections and for use as a safe prophylaxis.
For example, if funding were devoted for the rapid development of a micro-based pulmonary delivery system, mortality rates would have been miniscule and the pandemic would have been lessened greatly.[18] Repurposing ivermectin could have been achieved very quickly at a minor expense.[19] However, despite all the medical evidence confirming ivermectin’s strong antiviral properties and its impeccable safety record when administered properly, we instead witnessed a sophisticated government-orchestrated campaign to declare war against ivermectin and another antiviral drug, hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), in favor of far more expensive and EUA approved experimental drugs. Unlike the US, other nations were eager to find older drugs to repurpose against Covid-19 and protect their populations. A Johns Hopkins University analysis offered the theory that a reason why many African countries had very few to near zero Covid-19 fatalities was because of widespread deployment of ivermectin. In February 2020, the National Health Commission of China, for example, was the first to include hydroxychloroquine in its guidelines for treating mild, moderate and severe SARS-2 cases. Eight Latin American nations distribute home Covid-19 treatment kits that include ivermectin.[20] Why did the US and most European countries swayed by the US and the WHO fail to follow suit?
Early in the pandemic, physicians in other nations where treatment was less restricted, such as Spain and Italy, shared data with American physicians about effective treatments against the SARS-2 virus. In addition, there was a large corpus of medical research indicating that older antiviral drugs could be repurposed. Doctors who started to prescribe drugs such as ivermectin and HCQ, along with Vitamin D and zinc supplementation, observed remarkable results. Unlike the dismal recovery and high mortality rates reported in hospitals and large clinics that relied upon strict isolation, quarantine, and ventilator interventions, this small fringe group of physicians reported very few deaths among their large patient loads. Even reported deaths were more often than not compounded by patients’ comorbidities, poor medical facilities and other anomalies.
Very early into the pandemic, medical papers indicated ivermectin was a highly effective drug to treat SARS-2 infections.
In April 2020, less than a month after the WHO declared Covid-19 as a global pandemic, Australian researchers at the Peter Doherty Institute of Infection and Immunity published a paper demonstrating that a single ivermectin dose can control SARS-CoV-2 viral replication within 24-48 hours.[21] Monash University’s Biomedicine Discovery Institute in Australia had also published an early study that ivermectin destroyed SARS-2 infected cell cultures by 99.8 percent within 48 hours. But no American federal health official paid any attention.
As of March 2024, a database for all studies and trials investigating ivermectin against Covid-19 infections records a total of 248 studies, 195 peer-reviewed, and 102 involving controlled groups reporting an average 61 percent improvement for early infections, a 39 percent success rate in treating late infections, and an 85 percent average success rate for use as a preventative prophylaxis.[22] Moreover, prescribing ivermectin reduced mortality by 49 percent, compared to remdesivir’s 4 percent, Pfizer’s Paxlovid’s 31 percent, and molnupiravir’s 22 percent. Even hydroxychloroquine well outperforms these drugs mortality risk for early treatment at 66 percent.
A noteworthy study conducted in Brazil and published in the Cureus Journal of Medical Science prescribed ivermectin in a citywide prophylaxis program in a town of 223,000 residents. 133,000 took ivermectin. The results for a population of this size are indisputable in concluding that ivermectin is a safe first line of defense to confront the pandemic. Covid mortality was reduced 90 percent. There was also a 67 percent lower risk of hospitalization and a 44 percent decrease in Covid cases. Garcia-Aquilar et al reports a Mexican in vitro analysis showing a definitive interaction between ivermectin and the SAR-CoV-2 spike protein, which would account for its high efficacy in Covid-19 cases.[23]
The All India Institute for Medical Science (AIIMS) and the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), two of India’s most prestigious institutions, acted against the WHO and launched an ivermectin treatment campaign in several states. In Uttar Pradesh there was a 95 percent decrease in morality (a decline from 37,944 to 2,014). The Indian capital of New Delhi witnessed a 97 percent reduction. During the same time period, the state of Tamil Nadu, which followed the WHO’s ban on ivermectin, had a 173 percent increase in deaths (from 10,986 to 30,016 deaths).
There have been many concerted efforts to discredit ivermectin and other repurposed drugs’ effectiveness. Most notable is the large TOGETHER Trial Brazil study published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) that concluded both ivermectin and another repurposed drug fluvoxamine showed no beneficial signs for treating Covid-19 patients. The study was widely reported in the mainstream media. However, a Cato Institute analysis discovered the study in fact showed its benefits and the results were in agreement with 87 percent of other clinical trials investigating ivermectin. The Cato analysis identifies many odd anomalies in how the trial was conducted including an unspecified placebo—although it is suspected it was Vitamin C, which has itself been shown to be mildly effective against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and protocol changes as the study was underway including inclusion/exclusion criteria. By his own admission the TOGETHER Trial’s principal investigator Dr. Ed Mills at McMaster University in Ontario “designs clinical trials, predominantly for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.”[24] In a McMaster University press release, the Gates foundation is listed as a funder for the study to debunk ivermectin and fluvoxamine.[25] Oddly, Gates is nowhere listed among the several funders in the NEJM study’s disclosure. In addition, TOGETHER Trials is owned by the Canadian for profit startup Purpose Life Sciences, founded by Mills; legal documents showed Mills’ PLS is largely funded and controlled by Sam Bankman Fried’s FTX who invested $53 million into the project. Administrators of FTX’s bankruptcy are suing PLS for fraud.[26]
In short, the ivermectin/fluvoxamine TOGETHER Trial was a complete medical sham and intentionally designed for one single purpose: to fuel media disinformation in order to undermine ivermectin’s superior efficacy and safety profile to Big Pharma’s more profitable designer drugs.
In 2004, the US Congress passed an amendment to the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act known as Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). This piece of legislature legalized an anti-regulatory pathway to allow experimental medical interventions to be expedited and bypass standard FDA safety evaluations in the event of bioterrorist threats and national health emergencies such as pandemics. At the time, passage of the EUA amendment made sense because it was partially in response to the 2001 anthrax attacks and the US’s entry into an age of international terrorism. However, the amendment raises some serious considerations. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, EUAs had only been authorized on four occasions: the 2005 avian H5N1 and 2009 H1N1 swine flu threats, the 2014 Ebola and the 2016 Zikra viruses. Each of these pathogen scares proved to be false alarms that posed no threat of pandemic proportions to Americans. The fifth time EUAs were invoked was in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic, which at the time seemed far more plausible.
Before the government can authorize an EUA to deploy an experimental diagnostic product, drug or vaccine, certain requirements must be fulfilled. First, the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) must have sufficient proof that the nation is being confronted with a serious life-threatening health emergency. Second, the drug(s) and/or vaccine(s) under consideration must have sufficient scientific evidence to suggest they will likely be effective against the medical threat. The evidence must at least include preclinical and observational data showing the product targets the organism, disease or condition. Third, although the drug or vaccine does not undergo a rigorous evaluation, it must at least show that its potential and known benefits outweigh its potential and known risks. In addition, the product must be manufactured in complete accordance with standard quality control and safety assurances.
When we look back at the government’s many debacles during the Covid-19 pandemic, other EUA requirements warrant the spotlight. On the one hand, an EUA cannot be authorized for any product or intervention if there is an FDA alternative approved product already available, unless the experimental product is clearly proven to have a significant advantage. Moreover, and perhaps more important, EUAs demand informed consent. Every individual who receives the drug or vaccine must be thoroughly informed about its experimental status and its potential risks and benefits. Recipients must also be properly informed about the alternatives to the experimental product and nobody should be forced to take it.
Finally, an EUA requires robust safety monitoring and reporting of adverse events, injuries and deaths potentially due to the drug or vaccine. This is the responsibility not only of the private pharmaceutical manufacturers but also the FDA, physicians, hospitals, clinics and other healthcare professionals.
Obviously important cautions must be considered after approving a medical intervention under the EUA requirements. Foremost are the inherent health risks of any rapid response of experimental medical interventions, especially novel drugs and vaccines. As we observed during the FDA approval process and roll out of Pfizer’s and Moderna’s mRNA Covid-19 jabs, no long-term human trials were conducted to even estimate a reliable baseline of their relative efficacy and safety. The American public has blindly placed its trust in our federal health authorities decision-making. It is expected that under a national health emergency, the authorities would be completely transparent and act only by the highest ethical standards. However our institutions betrayed public trust and either ignored or transgressed cautions underlying EUA approved medical interventions in every conceivable way. Moreover, conflicts of interests have been discovered to have plagued the entire EUA review process.
Although the EUA amendment provides some protections to authorized drug and vaccine manufacturers, it was the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP) in 2005 that expanded liability protections. In addition to protecting private corporations, PREP also shields company executives and employees from claims of personal injury or death resulting from the administration of authorized countermeasures. The only exceptions for liability are if the company or its executive offices are proven to have engaged in intentional and/or criminal misconduct with conscious disregard for the rights and safety of those taking their drugs and vaccines.
During the pandemic, the FDA issued widespread EUAs with liability immunity for the PCR diagnostic kits for SARS-2, the mRNA vaccines and the anti-Covid-19 drugs. Curiously, the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services invoked the PREP Act on February 4, 2020 giving liability protections; this was over a month before the pandemic was officially announced, which raises serious questions about prior-planning before the viral outbreak in Wuhan, China.
From the pandemic’s outset, Fauci embarked on the media circuit to promise Americans that federal health agencies were doing everything within their means to get a vaccine on the market because there was no available drug to clear the SARS-2 virus. As we have seen with respect to ivermectin alone, this was patently false. Rather the government placed an overriding emphasis on vaccination with a near total disregard for implementing very simple preventative measures to inhibit viral progression. Once mass vaccinations were underway, we were promised that the SARS-2 virus would be defeated and life would return to normal. In retrospect, we can look back and state with a degree of certainty that American health authorities and these products’ corporate manufacturers may have violated almost every EUA requirement. Everything that went wrong with the PCR kits, the experimental mRNA vaccines and novel drugs could have been avoided if the government had diligently repurposed effective and safe measures as pandemic countermeasures. Very likely, hundreds of thousands of lives, perhaps millions, would have been saved.
Similarly the FDA issued a warning statement against the use of ivermectin. Even ivermectin’s manufacturer Merck discredited its own product. Shortly after ridiculing its drug, the Alliance for Natural Health reported, “Merck announced positive results from a clinical trial on a new drug called molnupiravir in eliminating the virus in infected patients.”[27]
And still the FDA considers these novel patented drugs to be superior to ivermectin. Favoring a vaccine regime and government-controlled surveillance measures to track every American’s movements, American health officials blatantly neglected their own pandemic policies’ severe health consequences. Ineffective lockdowns, masks, social isolation, unsound critical care interventions such as relying upon ventilators, and the sole EUA approvals of the costly and insufficiently effective drugs brought about nightmares for tens of millions of adults and children. This was all undertaken under Fauci’s watch and the heads of the US health agencies in direct violation of the EUA requirements to only authorize drugs and medical interventions when no other safe and effective alternative is available. Alternatives were available.
