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The Case of Typhoid Mary

By Jeffrey A. Tucker | Brownstone Institute | January 17, 2024

For four years now, any talk of allowing society to function in the event of a pandemic has called forth cliches about Typhoid Mary. It’s remarkable how this real event, a paradigmatic case of awesome and egregious powers of public health, in which a poor Irish immigrant was scapegoated for typhoid infections in New York, still survives – fully 100 years later.

Even otherwise scrupulous scholars I knew have tossed out her name expecting it to end all discussion of the necessity of lockdowns.

It’s time we examine the case. Typhoid Mary was a real person, Mary Mallon (1869-1938). By all accounts an excellent chef who had served many families and had outstanding skills. She was never symptomatic for typhoid. She was healthy and well. But when there was an outbreak at a home she served, she was hunted down, her stool tested positive, and then she was quarantined in New York as an asymptomatic carrier (1907-1910).

Legal pushback led her to be released three years later on the condition that she check in and never cook again. She defied both conditions and so was hunted down yet again. This time medical authorities demanded to remove her gallbladder which she refused to permit. She ended up spending a total of 26 years in solitary confinement before she died (1915-1938).

There is in fact a large literature on the case. The best are Famous and Difficult Patients: Amusing Medical Anecdotes from Typhoid Mary to FDR, by Richard Gordon (St. Martin’s Press, 1997); Typhoid Mary: Captive To The Public’s Health, by, Judith Walzer Leavitt (Beacon Press, 1996); Typhoid Mary: The Notorious Life and Legacy of the Cook Who Caused a Typhoid Outbreak in New York, by Charles Editors (2020) and many more but above all, Typhoid Mary, by Anthony Bourdain (Bloomsberry, 2005), which is a brilliant, engaging, and deeply sympathetic book. For a quick overview, there are many articles online.

All are fascinating and in agreement that Mary likely (probably) spread typhoid, along with many hundreds of others in New York who were never hunted and jailed. She never felt sick. She frequently tested negative and deeply distrusted the authorities that hunted her down. The man who started the whole bit was a lawyer/investigator named George Soper who ended up writing an article and book that caused her to forever live with the moniker. This book became a bestseller and Soper himself became a famous and beloved disease sleuth.

The public was so enthralled with the case that New York kids would skip rope to the line: “Mary Mary, what do you carry?” She tried to sue but her case was rejected by the New York Supreme Court. She was not allowed to see an eye doctor even though her eyelid was paralyzed. She was forced to take unproven treatments that threatened to destroy her kidneys.

No question that tagging her as public enemy number one was a reflection of prevailing bias against Irish immigrants who were seen as dirty and lower class. She was lower class but she wasn’t dirty. I’ve read much about her and find myself not entirely convinced that she was a source of sickness in every case in which she was blamed. The germ in question was spread primarily through water mixed with fecal matter so fixing that problem causes the issue to go away, as people later learned. In addition, the regime of test, track, and trace is notoriously error-prone and plays very much into the hands of the public’s desire to stigmatize the diseased and otherize infection no matter what.

Due to public hatred and unrelenting attacks, Mary very likely eventually came to believe that she was a source but, at some point, she didn’t care much, which is what happens when a whole country blames you alone for disease and the authorities jail you and threaten to cut you open.

In other words, she was treated like an animal, not a patient, and then later experimented upon with random untested treatments. Meanwhile hundreds of carriers of the said bug were out and about, while the water supply remained the main culprit.

Typhoid was ultimately conquered not by jails but by sanitation, hygiene, and antibiotics. Mary was blamed for infecting hundreds but only 3-5 died from cases she was accused of spreading (however inadvertently). Again, maybe.

The point was that she was declared guilty regardless, largely because of her class, her national origin, and ethnicity. She was an easy target, even though typhoid carriers were everywhere. Meanwhile, Salmonella typhi (the source of Typhoid) continued to be a problem until later fixed. Much later typhoid victims were easily treated with antibiotics and the disease prevented with vaccination and, even more importantly, hygiene.

What’s striking is how the case, which is so clearly an instance of public frenzy together with public health authoritarianism and brazen brutality, is so frequently cited as an example of how, of course, we must lock people down when there is a virus out and about. In reality, her case has aroused a century of questions about the power of the state to grab people out of their daily lives and imprison them without trial on the claim that they are disease spreaders.

To say that such powers can be abused is an understatement, as we well know in these post-lockdown times. People who have studied the case of Mary Mallon nearly always come around to having great sympathy for her. These were times when modern medical knowledge was advancing but so was the expectation that the rich whom she served would not be subject to the usual sicknesses that snagged the poor.

She alone among hundreds and thousands of likely carriers in the region was shamed and ruined for a disease she didn’t believe she had and did not intentionally spread. Meanwhile, there were no similar efforts undertaken to hunt down and capture other spreaders of Salmonella typhi.

Again, what did this actually achieve in terms of public health? Did the 30 years of involuntary captivity of this woman save lives? There is no way to know, but certainly people continued to die from the disease after her imprisonment, until good treatments came along. Meanwhile, public health authorities had their archetype of a disease carrier to justify their enormous power.

Eventually, Mary came to accept her plight and became a strong adherent of her Catholic faith, and died a peaceful death. Anthony Bourdain offers a deeply touching account of visiting her grave at St. Raymond’s Cemetery, Bronx, New York.

In 1973, I bought my first chef’s knife, a high-carbon Sabatier with a polished wooden handle. I was so proud of it – and I’ve held onto it all these years, remembering how it felt in my hand when I first unwrapped it, the way the handle rested against my palm, the feel of the blade, the sharpness of the edge. It’s old now, and stained, and the handle is cracked slightly in spots. I long ago gave up using it or trying to maintain it. But it is a beloved object. Something a fellow cook would appreciate, I hoped – a once fine hunk of quality French steel – a magical fetish, a beloved piece of my personal history. And a sign of respect, I hoped, an indicator that somebody, somewhere, even long after her troubles and her dying, took her seriously, understood, if only a little bit, the difficulty of her life as a cook. It’s the kind of gift I would like to receive, one that I would understand.

