Recently, Elon Musk was interviewed by Joe Rogan where he shared that, early in Covid, he had access to front-line data in China and “talked to doctors from Wuhan,” implying that if we had known what he knew, our use of mechanical ventilation would have been different. That is almost certainly true but he then went on to make several inaccurate statements which I think further fuel widespread misunderstanding and overestimation of the actual negative impacts of mechanical ventilation use during Covid in the U.S.
Now, I find it shocking that I might be putting myself in a position to defend the U.S. Covid response as that would be an outrageous endeavor, however, I take issue with his subsequent statements on mechanical ventilation use as they were almost completely wrong (almost).
I hate misinformation (inaccurate /false information) about Covid and I believe Elon trafficked in the same. I do not believe he did so out of willful, malevolent intent as that would be disinformation (what the now corporate controlled U.S. government regime does to us). His comments were instead borne of a stunning amount of ignorance regarding the real risks of mechanical ventilation and exactly how mechanical ventilation was misused (and not misused) both in China and in the U.S. during that first wave. So, here is my attempt to “set the record straight.”
ELON: “We had 20,000 employees in China and during the first wave we had nobody die and nobody get ill.”
This is both interesting and unsurprising and almost certainly accurate. It brings back harsh memories of all the fear porn that was being blasted out by the world’s media with cherry-picked images of scenes from the hardest hit areas like Wuhan, Lombardy, New York, Seattle etc. They did this while the vast majority of urban areas in the country and around the world did not experience such tidal waves of people in acute respiratory failure.
Although news media trying to get as many eyeballs glued to their shows is not new (i.e. “if it bleeds it leads”) in early Covid, it soon became apparent to many (in my world at least) that they also did so to instill widespread fear to increase compliance with what were soon to be draconian violations of civil liberty, bodily autonomy, informed consent, and free speech. Those violations were deemed necessary in their plight to coerce the entire U.S. population to be vaccinated. This is probably a good time to re-read the anonymous poem I posted last year titled “Message to the Unvaccinated.” Link here:
However, on this point of instilling the greatest amount of fear possible, a recent post by A Midwestern Doctorquoted Scott Atlas, a completely sane member of the White House’s insane Coronavirus Task Force:
As often happened, Fauci spoke up to support Dr. Birx’s concerns, saying people need to be warned even more strongly about the dangers of the virus spreading, about wearing masks and distancing. He claimed Americans didn’t think the virus was serious, and that was the reason cases spread. I was honestly surprised. I thought people were already panic-stricken. Normal life had virtually ceased to exist, even eliminating serious medical care or last visits with dying family. Meanwhile the media were on-message 24/7, instructing the public about masks and social distancing; there were signs and announcements demanding masks and diagrams about distancing everywhere; healthy young people were outside riding bicycles or driving their cars alone, wearing masks. Indeed, surveys showed that most adults perceived grossly exaggerated risks, particularly but not only younger people; and yes, a high percentage were obeying the edicts, distancing and wearing masks, according to virtually every published survey.
I challenged him to clarify his point, because I couldn’t believe my ears. “So you think people aren’t frightened enough?”
He [Fauci] said, “Yes, they need to be more afraid.”
To me, this was another moment of Kafkaesque absurdity. I replied, “I totally disagree. People are paralyzed with fear. Fear is one of the main problems at this point.” Inside, I was also shocked at his thought process, as such an influential face of the pandemic. Instilling fear in the public is absolutely counter to what a leader in public health should do. To me, it is frankly immoral, although I kept that to myself.”
ELON: I called doctors in Wuhan and asked “what are some of the biggest mistakes you made in the first wave” and they said “we put far too many people on mechanical ventilators.”
My motivation for writing this post is to try to correct (but not completely refute) the now widespread, strong belief that it was the “ventilators” that killed people and that if we did not use mechanical ventilators, many lives would have been saved. Or, similarly, “if they hadn’t put my (wife/mother/father etc) on a ventilator, they would be alive today.”
I largely and strongly disagree with the latter assessment (but not completely). The reason for my disagreement is that, based on my experiences running Covid ICU’s at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City, Greenville Memorial Hospital in South Carolina, St. Lukes Medical Center in Milwaukee, and Aspirus Wausau in Central Wisconsin, it wasn’t the vents that killed people. It was the lack of effective treatments being adopted.
Initially, it was the lack of any treatment (i.e. “supportive care only” approaches, particularly at UW) that led to widespread death after what was often weeks on a ventilator and later it morphed into sub-optimal, insufficiently aggressive, sometimes harmful, monolithic treatments like Remdesivir and a modest dose of corticosteroids instead of a broad, multi-component, safe, synergistic combination of therapies such as the MATH+ protocol that FLCCC members were using and recommending for hospital patients (forgive me for I am biased). However, Elon then said the following regarding mechanical ventilation:
“This is what is exactly damaging the lungs it is not Covid. The treatment, the cure is worse than the disease.”
“People yelled at me saying I am not a doctor but I said yeah but I do make spaceships with life support systems, what do you do?”
Well, Elon, although I don’t build spaceships, I actually used and taught mechanical ventilation to keep people alive for a living and did so throughout most of Covid. Further, mechanical ventilation was a deep interest if not passion of mine for almost 20 years prior.
The act of of sedating and paralyzing someone to place an endotracheal tube through their vocal cords and into their trachea is called “intubation” and is required to transition someone to support by an invasive mechanical ventilator. What I witnessed in the first wave (but not later waves) was doctors favoring “early intubation/mechanical ventilation” out of fear that the patient would suddenly crash (intubating a “crashing” patient is a higher risk procedure). And yes, another subtle, but not overt motivation, very early on, was to “protect” staff from exhaled breath due to fear of heated high flow nasal cannulas (this is an intermediate support device often used to avoid intubation) – more on this issue/aspect in Part 3 which is already available here).
Now, although it is true that each extra day on a ventilator can worsen prognosis, the harms are much more from prolonged, poorly responsive illness requiring prolonged sedation and immobility which then cause confusion/delirium and disuse atrophy of the muscles. So for him to say it is the ventilators which damage the lungs more than Covid is completely off – know that patients with neurological injuries affecting respiration can be kept alive safely on ventilators for weeks to months to years to decades without significant “damage” accumulating to the lungs.
Admittedly, the situation of someone with a lung injury is different in that inappropriate ventilator settings can certainly further damage the lungs, but with modern ventilator techniques such as low tidal volumes, daily spontaneous breathing trials, use of appropriate positive-end expiratory pressure, highly responsive inhalation triggers etc, the harms of mechanical ventilation to the lungs are generally minimal.
To wit, I have successfully extubated thousands of patients in my career despite devastating injuries to their lungs requiring prolonged periods on the ventilator, even in situations where the ventilator was particularly difficult to set in order to achieve the holy grail of mechanical ventilation, that of “patient-ventilator synchrony.” All I am saying is that his comment on the harms of mechanical ventilation was grossly overstated to an un-credible degree. He then went further:
“The treatment is worse than the disease.”
Ugh. Mechanical ventilation is not and has never been a treatment, it is simply a means to support a patient’s breathing to keep them alive while you administer therapies (more on this below) to reverse the underlying insult or infection that landed them on the ventilator in the first place – no-one, and I mean no-one in medicine has ever viewed the ventilator as a treatment or cure for anything.
However, the initial practice of “early intubation” caused unmanageable and chaotic situations in many hospitals by increasing demand for ICU rooms and ventilators, but I will argue below that this situation was almost completely fueled by the lack of effective treatments being adopted.
This is a key distinction, i.e the harm of ineffectively or not treating the disease far, far outweighed the harms of intubating too early. Further, “early” intubations largely occurred during the first wave, and as physicians became more familiar with the disease they began to defer intubation to much more advanced degrees of respiratory failure and hypoxemia (obviously there were exceptions to this, but, as I mentioned above, I travelled and worked fairly widely, and in each center I found that the ICU docs quickly learned to defer intubation to as late as possible in Covid induced hypoxemic respiratory failure. This issue is what I will explore in further detail in Part 2.