The 4-year history of the pandemic highlights a sharp distinction between dependable medical research and pseudoscientific fraud. The CDC adopted a common Soviet era practice to redefine the very definition of a vaccine and the parameters of vaccine efficacy in order to fit economic and ideological agendas. This explains Washington’s aggressive public relations endeavors to silence medical opponents. According to cardiologist Dr. Michael Goodkin’s private investigations, several of the most cited studies discrediting ivermectin’s antiviral benefits were intentionally manipulated in order to produce “fake” results.[28] These studies were then widely distributed to the AMA, American College of Physicians and across mainstream media to author “hit pieces” to demonize ivermectin and other repurposed drugs. The government’s belligerent and reactive diatribes, brazenly or casually advocating for censorship, were direct violations of scientific and medical integrity and contributed nothing towards developing constructive policies for handling a pandemic with a minimal cost to life. The consequence has been a less informed and grossly naïve public, which was gaslighted into believing lies.
The FDA’s EUAs for the Covid-19 vaccines and novel experimental drugs were in fact an attack on the amendments and PREP directives. Neither the vaccines nor drugs warranted emergency authorization because effective and safe alternatives were readily available. No doubt a Congressional investigation would uncover criminal misconduct and conscious fraud. Moreover, these violations of the PREP Act may have the potential to lead directly into medical crimes against humanity as outlined in the Nuremberg Code.
Although the Nuremberg Code has not been officially adopted in its entirety as law by any nation or major medical association, other international treaties, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki (which is not legally binding), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical Research on Human Subjects incorporate some of Nuremberg’s main principles that aim to protect people from unethical and forced medical research. Although the US signed the ICCPR as an intentional party, the US Senate never ratified it. The ICCPR’s Article 7 clearly states, “No one shall be subject to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” which can legally be interpreted to include forced medical experimentation implied as cruel, inhuman treatment. Other ICCPR articles, 6 and 17, are also applicable to medical experimentation to ensure ethical conduct, obtaining proper informed consent and the right to life and privacy. For a moment, consider the numerous senior citizens in nursing homes and hospitals who were simply administered experimental Covid-19 vaccines without full knowledge about what they were receiving. And now how many children are being coerced by the pseudoscience of health officials’ lies to be vaccinated without any knowledge of these mRNA products’ risk-benefit ratio?
The US is also a signatory to the Helsinki Declaration, which, although not directly aligned with Nuremberg, shares much in common. The Declaration shares some common features with the EUA amendment and PREP Act. These include voluntary informed consent—which is universally accepted, adequate risk and benefit information about medical interventions, and an emphasis on the principle of medical beneficence (promoting well-being and the Hippocratic rule of doing no harm). It also guarantees protections for vulnerable groups, especially pregnant women and children, which the US government and vaccine makers directly violated by conducting trials on these groups with full knowledge about these vaccines’ adverse events in adults. In addition, weighing the scientific evidence to assess the risk-benefit ratios between prescribing ivermectin and HCQ over the new generation of novel experimental drugs conclusively favors the former. This alone directly violates the ethical medical principles noted above.
However, the failure to repurpose life-saving drugs is less criminal than the questionable unethical motivations to usher a new generation of genetically engineered vaccines that have never before been adequately researched in human trials for long term safety. This mass experimentation, which continues to threaten the health and well-being of millions of people, is global and can legally be interpreted as a genocidal attack on humanity.
If the emerging data for increasing injuries and deaths due to the Covid-19 vaccines is reliable—and we believe it is—the handling of the pandemic can be regarded as the largest medical crime in human history. In time, and with shifting political allegiances and public demands to hold our leaders in government and private industry accountable, the architects of this medical war against civilization will be brought to justice.
*
Richard Gale is the Executive Producer of the Progressive Radio Network and a former Senior Research Analyst in the biotechnology and genomic industries.
Dr. Gary Null is host of the nation’s longest running public radio program on alternative and nutritional health and a multi-award-winning documentary film director, including his recent Last Call to Tomorrow.
Notes
[1] https://www.cnn.com/videos/health/2021/08/29/dr-anthony-fauci-ivermectin-covid-19-sotu-vpx.cnn
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-01-24/the-world-needs-effective-covid-drugs-as-ivermectin-persists
[3] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/10/very-very-bad-look-remdesivir-first-fda-approved-covid-19-drug
[4] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31022-9/fulltext
[5] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/29/dr-anthony-fauci-says-data-from-remdesivir-coronavirus-drug-trial-shows-quite-good-news.html
[6] https://www.dldjournalonline.com/article/S1590-8658(21)00923-3/fulltext
[7] https://journals.lww.com/md-journal/fulltext/2023/12290/the_association_between_covid_19_vaccination_and.45.aspx
[8] https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S2666-6065%25252823%25252900012-3
[9] https://clinicalinfo.hiv.gov/en/drugs/ritonavir/patient
[10] https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/13-things-to-know-paxlovid-covid-19
[11] https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2021/11/01/supercharging-new-viral-variants-the-dangers-of-molnupiravir-part-1/
[12] https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2021/11/02/harming-those-who-receive-it-the-dangers-of-molnupiravir-part-2
[13] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.01.20.23284849v1.full.pdf
[14] https://evidence.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/EVIDoa2100044
[15] https://c19early.org/waters.html
[16] https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/pfizer-gets-walloped-56b-write-down-covid-sales-continue-disappoint
[17] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7290143/
[18] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7539925/
[19] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7564151/
[20] https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2023/8-latin-american-governments-distributed-ivermectin-sans-evidence-to-treat-covid
[21] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7129059/
[22] https://c19ivermectin.com
[23] https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/24/22/16392
[24] https://empendium.com/mcmtextbook/interviews/perspective/236226,covid-19-to-treat-or-not-to-treat-platform-trials
[25] https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/855535
[26] https://c19ivm.org/tallaksen.html
[27] https://anh-usa.org/fda-ensures-pharma-profits-on-covid/
[28] https://www.trialsitenews.com/a/are-major-ivermectin-studies-designed-for-failure
April 6, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Anthony Fauci, CDC, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, European Union, FDA, United States |
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Palestinian Territory – A new Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor report titled “Killing starving Palestinians and targeting aid trucks: A deliberate Israeli policy to reinforce famine in the Gaza Strip” reveals the killing of 563 Palestinians and the injury of 1,523 more due to Israel’s targeting of people waiting for aid, distribution centres, and workers responsible for organising, protecting, and distributing aid.
According to the report, between 11 January and 23 March 2024, 256 people were killed in the Kuwait Roundabout area, in the southeast of Gaza City, 230 on Al-Rashid Street, in the southwest of the city, and 21 due to the targeting of aid distribution centres. Documentation also shows that 41 police officers and People’s Protection Committee members who were in charge of overseeing aid distribution were killed, along with 12 aid distribution workers, two of whom were from UNRWA.
The report concludes that Israel’s policies, and the collective punishments it imposes on the Gaza Strip, directly and explicitly aim to starve the Strip’s entire Palestinian population. Israel’s policy of deliberate starvation is not only an attempt to ethnically cleanse the enclave and apparent weapon of war—a war crime in itself—but is intended to expose Palestinian civilians to the risk of actual death. These actions are a crucial component of the genocide that Israel has been committing against the people of the Gaza Strip since 7 October 2023.
The use of starvation as a weapon has been an official political decision from the first day of the war, as declared by the Israeli Minister of Defense, and was implemented in integrated stages, which have included tightening the siege and closing the border crossings; preventing the entry of commercial goods; destroying all components of local production and food sources; increasing the Gaza Strip population’s reliance on humanitarian aid; and turning it into their main source of food.
Israel has been a major obstacle to humanitarian aid entering the Gaza Strip, targeting aid in storage and distribution facilities as well as on trucks. It has also targeted people waiting for the aid and those in charge of distributing it. All of these actions have been taken on a regular and severe basis.
This has prevented the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip from receiving aid, even just to the extent necessary to satiate their hunger or reduce their risk of dying from it.
Additionally, Israel’s targeting of personnel involved in overseeing and securing aid distribution, along with its refusal to cooperate with international organizations, has led to a persistent state of chaos and internal conflict. These actions, coupled with Israel’s attempts to dissolve UNRWA, the primary international organization responsible for introducing and distributing humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip, have exacerbated the situation, further deepening the famine in the Strip.
The report states that while Israel has permitted some aid to enter the Strip, it has placed restrictions on the amount of aid, kind of aid, and locations of entry, and has targeted starving civilians waiting for humanitarian aid and those working to distribute, secure, and protect it.
According to the report, Israel also uses starvation, aid restrictions, and the killing of hungry individuals as part of its forced displacement crime against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, especially the northern Gaza Strip. As a result, famine has spread throughout northern Gaza, where nearly all food supplies have run out in the markets, resulting in a rise in the number of fatalities from starvation, malnourishment, dehydration, and related illnesses, particularly among children and infants.
In the midst of intense attacks, raids, and bombardment across the air, land, and sea—during which Israel’s army has used thousands of tons of explosives—the Israeli army methodically started targeting every aspect of life in the Gaza Strip and has not stopped. This includes bombing mills, bakeries, grocery stores, shops, and markets; destroying crops and agricultural lands; killing livestock; and targeting boats and fishing equipment, water tanks, and their extensions; i.e. completely denying access to food resources and potable water to all 2.3 million residents of the Strip, half of whom are children, and depriving them of their already limited ability to produce food locally. This comes amid a complete closure of the border crossings, which were closed for weeks before being partially reopened under harsh Israeli conditions on 21 October following the application of international pressure.
The report includes seven parts: The first deals with the number of humanitarian aid convoy victims, while the second reviews the most prominent crimes involving the targeting of starving civilians waiting for humanitarian aid. The third examines the Israeli targeting of humanitarian aid distribution centres, while the fourth sheds light on crimes related to targeting humanitarian aid convoys. The fifth deals with the targeting of workers distributing humanitarian aid, the sixth sheds light on the targeting of those responsible for securing and protecting humanitarian aid, and the seventh deals with Israel’s attempts to evade responsibility for the massacres. The report also presents a set of conclusions and recommendations.
Euro-Med Monitor’s report concludes by highlighting the significance of facilitating the entry of necessary humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip without delay in order to stop the famine from spreading there. It stresses that Israel, as the occupying power, bears the primary responsibility for supplying food, medical supplies, and other necessities to the Strip’s residents in accordance with international law.
The report also urges the international community to fulfill its legal and moral obligations to the people residing in the Gaza Strip, ensuring that international law, as well as the rulings of the International Court of Justice, are respected and implemented, and to halt the genocide that the Court declared likely to have occurred in Gaza in January, which has been ongoing for nearly six months. It calls for immediate international pressure to be put on Israel to stop its starvation campaign against the people of the Strip, the complete lifting of the siege on the Strip, and the establishment of appropriate mechanisms to ensure the safe, effective, and rapid arrival of humanitarian supplies.
The report also demands the opening of an independent investigation into the killing of starving people, especially the horrifying massacres which Israel has tried to evade responsibility for.