I looked around the graveyard, making sure that no one else was watching, leaned over and with my hands, pulled back the grass at the base of her stone. I slipped my knife down there, covered it up the way it had looked before and left it for her. It was the least I could do.

A gift. Cook to cook.

January 17, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

mRNA vaccines lead to unwanted proteins – but what does it mean?

New research has experts angered by the “complete and utter regulatory failure” to ensure patient safety

BY MARYANNE DEMASI, PHD | JANUARY 16, 2024

After three years on the market and billions of doses later, the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines continue to throw up surprises.

A landmark study, published last December in Nature, has reignited concerns over the safety of the vaccines.

The study, by highly credentialled UK researchers, found that in addition to spike protein, Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine can instruct cells to produce other ‘off-target’ proteins, which are foreign to the immune system.

How does it happen?

The researchers say that ribosomes, which are responsible for decoding the mRNA in cells, can slip and misread the coded instructions about 8% of the time – known as “ribosomal frameshifting.”

They say the ‘glitch’ has to do with how the mRNA in the vaccine has been genetically modified.

Unlike naturally-occurring mRNA, the mRNA that exists in the vaccines has had a ‘uridine’ base replaced with a ‘N1-methyl pseudouridine’ (to stabilise it) and unfortunately, has made it prone to reading errors.

But are these ‘off-target’ proteins harmful?

At a press briefing, the study researchers insisted there were no safety concerns, and that their findings did not indicate the mRNA vaccines were unsafe.

The BBC characterised the glitch as a “harmless tiny slip” in mRNA gene translation.

Science said there was “nothing alarming” about the study, and interviewed experts who reiterated the absence of adverse events associated with these off-target proteins.

However, David Wiseman, a research scientist involved in medical product development, is not so convinced. He, and his co-authors, published their comments in Nature.

I spoke with Dr Wiseman about his concerns and what this research might mean for patient safety.

DEMASI: Thanks for speaking with me Dr Wiseman. How concerned are you about these latest findings?

WISEMAN: I’m very concerned. This raises more questions about the long-term safety of the mRNA vaccines.

DEMASI: Before we discuss what they found, can you explain the purpose of the study?

WISEMAN: Well, these researchers asked a simple question – are the instructions contained within the mRNA of the vaccines being faithfully carried out.  Or put another way, does the body make the spike protein it’s supposed to make, as instructed by the mRNA’s code.

It’s like saying here’s a recipe with instructions on how to make a cake – it’s grandma’s cake recipe. These researchers wanted to know if the mRNA could accurately give instructions on how to make Grandma’s cake or whether it would produce a corrupted version of grandma’s cake.

These researchers obviously knew from the literature that modifying some of the bases in the vaccine’s RNA – as was the case for the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines – that it might cause misreads of different kinds. It’s known as ‘frameshifting.’

DEMASI: And what exactly did they find?

WISEMAN: They found the Pfizer vaccine can cause your cells to make proteins that they are not supposed to make – you end up with what I call “Pfrankenstein proteins.”

DEMASI: Because sometimes there are errors in the way the mRNA is read?

WISEMAN: Yes. Imagine the following three-letter English words ABE DAN TEA TON ERA TWO – the letters are like the code on the mRNA. Now instead of starting to read the sentence at the letter “A” of the first word, you frameshift to the next letter – the letter “B.”

That means that all the other letters are shifted to the left and it will give you a new sentence with three-letter words BED ANT EAT ONE RAT etcetera.

So, the new words have a completely different meaning from the original words. This is what happened in the body of some people vaccinated with Pfizer’s product.

New unwanted “off-target” proteins were produced, that actually led to an “off-target” immune response.

DEMASI: So, were these off-target proteins detected in the blood of people who’d been vaccinated?

No, they did not measure these proteins in the blood of people who’d been vaccinated.

These researchers did something similar to what I did with the six English words – they “predicted” what some of these off-target proteins would look like, had there been a problem with frameshifting.

They made these frameshift proteins in the lab – about 30 or 40 of them – pooled them together in a test tube and then exposed them to blood lymphocytes (white blood cells that mount the immune response) taken from people who’d been vaccinated.

What they found in about 25 to 33% of people who’d received Pfizer’s product, was that their lymphocytes, responded immunologically when exposed to these frameshift proteins in a test tube.

It means their lymphocytes had seen the proteins before – their immune system had already been primed from a prior exposure, presumably after that person had received the mRNA vaccine.

DEMASI: They also tested samples from people who’d received the AstraZeneca vaccine and saw no immune reaction – can you explain why?

WISEMAN: The AstraZeneca vaccine is a different technology. It is a DNA vaccine and does not have the uridine modification that is causing the frameshifting in the mRNA vaccine.

So, it’s not surprising that the lymphocytes from people given the AstraZeneca vaccine did not react to these frameshift proteins, because they’d never seen them before.

DEMASI: They didn’t study people vaccinated with Moderna, but would you say the problem is likely to happen with Moderna’s vaccine too?

WISEMAN: Yes, I would because it’s also an mRNA vaccine and contains the same sort of uridine modification as the Pfizer vaccine.

DEMASI: OK, so making proteins you’re not supposed to make sounds bad, but the media coverage seemed to suggest there wasn’t a problem….

WISEMAN: What you have to realise is that your body is being hijacked, not just to produce spike protein, but also to produce other, what I call, “Pfrankenstein” proteins that are completely uncharacterised.