I instead maintain that the absurdly high death rates in many hospitals in the U.S and across the world in the early waves of Covid was due to an over-reliance on “supportive care only” approaches (i.e. limiting interventions to just supplemental oxygen, fluids, nutrition, fever suppressants, mechanical ventilation). Rarely were effective treatments targeting the underlying pathophysiology being offerred at most academic medical centers based on the widespread belief that patients were dying of a viral pneumonia and that no effective anti-viral therapies existed.
What was not being sufficiently taught or disseminated at that time is that Covid-19 disease had multiple phases, i.e. an early “viral replicative phase” marked by typical viral syndrome symptoms such as cough, fever, congestion, sore throat, fatigue etc with a minority of those patients then going on to develop the later “hyper-inflammatory phase” involving the lungs. The FLCCC tried very hard to alert “the system” to the fact that early studies found no live, culturable virus in patient secretions beyond Day 6 (cue the folks who state there is no virus and/or they don’t exist. To those, all I can offer is this excellent post addressing the issue by A Midwestern Doctor).
Thus, after about Day 6, a minority of Covid-19 patients began to develop morphed a hyper-inflammatory, pulmonary phase due largely to activated macrophages (an immune cell) as well as micro-clumping or clotting of blood cells and proteins. In this latter phase, anti-inflammatory or immunosuppressive therapies combined with anti-coagulants were required (this is why the FLCCC recommended corticosteroids and blood thinners in hospital patients from the outset and were observing excellent results with early use).
To wit, my first paper on Covid (and the one I am most proud of) was initially drafted in April of 2020. I argued then that Covid-19 pulmonary disease was not a viral pneumonia but instead an “organizing pneumonia” (a form of lung injury with many causes (viruses are only one of them) but whose mainstay of therapy is corticosteroids).
From the abstract:
I arrived at that hypothesis after a couple of weeks of being mystified by the repeated presentations of Covid patients with what was called at the time, “happy hypoxia”, i.e. the state of requiring high amounts of supplemental oxygen yet without exhibiting a significant increase in the work of breathing.
I knew I had seen “happy hypoxia” on a couple of occasions in my career but could not remember what was wrong with those patients until one morning during a shower before an ICU shift in New York City it hit me – “these patients remind me of patients with organizing pneumonia!” As soon as I got to work, before my shift, I called Dr. Jeff Kanne at the University of Wisconsin, one of the top chest radiologists in the world and an expert on organizing pneumonia.
“Jeff, what would you say if I told you that I think that all of these Covid patients are suffering from organizing pneumonia?” I asked. His answer? “Of course they are. We wrote this up in March in the journal Radiology after an expert panel that I chaired completed our review of all the CT scans from Wuhan.” They had actually written in their expert report that “the most common reported CT findings in Covid-19 patients are typical of an organizing pneumonia pattern of lung injury.”
“Clinicians don’t read radiology journals,” I shouted into the phone. “We need to publish this in a clinical medical journal! Like NOW!” We quickly agreed that we would write it up together.
I went home after my ICU shift and started working furiously. The paper included radiographic, pathologic, and clinical evidence to try to prove that the pulmonary phase of Covid-19 was an organizing pneumonia and that the first line of therapy for this condition was (wait for it)… corticosteroids.
Note that my paper above was not published until September 2020 due to 5 journals rejecting it, with one journal rejecting it because a peer-reviewer said “this cannot be published until a randomized controlled trial of corticosteroids is conducted.” Welcome to my life.
The problem we in the FLCCC had with getting the world to use corticosteroids in the hospital phase were many and will be explored in Part 2 (already available).
Situated in Gaza City, the Dar Al-Shifa Hospital is the largest medical complex in the Gaza Strip, and has a 700-bed capacity. The IDF has targeted the complex repeatedly over the past week-and-a-half, alleging Hamas’ use of facilities located underneath as a fortified command center. Is there any truth to this story? Sputnik did some digging.
The Israel Defense Forces provided a worrisome explanation for its targeting of hospitals and ambulances in the Gaza Strip on Monday, publishing (and then deleting) an eyebrow-raising X post saying that “for Hamas, ambulances are used to transport its operatives and weapons to disguise them as civilians,” while “hospitals are in fact terrorist infrastructure.”
“This is against international law and turns them into legitimate military targets,” the IDF said.
In the days and weeks before and since, the al-Shifa hospital complex has come under repeated attack. On November 4, an air strike hit an ambulance near the hospital’s entrance, killing 15 people and injuring 60 others. The hospital was targeted a second time on November 6. Finally, on Wednesday, the IDF launched a ground raid inside the facility.
Before mounting its “precise and targeted operation,” the IDF alleged that Hamas had established a secret headquarters burrowed deep underneath the medical complex. In a statement, the military said it had “publicly warned time and again that Hamas’ continued military use of the Shifa Hospital jeopardizes its protected status under international law,” and lamented that the “relevant authorities in Gaza” ignored an IDF ultimatum to “cease” “all military activities within the hospital.”
Several weeks earlier, the IDF released a computer-animated video of a massive alleged underground tunnel and bunker complex it said was situated underneath the hospital complex, including conference rooms, arms and fuel caches and even a makeshift weapons factory. Israeli intelligence followed up by providing interrogation footage of a captured Hamas fighter admitting there was indeed a large underground hardened facility underneath al-Shifa used by the militant group. US intelligence, Pentagon and White House officials chimed in in support of Washington’s Israeli ally, alleging that Hamas has indeed been using tunnels underneath Al-Shifa for “command and control areas as well as weapons storage,” and that “newly declassified intelligence” indicates that the hospital is being used “to support their military operations.”
Hamas has dismissed the allegations, accusing the IDF of using the claims to justify its indiscriminate bombing of the Gaza Strip.
Who Built the Facilities Underneath al-Shifa?
Starting out as an army barracks during the British Mandate for Palestine era, al-Shifa was turned into a hospital in 1946 during the closing years of Britain’s occupation, and expanded into an entire complex of medical facilities during Egypt’s administration of Gaza between 1953 and 1967. Seizing the Strip during the Six-Day War of June 1967, Israel preserved and then expanded the hospital complex, and in the 1980s, with US financial backing, gave it a major overhaul, with Israeli architects Gershon Zippor, Teddy and Ben Kaplan and others tasked with creating its modern-day design, outlining a “Master Plan for the Year 2000” of modern, six-floor buildings spread across a 12.5-acre complex and equipped with what were at the time the latest medical innovations.
Along with the medical facilities, the project reportedly saw the construction of “a secure underground operating room and tunnel network” underneath the Hospital’s Building Number 2 in 1983, with a large “underground concrete floor” constructed underneath the facility during the same period. Other reports indicated that the hardened underground facilities were used to house the hospital’s laundry and “various administrative” offices.
Zippor, notably, had previous experience with underground military facilities, and between 1972 and 1976 engaged in the conversion of bunkers and trenches used during the Six-Day War into the Ammunition Hill Memorial Site and Museum in Jerusalem.
Hamas reportedly knew about the hospital complex’s hidden underground fortified areas, with a 2014 report in Ynet revealing that Zippor’s son, Barak, had mentioned that in the late 1980s, an Israeli contractor “hired Hamas as a security company” for the hospital.
As for the potential use of the underground facilities by Hamas after Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, a 2009 report in Haaretz citing Palestinian sources indicated that the militant group’s leaders never hide in one place, but spread out and constantly change locations using an elaborate network of tunnels.
None of the Israeli reporting on the hospital complex’s construction shows photos of its reported fortified basement areas, and reporters covering Israeli attacks on or near the hospital during Israel’s wars with Hamas in 2008-2009, 2012, 2014 and 2023 have yet to present any direct proof of Hamas’ use of the underground facilities built by the Israelis.