Full report here
April 5, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Gaza, Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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Included in the trillion-dollar spending package signed into law by President Biden on March 23, 2024 are provisions to disburse a combined total of at least $7.505 billion to and/or on behalf of Israel in the year 2024. This works out to $20.5 million per day.
These provisions were included in the package despite Israel’s many actions that harm Americans, U.S. laws ruling aid to Israel illegal, most Americans believe the U.S. already gives Israel too much money, and that Israel is in the middle of an onslaught against Gazan men, women, and children.
2024 Money to Israel ($3.8 Billion total):
$3.3 billion in grants to Israel under the Foreign Military Financing Program – to be disbursed within 30 days. (Including $725.3 million for procurement of defense articles and R&D) page 867
$500 million for Israeli Cooperative Programs, (beginning on page 103) including:
- $80 million for the procurement of the Iron Dome defense system
- $127 million for Short Range Ballistic Missile Defense
- $40 million for Short Range Ballistic Missile Defense Co-Production Activities
- $80 million for Israeli Missile Defense Architecture
- $173 million for Arrow System Improvement Program
Additional expenditures on behalf of Israel:
- $5 million for the Department of State to carry out provisions of the Migration and Refugee Assistance act to accommodate refugees resettling in Israel. (Page 710)
- $1.4 billion to Egypt (page 861) and $2.3 billion for Jordan (pages 126, 136, & 868) stem from agreements that benefit Israel, namely that these countries desist from advocating for full Palestinian rights.
As eminent economist Thomas Stauffer stated in a detailed analysis of U.S. expenditures: “Protection of Israel and subsidies to countries willing to sign peace treaties with Israel, such as Egypt and Jordan, has been the prime driver of U.S. outlays.“
Former U.S. Ambassador Chas Freeman concurred, noting that aid to Egypt and Jordan, are supported “in large measure in terms of their contribution to the security of the Jewish state.”
The money for Egypt originated from an inducement to obtain and then maintain Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel (AIPAC even advocated that the U.S. continue aid to Egypt when said aid was called into question in 2013) and the money to Jordan is based on similar terms, the Guardian noting in 2019 that Jordan’s willingness to work with Israel “helps to smooth the way for annual US aid payments worth more than $1.5bn each year that keep Jordan’s donor-dependent economy afloat.” The Jordanian government, despite protest from most of its population, has a history of enforcing Israeli policies.
The total amount of money to be expended on behalf of Israel amounts to over $3.705 billion.
This money to and for Israel is not new. Over the years, Israel has received far more U.S. tax money than any other country on earth: on average as of 2013 of over 7,000 times more direct aid per capita than anyone else.
Economist Thomas Stauffer wrote that support for Israel also includes numerous miscellaneous items such as “special trade advantages, preferential contracts, and aid buried in other accounts.” As of 2002, he found, support for Israel had cost Americans $1.8 trillion – and had cost “some 275,000 American jobs each year.”
And since then the cost of Israel to American taxpayers now also includes the lives destroyed and the multi-trillion dollar cost of the Iraq war, a tragic and disastrous quagmire promoted by Israel and its American partisans. And on top of this are the costs, in both lives and treasure, of Israel-influenced policies regarding Syria, Iran, and others.
In addition to the aforementioned financial benefits to Israel, there are other items that help Israel:
- Restricting funds for Diplomatic programs so the US Embassy must remain in Jerusalem. (Page 743)
- Emergency Wartime Supplemental Appropriations Act Amended to Extend Loan Guarantees to Israel for one more year, expiring on September 30th, 2029 (Page 830)
- Arms Export Control Act authorized to commercially lease defense articles to Israel, Egypt & NATO allies. Page 842 the law restricts funding certain international programs.
- An express prohibition of funds for a Palestinian state unless certain stipulations are met. (Page 851)
- An express prohibition of funds for the Palestinian Broadcast Corporation (page 854), the Palestinian Authority, Hamas & PLO (page 860)
- No funds for UN human rights council unless Israel is removed as an agenda item. (Page 936)
- No funds for UN Commission of inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian territory. (Page 938)
- There is an “Economic Support Fund” for the West Bank and Gaza under the Taylor Force Act, that contains extremely strict requirements for disbursement. (Page 877)
- USAID Assistance for Gaza provided there is Israeli oversight (Page 997)
- A prohibition on funding the United Nations Relief & Works Agency (Page 1010)
Bottom line:
The total amount of money to be spent because of Israel, whether directly or indirectly, is at least $7.505 billion, or $20.6 Million daily.
AIPAC thanks Congress
AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, noted that the funding has no conditions, and tweeted that they “appreciate the efforts of many members who worked to include key pro-Israel provisions in the bill.
In particular, we thank the leadership of @PattyMurray @SenatorCollins @ChrisCoons @LindseyGrahamSC @SenatorTester @SenSchumer @LeaderMcConnell @RepKayGranger @rosadelauro @MarioDB @RepBarbaraLee @KenCalvert @BettyMcCollum04 @RepDWStweets @RepLoisFrankel @SpeakerJohnson @RepJeffries”
A number of politicians who had previously announced they opposed any request for aid to Israel, still voted for the bill:
- Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia
- Rep. Delia Ramirez of Illinois
- Rep Ilhan Omar of Minnesota
- Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York
- Rep Summer Lee of Pennsylvania
- Rep Andre Carson of Indiana
- Rep Jamaal Bowman of New York
- Rep Cori Bush of Missouri
- Rep Rashida Tlaib of Michigan
Voters can contact their representatives here to give them their opinion about how their tax money should be spent.
Matt Sabourin dit Choinière, a former Air Force Officer residing in New Hampshire, is an intern at If Americans Knew. The article draws on previous IAK reports and incorporates some of their text.
April 5, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Israel, Middle East, Palestine, United States, Zionism |
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By Uriel Araujo | April 5, 2024
Peter Smith, Lucas Webber, and Colin P. Clarke, writing for The Diplomat, argue that ISIS and ISKP terrorist groups “have viewed Moscow as their enemy since the group’s inception” largely due to the Kremlin’s role in Syria. I recently wrote about the Russian role in fighting terrorism in the Levant and Central Asia, and much is being (finally) said about that in the aftermath of the violent Crocus City Hall terror attack near Moscow. It is about time, however, to talk about the hypocrisy pertaining to Washington’s role in Syria and elsewhere and in the evolution of ISIS itself and Islamic terrorism in general.
It may be a politically incorrect truth, but the fact remains that Hezbollah as well as Iranian and Russian forces have been playing a major role in fighting ISIS in Syria for over a decade as well as in guaranteeing the safety of Christians and other minorities in a region where Wahhabi extremists were beheading, enslaving and kidnapping them. Meanwhile, American military aid to insurgents in Syria is a well established fact.
It so happens the weapons provided by Washington to rebels there “ended up” in ISIS hands, according to more than one Amnesty Report. It could be just a coincidence, but, in fact, it is not far-fetched at all to say the United States played a key role in the evolution of ISIS both in Iraq and Syria – and much has been written on it. In any case, this is far from being the only instance of the world’s Atlantic superpower sponsoring terrorism – mayhem and civil war. Already in 1991, Graham H. Stuart, who was Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Stanford University, wrote on how the terrorism of the American enemies even paled in comparison to Western sponsored terror. This remains true to this day. The case of Libya is emblematic in this regard and it is worth having a look at it.
One may recall that, after seeing reports of Gaddafi’s capture and brutal assassination on her Blackberry device in between interviews, then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton famously said, while cheering, “We came, we saw, he died” – paraphrasing Julius Cesar’s “Veni; vidi; vici” (“I came; I saw; I conquered”). She had been in Tripoli (Libya) earlier that same week for talks with Libya’s National Transitional Council (NTC) leaders. The reporter then asked her whether the Libyan leader’s death had anything to do with Clinton’s surprise visit to the country. She firstly replied “no”, but then added with a chuckle while rolling her eyes, “I’m sure it did!”
The Roman statesman and general, according to Appian of Alexandria, used the aforementioned phrase to report to the Roman Senate his swift victory in the war against Pharnaces II of Pontus in modern-day Turkey. Clinton’s paraphrasing of it in turn was basically a top US official cheering the obscene assassination of a sovereign country’s head of state by the hand of American proxy terrorist bandits in Libya. These rebels stripped and tortured the deposed leader and joyfully filmed it before killing him. A video appallingly shows the man being stabbed or poked in the anus with what appears to be a stick or a bayonet, which ensued a scandal throughout the country. The rotting body, later placed in an industrial freezer, was publicly displayed for days by the rebel authorities.
Both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International called for an independent autopsy and investigation, to no avail. Whether one likes or not Gadaffi and his authoritarian rule, the hard fact is that slavery has literally made a comeback in post-Gaddafi Libya, with Black Africans being sold as slaves in open markets. The American-aided “spring” basically turned Libya into a ruined nation – Gaddafi’s Libya was no paradise, but one should keep in mind that the country for years had the highest Human Development Index in Africa before the civil war, and boasted of significant gender equality.
I’ve written before on the hydropolitics of the American intervention in Libya and the NATO bombing of the “Great Man-Made River” project. Besides dropping bombs on over 100 targets in Libya, together with France and its other NATO allies (which resulted in the deaths of civilians, including babies), Washinton provided covert military assistance to the rebels who toppled Gaddafi, despite the presence of Al-Qaeda and other terror groups amongst them. Sometimes it was not so covert: an American Predator drone took part in the airstrike in Muammar Gaddafi’s convey just moments before his death, and the whole matter was hailed by Washington and enthusiasts as a “new kind of US foreign policy success”, with an unnamed US official describing such policy as “leading from behind”. According to former CIA officer Bruce Riedel: “There is no question that al Qaeda’s Libyan franchise, Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, is a part of the opposition. It has always been Qaddafi’s biggest enemy and its stronghold is Benghazi.”
It is no wonder ISIS-Libya (ISIS-L) emerged in the aftermath of the country’s civil war and is active there to this day. One group of Liybians who had fought against Gaddafi went to Syria to join the anti-government rebels there, by forming the Battar Brigade in 2012, which later pledged its loyalty to US-aided ISIS. Many Battar Brigade veterans then returned to Libya in 2014, to create the Islamic Youth Shura Council faction.
To sum it up, time and time again one will encounter Washington authorities directly or indirectly involved in the aiding and arming of the most vicious terrorist groups in North Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere, as admitted by US top officials themselves. It is part of the core of its foreign policy. And it is about time to stop pretending it isn’t.
April 5, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | al-Qaeda, Hillary Clinton, ISIS, Libya, Middle East, Syria, United States |
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One of the curious features of the American landscape is the fact that these days the financialization of the economy is widely condemned as unhealthy, yet little is being done to reverse it. There was a time, back in the 1980s and ‘90s, when finance-driven capitalism was supposed to usher in a time of better capital allocation and a more dynamic economy. This is not a view one hears often anymore.