We don’t know what they are, what they do, for how long they’re made or how long they last in the body, and we have no idea what their toxicity is. From the Nature paper however, we do know that these unwanted proteins elicit immune reactions in the body.

DEMASI: What could these immune reactions lead to? You were concerned about autoimmune conditions?

WISEMAN: Yes. These researchers showed that frameshifting could create chimeric proteins.  Basically, as the ribosome reads the code for the spike protein, it may slip in the middle of reading the code. So, the first half is spike protein, and the second half is a Pfrankenstein protein.

Now, just imagine one half can still attach to the ACE2 receptor on cells but on the other end, you’ve got this Pfrankenstein protein dangling outside of the cells.  Your immune system is going to destroy the cell because it looks foreign, and now you’ve got something that looks like an autoimmune condition.

Or you could have a protein that turns out to be not necessarily identical, but sufficiently similar to another protein in our body like a hormone and it ends up mimicking the hormone’s activity and disturbing your endocrine system.

DEMASI: But the study authors said there were “no adverse events” associated with these frameshift proteins.

WISEMAN: The authors wrote, “…there is no evidence that frameshifted products in humans generated from BNT162b2 vaccination are associated with adverse outcomes.”

But they only looked at 21 people who received Pfizer’s vaccine, so you cannot call that a serious safety study by any stretch of the imagination.

And how did they select these people?  The volunteers were part of another government funded study and had not reported undue effects from vaccination. Since they did not study subjects who had reported adverse vaccine effects, the selection of participants was probably biased.

DEMASI: The authors of the study said that with some tweaks they could identify potential slips and reduce reading errors…..

WISEMAN: Right, and this work should’ve been done by the vaccine manufacturers and by the regulators before the product was authorised and given to billions of people. They’ve asked people to take a vaccine, and put it into children and they have no clue what is happening inside the body.

What they’re trying to say now is that there have been no problems identified in 21 people, but in the future there may be problems, so we should just keep studying it.

Are you kidding me? What they’re saying is that ‘we will inject you first and ask safety questions later.’ It’s not good enough.

It’s just like the retired Pfizer executive admitted in a Nature article, “We flew the aeroplane while we were still building it.”

DEMASI: Shouldn’t the drug regulators be all over this?

WISEMAN: This has been a complete and utter regulatory failure. The 2021 WHO guidelines say that for mRNA vaccines the manufacturers have to disclose all the sequences and unexpected reading frames. They were required to have done this work already… The FDA should have been looking at it.

The mRNA vaccines are causing our bodies to produce uncharacterised proteins, with unknown toxicology, that produce an immune response of unknown clinical significance. The dereliction of duty by regulators shows how they’ve sunken to an all-time low.

January 17, 2024 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

US health agency hushed Covid vax myocarditis warning – media

RT | January 17, 2024

The US Centers for Disease Control never sent an urgent health alert it had drafted in May 2021 regarding a potentially fatal side-effect linked to the Covid-19 vaccinations it was promoting, and continued to push the shots without warning the public, according to a document obtained by Epoch Times on Wednesday.

In an inter-agency email titled “draft alert on myocarditis and mRNA vaccines” obtained by the Times, CDC official Dr. Demetre Daskalakis informed two high-ranking colleagues that he had attached “the most recent draft of an alert as discussed.”

The agency disseminates what it describes as “vital health information” to doctors and public health officials at federal, state and local levels through a system called the Health Alert Network. The warning was reportedly prepared for release via this network; Daskalakis’ email was dated May 21, 2021, but never saw publication.

While the exact text of the warning has not been made public, the CDC had been tracking cases of myocarditis – a potentially deadly heart condition – in individuals vaccinated with Pfizer and Moderna’s mRNA-based Covid-19 vaccines for months, witnessing what it internally acknowledged was an alarming spike in cases, even as it continued to urge all Americans to get vaccinated against the novel coronavirus.

Two days before the email was sent, the CDC told state officials it was “closely monitoring” post-vaccination cases of myocarditis and pericarditis, a similar condition, and acknowledged that such cases “can be serious.” However, the public was not notified until weeks later – and the CDC continued to promote the jabs to all Americans, even after the risk was made public.

Instead of the never-released draft alert, the CDC later chose to inform healthcare providers about the danger in a document headed “clinical considerations” that lacked the forceful language or widespread distribution a Health Alert Network bulletin would have received. While it acknowledged the increased risk of myocarditis, it placed equivalent emphasis on the need to vaccinate everyone over age 11.

Last year, it emerged that both the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration had been made aware of a myocarditis “safety signal” triggered by an unusually large number of adverse event reports as far back as February 2021 – just two months after the mRNA-based vaccines received regulatory approval [emergency use authorizion].

Despite international news reports that vaccination with Pfizer and Moderna’s shots was associated with an elevated risk of myocarditis, the US regulatory agencies did not inform the public about the risk until after the jabs had been approved for patients between 12 and 15 years old – one of the age groups most susceptible to their deadly side effects.

January 17, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

TUCKER CARLSON INTERVIEWS BRET WEINSTEIN

TCNonX | January 8, 2024

January 17, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | Leave a comment

US seeks funds for new bioweapons projects from Clinton, Soros, Rockefeller Foundations: Russian MoD

By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 15.01.2024

Russia’s Radiological, Chemical and Biological Defense (RCBD) Troops began extensive reporting on Pentagon funding for military-related biological research in Eastern Europe and around the world in early 2022, with much of their findings based on the tens of thousands of documents seized over the course of the special military operation in Ukraine.

The United States government is actively searching for new sources of funding for military biological research from leading American ‘philanthropic’ institutions, including the Clinton, Soros, Rockefeller and Biden Foundations, RCBD Troops chief Igor Kirillov has announced.