“When it comes to the issue of the bunker or the tunnels underneath the Shifa Hospital, I think one of the reasons that Israel is…asserting this is because every time it has tried to make an assertion regarding Hamas’ operations, those assertions have consistently been debunked,” Sami Hamdi, political analyst and head of International Interest, a UK-based global risk and intelligence company, told Sputnik.
The IDF will undoubtedly hope to find evidence of Hamas using underground facilities and tunnels built in the 1980s as evidence to support its narrative about the Palestinian militant group’s use of civilian infrastructure and noncombatants as human shields, but it remains to be see whether Tel Aviv can actually sway public opinion in this manner, the political analyst believes.
“The point being, I think that when it comes to the Israelis pushing this narrative, it has less to do with the idea that Israel actually believes [it] and more about a desperate attempt to try to win back public opinion that it has emphatically lost as a result of the bombardment of social media videos showing the realities of the atrocities that are being committed in Gaza,” Hamdi said.
Mehmet Rakipoglu, a researcher at Dimensions for Strategic Studies, a London-based think tank, points to the irony of the IDF accusing Hamas of using bunkers and tunnels underneath Gaza’s civilian infrastructure when Israel itself appears to have built the “secret shelter” under the Shifa hospital in the first place.
“It is obvious that Hamas did not use the hospital as a shield. Even though Israel tries to manipulate public opinion with amateur videos, the truth is clear,” Rakipoglu told Sputnik.
So far, “the places that Israel claims to be used by the ‘Hamas terrorist cells’ and as tunnels are spare water tanks,” the observer said, referring to social media posts mocking the IDF’s reported ‘proof’ of alleged militant tunnel networks in civilian areas which turn out to be mere water containers, heaters and septic tanks.
Having successfully accomplished the destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States is estimating that in Ukraine too, destruction is nearly complete. At the recent meeting of the foreign and defence ministers of the US and India in New Delhi in the 2+2 format, the two countries “concurred on the need for post-conflict reconstruction” in Ukraine. It is an assertion that is out of sync with ground realities.
The Indians and Americans are whistling in the dark. Going forward, in fact, a whole new phase of Russia’s special military operations is to be expected and it is up in the air how Ukraine might look like in the aftermath.
There is much unfinished business left with regard to the so-called “South Russian lands” comprising Novorossiya, the historical name used during the Czarist era for the administrative area immediately north of the Black Sea and Crimea.
In remarks at a recent meeting on November 3 on the eve of the National Unity Day with members of the federal and regional heads of civic chambers at the Victory Museum in Moscow, President Vladimir Putin repeated once again that Russia is “defending our moral values, our history, our culture, our language, including by helping our brothers and sisters in Donbass and Novorossiya to do the same. This is the key to today’s events.”
A noted political figure from Ukraine, Vladimir Rogov who used to be a lawmaker in Kiev reminded Putin with passionate intensity, “Believe me, we, people living in the southern part of Russia, which was cut off from its roots for 30 years, are, in fact, a storehouse of the Russian people’s historical forces, which was mothballed and could not make any efforts to regenerate our great Russia.”
Putin responded by underscoring the historical fact that Novorossiyaconstituted “the South Russian lands – all the Black Sea region and so on” that were founded by Catherine the Great after a series of wars with the Ottoman Empire.
Putin said that the Russian Federation chose to come to terms with the unfair, unjust move by the Soviet leadership to transfer the South Russian lands to Ukraine, but things began to change when the regime in Kiev “started to exterminate everything Russian…, declared that Russians are not an indigenous nation in these lands…, also started dragging this entire territory into NATO – brazenly, without heeding any of our protests, without paying attention to our position, as if we did not exist at all. This is what lies at the centre of the conflict that is taking place today. This is the cause of this conflict .”
Putin said the choice narrowed down to doing nothing or to “stand up in defence of the people living there… we need to do everything we can to ensure that the entry of these territories [into Russian Federation] is smooth, natural, and that people feel the result as quickly as possible.”
This was not the first time Putin expressed such views. But the context in which he spoke is important, as it has more than one salience, aside from the Russian psyche as a civilisation state — the tidings from the battlefields; Russia’s transition as a war economy; Europe’s inability to substitute for the US retrenchment due to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
First, the Ukrainian counteroffensive has ended in failure and another such misadventure is highly unlikely if only because Ukraine has no manpower left. The Russian military is gaining the upper hand.
Putin made an unexpected overnight visit last week to Rostov-on-Don, the operational centre for Russia’s war effort in Ukraine — the second such visit to the military headquarters in less than a month. Accompanied by Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and the commander of military operations in Ukraine Gen.Valéri Gerassimov, Putin was shown new military equipment and heard reports on the military’s progress in Ukraine, according to the Kremlin.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov later said Russia is pressing ahead with its goals in Ukraine. This is one thing.
Now, this is happening when the European Union nations acknowledged on Tuesday that they may be on the way to failing Ukraine on their promise of providing the ammunition Kiev’s military dearly needs to stave off an expected Russian offensive.Amidst much fanfare early this year, EU leaders had promised to ramp up production and provide 1 million rounds of ammunition to Ukraine’s front line by spring 2024 but is finding it tough to come up with the goods.
In comparison, Russia now produces more ammunitions than the US and Europe; it can manufacture 200 tanks and two million units of ammunition in a year. This asymmetry has serious consequences for the attritional war in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Alexander Mikheyev, the chief executive of Rosoboronexport, was bullish on Tuesday, saying, “I can say with certainty that the current portfolio of orders is worth more than $50 billion… Today, we see that interest is even greater than it was before because our equipment — all aircraft, armoured vehicles, air defence systems, small arms, high-precision weapons — performed well in the conditions of the special military operation [in Ukraine.] So, either the partners are already coming back, or the long pause we had is over.”
Suffice to say, not only is the Russian defence line well equipped and fortified but the mobilisation of the defence industry is also beginning to show results. Plainly put, Russia can carry on with the attritional war in Ukraine for years to come, as its war economy has put the special military operations on “self-financing”, “cost accounting” principles, while normal life moves on. (The Russian economy is expecting a 3 percent growth this year.)
To be sure, the Kremlin also would have taken note of US President Joe Biden’s audacious characterisation, during the recent address to the nation after his visit to Israel, of military aid to Ukraine and Israel as “a smart investment that’s going to pay dividends for American security for generations.”
Then, of course, there is the worsening external security environment. Thus, at a recent meeting on security, Putin compared the US to a spider:
“It is necessary to know and understand where the root of evil is, that spider who is attempting to wrap the entire planet, the entire world, into its web and wishing to achieve our strategic defeat on the battlefield…
“Fighting precisely this enemy within the framework of the special military operation, we are yet again boosting the positions of all those who are battling for their independence and sovereignty… The truth is that the more Russia is growing stronger and our society is becoming more unified, the more effectively we will be able to stand both for our own national interests and the interests of those nations that fell victim to the West’s neocolonial policy.”
Therefore, the increasingly frequent references in the Russian political discourse to the preservation of the Russian way of life, culture and values in Novorossiya can be deduced as highly meaningful markers on what lies ahead in the special military operations.
The Deputy chairman of Russia’s security council, Dmitry Medvedev was explicit recently that Novorossiya [New Russia] would include Odessa and Nikolayev as well — and possibly Kiev itself — which would probably leave Lvov in western Ukraine as the landlocked rump state on the Polish border available for NATO membership eventually.
Medvedev wrote today on Telegram channel: “America easily betrays “its sons of bitches” when they become useless. It seems that this period is definitely coming for Kiev. And it’s not just the swarms of Republicans and Democrats heading into the U.S. presidential election. Just tired already. They got it — they eat too much money, steal wildly and do not achieve military success. Plus, the Israeli-Palestinian mess happened. In short, the support of the untied “son of a bitch” is nearing an inevitable end. Of course, not at once. There will also be a lot of money, schizoid spells about democracy, bravura assurances about the coming victory on earth, and false beliefs about alliance for all time and other and other. But the situation is clear: the time to go into oblivion for another American “son of a bitch” is coming.”