So, if such a phenomenon is overwhelmingly viewed negatively but isn’t being amended, then perhaps it’s not merely a failure of policymaking but rather something deeper – something more endemic to the very fabric of the capitalist economy. It is of course possible to lay the blame for this state of affairs at the feet of the current crop of cynical and power-hungry elites and to stop one’s analysis there. But an examination of history reveals recurrent instances of financialization that bear remarkable similarities, which invites the conclusion that perhaps the predicament in the American economy in recent decades is not unique and that the ever-rising power of Wall Street was in a sense preordained.
Introducing Giovanni Arrighi: Financialization as a cyclical phenomenon
It is in this context that it pays to revisit the work of the Italian political economist and historian of global capitalism Giovanni Arrighi (1937-2009). Arrighi, who is often simplistically pigeonholed as a Marxist historian, a label far too constricting given the breadth of his work, explored the origins and evolution of capitalist systems dating back to the Renaissance and showed how recurrent phases of financial expansion and collapse underpin broader geopolitical reconfigurations. Occupying a central place in his theory is the notion that the cycle of rise and fall of each successive hegemon terminates in a crisis of financialization. It is this phase of financialization that facilitates the shift to the next hegemon.
Arrighi dates the origin of this cyclical process to the Italian city-states of the 14th century, an era that he calls the birth of the modern world. From the marriage of Genoese capital and Spanish power that produced the great discoveries, he traces this path through Amsterdam, London and, finally, the United States.
In each case, the cycle is shorter and each new hegemon is larger, more complex and more powerful than the previous one. And, as we mentioned above, each terminates in a crisis of financialization that marks the final stage of hegemony. But this phase also fertilizes the soil in which the next hegemon will sprout, thus marking financialization as the harbinger of an impending hegemonic shift. Essentially, the ascending power emerges in part by availing itself of the financial resources of the financialized and declining power.
Arrighi detected a first wave of financialization starting around 1560, when the Genoese businessmen withdrew from commerce and specialized in finance, thereby establishing symbiotic relations with the Kingdom of Spain. The subsequent wave began around 1740 when the Dutch began to withdraw from commerce to become “the bankers of Europe.” The financialization in Great Britain, which we will examine below, emerged around the end of the 19th century; for the United States, it began in the 1970s.
Hegemony he defines as “the power of a state to exercise functions of leadership and governance over a system of sovereign states.” Central to this concept is the idea that historically such governance has been linked to the transformation of how the system of relations among states functions in itself and also that it consists of both what we would call geopolitical dominance but also a sort of intellectual and moral leadership. The hegemonic power not only rises to the top in the jockeying among states but actually forges the system itself in its own interest. Key to this capacity for the expansion of the hegemon’s own power is the ability to turn its national interests into international interests.
Observers of the current American hegemony will recognize the transformation of the global system to suit American interests. The maintenance of an ideologically charged ‘rules-based’ order – ostensibly for the benefit of everyone – fits neatly into the category of conflation of national and international interests. Meanwhile, the previous hegemon, the British, had their own version that incorporated both free-trade policies and a matching ideology that emphasized the wealth of nations over national sovereignty.
Returning to the question of financialization, the original insight into its epochal aspect first came from the French historian Fernand Braudel, of whom Arrighi was a disciple. Braudel observed that the rise of finance as the predominant capitalist activity of a given society was a sign of its impending decline.
Arrighi adopted this approach and, in his major work called ‘The Long Twentieth Century,’ elaborated his theory of the cyclical pattern of ascendency and collapse within the capitalist system, which he called the ‘systemic cycle of accumulation.’ According to this theory, the period of ascendency is based on an expansion of trade and production. But this phase eventually reaches maturity, at which point it becomes more difficult to profitably reinvest capital in further expansion. In other words, the economic endeavors that propelled the rising power to its perch become increasingly less profitable as competition intensifies and, in many cases, much of the real economy is lost to the periphery, where wages are lower. Rising administrative expenses and the cost of maintaining an ever-expanding military also contribute to this.
This leads to the onset of what Arrighi calls a ‘signal crisis,’ meaning an economic crisis that signals the shift from accumulation by material expansion to accumulation by financial expansion. What ensues is a phase characterized by financial intermediation and speculation. Another way to think about this is that, having lost the actual basis for its economic prosperity, a nation turns to finance as the final economic field in which hegemony can be sustained. The phase of financialization is thus characterized by an exaggerated emphasis on financial markets and the finance sector.
How financialization delays the inevitable
However, the corrosive nature of financialization is not immediately evident – in fact, quite the opposite. Arrighi demonstrates how the turn to financialization, which is initially quite lucrative, can provide a temporary and illusory respite from the trajectory of decline, thus deferring the onset of the terminal crisis. For example, the incumbent hegemon at the time, Great Britain, was the country hardest hit by the so-called Long Depression of 1873-1896, a prolonged period of malaise that saw Britain’s industrial growth decelerate and its economic standing diminished. Arrighi identifies this as the ‘signal crisis’ – the point in the cycle where productive vigor is lost and financialization sets in.
And yet, as Arrighi quotes David Landes’ 1969 book ‘The Unbound Prometheus,’ “as if by magic, the wheel turned.” In the last years of the century, business suddenly improved and profits rose. “Confidence returned—not the spotty, evanescent confidence of the brief booms that had punctuated the gloom of the preceding decades, but a general euphoria such as had not prevailed since…the early 1870s….In all of western Europe, these years live on in memory as the good old days—the Edwardian era, la belle époque.” Everything seemed right again.
However, there is nothing magical about the sudden restoration of profits, Arrighi explains. What happened is that “as its industrial supremacy waned, its finance triumphed and its services as shipper, trader, insurance broker and intermediary in the world’s system of payments became more indispensable than ever.”
In other words, there was a large expansion in financial speculation. Initially much of the expanding financial income derived from interest and dividends being generated by previous investments. But increasingly a significant portion was financed by what Arrighi calls the “domestic conversion of commodity capital into money capital.” Meanwhile, as surplus capital moved out of trade and production, British real wages began a decline starting after the mid-1890s – a reversal of the trend of the past five decades. An enriched financial and business elite amid an overall decline in real wages is something that should ring a bell to observers of the current American economy.
Essentially, by embracing financialization, Britain played the last card it had to stave off its imperial decline. Beyond that lay the ruin of World War I and the subsequent instability of the interwar period, a manifestation of what Arrighi calls ‘systemic chaos’ – a phenomenon that becomes particularly visible during signal crises and terminal crises.
Historically, Arrighi observes, these breakdowns have been associated with escalation into outright warfare – specifically, the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48), the Napoleonic wars (1803-15) and the two World Wars. Interestingly and somewhat counterintuitively, these wars have typically not seen the incumbent hegemon and the challenger on opposing sides (with the Anglo-Dutch naval wars a notable exception). Rather, it has typically been the actions of other rivals that have hastened the arrival of the terminal crisis. But even in the case of the Dutch and British, conflict co-existed with cooperation as Dutch merchants increasingly directed their capital to London, where it generated better returns.
Wall Street and the crisis of the last hegemon
The process of financialization emerging from a signal crisis was repeated with startling similarities in the case of Britain’s successor, the US. The 1970s was a decade of deep crisis for the US, with high levels of inflation, a weakening dollar after the 1971 abandonment of gold convertibility and, perhaps most importantly, a loss of competitiveness of US manufacturing. With rising powers such as Germany, Japan, and, later, China, able to outcompete it in terms of production, the US reached the same tipping point and, like its predecessors, it turned to financialization. The 1970s was, in the words of historian Judith Stein, the “pivotal decade” that “sealed a society-wide transition from industry to finance, factory floor to trading floor.”
This, Arrighi explains, allowed the US to attract massive amounts of capital and move toward a model of deficit financing – an increasing indebtedness of the US economy and state to the rest of the world. But financialization also allowed the US to reflate its economic and political power in the world, particularly as the dollar was ensconced as the global reserve currency. This reprieve gave the US the illusion of prosperity of the late 1980s and ‘90s, when, as Arrighi says “there was this idea that the United States had ‘come back’.” No doubt the demise of its main geopolitical rival, the Soviet Union, contributed to this buoyant optimism and sense that Western neoliberalism had been vindicated.
However, beneath the surface, the tectonic plates of decline were still grinding away as the US became ever more dependent on external funding and increasingly ramped-up leverage on a diminishing sliver of real economic activity that was rapidly being offshored and hollowed out. As Wall Street rose in prominence, many quintessential American economies were essentially asset-stripped for the sake of financial profit.
But, as Arrighi points out, financialization merely stalls the inevitable and this has only been laid bare by subsequent events in the US. By the late 1990s, the financialization itself was beginning to malfunction, starting with the Asia crisis of 1997 and subsequent popping of the dotcom bubble, and continuing with a reduction in interest rates that would inflate the housing bubble that detonated so spectacularly in 2008. Since then, the cascade of imbalances in the financial system has only accelerated and it has only been through a combination of increasingly desperate financial legerdemain – inflating one bubble after another – and outright coercion that has allowed the US to extend its hegemony even a bit longer beyond its time.
In 1999, Arrighi, in a piece co-authored with American scholar Beverly Silver, summarized the predicament of the time. It has been a quarter century since these words were penned, but they might as well have been written last week:
“The global financial expansion of the last twenty years or so is neither a new stage of world capitalism nor the harbinger of a ‘coming hegemony of global markets’. Rather, it is the clearest sign that we are in the midst of a hegemonic crisis. As such, the expansion can be expected to be a temporary phenomenon that will end more or less catastrophically… But the blindness that led the ruling groups of [hegemonic states of the past] to mistake the ‘autumn’ for a new ‘spring’ of their…power meant that the end came sooner and more catastrophically than it might otherwise have…A similar blindness is evident today.”
An early prophet of a multipolar world
In his late work, Arrighi turned his attention to East Asia and surveyed the prospects for a transition to the next hegemony. On the one hand, he identified China as the logical successor to American hegemony. However, as a counterweight to that, he did not see the cycle he outlined as continuing in perpetuity and believed there would come a point where it is no longer possible to bring into existence a state with larger and more comprehensive organizational structures. Perhaps, he speculated, the US represents just that expansive capitalist power that has taken the capitalist logic to its earthly limits.
Arrighi also considered the systemic cycle of accumulation to be a phenomenon inherent to capitalism and not applicable to pre-capitalist times or non-capitalist formations. As of 2009, when he died, Arrighi’s view was that China remained a decisively non-capitalist market society. How it would evolve remained an open question.
While Arrighi was not dogmatic on how the future would shape up and did not apply his theories deterministically, especially with regard to the developments of recent decades, he did speak forcefully about what in today’s language could be called the necessity of accommodating a multipolar world. In their 1999 article, he and Silver predicted “a more or less imminent fall of the West from the commanding heights of the world capitalist system is possible, even likely.”
The US, they believe, “has even greater capabilities than Britain did a century ago to convert its declining hegemony into an exploitative dominion.” If the system does eventually break down, “it will be primarily because of US resistance to adjustment and accommodation. And conversely, US adjustment and accommodation to the rising economic power of the East Asian region is an essential condition for a non-catastrophic transition to a new world order.”