“Based on an analysis of documents received in the course of the special military operation, the structure of the system created by the US administration for the global management of biological risks has become clear,” Kirillov said in a briefing Monday, summarizing an analysis of US military-biological activities in Ukraine and globally over the course of 2023.

“It consists of government agencies and private contractors, including representatives of Big Pharma. Through the organs of the executive branch, a legislative framework is being created to finance military-biological research directly from the federal budget. Guarantees provided by the state attract funds from non-governmental organizations controlled by the Democratic Party leadership, including the Clinton, Rockefeller, Soros and Biden Foundations,” Kirillov said.

According to the RCBD Troops’ chief’s information, the main private contractors involved in the Pentagon’s military-biological program include Metabiota, Black & Veatch and CH2M, with the companies tasked with the construction of facilities and the supply of equipment to labs around the globe. Their work is coordinated by the DoD’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency. On the Big Pharma front, Pfizer, Moderna, Gilead, Dynport Vaccine, AbbVie, Parexel, Eli Lilly & Co, Merck and Battelle are identified as key partners.

Washington’s goals are multifold, Kirillov said, and include the study of the causative agents of “particularly dangerous infections in regions of the world that are strategically important for the United States,” and achieving “superiority” in biomanufacturing, including by using biological espionage against potential geopolitical adversaries.

“Materials received have confirmed that the US military was set the task of monitoring the biological situation in the Middle East and Central Asia, territories bordering China, Turkiye, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia,” Kirillov said. “Over the past year, the Pentagon developed and adopted a number of conceptual documents involving the expansion of the foreign network of US-controlled biological laboratories, and continuing military biological research beyond America’s national jurisdiction.”

Furthermore, the RCBD Troops chief said, 2023 saw the creation of new administrative and technical structures, including the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, and the State Department’s new Bureau of Global Health Security and Diplomacy, with their main aims assumed to be centered on securing the further expansion of America’s military-biological activities worldwide.

“While the stated goals include ‘monitoring infectious diseases’ and providing assistance to developing countries, the example of Ukraine makes clear how the military-biological potential of the United States is being built up,” using such otherwise seemingly benign institutions, Kirillov said.

The RCBD Troops chief pointed out, for instance, that by the time Russia kicked off its military operation in Ukraine, the Pentagon was already deeply engaged in a series of dangerous experiments studying the causative agents of dangerous diseases, including tularemia, anthrax and hantavirus, monitoring the local biological environment, collecting virus strains and studying the susceptibility of the local population to various diseases (including via unethical and potentially illegal experiments against an unwitting civilian population, ed.).

Washington’s European allies engaged in similar projects throughout 2023, promoting a network of ‘Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Risk Mitigation Centers of Excellence’, which Kirillov said are factually aimed at placing biolabs in former Soviet republic countries. The Ukrainian case has shed light on how such institutions are financed via a series of grants to the country’s Science and Technology Center, with similar projects popping up in Central Asia and countries of the Southern Caucasus.

Listing examples of military-biological activities by NATO countries in the former Soviet space, Kirillov pointed to ‘Project 2410’ – conducted with the participation of researchers from the University of Florida, studying natural resistance of the causative agent of the brucellosis virus in domesticated and wild animals, including its possible transmission to human beings.

Another initiative, ‘Project 2513′ deals with risk factors and resistance of virulent enterobacteriaceae, including “isolating strains which are resistant to all known classes of antibiotics.”

“Project 2545 involves modeling the evolutionary changes of individual viruses which are highly pathogenic to humans. The research was supported by the UK Research and Innovation agency,” Kirillov said.

As before, the RCBD Troops chief said, US military-biological research abroad in 2023 was designed to take advantage of gaps in international legislation, allowing scientists to engage in highly risky research abroad which they would be prohibited from doing at home.

“The fact that the United States is blocking any and all international initiatives to verify [its adherence to] the Biological Weapons Convention is of particular concern. This excludes the possibility of checking the activities of laboratories both in the United States and abroad,” Kirillov said, pointing to US efforts to block or ignore Russian questions about the potential violations of the Convention by Kiev and Washington, including as relates to “research carried out on Ukrainian military personnel and the mentally ill, and the concealment by Ukraine and the United States of evidence of cooperation in the military-biological field in international reporting.”

Throughout 2023, Russia continued its efforts to identify individuals engaged in US military-biological activities in Ukraine and elsewhere, from DTRA and Eco-Health Alliance officials to various other government officials and private contractors, including the US Agency for International Development (USAID). The RCBD Troops’ efforts also included uncovering training for potential false flag scenarios to accuse Russia of using bioweapons – including one such training session in Lvov, western Ukraine, in August 2023, involving Ukraine’s Security Service and National Police.

“We have said repeatedly that the work of American military biologists is aimed at the creation of ‘artificially controlled epidemics’, and that it is not controlled within the framework of the Biological Weapons Convention nor the UN Secretary-General’s mechanism for investigating the use of biological weapons,” Kirillov said.

In light of these activities, the RCBD Troops chief expressed concerns about the potential for the “further deterioration” of the global epidemiological situation, including via the creation of new “artificial foci of diseases and an uncontrolled expansion” of disease carriers. The identification of Asian and African disease-carrying mosquitos in European countries, and the increase in the incidence of atypical infections across the region, from dengue to West Nile virus, are all evidence of this deteriorating situation, Kirillov said.

“Of particular concern is the growing number of studies of smallpox and other human-pathogenic orthopoxviruses conducted by US military specialists, [including] assessments of the monkeypox virus as a potential damaging biological agent and searching for agent-based imitators of smallpox viruses,” the senior Russian officer said. “Furthermore, despite the World Health Assembly ban, members of the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases has conducted aerobiological experiments using two strains of the variola virus.”