Clearly, it is surreal to even contemplate a US-Indian collaboration for the reconstruction of Ukraine. The cruel fate that awaits Ukraine may turn out to be far worse than what Iraq and Afghanistan experienced.
In a new verdict concerning medical freedom and free speech, another Canadian nurse could face de-certification. Delegate Leah McInnes, a Saskatchewan nurse, had a grievance filed against her by a colleague on September 26, 2021, after her social media posts spoke out against the compulsion for COVID-19 vaccines. Despite advocating their usage, she expressed strong resistance to the imposition of medical measures.
Between August and October 2021, McInnes publicly criticized the government’s pandemic strategy via social media, triggering an investigation by Saskatchewan’s College of Registered Nurses (CRNS) into her nonworking hours advocacy. She was accused by the governing body of propagating “misinformation” through expressing differing opinions, such as her promise to campaign for the removal of “unjustly excessive mandates” and the violation of individuals’ medical record privacy.
She was subsequently charged with “professional misconduct” under the Registered Nurses Act, for her social media posts and involvement in the protest. They argue she abused her authority and operated outside her professional domain.
As reported by Rebel News, the College suggested that McInnes confess to professional misconduct, albeit she stood firm with her convictions in defense of free speech rights. Subsequently, they raised a Notice of hearing against her, which encompassed an updated list of allegations against her.
The listing includes her participation in a demonstration against vaccine mandates, alongside posting “anti-vaccine messages” online, her legal representation at the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms stated.
In the judgment by the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal, Strom v. Saskatchewan Registered Nurses Association, it was quoted that objections, even by service providers, do not necessarily deplete assurance in healthcare providers or the healthcare infrastructure. It argues that candid expression could “boost confidence… of this enormous and ambiguous arrangement,” and usher in progressive changes.
Andre Memauri, one of the accused’s attorneys, stated “The Discipline Committee will hear how Ms McInnes protested against vaccine mandates and vaccine passports in support of patient autonomy, dignity and privacy adhering to her ethical obligations.” He disputes that the regulatory authority “released misleading information” about his client.
Memauri added, “It’s regrettable that a certified nurse in the Province of Saskatchewan is again experiencing regulatory backlash for legitimate criticism of the healthcare system, post the Court of Appeal’s verdict in Strom.”
When Dr. Robert Sullivan collapsed on his treadmill three weeks after his second COVID-19 vaccine in early 2021, he fell into a “nightmare” ordeal that he said exposed glaring deficiencies in the nation’s vaccine safety monitoring system.
But like others interviewed in a recent investigation by The BMJ, Sullivan hit barrier after barrier when trying to submit and update his report.
Almost three years later, still grappling with debilitating symptoms, Sullivan’s experience highlights the systemic problems with the U.S. adverse events monitoring system run jointly by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
From doctors unable to file reports to disappearing data, limits on transparency and lack of resources to follow up on concerning vaccine reactions, experts warn VAERS is failing to detect critical safety signals.
According to one of those experts — VAERS researcher Albert Benavides, whose experience includes HMO claims auditing, data analytics and revenue cycle management — VAERS’ failure isn’t accidental.
“It is not broken,” Benavides wrote in his Substack coverage of The BMJ investigation. “VAERS runs cover for the big pharma cabal.”
‘They even delete legitimate reports’
Like others interviewed by The BMJ, Sullivan experienced limited follow-up after submitting his VAERS report. He received only a temporary report number months after his initial submission.
A physician named “Helen” (pseudonym) told The BMJ that fewer than 20% of concerning reports get follow-up, including many deaths she reported.
In consultation with Benavides, an audit by React19 found that 1 in 3 COVID-19 vaccine adverse events reports in VAERS were either not posted publicly or were deleted. React19 is a nonprofit that collects stories of people injured by the mRNA vaccines.
According to The BMJ, of those queried by React19, “22% had never been given a permanent VAERS ID number and 12% had disappeared from the system entirely.”
Benavides, who publishes the VAERSAware dashboards documenting many of the problems with VAERS, said there is even deeper dysfunction in the VAERS system — from inventing symptoms to deleting reports.
“VAERS does not publish all legitimate reports received,” Benavides told The Defender. “They throttle publication of reports. They even delete legitimate reports.”
For a system dependent on voluntary engagement, these restrictive policies keep critical data hidden, according to Benavides.
In 2007, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) contracted with Harvard Pilgrim Health Care (HPHC) to review the VAERS system. In 2010, HPHC filed its r report, which determined that 1 in 39 people experienced vaccine injuries and that only around 1% of vaccine-related injuries or deaths are ever reported to VAERS.
The CDC, which operates under HHS, scuttled the study, refused to take calls from the researchers and declined to upgrade the VAERS system when a new, much more effective system was developed.
‘Blind spots are self-created’
VAERS “collects reports of symptoms, diagnoses, hospital admissions, and deaths after vaccination for the purpose of capturing post-market safety signals,” according to The BMJ.
But the limited transparency of VAERS data presents barriers to proper analysis, according to The BMJ’s investigation and researchers like Benavides.
The public — including doctors and other report submitters — can access only incomplete initial reports, not updates with vital details.
This means outcomes like death are often excluded if the initial report was for an injury and a subsequent death report was filed.
“I made the false assumption that my conversation [with VAERS] would result in an adjustment to the publicly reported case,” Patrick Whelan, M.D., Ph.D., told The BMJ.
Whelan, a rheumatologist and researcher at the University of California Los Angeles, in 2022 filed a report of a cardiac arrest in a 7-year-old male patient after COVID-19 vaccination.
“I assumed that, since it was a catastrophic event, the safety committee would want to hear about it right away,” Whelan said. But nobody called him or requested an update after his submission.
“There was no mechanism for [updating] it,” Whelan told The BMJ. “The only option I had was to make a new VAERS report.” Without updates, the VAERS data showed that the boy was still hospitalized.
Whelan is one the authors of a recent critique of the Cochrane Review that concluded the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines were not dangerous.
The problem with VAERS is not limited to a lack of adequate follow-up but to the incomplete and often inaccurate information found there.
“VAERS in effect allows typos, truncated lot #’s, UNK [unknown] ages, UNK vax dates, UNK death dates, etc. to pass through into publication,” Benavides said.
Benavides said specific data — including ethnicity, hospital names, attending physicians, submitter’s relationship to the patient, patient and submitter addresses, telephone numbers and emails — collected by VAERS are not published,
“Any blind spots are self-created, in my opinion,” he said.
Agencies maintain two separate VAERS databases — public gets to see only one
“There’s two parts to VAERS, the front end and back end,” stated Narayan Nair, division director for the FDA’s Division of Pharmacovigilance at a December 2022 meeting with advocates, according to The BMJ. “Anything from medical records by law can’t be posted on the public-facing system,” he said.
The BMJ investigation discovered that the FDA and CDC maintain two separate VAERS databases, one available to the public that contains only initial reports, and a private back-end system containing all of the updates and corrections.
“Anything derived from medical records by law” cannot be posted on the public-facing system, Nair told the advocates, according to The BMJ.
In an apparent contradiction to this claim, The BMJ noted the FDA’s Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS), which collects post-marketing information on drug reactions, posts its updates publicly.
Sullivan, who met Nair years before COVID-19 and considers him a friend, told The Defender that if this “very bright, kind and caring person” could not fix VAERS, “I don’t think it’s fixable.”
CDC says it reviewed 20,000 reports of deaths — none were related to COVID shots
Withholding outcome data like deaths obscures critical safety signals, experts contend.
James Gill, a medical examiner, reported the death of a 15-year-old patient after vaccination, but the case was dismissed by the CDC despite autopsy evidence, according to the BMJ investigation.
Physician “Helen” told The BMJ that after filing reports on her medical patients, including six who had died, she received only a single request for medical records on the death and two for hospital-admitted patients.