Whether such accommodation is forthcoming remains to be seen, but Arrighi strikes a pessimistic tone, noting that each hegemon, at the end of its cycle of dominance, experiences a “final boom” during which it pursues its “national interest without regard for system-level problems that require system-level solutions.” A more apt description of the current state of affairs cannot be formulated.
The system-level problems are multiplying, but the sclerotic ancien régime in Washington is not addressing them. By mistaking its financialized economy for a vigorous one, it overestimated the potency of weaponizing the financial system it controls, thus again seeing ‘spring’ where there is only ‘autumn.’ This, as Arrighi, predicts, will only hasten the end.
Henry Johnston is an RT editor. He worked for over a decade in finance and is a FINRA Series 7 and Series 24 license holder.
April 4, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Economics, Timeless or most popular |
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Iran’s apparent restraint in the face of Israeli aggression should not be mistaken for weakness. Tehran steadily applies pressure on Tel Aviv through its own methods, setting the stage carefully for Israel’s unravelling.
A strategy in asymmetrical warfare is expressed by the “boiling frog” theory:
Legend has it that a frog placed in a shallow pot of water heating on a stove will remain happily in the pot of water as the temperature continues to climb, and will not jump out even as the water slowly reaches the boiling point and kills the frog. The change of one degree of temperature at a time is so gradual that the frog doesn’t realize he is being boiled until it is too late.
While the story is an apologue – a pretty fable meant to convey a meaningful lesson – it is one frequently invoked by militaries and geopoliticians to describe the “long game” of reaching strategic objectives.
Today, it is Iran and its regional allies who are using a measured approach to increase temperatures in West Asia until the water boils the US and Israeli ‘frogs’ to death. Strategy, discipline, and rare patience – the antithesis of western short-termism – will bring Iran victory. To quote the Taliban: “Americans have watches, but we have the time.”
Time is now on the side of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its regional allies. Two connected examples show how the IRGC is calibrating temperatures like scientists in a laboratory.
The Yankee Frog
Following the launch of the Hamas-led resistance operation Al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October of last year, US President Joe Biden deployed US Navy assets to the Persian Gulf and Mediterranean Sea to “defend” Israel.
On 26 November, the USS Eisenhower and its escorts navigated through the Straits of Hormuz, anchoring in the Persian Gulf on the Saudi Arabian side. Yemen’s Ansarallah-aligned naval forces initially targeted Israeli ships and Eilat Port with their first shots on 19 October. But by 29 November, their attacks escalated to include vessels bound to or from Eilat, irrespective of flag or ownership.
This pattern culminated in the Pentagon’s announcement of “Operation Prosperity Guardian” on 18 December, aimed at safeguarding Israel’s economic interests at the expense of US military personnel. Subsequently, the Eisenhower and its naval escorts relocated from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, purportedly to “defend” the occupation state.
Instead, the positioning of US Navy assets in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden has left them susceptible to potential attacks from Iranian or Iranian-supplied weaponry, including cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and drones.
Despite efforts from the US Navy (USN) and the US Air Force (USAF), Ansarallah remains undefeated. Previous Anglo–American airstrikes in Yemen have proven ineffective, while the ongoing pace and expanding scope of Yemeni operations are straining naval resources and dampening morale.
Unlike ‘Hollywood guns,’ US Navy vessels do not have unlimited interceptor missiles, nor can they be reloaded at sea. As for the morale of American personnel, it will break in the long run, particularly since many, if not most, sailors and marines are simply not invested in a fight for Israel.
Last month, Captain Chris Hill, the commanding officer of the USS Eisenhower, said: “People need breaks, they need to go home.”
While sailors, marines, and airmen are getting antsy dodging Ansarallah’s drones and missiles on a daily basis, the ‘Yankee Frog’ is merrily paddling about his Washington hot tub, believing the ‘might’ of the USN will defeat the pesky ‘Houthis.’
This was arguably a well-calibrated move supported by Iran that accomplished two objectives: First, it got the carrier battle group out of the Persian Gulf, and second, it sucked the US into an escalatory trap. The Yankee Frog is in the Red Sea/Gulf of Aden hotpot. It cannot win.
It will either jump out and flee in humiliation, further destroying the credibility of the US armed forces following its humiliating 2021 debacle in Afghanistan; or it will remain in the hotpot and be boiled to death—with the loss of ships and lives.
With either outcome, Iran wins. Relatedly, an Iranian defeat of the US will be welcomed by China, Russia, and scores of US adversary states, particularly across the global south. As noted by one astute Twitter/X user, Armchair Warrior (describing Russia’s likely responses to Ukrainian provocations), by its actions, Iran has demonstrated “reflexive control” over Washington’s actions. By this, he means, “If every military action you take gets a symmetrical reaction, then you can control the nature, venue, and tempo of the conflict to your benefit.” This is precisely what the IRGC is cleverly doing.
The Israeli Frog
The wee ‘Israeli Frog,’ meanwhile, somnolent in the warm water, is dreaming of his ‘new Israel’ – the Israel that he will create once he has ethnically cleansed Gaza. He has plans to develop Gaza, build luxury condos along the beachfront, and build housing units for new settlers.
Architects are now drawing up plans. Former President and current Republican contender Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a Netanyahuist and Likud Party benefactor, is measuring drapes for his Gaza waterfront condominium.
However, the Israeli military has not defeated Hamas, which continues to inflict significant damage to Israeli military hardware and human assets. By one estimate, Hamas has only been degraded by 15–20 percent. The occupation army wholly depends on the US and its European vassal states for armaments since its domestic production capacities are limited.
According to one estimate, some 500,000 settlers have returned to their homelands; most will not return. Since 7 October, conscription is no longer a safe yet inconvenient three-year requirement: parents are afraid for their daughters and sons.
The dormant refusenik movement that emerged from the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon has re-awakened. Draftees are refusing to serve and being jailed as a result. The conscription exemption for ultra-Orthodox Jews expired on 1 April; they are threatening to flee Israel, whose very survival is dependent on Jews moving there.
If representatives of ultra-Orthodox Jews quit Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition, it could bring down his extremist government. Internal tensions within Israeli society are escalating, fueled by socio-economic pressures and disillusionment with the government’s handling of the war.
The Israeli economy is in shambles. The shekel is declining. Budget deficits and borrowing have skyrocketed. Moody’s downgraded Israel’s credit from A1 to A2 on 9 February. Israel’s tourism industry has collapsed into crisis. Most major airlines no longer fly to Israel. Israel’s manufacturing and agricultural bases are small. Israel has limited access to natural resources and energy; it depends on overland lifelines to Jordan and Egypt, with Azerbaijani oil and gas coming to Haifa from Turkey.
Iran is doing to Israel just what Israel did to it with economic sanctions. But unlike Israel, Iran has abundant supplies of oil and gas, 85 million literate and educated people who are not planning to flee, and formidable agricultural and manufacturing bases.
Tehran is methodically throttling Israel’s economy. Haifa port is on Hezbollah’s target list. If Haifa is shut down alongside Eilat, Israel will only have overland lifelines for food and energy supplies. Ben Gurion International and other airports may be targeted in the future.
Turning up the heat, one degree at a time
The recent Israeli attack on the Iranian diplomatic mission in Damascus, purportedly in response to an Iraqi drone striking Eilat, mirrors Netanyahu’s apprehensions and frustrations – that “the whole world is ganging up on us.”
Netanyahu’s strategy appears to be to goad Iran into escalating tensions, potentially prompting them to target American military assets in the region, thereby drawing the US into the Gaza War. However, it’s uncertain whether Tehran will take the bait.
While the IRGC is likely to respond, they will look to avoid falling into Netanyahu’s trap. Instead, Iran may opt to tighten its economic stranglehold on Israel, possibly by targeting strategic locations such as Eilat, Haifa, and Ben Gurion Airport.
The IRGC understands that Israel’s economy cannot sustain a prolonged conflict. Therefore, their strategy might involve a gradual escalation – effectively boiling the Israeli frog slowly – through coordinated actions involving Hezbollah, Ansarallah, and various Syrian and Iraqi-based factions.
As the economist Herbert Stein noted, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” While Israel is far from being on the brink of collapse, the disciplined and calculated actions of the IRGC are steadily increasing regional tensions. If left unchecked, this could lead to significant repercussions for Israeli society and its economy – all without it realizing, like the wee boiling frog.
April 3, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | Iran, Israel, Middle East, Palestine, Zionism |
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Twenty-five years ago, NATO was bombing Serbia as the first performance in its new role. The collapse of the Soviet Union had deprived the military alliance of its initial official role of defending its member states from a theoretical communist threat. Under no threat and devoid of UN Security Council approval, NATO assumed the self-ordained role of virtuous defender of allegedly oppressed minorities by bombing what was left of largely dismantled Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999 on behalf of Albanian rebels in the Serbian province of Kosovo.
NATO’s air attacks on the Balkan nation were the practical application of a new post-Cold War doctrine. To succeed, this doctrine relied on Western media to report on crisis areas with the appropriate mixture of exaggerations, omissions and outright lies to justify NATO’s virtuous interventions. The military industrial complex could breathe easy and a new generation of journalists began successful careers eagerly spinning their reports to serve the new humanitarian war ideology.
None was more successful than Dublin-born Samantha Power, whose novice reports from Bosnia in the mid-1990s provided the basis for her 2002 book on “genocide” which “quickly became an international sensation, glowingly reviewed almost everywhere, a huge bestseller that won her a Pulitzer Prize and launched her career as a leading figure in human rights doctrine.” She has gone on from one top governmental post to another, a Washington star, urging the United States to intervene on moral grounds.
Samantha Power owes her remarkable success to her talent as a writer, her ambition, her striking presence, but not least to the man at the origins of the whole humanitarian war policy.
That was none other than Morton Isaac Abramowitz, a highly influential member of the foreign policy establishment and the main inventor of what would become the “R2P” (Responsibility to Protect) doctrine. The crucial policy contribution of Abramowitz is explained at the start of my 2002 book, Fools’ Crusade, as follows:
As president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in the early 1990s, Abramowitz headed a project to develop a new U.S. foreign policy for the post-Cold War era. Rather than identifying “threats”, especially at a time when few threats could be seen, a successful new policy needed to combine promotion of U.S. interests with proclamation of U.S. “ideals”.
Theory and Practice
At the Carnegie Endowment in 1992, Abramowitz published the theory of the new U.S. “humanitarian intervention” policy as Self-Determination in the New World Order.
“The vision of a ‘new world order’ since 1990 has been a world with one superpower – the United States – in which the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle, disputes are settled peacefully, aggression is firmly met by collective resistance, and all people are justly treated.”
That sounds very nice. But put into practice, “collective resistance” means NATO, and “all people are treated justly” depends on Washington’s preferences. The new rules-based order was not to be confused with traditional international law, based on national sovereignty. Globalization was making national sovereignty outdated (except for the United States). “Ideals” make rules more flexible.