Such efforts could easily spark a global smallpox pandemic, Kirillov warned, citing the examples of the recent monkeypox pandemic and the increased incidence of cowpox observed over the past decade.

“I will remind you that American researchers are showing keen interest in the synthesis of orthopoxviruses. In 2017, they synthesized the functional genome of the horsepox virus. At the same time, the potential for artificially produced Lassa, Ebola, and Marburg viruses, as well as coronaviruses which are pathogenic to humans, has been demonstrated,” Kirillov said, pointing, for example, to the 2022 research at Boston University to create a new type of SARS-CoV-2 that’s far deadlier than any previously discovered strain.

“The risks of such dual-use research increase significantly when artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies are incorporated. This was clearly demonstrated by one US firm which used an AI-based theraputic compound generator to create potential chemical warfare agents,” the RCBD Troops commander stressed.

Ultimately, Kirillov said, the continued “systematic expansion” of the US’s military-biological programs poses a clear “threat to the security of the Russian Federation and other states considered by the United States as strategic adversaries.”

“The scale of dual-use research conducted in the United States and the global biological risks it creates raise questions on the need for an independent international investigation,” Kirillov said, noting that Russian revelations uncovered over the course of the special military operation in Ukraine have forced even staunch US allies to reconsider their position regarding potential US violations of the Biological Weapons Convention.

January 16, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Israeli war on Gaza was a high-risk gamble that proved a failure: Analyst

By Alireza Hashemi | Press TV | January 16, 2024

The Israeli genocidal war on Gaza was a high-risk gamble that eventually proved a failure, and the rising direct and indirect costs of the war make it difficult for the regime to sustain it, says an analyst.

Mohammad Sadeq Koushki, a Tehran-based political and foreign affairs commentator, in a conversation with the Press TV website, said the Israeli regime has encountered staggering losses with its onslaught on Gaza, which makes it hard for Israeli officials to keep fanning its flames.

“This war is unequal in many aspects. The biggest difference is that the Palestinian side has nothing to lose, and nowhere to go. They have no option but to defend themselves and to continue the war for as long as it takes,” he said, referring to the Palestinian resistance’s upper hand over the occupation.

“But on the other hand, the Zionists have a lot to lose. Those still living in the Israeli-occupied territories went there in the hope that they would have a better life there. Now that doesn’t exist and people are losing their motivation to remain in the occupied lands and have decided to leave.”

Koushki said the indirect costs of the war are also taking a heavy toll on the regime’s economy.

“It’s not just ordinary people leaving. Investors are also leaving. The skilled workforce who went there from Europe and the US are also leaving. Tourists are also afraid of visiting the region,” he noted.

“Reservists, who were summoned by the regime, have also left their jobs. For the first time, a huge population has been displaced, and the regime has to pay for their living expenses.”

Staggering cost of war

He said the Benjamin Netanyahu-led regime has been spending 200 to 250 million dollars per day on the war while continuing to lose their troops and tanks and military vehicles.

“It was a high-risk gamble from the beginning and it has failed. It’s the Zionist settlers who have to pay for this failure. Netanyahu is doing this at their expense. And the costs are rising fast,” Koushki said.

This week, the genocidal war launched by the Israeli regime on Gaza on October 7 completed 100 days, leaving almost 24,000 Palestinians dead, the majority of them children and women.

Despite the high casualty toll in Gaza, the Palestinian resistance groups backed by the people of Palestine have refused to retreat or surrender, or even leave the besieged territory.

According to political pundits, the regime failed to achieve any of its stated objectives of the war.

Of late, the Israeli military claimed that it has shifted to “a new phase” of the war, which it says is focused on the southern part of the blockaded territory.

There have also been reports of Israeli military regiments abandoning northern Gaza without managing to eliminate the Hamas resistance group or destroy its infrastructure.

Israel can’t crush resistance

Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly rejected international calls for a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza, vowing that “no one will stop us” from eliminating the Hamas movement.

Israeli officials say the regime will keep going for months or even years until it achieves its stated goals.

Koushki said Hamas is a manifestation of Palestinian resistance and Israel has never been able to eliminate this resistance throughout the past 75 years of its occupation.

“Hamas is nothing to be destroyed. From the 1990s onwards, hundreds of Hamas commanders were assassinated. The most important leaders. What happened to Hamas,” he asked.

“Even if Israel gets all of Hamas members in Palestine and executes every single one of them, the next generation of Palestinians will be the new Hamas. They can’t eliminate the resistance.”

On calls by various Israeli regime officials for Gazans to be “encouraged” to leave the region, Koushki asserted that Israel’s forced displacement plan is not feasible.

‘Zionists feel cornered’

On recent Israeli attacks inside Syria and Lebanon, which led to the martyrdom of several commanders of the resistance front, including Iran’s Sayyed Razi Mousavi, Koushki said it won’t help the regime.

“Even if Israelis attack Syria or Lebanon 10 times a day, or assassinate five resistance commanders each day, it doesn’t change anything on the ground in Gaza and doesn’t make up for Israel’s huge losses.”

When asked about the effectiveness of attacks by Lebanese, Iraqi, and Yemeni resistance groups against Israeli interests, Koushki highlighted the significant psychological impact of these strikes.

“Those living in the occupied territories feel they’re cornered and this places a huge pressure on them. They feel they’re being attacked from all directions. This is the first time that all occupied territories are insecure. From Eilat in the south to Galilee in the north to even central regions. People feel they don’t belong to this region,” the Iranian analyst told the Press TV website.

Asked whether the US and its allies can deter further anti-Israel operations by the Yemeni military, the analyst said the recent attacks on Yemen have not degraded their capability to attack Israel.