The standard operating procedure for COVID-19 vaccine reports in VAERS, according to The BMJ, is for reports to be processed quickly and for “serious reports” to receive special review by CDC staff.
However, while some other countries have acknowledged the probable connection between the mRNA vaccines and death, the CDC, while claiming to have reviewed nearly 20,000 death reports, has yet to acknowledge a single death linked to the COVID-19 vaccines, The BMJ said.
Benavides provided The Defender examples of VAERS “deleting legitimate reports,” not just duplicates or false claims.
“VAERS even deleted dead Pfizer Trial patients,” he said, claiming that this report, for example, was not a “duplicate” and did not appear to be fake.
Benavides said:
“There are currently about 50 deaths that are not counted as deaths because the correct box is not checked off.
“There are thousands of reports and about 100 deaths in ‘UNKNOWN VAX TYPE’ in VAERS. Read the narrative to see these are clearly C19 jab-related deaths.
“There are over a thousand cardiac arrests where they are not marked as dead, and I question if they actually survived because there is no mention of ROSC [return of spontaneous circulation].”
“Why couldn’t VAERS populate the ages of these dead kids before publication?” Benavides said, pointing to this report on his website.
Physicians report only FDA-recognized adverse events
Ralph Edwards, former director of the Uppsala Monitoring Centre and until recently editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Risk & Safety in Medicine, told The BMJ the regulators may be relying too heavily on past epidemiological data, especially for new types of adverse events. “If something hasn’t been heard of before, it tends to be ignored,” he said.
Without guidance to report potential risks, doctors also face barriers. “Physicians are only willing to talk about FDA-recognized vaccine adverse events,” stated physician “Helen” in a 2021 meeting between the FDA and physicians and advocates, according to The BMJ.
Svetlana Blitshteyn, a neurologist and researcher at the University at Buffalo, New York, told The BMJ if physicians are not educated to look for a specific condition, they’re unlikely to test for it or know how to treat it.
Sullivan told The Defender he believes his experience of developing pulmonary hypertension after taking the mRNA vaccine is one such safety signal the CDC and FDA are overlooking — a condition he believes many athletes have unknowingly developed.
Sullivan co-authored a paper of his and one other similar case of post-vaccine pulmonary hypertension. According to the paper:
“Pulmonary hypertension is a serious disease characterized by damage to lung vasculature and restricted blood flow through narrowed arteries from the right to left heart. The onset of symptoms is typically insidious, progressive and incurable, leading to right heart failure and premature death.”
“Athletes are canaries in the coal mine,” Sullivan told The Defender, speaking of the unusual numbers of athlete deaths since the rollout of the vaccine. Sullivan thinks that those with superior physical conditioning, like him, stand a better chance of survival with early detection.
However, he said, “Athletes will get echocardiography, and it will be essentially normal. The only way to tell for sure is to do a right-heart catheterization” that can identify the anomaly.
Sullivan believes the lives of many athletes could still be saved if the reporting system recognized and investigated the signal — and said he would be happy to join a project dedicated to this goal.
He also told The Defender he believes many of the sudden deaths reported in the 25- to 44-year-old age group are a result of this hidden condition.
‘The buck stops with the CDC for reforms’
Critics point to choices by the CDC as compounding VAERS’ passive design and understaffing issues.
Despite over 1.7 million reports since the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, staffing was not boosted accordingly, according to statements the CDC made to The BMJ.
A Freedom of Information Act request by The BMJ revealed Pfizer has nearly 1,000 more full-time employees working on vaccine surveillance than the CDC. Records showed in 2021, Pfizer on-boarded 600 additional full-time employees to handle the volume of adverse reports and planned to hire 200 more.
Physician “Helen” in The BMJ article called for an end to the “negative feedback loop” whereby the FDA fails to list adverse reactions because passive surveillance systems like the FDA’s don’t display them, while at the same time, because of that lack of disclosure, “physicians are blinded to the adverse reactions in their patients, and thus aren’t reporting them.”
“The buck stops with the CDC for reforms needed to open up data,” Benavides told The Defender, adding several suggestions that could immediately improve VAERS:
“Revert back to pre-January 2011 when VAERS did append initial reports with follow-up data, including death. Take off the arbitrary 30-minute time limit to file a report before getting kicked off. Make the process easier to submit follow-up data.”
When asked why the incompetence of VAERS had been allowed to continue for so long, Sullivan told The Defender, “Because of the lack of product liability” for the vaccines “and the surge to defend economic interests.”
Sullivan said he’d like to see the following changes to the system:
Pharmaceutical advertising banned.
Pharmaceutical company revenues devoted to advertising instead be spent on R&D.
The tax money collected on pharma profits be directly sent to victim injury funds.
Yale cardiologist takes on study of COVID vaccine injuries
Benavides said he spoke with Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) Monday and is also in discussion with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic to address the concerns with VAERS, including the under-publishing of reports.
“That’s a long overdue prospect and it would be incredible to actually get some analysis by that committee,” he said.
Another bright spot comes from news reported in The BMJ’s investigation that Dr. Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist and researcher at Yale University, has been recruiting members of React19 to study their vaccine injuries.
“We are working hard to understand the experience, clinical course, and potential mechanisms of the ailments reported by those who have had severe symptoms arise soon after the vaccination,” Krumholz told The BMJ.
Sullivan told The Defender that medical science is “just beginning to catalog the damage to the heart” from the vaccines but that “in order to treat something, you have to diagnose it” — and that, because of the shortcomings with VAERS, “we have yet to scratch the surface of that.”
Sullivan, now almost three years into his ordeal, is outliving his initial prognosis.
“I have a grim diagnosis hanging over me, but I’m optimistic because I’m still here,” he said. “I had something bad happen to me, but I’ve met so many amazing, wonderful people along the way who are just interested in truth.”
“I’m going to live the best and most productive life I can with the time I have left,” Sullivan said, helping others who “have this cloud hanging over their future.”
John-Michael Dumais is a news editor for The Defender. He has been a writer and community organizer on a variety of issues, including the death penalty, war, health freedom and all things related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Although they spend a lot of time and resources pretending that they are “democrats” and not racists, Zionists are often, especially in a crisis situation, very clear about what they believe.
We see settlers regularly on the streets of occupied Palestine chanting provocative slogans such as “may your village burn”, and “death to Arabs” and also calling for a second Nakba.
But the racist and genocidal nature of Zionism goes right to the top.
What follows is a series of inflammatory and deeply racist statements by Zionists, all uttered after 7 October 2023 and the launch of the Al Aqsa Storm (also known as Al Aqsa Flood) operation by the Hamas-led Palestinian resistance.
“I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals.”
Yoav Gallant, Israeli military affairs minister, 9 October 2023
“Israel needs to increase the humanitarian pressure on the Gaza Strip so that eventually hundreds of thousands of hungry and thirsty Gazans will break through the Rafah crossing.”
Tzachi Levi, Israel National News, 20 October 2023
“I am very puzzled by the constant concern which the world, … is showing for the Palestinian people and is actually showing for these horrible inhuman animals who have done the worst atrocities that this century has seen.”
Dan Gillerman, Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations, 25 October 2023
“We are sons of light, they are sons of darkness. And light will prevail over darkness.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Prime Minister, 25 October 2023
“Do not leave a stone upon a stone in Gaza. Gaza needs to turn to Dresden, Yes! Complete incineration, No more hope…. Annihilate Gaza Now! Now!”
Moshe Feiglin, leader of the libertarian Zionist party Zehut, former Knesset member, 26 October 2023
“If we were dealing with humans, we’d send humanitarian aid, but we’re dealing with animals.”
Rabbi Meir Mazuz, October 2023
“It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true.”
Israeli President Isaac Herzog, 12 October 2023.
“You have to be very careful. Let me tell you we are going to finish this war, we are going to win, because we are stronger. After this Russia will pay the price. Russia will pay the price. Russia is supporting the enemies of Israel. Russia is supporting Nazi people who want to commit genocide on us. And Russia will pay the price.”