The sovereign nation is being broken down subtly by the pressures of economic globalization. It may also be undermined from within, by domestic insurgencies. In the post-Cold War world, the Carnegie Endowment study noted, “groups within states are staking claims to independence, greater autonomy, or the overthrow of an existing government, all in the name of self-determination”. […] In the future, the authors announced, “humanitarian intervention will become increasingly unavoidable”. The United States will have the final word as to when and how to intervene.
Abramowitz subsequently helped put his theory into practice in crumbling Yugoslavia. He was the eminence grise behind U.S. diplomats, steering the events leading to the “Kosovo war” that split the province of Kosovo off from Serbia. He was advisor to the Kosovo Albanian delegation at the imitation “peace negotiations” staged at Rambouillet to provide an excuse for the bombing of Serbia. The moderate Albanian Kosovo leader Ibrahim Rugova was replaced by the armed gangster, Hashim Thaci. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright set terms no Serbian leader could accept, demanding the right to station NATO troops over the entire country, with full impunity. The Serb side was then blamed for the failure, and NATO began to bomb on March 24, 1999.
Samantha Steals her Way into Bosnia
Back in 1992, fresh out of Yale, 22-year-old Samantha Power was given a position as intern in the office of Abramowitz at the Carnegie Endowment. As a proofreader, she quickly absorbed the new official doctrine. At that time, her boss was obsessed with the conflicts in Bosnia as implicating the future of NATO. Determined to get to Bosnia where the action was, Samantha stole stationery from the neighboring office of Foreign Policy magazine and forged a letter from the editor to the head of the UN Press Office, asking that the UN provide her, as Foreign Policy’s “Balkan correspondent,” with “all necessary access.”
From that time on, her work functioned precisely to advance the new “humanitarian intervention” policy of her mentor, Morton Abramowitz. She recalls that his influence helped her get increasingly important assignments – most crucially, writing about the Srebrenica massacre for The Washington Post.
With the Srebrenica reports, the term “genocide” emerged as the power word that could give NATO its new mission.
The Western press corps based in Sarajevo tended to become emotionally involved with the Muslim side which was its principal news source. Missing from their dispatches were reports on Muslim massacres of Serbs villages or on the well-armed Islamic fighters who joined the Muslim side from Afghanistan and Arab countries, some of them settling permanently in Bosnia.
When Bosnian Serb forces captured the Muslim base at Srebrenica in July 1995, they evacuated women, children and the aged to safety, while men fled, fearing retaliation. Many were killed in unclear circumstances.
Without reference to such context, Western media focused on reports of a massacre of 8,000 male prisoners as a unique event which branded the Serbs as the guilty party in the three-sided civil war. With the Srebrenica reports, the term “genocide” emerged as the power word that could give NATO its new mission.
Calling Srebrenica “genocide” provided the argument for NATO bombing: if Serbs committed genocide in Bosnia, it implied that Serbs were genocidal and risked committing genocide in Kosovo unless NATO intervened. This theory was supported by wildly inaccurate accusations voiced by leading Western politicians during the bombing campaign.
That was the story that was sold to the public by politicians and the media. From the start, the Serb majority in Yugoslavia had been portrayed as invaders in their own country, with everyone else as victims. Thus was destroyed the last semi-socialist, nonaligned country in Europe.
The Kosovo war indeed combined U.S. “interests and ideals”. The ideals were preventing a genocide that never would have taken place (and also, incidentally, preventing a negotiation that could have settled the whole conflict as well). The interests included the immediate construction by the Americans of a giant U.S. military base on the territory of Kosovo, once Serbian forces were obliged to leave.
Genocide and R2P
Samantha Power’s 2002 book was subtitled “America in the Age of Genocide”. To speak of the present as an “age of genocide” is wildly melodramatic, but the purpose is to place virtuous America in the center of drastic moral demands. America must save the world from its genocidal self. “Genocide” was thereby promoted as the most potent pretext for U.S. military intervention – precisely by deploring its absence, both in Bosnia and more convincingly, in Rwanda. The Clinton administration was certainly not going to intervene in Rwanda, because the bloody chaos was in fact favoring the conquest of Rwanda by Paul Kagame and his army, which had invaded Rwanda from Uganda in 1990. Kagame was a favored client of the United States. There was no reason for Washington to interfere with Kagame’s victory.
But the “failure to stop genocide” was an appeal to the liberal conscience to intervene later on, whenever the U.S. was in need a powerful argument to get rid of a someone it wanted to get rid of. Moammer Gaddafi had been on the U.S.-UK hit list for decades, but had made concessions to gain reconciliation. But when Gaddafi’s usual fundamentalist Islamic opponents in Tripoli used the 2011 “Arab spring” to raise protests, the “threat of genocide” alarm was raised on their behalf. In Washington, action to stop Gaddafi from “committing genocide” was urged by Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and Samantha Power, while Bernard Henri Lévy raised the alarm in Paris. NATO rose to the challenge, destroyed the most economically successful country on the African continent and murdered its leader, creating a flood of refugees to Europe and other disasters. Most of the liberal left cheered.
Today it is widely recognized that the Irak war was based on deceit and ended in disaster. Other U.S. wars are mostly conceded to have been unfortunate mistakes. There are doubts about Libya, due mainly to the refugee flow. But the destruction of Yugoslavia, and in particular the 1999 “Kosovo war”, is still widely accepted in the West as what it was arranged to appear: NATO’s generous humanitarian intervention to prevent “genocide” by racist Serbs against the oppressed Albanian minority.
The distortions of the Bosnia conflict and the Kosovo war were precisely the practical application of the Abramowitz policy: promote minority rebellions to break down national sovereignty and change governments the U.S. doesn’t like, while supplying NATO with a new geographically unlimited mission of “humanitarian intervention”. Yugoslavia was the starting point of the whole aggressive post-Cold War U.S. policy as “single superpower” determining the world order, using the idealistic pretexts set out by Abramowitz. Young Samantha Power, who was very smart, got the point and ambitiously cheated her way into a supporting role as reporter in the Bosnia spectacle, which she eventually transformed into an astonishingly successful career.
I was in Kosovo on my own in months prior to the NATO bombardment and saw quite clearly that in that small province, the Serbs were a frightened minority while Albanians were already tasting their future triumph. There was absolutely no danger of a Serbian “genocide” of Albanians. But Western editors kept sending in ignorant young aspiring journalists, on the lookout for some “Serb atrocity” that could advance their budding career. Editors rejected any report that went in a different direction. It was at that time just plain impossible to publish an unbiased report. I know from experience.
Above all, breaking up Yugoslavia was an exercise in subsequent efforts to undermine the Russian Federation, by inciting the Federation’s ethnic minorities against the Russians. Ukraine was the crucial battering ram. I always used to think of Ukraine when studying the conflicts in the Krajina regions of Croatia and Bosnia, as both words have the same root (border land) and suffered from similar conflicts, notably in World War II. Western powers had revived the Nazi-supported Croatian nationalism against the Serbs to break up Yugoslavia. They would revive much more virulent Nazi-supported Ukrainian nationalism against Russian-speakers in Eastern Ukraine, in an effort to weaken and eventually even break up the Russian Federation.
And for the United States, the humanitarian “ideals” of supporting minorities would be compensated by the major strategic “interest” of eventually gaining control of Crimea, and with it, Russia’s main naval base in Sebastopol. Putin did what any Russian leader not brain-dead would have done: he headed off this disaster by mobilizing the Russian inhabitants of Crimea to vote to return to Russia, which they had never chosen to leave. This obvious act of self-determination is denounced in the West as an invasion.
The Ideological Backlash
Unfortunately, the blatantly tragic misuse of the “humanitarian intervention” or R2P doctrine in Libya has not managed to achieve its discredit. It is threatened now by the danger that it is changing sides in the very global conflicts it has stimulated.
The referendum in Crimea was a democratic measure of self-determination that fit the Abramowitz standards. The Russian “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine in 2022 was partially motivated by the sort of consideration featured in the Abramowitz doctrine: defense of the population of Donbas, under attack from an ultranationalist regime in Kiev. Of course, Western governments and media have simply totally ignored any Russia appeal to the ideals of human rights and self-determination, which they consider their own private property as self-declared unique “democracies”. Russia is classed as an “autocracy” whose interests must be malevolent and thus don’t count.
A greater threat to the West’s self-proclaimed monopoly on virtue is coming from Israel’s merciless attack on the people of Gaza. Most of the Global South and growing sections of Western populations are horrified by Israel’s destruction of hospitals, mass murder of children and efforts to starve the Palestinians. They see Israel, with full Western backing, committing Genocide – the real thing this time, out in the open, blatant and unrelenting.
The NATO war machine may have to conjure up a new set of moralizing pretexts for its aggressions.
Notes
See Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions, Pluto Press, 2002, pp 9-10; Monthly Review 2003
Here, with William Burns, Samantha Power discusses her new autobiography The Education of an Idealist and recalls her short term working for Abramowitz at the Carnegie Endowment. https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/09/13/samantha-power-on-education-of-idealist-event-7178
April 3, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | NATO, Samantha Power, United States, Yugoslavia, Zionism |
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It is now openly acknowledged in Germany that COVID-19 did not exist and declared from the beginning: the Corona measures had nothing to do with health.
It was a government and intelligence operation to enslave the people, a run-up to dictatorship under a ‘one world government’
Reports here: https://www.stefan-homburg.de/images/Corona%20Facts.pdf
April 3, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Germany, Human rights |
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One of the World Central Kitchen vehicles targeted by Israel as it was passing through a “deconflicted zone” in the besieged Gaza Strip, April 2, 2024. (Photo by Reuters)
Ships loaded with humanitarian aid for the Palestinians trapped in the Gaza Strip will turn back in the wake of a deadly strike by the Israeli regime forces on relief workers.
Cyprus’ foreign minister said on Tuesday that undelivered food and supplies were being returned after aid groups suspended operations due to the brutal killing of members of an international charity.
Seven World Central Kitchen workers were killed in the Israeli strike on vehicles used by the US-based charity organization.
Minister Constantinos Kombos said the charity is suspending its operations in Gaza out of respect for the victims as well as to review its security protocols. Cargo ships loaded with 240 tonnes of canned food destined for Gaza were preparing to return.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Theodoros Gotsis had said earlier that around 100 tonnes of aid had been unloaded before the World Central Kitchen suspended operations after its workers were killed.
Cyprus’ port city of Larnaca has played a key role in trying to establish a maritime aid corridor to Gaza. Those efforts suffered a major setback when the World Central Kitchen halted operations.
The World Central Kitchen said its aid workers were traveling in a “deconflicted zone” in two armored cars branded with the charity’s logo as well as “a soft skin vehicle.”
Despite coordinating movements with the Israeli military, “the convoy was hit as it was leaving the Deir al-Balah warehouse, where the team had unloaded more than 100 tonnes of humanitarian food aid brought to Gaza on the maritime route,” the group said in a statement.
The Israeli regime has acknowledged the strike, claiming it will carry out an independent investigation into the attack.