“The point is that Yemenis have imposed a semi-blockade on Israel. Did these attacks stop Yemen from targeting Israel-linked ships? Yemenis have conducted attacks against those ships even after the recent US-UK attacks. So they couldn’t stop Yemen and it’s very hard to believe they can do that shortly.”

South Africa’s genocide case

On South Africa’s genocide case against Israel, he said the regime is unlikely to abide by any ICJ verdict but it would significantly boost the pro-Palestine movement worldwide.

“Israel defied numerous UN resolutions and disregarded the 2004 ICJ ruling on the separation wall. This genocide case would be no exception. But Israel’s flouting of laws will only solidify its status as a pariah in the eyes of its backers in the West and further mobilize global public opinion against the regime.”

January 16, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

COVID-19 Vaccines May Cause Harm Five Years after Injection

US Congressional Testimony from Drs. McCullough, Cole, and Milhoan on Long-Term Health Impact of Genetic Vaccination–Full Hearing

By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH | Courageous Discourse | January 13, 2024

Friday January 12, 2024, Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene held a historic US Congressional Panel in The Rayburn Building on Capitol Hill to learn why COVID-19 vaccination continues to cause record injuries, disabilities, and deaths, even years after the primary series in 2021.

The hearing was attended by Greene (R-GA), Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), US Representatives Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), and Any Biggs (R-AZ) and the witnesses were Dr. Peter McCullough adult internal medicine, cardiology, Dr. Ryan Cole, clinical pathology, and Dr. Kirk Milhoan, pediatrics, pediatric cardiology.

The two hour session was nonstop from opening statements and questions from our lawmakers to the experts. It was live-stream broadcasted through many channels and press took interviews from Greene and Johnson. The audience included stakeholders who have suffered injuries from COVID-19 vaccination, students, corporate executives, independent media, and the Children’s Health Defense.

Dozens of citations are given for the Congressional Record from the peer-reviewed literature, safety databases, and slides were shown demonstrating COVID-19 vaccine Spike protein doing widespread damage to the human body. Dr. McCullough pointed out for genetic products, the FDA regulatory window for safety concerns is five years. Americans are worried. A Rasmussen poll out on the day of the hearing reported 53% of Americans think severe side effects from the vaccines are leading to large numbers of unexplained deaths.

Please take the time to review this hearing and please share it widely with your family, friends, and colleagues. At the end Senator Johnson makes a plea to physicians and other healthcare workers to come forward, be honest in their missteps, and get on the right side of history. COVID-19 vaccination has been a biological safety catastrophe for the world. On January 12, 2024, all three witnesses called for market withdrawal of all COVID-19 vaccine products for safety concerns—its in the record.

Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH

President, McCullough Foundation

www.mcculloughfnd.org

January 14, 2024 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Techno-Hell: ‘Natural’ Breastfeeding Condemned as ‘Ethically Problematic’

By Ben Bartee | Armageddon Prose | January 13, 2024

One would be hard-pressed to imagine a human activity more natural than a mother breastfeeding her infant, aside from, perhaps, eating, sleeping, and sex.

The pharmaceutical front group American Academy of Pediatrics, which touts the virtues of transing children just as soon as it can wrangle their doomed genitals into its vice grip, disagrees.

Via American Academy of Pediatrics

“Medical and public health organizations recommend that mothers exclusively breastfeed for at least 6 months. This recommendation is based on evidence of health benefits for mothers and babies, as well as developmental benefits for babies.

A spate of recent work challenges the extent of these benefits, and ethical criticism of breastfeeding promotion as stigmatizing is also growing.

Building on this critical work, we are concerned about breastfeeding promotion that praises breastfeeding as the “natural” way to feed infants. This messaging plays into a powerful perspective that ‘natural’ approaches to health are better, a view examined in a recent report by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. Promoting breastfeeding as ‘natural’ may be ethically problematic, and, even more troublingly, it may bolster this belief that ‘natural’ approaches are presumptively healthier. This may ultimately challenge public health’s aims in other contexts, particularly childhood vaccination.”

Note the passive-aggressive placement of the term “natural” in quotation marks, so as to emphasize that breastfeeding being natural is a dubious or disputable claim — as if every female mammal on Earth for millions of years hasn’t breastfed its young, as if that’s not, in fact, one of the defining features of mammalism.

Once you’ve downloaded the technocratic paradigm blueprint from which this kind of tripe emerges, the aims of this propaganda come into clearer focus. (Spoiler alert: it’s not about “gender equity” or whatever nonsense.)

As far as I can tell, there are two main biomedical and social control advantages to phasing out breastfeeding as a barbaric, filthy relic of the past, in the tradition of Brave New World:

  • Mothers pass their adaptive immune systems to their babies through breastmilk. One might call this “nature’s pharmacy.” All of the antibodies that the mother has accumulated through her life on Earth are gifted to her baby, to the obvious benefit of the child’s needy and developing immune system.
  • Breastfeeding enhances the mother-child bond, the first and arguably most important social bond that serves as the foundation for all others.

Each of these effects of breastfeeding enhances the baby’s physical and psychological health and fosters a functional society. Conversely, neither enhances pharmaceutical profits or the social control of the state.

Which means — as in the case of mothers protesting school boards a year ago or so over transing kids who were subsequently targeted by the DOJ — promoting breastfeeding is a vocation fit only for domestic terrorists. Will breastfeeding mothers one day find themselves on a DHS watchlist for the sin of feeding their babies?

Transhumanist ideology is hellbent on severing every physical and emotional tie that binds people — actual, biological, honest-to-God people — together and weaponizing human physiology for profit and social control.

The social engineers want us isolated, atomized, afraid, sick, and sad. Ultimately, they want us dead. Anti-humanism is at the heart of their ethics.

Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist.