Amir Weitmann, a senior member of Likud party, on RT, 19 October 2023
“This is not Auschwitz – This is Hamas! We are not fighting against humans – we are fighting monsters! Israel will not stop until Hamas is destroyed! This is what I said at the General Assembly podium when I showed footage of Israeli civilians burnt alive by Hamas and of Hamas savages.”
Gilad Erdan, Israel ambassador to the United Nations, 26 October 2023
“Are you serious asking about Palestinian civilians? What’s wrong with you?”
Former Israeli PM Naftali Bennett on Sky News after being asked – “What about the babies in incubators in Gaza whose life support has been turned off because the Israelis have cut off the power”, 12 October 2023
“Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48. Nakba in Gaza and Nakba to anyone who dares to join!”
Ariel Kallner, Likud party, member of the Knesset
“Be triumphant and finish them off and don’t leave any behind. Erase the memory of them Erase them, their families, their mothers and their children. These animals can no longer live.”
Ezra Yachin, 95, former Stern Gang terrorist, now back in the occupation forces. October 2023
These are only a sample of the many genocidal statements issued by Zionist leaders and cheerleaders from the past month alone.
Many more can be found online in various useful threads, compilations and videos.
The epidemic of genocidal statements in the period after October 7 has shocked the world and rightly so. But, of course, Zionism has always been an ideology and a practical movement that is intrinsically racist and inherently genocidal.
To establish a “Jewish state” in historic Palestine, Zionists deemed it necessary to find a way to eliminate the natives either by killing them or forcing them to leave.
In his 1896 book The Jewish State, a foundational text for the Zionist racist movement, Theodor Herzl explained that the Zionist movement should appeal to European imperial powers to support the creation of a “Jewish state” in Palestine.
To help bolster support for Zionism among European imperialists, Herzl presented Zionism as a civilising mission, saying, “To Europe, we would represent a part of the barrier against Asia; we would serve as the outpost of civilization against barbarism.”
During his trip to Palestine in 1898, Herzl said that “large-scale drainage operations and the elimination of swamps … could make [Palestine] habitable [for Europeans]” and that, “Such Arabs, as are immune to the fever, might be used for the work”.
He went on to say “If we move into a region where there are wild animals to which the Jews are not accustomed – big snakes, etc. – I shall use the natives, prior to giving them employment in their transit countries [i.e. before they are deported], for the extermination of these animals.”
In April 1905, at a talk in Manchester, England, leading Zionist ideologue Israel Zangwill said, “[We] must be prepared …. to drive out by the sword the [Arab] tribes in possession … or to grapple with the problem of a large alien population, mostly Mohammedan”.(Masalha, The Politics of Denial: Israel and the Palestinian Refugee Problem, Pluto Press 2003: 15)
The Council of the Jewish Agency responded to the 1938 Peel Commission by constituting a Population Transfer Committee, to plan the compulsory removal of Palestinians, to take place, as they put it, not “by preaching ‘sermons on the mount’ but by machine-guns”.(Porter et al. (eds), Faith in the Millennium Sheffield Academic Press 2001: 79)
Later, in 1941, Ben-Gurion, the Labour Zionist leader and first Prime Minister of the Zionist entity said, “It is impossible to imagine general evacuation [of Palestinians from the land] without compulsion and brutal compulsion”. (Masalha: 19)
Today the ‘brutal compulsion’ continues as the Zionists try and finish the job of eliminating the natives either by killing them or by forcing them out into the Sinai or Jordan.
It’s not just the “far right”, it’s not just the revisionists, it’s not just the centrists, it’s not just the labour Zionist tradition, it’s not just the “socialist” Zionists.
Zionism at its root is a racist and genocidal ideology. It must be eradicated.
David Miller is the producer and co-host of Press TV’s weekly Palestine Declassified show. He was sacked from Bristol University in October 2021 over his Palestine advocacy.
Health Canada recognizes that Pfizer committed fraud. The shots turn out to be even worse than I thought. They contain large quantities of DNA, and multiple genetic sequences including a very dangerous SV40 promoter sequence which promotes permanent genetic modification, disease, and cancer. Sadly, innocent people are uninformed and lining up for injections that they would never agree to if they knew what was in them and what it can do to them.
Here is my ten minute video to update you, with a focus on current priorities and strategies. Crisis is a combination of danger and opportunity. The SV40 revelation marks severe danger, but it is also an opportunity to finally set things right. This video includes genuinely kind and honest advice for the CPSO administrators and staff; and a small request for you to please share your judgement of me as a doctor with the CPSO.
Please Share Your Judgment of Dr Trozzi with the CPSO here:
COLLEGE DENIES DR. TROZZI’S RIGHT TO FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION
We are the Administrative State and You are Not
The Ontario Physicians and Surgeons Discipline Tribunal has ruled that Dr. Mark Trozzi is guilty of professional misconduct and dishonourable conduct and is incompetent in the practice of medicine for questioning the government’s Covid-19 narrative. He was also found guilty of professional misconduct and was deemed incompetent for writing medical exemptions for Covid-19 injections in support of a patient’s right to refuse coerced medical treatment under Ontario’s Health Care Consent Act and section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
In 2021, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario established three Covid-19 restrictions through website statements — doctors were forbidden from: (i) making any statements that discourage anyone from following Covid-19 public policies and recommendations; (ii) prescribing alternative Health Canada approved medications for the treatment of Covid-19; and (iii) writing medical exemptions for Covid-19 injections, unless a patient had suffered a severe allergic reaction or developed myocarditis after a first shot. Based on the restrictions relating to freedom of expression and medical exemptions, the College issued investigation orders against Dr. Trozzi in 2021.
This eventually led to a five-day hearing in July of 2023 during which the College Tribunal focused its prosecution on Dr. Trozzi’s daily newsletter at drtrozzi.org, where he had supposedly caused harm by spreading “misinformation” about Covid-19 science. The College was particularly concerned with Dr. Trozzi’s view that neither Big Pharma nor Health Canada had done the due diligence required to prove the Covid-19 injections were safe and effective. The Tribunal concluded that his views were inflammatory, unprofessional and worthy of censure. On November 10th, the Tribunal will hold a penalty hearing to determine whether to revoke the licence of the 25-year ER veteran and former university professor.
Trozzi’s lawyer, Michael Alexander, commented: “The Tribunal wrote up the prosecution’s position on almost every issue. The one saving grace was the College’s acknowledgement that the right to free expression includes the right to make statements that may be wrong or mistaken. However, that position is difficult to reconcile with the Tribunal’s view that Dr. Trozzi can be punished for spreading misinformation.“
He added: “The Tribunal did not address our argument that the College lacked the authority to investigate and prosecute Dr. Trozzi since its Covid-19 restrictions were merely recommendations rather than binding rules or regulations, even though we cited the Ontario Divisional Court and the Ontario Court of Appeal in support of our position.”
Further, he stated: “The Tribunal totally ignored our cross-examination of the College’s expert witnesses, which makes the entire decision a complete travesty. On cross, the College’s main expert witness on Covid science, Dr. Andrew Gardam, admitted that he had never responded to the 41-page expert report provided by Dr. Trozzi in which he rebutted Gardam’s own 8-page expert report with 29 scientific citations. As a result, in closing submissions, we argued that Dr. Trozzi was unrefuted on Covid science; yet, the Tribunal made no mention of this fact.”
Finally, he added: “The Tribunal also paid no attention to the fact that the Supreme Court recognized an expansive right to freedom of expression as an inherent feature of parliamentary government as early as 1939, which gives the right a higher status than it enjoys under the Charter. In matters of law, we will appeal the decision to the Divisional Court on the standard of correctness.”
For media inquiries, please contact Michael Alexander by cell at 416-318-4512 and by e-mail at malexanderjd@protonmail.com.