April 2, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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Researcher Frances Stonor Saunders dedicated an entire book, under the title “Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War”, to the work of the United States government to finance influencers of the non-communist left, mainly in Europe and North America.
Intellectuals, journalists, artists and activists (in addition, obviously, to professional politicians) were financed directly or indirectly by the US Central Intelligence Agency through programs to promote culture and development that were nothing more than a façade for it to pour money into determined sectors, in order to combat the influence of the Soviet Union and what it still represented, in one way or another (the revolution and the fight against imperialism).
The CIA’s “cultural war” strategists were thinking not of modifying the leftist policy they financed, but rather of encouraging an already existing policy. It was a left compatible with its interests, which did not clash with the fundamental policy of imperialism. The objective was to strengthen this policy, make it “hegemonic” within the left, making revolutionary and anti-imperialist politics secondary ─ the final victim of these projects.
In this way, the CIA financed the holding of cultural congresses, exhibitions, concerts and the publication of newspapers, magazines, books and films with the intention of promoting “left-wing” ideas and policies perfectly compatible with its own.
Mainly journalistic and theoretical publications had as a fundamental aspect of their editorial line the fight against Marxist and anti-imperialist ideas.
This type of activity is often called “covert operations”, when the US government uses front organizations to hide the involvement of its agencies in conspiracies and operations around the world. Two of the main organizations that serve as a facade for the CIA to this day are the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, “both of which were conscious instruments of the clandestine foreign policy of the United States, with directors and employees who had close ties to the US secret service. American, or were even members of it” (pp. 156-157).
Created in 1936, the Ford Foundation was the tax-exempt cream of the vast Ford fortune, and had assets totaling more than three billion dollars by the late 1950s. Dwight Macdonald memorably described it as “a vast mass of money, completely surrounded by people who want some.” The architects of the Foundation’s cultural policy after World War II were perfectly in tune with the political imperatives that supported the United States’ massive presence on the world stage. At times, the Ford Foundation seemed to be a simple extension of the government in the area of international cultural propaganda. The Foundation had a history of close involvement in clandestine actions in Europe, working closely with those responsible for the Marshall Plan and the CIA on specific projects. This reciprocity was further amplified when Richard Bissell, a Marshall Plan planner whose signature had provided matching funds to Frank Wisner, joined the Ford Foundation in 1952, accurately predicting that there would be “nothing to prevent an individual from exercising as much influence through his work at a private foundation as he could have through government work.” During his tenure at Ford, Bissell met often with Allen Dulles and other CIA officials, including Tracy Barnes, his former classmate at Groton, in a “reciprocal search” for new ideas. He left suddenly to join the CIA as special assistant to Allen Dulles in January 1954, but not before helping to bring the foundation to the forefront of Cold War thinking.
Bissell had worked directly under Paul Hoffman, who became president of the Ford Foundation in 1950. Having come to the Foundation directly from his position as administrator of the Marshall Plan, Hoffman had taken a thorough immersion course in the problems of Europe and the power of ideas for dealing with these problems. He was fluent in the language of psychological warfare and, echoing Arthur Koestler’s 1950 exclamation (“Friends, freedom has gone on the offensive!”), spoke of “fighting the battle of peace.” He also shared with Robert Maynard Hutchins, a spokesman for the Ford Foundation, the view that the State Department was “subject to so much domestic political interference that it can no longer present a complete picture of American culture.”
In 1952, the Ford Foundation debuted in earnest as a CIA front in the international political-cultural arena. This is when the Intercultural Publications Program was created. It allocated 500 thousand dollars to launch the magazine Perspectives, whose target audience was the French, English, Italian and German non-communist left. Its aim was “less to defeat leftist intellectuals in dialectical combat than to lure them away from their positions through aesthetic and rational persuasion,” according to the program’s head, James Laughlin. The magazine’s policy was not to advertise the American lifestyle. “This omission alone will become the most important element of propaganda, in the best sense,” said one academic at the time. That is, the aim was to convey right-wing politics as something left-wing.
(to be continued)
Eduardo Vasco is a Brazilian journalist specializing in international politics.
April 2, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Deception, Timeless or most popular | CIA, United States |
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On SIDS
If nature or God had perfected puncturing one creature with substances from another as a pillar of health and vitality, plentiful examples would abound throughout the natural world. Instead, every creature that punctures and injects another only harms the creature being toxxinated by direct blood injections. Simple examples: ticks, fleas, mites, parasites, mosquitos, snakes, scorpions, tse-tse flies, black flies, horse flies. Across all species, there’s over 200 that puncture and suck blood. In no case does blood sucking or toxxine injection benefit the suckee, only the parasitic sucker.
TOXXINES, scientific definition for the ancient blood cult practice of injecting toxins by a predator into their prey. Legend has it that early cult priests observed that in nature, every single example where a predator punctured a prey and sucked blood, or injected into the blood, the prey suffered under some magical or mystical influences wielded by the predator. Priests reasoned they could own this power. Cult priests convinced millions throughout history to give their life forces over to this dark cult. The cult thrived and gained extensive powers over their punctured prey. Where do we see this parasitic class thriving today? What effect do we see upon their suckees? – Anon Reader
This stack is based on AMD’s excellent recent article.
Which was an update and revision of AMD’s Aug 2022 piece.
The last time I wrote about SIDS was in Aug 2023, but prompted by AMD’s piece, I thought it was time for another.
Let’s do something different here. Let’s start with a test.
Here is a 15-question multiple-choice test based on AMD’s stack. Answers below.
Let’s see how many you get right?
Exam
1. What is the most common term used for the sudden and unexplained death of an infant?
A) Crib death B) Infant mortality C) Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) D) Shaken Baby Syndrome
2. Which vaccine has been most strongly linked to cases of SIDS?
A) MMR (Measles, Mumps, Rubella) B) DPT (Diphtheria, Pertussis, Tetanus) C) Polio D) Hepatitis B
3. In what decade did national immunization programs begin, leading to a rise in SIDS cases?
A) 1940s B) 1950s C) 1960s D) 1970s
4. What did Dr. Archie Kalokerinos identify as a major contributing factor to infant deaths in Aboriginal communities in Australia?
A) Poor sanitation B) Genetic predisposition C) Vitamin C deficiency D) Parental neglect
5. What was the name of the 1985 book that led to the withdrawal of the whole-cell DPT vaccine from the US market?
A) “The Vaccine Book” B) “DPT: A Shot in the Dark” C) “Vaccine Safety Manual” D) “What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Children’s Vaccinations”
6. Which country saw a significant reduction in severe reactions and deaths from the DPT vaccine after delaying the injection age?
A) United States B) United Kingdom C) Japan D) Australia
7. What did Dr. William Torch’s study find regarding the timing of infant deaths after DPT vaccination?
A) Most deaths occurred within 24 hours B) Most deaths occurred within 1-3 weeks C) Most deaths occurred within 2-3 months D) There was no clear pattern
8. What did Peter Aaby’s study in low-income countries reveal about the DTP vaccine?
A) It reduced overall mortality rates B) It increased mortality rates by 5-fold compared to unvaccinated children C) It had no effect on mortality rates D) It only increased mortality rates in girls
9. Which type of vaccine has been shown to significantly increase the risk of sudden unexpected death in infants within days of administration?
A) Hexavalent vaccines B) Pentavalent vaccines C) Trivalent vaccines D) Monovalent vaccines
10. What did studies find regarding the incidence of cardiorespiratory events in premature infants after vaccination?
A) There was no increase in cardiorespiratory events B) Cardiorespiratory events increased by 10-15% C) Cardiorespiratory events increased by 30-50% D) Cardiorespiratory events decreased after vaccination
11. What trend in infant mortality was observed during the COVID-19 lockdowns when childhood vaccination rates declined?
A) Infant mortality increased significantly B) Infant mortality decreased significantly C) There was no change in infant mortality rates D) The data was inconclusive
12. According to VAERS data, what percentage of reported infant deaths occur within 7 days post-vaccination?
A) 25.5% B) 48.3% C) 63.7% D) 78.3%
13. What did a study find regarding the risk of death in infants receiving 5-8 vaccine doses compared to those receiving 1-4 doses?
A) The risk was the same B) The risk was 1.5 times higher C) The risk was 2 times higher D) The risk was 3 times higher
14. What percentage of Medicare spending is attributed to care in the final year of life?
A) 10% B) 25% C) 40% D) 60%
15. According to one study, what reduction in overall risk of death was observed when a few non-necessary drugs were removed from elderly patients?
A) 23% B) 41% C) 56% D) 72%
Answer Key:
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C
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B
-
C
-
C
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B
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C
-
B
-
B
-
A
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C
-
B
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D
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B
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B
- C
Next let’s look at 20 Statistics.
- Nearly 10,000 SIDS deaths occur in the United States each year, potentially related to vaccines.
- The incidence of SIDS has grown from 0.55 per 1,000 live births in 1953 to 12.8 per 1,000 in 1992 in Olmstead County, Minnesota.
- The increase in SIDS as a percentage of total infant deaths has risen from 2.5 per 1,000 in 1953 to 17.9 per 1,000 in 1992.
- In Japan, a 85-90% reduction in severe reactions and deaths from the DPT vaccine was observed when the injection age was delayed from 3-5 months to 24 months during the 1970s.
- The infant mortality rate in Japan declined from 12.4 per 1,000 births in the mid-1970s to 5 per 1,000 births in the mid-1980s, after the DPT vaccination age was raised to 2 years old.
- In a study by Torch, 6.5% of infants died within 12 hours of DPT vaccination, 13% within 24 hours, 26% within 3 days, and 37%, 61%, and 70% within 1, 2, and 3 weeks, respectively.
- In 1978-1979, 9 out of 11 infants who died within 8 days of DPT vaccination had been given the same Wyeth vaccine lot, and 5 died within 24 hours.
- Vitamin C deficiency, exacerbated by vaccination, led to an infant death rate of over 50% in one Aboriginal community in Australia.
- DTP vaccine was associated with a 5-fold higher mortality rate than being unvaccinated in low-income countries, according to a study by Peter Aaby.
- Hexavalent vaccines increase the risk of sudden unexpected death in infants by 31.3 times within one day and 23.5 times within two days of vaccination.
- A GSK confidential report revealed that 97.9% of all sudden deaths following the first dose of hexavalent vaccination occurred within the first 10 days post-vaccination.
- Premature infants have a 30% incidence of cardiorespiratory events within 24 hours of vaccination, with 51.5% experiencing such events after their first vaccination.
- During the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020, a significant drop in overall childhood mortality was observed, particularly in the 0-4 age range and among ethnic minorities.
- All-cause infant mortality under one year of age in Florida decreased by 8.93% in 2021, coinciding with a drop in childhood vaccination rates from 93.4% to 79.3%.
- In VAERS, 58% of reported infant deaths clustered within 3 days post-vaccination, and 78.3% within 7 days post-vaccination, a statistically significant difference compared to the 8-60 day post-vaccination period.
- For SIDS cases reported in VAERS, 51% occurred within 3 days post-vaccination, and 75.5% within 7 days post-vaccination.