January 14, 2024 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

55 U.S. Doctors Behind Psychiatric Diagnosis Manual Took $14M From Drug Companies

By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | January 11, 2024

Fifty-five of the U.S. doctors who helped decide what diagnoses and treatments were included in the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) main diagnostic manual received more than $14 million in undisclosed industry funding, a special report in The BMJ revealed.

According to The BMJ :

“The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association standardizes symptom criteria and codifies psychiatric disorders. This manual plays a central role in the approval of new psychiatric drugs and the extension of patent exclusivity, and it can influence payers and mental health professionals who seek third party reimbursements.”

The manual, now in its fifth edition, DSM-5-TR, is often referred to as the “bible” of psychiatric disorders. It was released in 2002 and includes changes made since the APA first published the manual in 2013.

The authors of The BMJ report wrote that “industry influence over the development of this diagnostic guideline can have a profound effect on public health (eg, by broadening diagnostic categories and influencing what drugs will be prescribed and covered by insurance). It is thus critical that authors of this psychiatric taxonomy should be free of industry ties.”

Research consistently shows that conflicts of interest lead to “pro-industry thinking and conclusions,” the authors of the report said.

The BMJ found that the doctors who received the most money — often in the form of food, beverages, travel and consulting reimbursements — were those working in diagnostic areas “where drug interventions are often the standard treatment, such as depressive disorders, neurocognitive disorders, and drug induced movement disorders.”

The study’s lead investigator, Lisa Cosgrove, Ph.D., a professor and clinical psychologist in the Applied Ethics Center at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, told Medscape Medical News, the study’s intent was “not to point fingers at the APA or individual members of the APA but rather to provide hopefully a small piece of research data that would help the APA look at the larger systemic issue of conflicts of interest.”

Justine Tanguay, a lawyer with Children’s Health Defense and research director for the organization’s Reform Pharma initiative, praised the researchers for bringing public awareness to the issue.

Tanguay told The Defender :

“It’s an outrageous concept to think that if a doctor, scientist or public health official is paid or funded by Big Pharma that he or she can present or recommend an independent viewpoint.

“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that even the perception of a conflict of interest undermines the integrity of medicine.”

The Reform Pharma campaign is working “to systematically remove Big Pharma corruption and to restore the healthcare system” — which is needed now more than ever because “such conflicts of interest … have become the norm,” Tanguay said.

A problem for over a decade

Cosgrove — who previously served as a research fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University — has for over a decade studied conflicts of interest among contributors to the APA’s manual.

The high percentage of doctors with industry ties reported by the latest BMJ study, published Wednesday, mirrors the findings reported in her previous work.

“What we also see that’s consistent with our 2016 study and 2012 study is the panels for which the members had the most financial ties to industry were those for which pharmaceutical interventions are the first line of therapy,” Cosgrove said.

After duplicate names had been removed, The BMJ identified 168 individuals who served as either panel or task force members of the DSM-5-TR. Of those, 92 met the inclusion criteria of being a physician based in the U.S. and therefore could be included in Open Payments, a publicly accessible database.

Eighty-six of the doctors were panel members for the DSM-5-TR. The other six were task force members who also had decision-making powers.

Of these 92 individuals, 55 (60%) received payments from industry. The authors used OpenPayments to look at the funding the 92 doctors received from 2016 to 2019 — the years just before and during the development of the DSM-5-TR.

The amounts ranged from just under $14 per doctor to $2.7 million per doctor. Collectively, the doctors received more than $14.2 million.

Cosgrove and her co-authors found it particularly unethical that more than one-third of the doctors received money as “compensation for services other than consulting, including serving as faculty or as a speaker at a venue other than a continuing education program.”

In other words, these individuals were hired by drug companies as “key opinion leaders” to speak at pro-industry events. Cosgrove and her co-authors said:

“Being on a speakers bureau or being a key opinion leader is widely recognized as an egregious financial conflict of interest because the role of the key opinion leader is essentially a marketing one; the talks given are usually presented at educational events sponsored by industry.”

Dr. Bernard Lo, professor emeritus of medicine and director emeritus of the Program in Medical Ethics at the University of California, San Francisco, agreed. He told Medscape that key opinion leaders are hired by drug companies to give talks, meaning they are used by the industry as “basically salespeople trying to increase sales of a product.

Full public disclosure needed

Before the development of the DSM-5, the APA claimed the organization’s goal was to develop a “transparent process of development for the DSM, and … an unbiased, evidence-based DSM, free from any conflicts of interest.”

An APA spokesperson told Medscape that DSM-5-TR decision-makers were not allowed to participate if the organization was made aware they had received more than $5,000 in industry payments and that all who worked on the text revision were required to disclose all sources of income prior to their participation.

“The APA implemented and enforced a rigorous process for DSM-5-TR that required transparency by all contributors of their personal and professional interests, followed by an independent review to ensure that personal and professional interests did not bias any results,” the spokesperson said.

The study’s findings, however, contradicted that claim by the APA. And the APA did not publicly disclose industry ties for the latest edition of the manual, according to the study authors.

The APA also did not publicly disclose minutes of the DSM meetings, summaries of changes proposed by the panel and task force members or reasons for those changes.

Public disclosure of all industry funding is critical, according to Lo.

“Part of the report should be, ‘Here are the conflicts of interest reported by the members of the panel’ … Failure to do that in the DSM-5-TR is unacceptable from an ethical and transparency point of view,” Lo said.

The APA’s failure to adequately address conflicts of interest doesn’t promote transparency or public trust in the diagnostic criteria published in the DSM-5-TR, he said.

Tanguay agreed. “In order to have trust in medicine, we need to have transparency, whether it covers medical research, scientific publications or public health policy.”