As you know, I have supported your bid for the presidency even before you declared last spring. I have admired and believed in you for years, and when you entered the race I felt hope for the first time in decades that your non-violent impulses, honed by your tragic family history and a deep revulsion for our country’s imperial wars and violent history, would triumph and usher in a new era of peace. Despite the naysayers who dismissed you from the start, I said Yes, that you would shock those who ridiculed and maligned you and that you would be the man to carry out President Kennedy’s American University speech and fulfill his and your father’s legacy of “not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women” because “we all breathe the same air” and “we all cherish our children’s futures” and “we are all mortal.”
I suggested that you would heal the divide and not expand it. Seeing you stumble on your way by throwing your full support to the Zionist leaders of Israel has been a body blow to me. At first I thought it might be explained by your reaction to the false antisemitic accusations that were hurled your way once word emerged that you might enter the presidential race. But as time went on it dawned on me that I was wrong and that you were in sync with the powerful Israel Lobby. So now, I feel as if we are in the tenth round of fight for your soul’s compassion. That you have not defended the children of Gaza and condemned their massacre by the thousands has shocked and sickened me.
As a scholar of religion and its intersection with politics, I have been meditating on current events.
Religion has for a very long time been used as a cover for slaughtering people and seizing their land. This is true for the United States and Israel. It is built into their theological underpinnings. So it should not be at all surprising that the current Israeli massacre of Palestinians is fully supported by the U.S. government led by President Joseph Biden and by almost every presidential aspirant. You, however, as a self-styled anti-war candidate are a great surprise to me, although I may be naïve and shouldn’t be since you gave your unequivocal support to the Israel government a month ago, following the October 7 Hamas-led incursion into Israel that killed innocent Israelis (many of whom were also probably killed by the IDF as Jonathan Cooke has reported). Despite that, I still expected your conscience would surely prompt you to condemn what can only be described as genocide, the slaughter of the innocents in Gaza that is ongoing.
You have undermined your claim to “end the forever wars” and to defend children. Why you have done (or not done) this is a question that so many of your supporters and former supporters are asking. Only you can say. Perhaps we might only know if you unequivocally condemned Israel’s actions and faced whatever might come your way as a result. This is unlikely, I now realize, but one can still hope. I think it would take a spiritual miracle of moral courage, because of your claim that your historical analysis that you say is sincere and true that Israel now and always has been the just and innocent party and the Palestinians the evil ones. I find your analysis unbelievable and your silence as innocents are being slaughtered indefensible, even as I applaud so many of your other positions, as you know. Everyone knows that running for the U.S. presidency creates strange bedfellows, but your touting of the Israeli propaganda in which you conflate the Palestinian people with Hamas to justify massacring civilians is beyond strange – it is immoral.
I know how much you respect Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and you no doubt have heard his words before.
“And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular – but one must take it simply because it is right.”
– Martin Luther King Jr.
Conscience calls to you, Bobby. Be true to that voice within. Politic as it may be, there is a heavy burden of guilt for abandoning the Palestinians to slaughter by silence. King learned this when he saw those photos of the napalmed and dead Vietnamese children and was conscience-stricken to come to Riverside Church in New York to give his speech “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence.” You can do the same. The pictures of dead Palestinian children, victims of U.S. support for Israeli bombs, are there to see. Martin quoted your uncle, John, that “those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” He said that we can no longer worship the God of hate and retribution. He said, “Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted.”
You too, Bobby, can break your silence, step up high and let your conscience also leave you no other choice but to condemn the genocide in Gaza. As Martin said, “A time comes when silence is betrayal.”
You say you are making “a moral case for Israel” as the justified party in its seventy-five year long war with the Palestinians. In doing so you have reneged on your campaign promise to emulate President John Kennedy, who would be appalled by your silence. Your website, Kennedy 24, declares that “[you] Kennedy will revive a lost thread of American foreign policy thinking, the one championed by his uncle, John F. Kennedy who, over his 1000 days in office, had become a firm anti-imperialist.” In genuflecting to the Israel genocide while touting your connection to JFK and your father, Senator Robert Kennedy, you have in fact taken a position toward Israel diametrically opposed to theirs. One could sense this coming when under pressure this past summer, you withdrew your support for Roger Waters, a strong Palestinian supporter who was falsely accused of being anti-Jewish, and you then allowed your “friend” Rabbi Shmuley Boteach to say that Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian, killed your father in 1968 when you knew that was a lie and was part of a sophisticated intelligence conspiracy to blame the patsy who was said to hate Israel. To allow Shmuley to audaciously and heartlessly repeat a CIA trope about your father’s assassination was a telltale sign of worse to come.
For both the U.S. and Israel, the Bible has been used to cover up the crimes of their foundings. They have analogous histories rooted in religious myths. In both cases, the indigenous peoples were considered less than human – savages, infidels – or in the description of Palestinians by the current Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, “human animals.” Such racist, dehumanizing language has been repeated time and again throughout the American and Israeli narratives used to justify their crimes against those they killed and whose land they stole. The gloss of civilized hypocrisy has been unmasked by such language, just as it was when Hitler repeatedly called Jews “vermin.” Irony aside, the Nazi rhetoric of denigration and racial superiority to justify exterminating Jewish people has been repeatedly mirrored by American and Israeli leaders, whether it was against the Original Free Peoples of North America, Vietnamese, Koreans, Iraqis, etc. or the Palestinians. It is the master/slave mentality deeply rooted in U.S. and Israel history.
Bobby, you have said that you hope to be the second independent candidate to become president, the first being George Washington. Yet Washington was a racist and slave owner who supported the extermination of the Indian natives so the white settlers could take their land. He himself did so, speculating in Native lands together with most of the other prominent politicians from the early days of the Republic, including Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, Andrew Jackson, et al. For the governors and legislators of the thirteen states it was also open sesame on the seizure of Indian land which required their slaughter in turn.
One can learn this in Peter P. d’Errico’s important recent book, Federal Anti-Indian Law: The Legal Entrapment of Indigenous Peoples, where he makes clear how U.S. law was used to codify such “legal” theft and killing. Such federal law was, as d’Errico writes, a claim of unlimited U.S. power and not really law at all but the suspension of law as it granted the U.S. government complete authority over Native peoples, their lives, and their land. Legal theft, in other words. Like the English justification for their claim to their colonies – the “right of discovery” proclaimed in Henry VII’s commission to John Cabot: “to subdue and take possession of any lands unoccupied by any Christian Power” – a series of three Supreme Court rulings in the 1830s by Chief Justice John Marshall were based on the claim of “Christian discovery,” which in turn was based on a papal grant from Pope Alexander the Sixth in 1493 that gave to Christopher Columbus’s sponsors, Ferdinand and Isabella, ownership of any land Columbus might discover. This divine right required the killing and subjugation of non-Christian infidels and heathens who were considered brute animals, just as the Palestinians are today.
Similar justifications have been used by Zionists for the killing of Palestinians and the seizure of their land in the name of the Biblical Jewish God and his instructions to them. This myth claims that God gave them the ancestral Palestinians’ land, therefore, like native peoples of North America who, according to the non-law U.S. Indian law, only had the right of occupancy, the Palestinians could be killed and dispossessed by the God-given rightful owners, which they were in 1948. Netanyahu has made such claims many times, as have his predecessors. He calls for a holy war of annihilation against the Palestinians, based on the Hebrew Bible. This is widely known and has a long history in the Zionist propaganda narrative that has allowed for seventy-five years of killing and the systematic shrinking of Palestinian land to its pitiful size today.
It is interesting to note that the three primary countries that intersect in the use of religious justification for colonial and imperial policies are England, the U.S., and Israel – together with the Papacy and its May 4, 1493 bull Inter Caetera issued by Pope Alexander the Sixth to declare Christian discovery. I mention this since I am an Irish-American Catholic, and it was the Irish uprising against the English colonial occupiers that has become a key inspiration for anti-colonial rebels throughout the twentieth century and beyond. I have taken inspiration from my Irish ancestors. This is your heritage also, Bobby, so it becomes even more surprising that you, even as you tout the American Revolutionary War rebel fighters against the English colonialists, would support the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians. As a lawyer, you must be aware of Federal Indian Law and how it, like all law, is rooted in a metaphysics of being human; has presuppositions that are brought to the bar, and in the case of federal Indian law, a Christian nomos at odds with that of Native peoples’.