- Infants receiving 5-8 vaccine doses were 1.5 times more likely to die than those receiving 1-4 doses, according to a VAERS analysis.
- Boys were 1.4 times more likely to die after vaccination than girls, according to the same VAERS analysis.
- Care in the final year of life accounts for approximately 25% of all spending by Medicare.
- One study found that removing a few non-necessary drugs from elderly patients reduced their overall risk of death by 56%.
Lastly here are 30 Q&As to interact with AMD’s essay.
1. What vulnerable groups does the pharmaceutical industry often target to maximize profits?
Answer: The pharmaceutical industry often targets prisoners, colonized indigenous populations, the mentally disabled, orphans, children in foster care, the elderly, and infants to maximize profits through unethical human experimentation and creating captive markets for unsafe pharmaceuticals with questionable benefits.
2. Where was the DPT vaccine first tested in the early 20th century, and what was discovered in 2014 related to this?
Answer: The DPT vaccine was first tested in Irish orphanages in the early 20th century. In 2014, unmarked mass graves belonging to Irish orphans were discovered. Further research revealed these graves belonged to a group of 2,051 children upon whom an early diphtheria vaccine was covertly tested in the 1930s.
3. Since the DPT vaccine hit the market, what have physicians around the world observed regarding infant deaths?
Answer: Since the DPT vaccine hit the market, physicians around the world have observed waves of infant deaths following its use, which were often sudden and inexplicable, along with many other severe side effects.
4. What key role did infant deaths play in creating the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act?
Answer: The infant deaths observed after DPT vaccination played a key role in creating the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, as many parents who successfully lobbied Congress to address vaccine injury issues had DPT-injured children.
5. What did vaccine safety activists predict would happen to infant deaths during the COVID lockdowns when children were skipping their routine vaccines?
Answer: Vaccine safety activists predicted that the COVID lockdowns would lead to an unprecedented drop in infant deaths since children were skipping their routine vaccines.
6. How do current events with COVID-19 parallel the early days of the AIDS epidemic in regards to Fauci’s actions?
Answer: In both the early AIDS epidemic and the COVID-19 pandemic, Fauci fought to keep effective treatments off the market and instead pushed dangerous and ineffective but profitable drugs like AZT for HIV and remdesivir for COVID-19.
7. What are two recurring issues that always emerge in the pharmaceutical industry?
Answer: Two recurring issues in the pharmaceutical industry are: 1) Finding ways to regularly test experimental drugs with high potential toxicities to identify commercially successful ones, and 2) Creating guaranteed markets for unsafe pharmaceuticals with questionable benefits.
8. How have dangerous medical treatments been unethically tested on vulnerable populations throughout history?
Answer: Dangerous medical treatments have been forcibly tested on prisoners, colonized indigenous populations, the mentally disabled, orphans, foster children, and by outsourcing research to third-world countries or using the military’s command structure to compel participation.
9. What process can be observed in how countless drugs are prescribed to the elderly until their combined toxicity causes significant health issues?
Answer: In the elderly, countless drugs are prescribed until their combined toxicity causes enough degeneration to require hospitalization or nursing home admission. Then, more medical interventions are administered until a critical point is reached and the elder dies, with end-of-life care accounting for a large portion of Medicare spending.
10. What are some of the key demographics in the United States that are forced to receive vaccinations?
Answer: In the U.S., key demographics forced to receive vaccinations include children, those in foster care, the elderly, prisoners, service members, students, and healthcare workers. Pediatricians and veterinarians also face financial pressures to vaccinate to maintain their practices.
11. What did a doctor who worked with Robert Mendelsohn recall him saying about why he was willing to sacrifice his eminent position to speak out against the medical system?
Answer: Dr. Mendelsohn said that during his time as Medical Director of Project Head Start in 1968, he was horrified by private White House discussions on controlling poor populations through infant formula, vaccinations, hospital birthing practices, deficient schools, and neighborhood abortion clinics, which deeply conflicted with his faith and medical ethics.
12. What important book published in 1985 was pivotal in the whole-cell DPT vaccine being withdrawn from the domestic market?
Answer: The 1985 book “DPT: A Shot in the Dark” was a pivotal factor in the more dangerous whole-cell DPT vaccine being withdrawn from the U.S. market and replaced with an acellular version. The book also helped create the political will for the 1986 National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.
13. What did Dr. Archie Kalokerinos discover was the primary cause of many health issues affecting Aboriginal children in Australia?
Answer: Dr. Kalokerinos discovered that many of the serious health issues affecting Aboriginal children, such as pneumonia, ear infections, infant irritability, and inability to feed, primarily arose from severe vitamin C deficiencies due to the destruction of native diets by colonization.
14. After Dr. Kalokerinos addressed the vitamin deficiencies, what did he then witness regarding the infant death rate in one Aboriginal community following an immunization campaign?
Answer: After initially addressing widespread vitamin deficiencies, Dr. Kalokerinos then witnessed the infant death rate in one Aboriginal community reach an astonishing 50% following an immunization campaign, leading him to realize that the same vitamin C depletion occurred after vaccination.
15. What did Dr. Kalokerinos later demonstrate in an animal model regarding vitamin C supplementation and vaccination?
Answer: Dr. Kalokerinos later demonstrated in an animal model that vitamin C supplementation could prevent the deaths commonly seen after vaccination, and he eventually convinced local medical authorities to hear his case that vaccines may be causing unintended infant deaths.
16. How did the DPT vaccine also become linked to childhood ear infections by many physicians like Dr. Kalokerinos?
Answer: Many physicians, including Dr. Kalokerinos, observed a direct link between DPT vaccination and the development of childhood ear infections. One doctor noted a surge in ear infections among children in an Indian ashram after a DPT vaccination campaign, a condition not seen there in the years prior.
17. What reduction in severe reactions and deaths from the DPT vaccine did Japan observe when they delayed the injection age from 3-5 months to 24 months during the 1970s?
Answer: When Japan delayed DPT vaccination from 3-5 months to 24 months of age during the 1970s, they observed an 85-90% reduction in severe reactions and deaths attributed to the vaccine.
18. What did Raymond Obomsawin find regarding monitoring infants at home after DPT and Polio vaccination?
Answer: Raymond Obomsawin found that when infants were monitored at home after DPT and Polio vaccination, there was a spike in non-fatal disruptions of breathing that continued for over six weeks post-vaccination, overlapping with the typical period of death observed after these vaccinations.
19. What tends to happen with SIDS cases when examined at morgues in relation to the infant age and vaccination schedule?
Answer: When SIDS cases are examined at morgues, they tend to cluster at precisely 2, 4, and 6 months of age, rather than evenly throughout the 2-6 month range, which coincides with the timing of routine childhood vaccinations and can only be logically explained as a consequence of vaccination.
20. How did the diagnostic criteria and classification for SIDS change over time, and what impact may this have had on tracking SIDS incidence?
Answer: Prior to 1969, SIDS was not formally classified as a disease entity. In 1979, the ICD coding system removed vaccinations as an official cause of death, making it impossible to directly link SIDS to vaccines. Changes in diagnostic classifications during the “Back to Sleep” campaign may have also impacted SIDS statistics.
21. What did a 2011 study find when comparing infant mortality rates across 34 nations in relation to the number of required childhood vaccines?
Answer: A 2011 study comparing infant mortality rates across the 34 nations with the lowest rates found a clear correlation between the number of required childhood vaccines and increased infant mortality, with the United States having the highest number of mandatory vaccines and the highest infant mortality rate.
22. What were the results of Peter Aaby’s study on the DTP vaccine’s effects on mortality in low-income countries, and what happened after he reported his findings?
Answer: Peter Aaby’s study found that the DTP vaccine was associated with a 5-fold higher mortality rate compared to unvaccinated children in low-income countries, suggesting the vaccine may cause more deaths from other causes than it prevents. After reporting his findings, the results were buried, and DTP vaccination rates continued to increase in these countries.
23. What specific factors have been found to increase the likelihood and severity of adverse events and deaths following vaccination in infants?
Answer: Factors found to increase the risk and severity of adverse events and deaths after infant vaccination include premature birth, low birth weight, younger age at vaccination, receiving multiple vaccines simultaneously (especially DTP and Polio), and the use of combination vaccines like the hexavalent vaccine.
24. What did multiple studies find regarding the risk of cardiorespiratory events and death in premature infants after receiving routine vaccinations?
Answer: Multiple studies found significantly increased risks of cardiorespiratory events (apnea, bradycardia, desaturation) and death in premature infants following routine vaccinations, particularly in those with younger gestational age, lower birth weight, and pre-existing respiratory issues. These risks were highest after the first vaccination and with simultaneous administration of multiple vaccines.
25. How did the COVID-19 lockdowns inadvertently provide a control group to assess the impact of vaccination on SIDS incidence?
Answer: The COVID-19 lockdowns created an unintended natural experiment by disrupting routine childhood vaccination programs globally, providing a rare opportunity to compare SIDS incidence and infant mortality between vaccinated and unvaccinated infants during the pandemic period.
26. What trends were observed in SIDS and infant mortality in the U.S. during the 2020 lockdowns when childhood vaccination rates significantly declined?
Answer: During the 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns in the U.S., when childhood vaccination rates significantly declined, an unexpected decrease in all-cause infant mortality was observed, particularly in the 0-4 age range most affected by SIDS. This reduction was most pronounced in ethnic minority groups, who often experience higher rates of vaccine injury.
27. How did Florida’s drop in childhood vaccination rates in 2021 appear to affect infant mortality in the state?
Answer: In Florida, a drop in childhood vaccination rates from 93.4% in 2020 to 79.3% in 2021 coincided with an 8.93% decrease in all-cause infant mortality under one year of age, a reversal of the previous year’s trend. This suggests a potential causal link between vaccination and a significant portion of infant deaths.
28. What patterns can be observed in VAERS data regarding the timing and clustering of reported infant deaths after vaccination, particularly with the DPT vaccine?
Answer: Analysis of VAERS data shows clear clustering of reported infant deaths in the days immediately following vaccination, with the DPT vaccine being most commonly associated. Of reported deaths, 50-75% occur within 3-7 days post-vaccination, representing a 57-69 times higher rate than in the 8-60 day post-vaccination period, a statistically significant difference.
29. How do the physiological responses to vaccine toxicity tend to be distributed across the population, and what does this suggest about chronic health issues in children?
Answer: Physiological responses to vaccine toxicity follow a bell curve distribution, with severe reactions like death representing the tip of the iceberg. This suggests that for every reported death, there are likely far more unreported cases of chronic health issues in children resulting from vaccine damage, many of which have become increasingly common.
30. What role does the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) play in perpetuating issues with unsafe vaccines being added to the childhood schedule without adequate safety testing?
Answer: The CDC’s ACIP perpetuates issues with vaccine safety by consistently assuming all newly approved vaccines are safe and effective without adequate testing and recommending their addition to the childhood schedule. This effectively creates captive markets and liability protection for manufacturers, disincentivizing thorough safety studies and allowing potentially harmful vaccines to be widely administered.
April 1, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
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