Those with industry ties should be barred

Cosgrove recommended the APA follow the 2011 report, “Clinical Practice Guidelines We Can Trust,” produced by the Institute of Medicine (IOM, now called the National Academy of Medicine). The report is an updated and streamlined version of a 2009 conflicts of interest guideline co-authored by Lo.

“The IOM recommends that the whole guideline development group be free of industry ties,” Cosgrove said. “At a minimum, the chair … and the majority of folks should not have ties to industry.”

Tanguay went further by saying scientists with industry ties should be barred from publication because such ties distort the scientific literature.

Dr. Giovanni A. Fava — a highly regarded researcher and clinician — in 2009 warned, “The increasing influence of the pharmaceutical industry on psychiatric research and practice is leading to an intellectual and clinical crisis.”

While some might argue that banning all those with industry ties would shrink the expert pool that develops the DSM and other guidelines, Cosgrove said that’s not the case.

“There are hundreds of experts in all medical disciplines that do not have industry ties,” she said. “The ‘most experts have industry ties’ is a spurious and unsupported argument.”

The APA should especially ban those who received industry money for serving as key opinion leaders, Lo said.

The APA did not immediately respond to The Defender’s request for comment.

Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

January 14, 2024 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

How Israeli legal squad fumbled, failed, got exposed at ICJ genocide hearing

By Ivan Kesic | Press TV | January 14, 2024

South Africa on Thursday presented compelling evidence of the Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which was followed by incoherent rhetoric by a team of lawyers representing Tel Aviv, who tried to defend the indefensible.

The team of lawyers representing the South African government presented an exhaustive, well-researched 84-page document at the top UN court in the Hague, explaining that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, by using a variety of methods.

They include causing serious bodily and mental hurt, forced evacuation of people, widespread hunger, and bringing about “physical destruction” of people in the small besieged territory.

In their opening remarks, the South African team said they “place Israel’s genocidal acts and omissions within the broader context of Israel’s 56-year occupation, 25-year apartheid, and 16-year siege imposed on the Gaza Strip.”

“The point is not simply that Israel is acting disproportionately. The point is that the prohibition on genocide is an absolute,” said Vaughan Lowe, one of the South African lawyers.

More than 23,500 people have already been killed in Gaza in the past 100 days, a vast majority of them children and women. Thousands more are lost under rubble and presumed dead.

Physicians, aid workers and journalists have also been killed deliberately by the Israeli regime’s forces, and the damage to the civil infrastructure is enormous and disproportionate to anything seen before.

On Thursday, the legal team representing South Africa requested that the court issue emergency measures to stop the relentless aerial bombardment and ground invasion of the Gaza Strip.

With this action, South Africa showed that its people still remember and respect Nelson Mandela’s words: “We know very well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

In its Friday counter-submission, lawyers representing the Israeli regime laid out its “defense”.

Led by veteran British lawyer Malcolm Shaw, the team of lawyers argued that South Africa’s application “distorted” and “decontextualized” Israeli military actions in Gaza.

The team of lawyers representing the regime also made some outlandish claims, repeating lies peddled by the Israeli and Western media, such as the beheading of babies and hospitals not being bombarded.

The lie about Israeli children “beheaded” by the Hamas was debunked long ago. Even the Israeli media recently admitted that the Oct. 7 killings were linked to the regime’s military in line with the so-called Hannibal Directive.

The claim that no hospitals have been bombed by the Israeli regime in Gaza also holds no water. Images of dozens of hospitals being attacked and inmates being killed have been doing rounds on social media.

Such was the confusion that Shaw misplaced a page of his presentation, cutting a sorry figure.

Tal Becker, a legal adviser for the regime’s foreign ministry, presented opening statements, arguing that South Africa had “ignored” the events of October 7 and that Israel had “the right to defend itself.”

He also told the court that the Genocide Convention was drawn up in the aftermath of the Holocaust and that the phrase “never again” is one of “the highest moral obligations” for Israel.

Becker rejected requests for an interim order, arguing South Africa is trying to deny Israel “the opportunity to meet its obligations” to the captives.

Legal experts were quick to criticize Becker’s presentation, primarily because it moralizes based on anachronistic events from World War II, irrelevant to contemporary politics.

This represents the continuation of decades of the Zionist victimhood narrative, by which the Israeli regime’s crimes and dirty policies are sought to be justified by victims from the past.

Becker manipulatively accused South Africa of ignoring October 7, specifically Operation Al-Aqsa Storm, the catastrophic Israeli military defeat that the regime likes to manipulate to be an alleged “war crime.”

In reality, South Africa resolutely placed the genocide in the context of the long-term Israeli occupation, apartheid and siege of Gaza, which the Israeli regime ignored in its presentation and invoked its own interpretation on October 7.

Legal experts point out that Israel’s arguments were abysmally weak and incoherent because no events of that date give the right to a war crime of a disproportionate nature.

They further argue that as an occupying entity that has grabbed the land of Palestine by force, the Israeli regime does not have “the right to self-defense” so this argument also does not hold water.

In 2003, the ICJ ruled that an occupying power cannot claim the right to self-defense, in a case involving Israel’s construction of a separation wall in the occupied West Bank.

The Israeli regime’s legal team claimed that South Africa’s accusation about Zionist officials harboring an inherent intent to destroy the Palestinian people was based on “random assertions.”

That is also a shoddy argument since top regime officials, including parliamentarians, the war minister, the president and the premier have called for genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

After Israel’s final “defense,” South Africa’s Minister of Justice Ronald Lamolathe said the Israeli regime has suffered a shameful defeat.

He also rejected flawed Israeli denials, stressing that genocide “is never declared in advance” and evidence for 13 weeks is at the disposal of the ICJ that shows the Israeli regime has committed genocide.

Ivan Kesic is an independent journalist and researcher.

January 14, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

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