You surely know that the Israeli assault on Gaza is a massive war crime according to international law, and even within the moderate Catholic just war theory, is, by its distorted proportionality, evil and must be rejected as immoral and a terrible sin. You claim to want to end all wars but support the ongoing slaughter of thousands upon thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians, including so many children and women. Nor have you said a word against Biden’s saber rattling with aircraft carriers, U.S. drones, and assistance for Israel’s bloodthirsty assault that raises the threat of a much wider war that could turn nuclear.
Yes, the question is why such silence, which you can break now. I beg you to speak out. You are a man of conscience. MLK, Jr. speaks to us all still.
And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular – but one must take it simply because it is right.
Amid the growing global outcry over the Palestinian death toll and humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, the US has offered Israel its wholehearted support and refrained from joining calls for a ceasefire in the enclave. It has also remained highly opaque regarding the specific military assistance it has pledged Tel Aviv.
Throughout its history, the United States has never allowed concerns about the civilian death toll to impact its warfare strategy, and current developments in Gaza are yet another glaring example of this, scholar, educator and journalist K.J. Noh told Sputnik.
“The fundamental immorality of US warfare… is that it has never sought to minimize the deaths of civilians. We know that US wars recently have been somewhere in the range of 90 percent civilian deaths,” the scholar underscored.
Recalling US doctrine implemented in countries like Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere, it has been “simply to kill anything that moves. You create a free fire zone, you kill anything that moves, and the murder is indiscriminate,” the pundit said. Afterwards, they may use mainstream media to “paste it over” with “PR means and releases.”
US Business ‘is War’
Whether it is weapons to fuel the NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, or sending military assistance to Israel in its fight against Hamas, “fundamentally, the business of the US is war,” K.J. Noh emphasized.
“You know, the US is number one supplier of arms to the world. It’s 40 percent of all arms sales… and it sells them to quisling governments and to governments that are involved in the Pacific pivot – this escalation to war against China,” underscored the scholar, adding that Washington is “turning the entire planet into an armed madhouse” using taxpayers’ dollars.
Ever since the Hamas attack of October 7, Israel’s strong response, with its relentless strikes and then ground operation in Gaza that has been driving up the civilian death toll in the enclave has boosted sympathy for the Palestinian issue across the globe. And yet, we see how Washington has doubled down on its determination to offer “unwavering” support for Israel. As Israel Defense Forces (IDF) continue their onslaught on Gaza, the Palestinian death toll in the enclave since 7 October has exceeded 11,000, according to local health officials. US President Joe Biden, however, has rejected calls for a ceasefire, with Washington floating the suggestion for a brief “humanitarian pause” in Israel’s assault to allow aid to enter Gaza or permit civilians to leave the enclave.
After the Biden administration asked for an additional $14 billion for Israel from Congress, Washington committed to delivering to Tel Aviv Iron Dome air defense missiles, small diameter bombs and Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) kits, besides the earlier agreed weapons deals, as per US media reports. At the same time, unlike the case with Ukraine, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby acknowledged that Washington’s military supplies to Israel were shrouded in secrecy. During an October 23 press briefing, Kirby said that “We’re being careful not to quantify or get into too much detail about what they’re getting — for their own operational security purposes, of course.”
“Transparency in war is largely an illusion or at best, selective. You know, war is always deception. Both the published lists and the unpublished lists. The published lists are designed to intimidate, or message, or signal, or posture. And the unpublished lists are… often hiding dirty criminal tactics.”
As far as the ongoing developments in besieged Gaza, which is being pounded by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), “the US is providing the weapons,” K.J. Noh pointed out, adding:
“It is now the accomplice, or it has always been the accomplice to this genocide of which we know 99.6 percent have been civilians so far by any tabulation that we can see. And so because the US is accomplice to this genocide, it has said there are no restrictions on how the weapons are used. So then it makes sense that it would obscure the weapons that it provided.”
“The use of war by the US has been a constant, certainly at least since the 1990s, and certainly… the use of proxies as well… We know that ISIS itself was cultivated by the US until it started to blow back,” the expert recalled.
Furthermore, now Israel has reportedly requested several hundred expendable switchblade kamikaze drones, K.J. Noh pointed out, which signals “that there is going to be intense urban warfare with intense casualties.”
“And it just speaks to the constant escalation, and the fact that there is the ‘no holds barred’ [approach] as this war continues to move forward,” he said.
‘Real Costs of War’
From the Biden administration’s opaque arms deals with Israel, and lack of concern for the civilian death toll in Gaza, the educator weiged in on the American establishment’s attitude towards its own soldiers.
“We don’t understand or we choose not to understand the real costs of war,” K.J. Noh said.
A recent report in The New York Times appeared to shed light on strange new physical and psychic wounds discerned among military gun crews, dating back to a “secret US offensive during 2016 and 2017″ seeking to defeat the Islamic State in Syria. At the time, a plan to put a minimal number of American boots on the ground to target the enemy with artillery fire backfired in the sense that the US soldiers returned plagued by nightmares, panic attacks, depression, etc. Many, as per the report, have died by suicide. The Marine Corps in 2019 issued findings of an investigation that showed these gun crews were likely injured by having to fire a huge number of rounds daily. And yet, the military appeared to dismiss these concerns.
“What this article does, in my opinion, is it takes what looks to me like a description of war trauma, PTSD, moral injury, and then tries to shoehorn it into a kind of biophysical symptom that is blast exposure or blast shock. Now, this is not new. This type of thinking goes all the way back to World War II,” claimed the expert.
According to K.J. Noh, its “part of an ideological crusade that wants to distract from the moral costs, and to turn moral damage into a medical phenomenon which that you can then treat with medical procedures.”
“The simple fact is that when you seek to snuff out another human’s life, you have to silence your own conscience. And sometimes that doesn’t work, and so then this conscience returns with a vengeance… And I think these types of hauntings and hallucinations are part of that phenomenon,” K.J. Noh underscored.
My career as a truth jihadi just reached a new milestone: One of my videos was censored by Rumble. Having a video removed by Rumble for being too controversial is quite an accomplishment. Like Col. Michael Aquino’s getting kicked out of the Church of Satan for being too evil, it’s definitely something to put on your resumé.
Why did Rumble wait this long to start censoring me? I’ve been saying things the censors don’t like, and inviting guests who say even more things they like even less, for the better part of two decades. I’ve been hard at work spreading all the true conspiracy theories, starting with 9/11 and JFK, as well as discussing the most interesting ones that might or might not be true. I have questioned the 2020 election results, explained why my family and I haven’t been vaccinated since the 1990s, blasphemed against the WHO’s pandemic guidelines, opined that COVID was obviously a bioweapon, and earned numerous awards for “anti-Semitism” from the ADL and B’nai Brith.
None of that bothered Rumble in the least. After all, it’s a free speech platform, right?
So what does it take to get banned from Rumble? Three simple words: “I support Hamas.”
In this week’s False Flag Weekly News I outperformed Cat McGuire (for once) in saying things the ADL won’t like. Angered by the genocide of Gaza, I uttered many uncomplimentary and/or inflammatory remarks about the Chosen People and their Chosen State. But of all of the “oy vey” things I said, what the ADL will hate the most is my open declaration of support for Hamas.
And that, of course, is the most obvious reason to support Hamas: “They” really, really don’t want you to.
Ironically, “they” proved me right. The ADL spies paid by that multi-billion-dollar organization to watch all my stuff found the “here’s why I support Hamas” section of the video, transcribed it, leaned on Rumble, and got the video banned. (If you have a more plausible alternative narrative, feel free to post it in the comments section. You can still watch the video on Bitchute—for now, anyway.)
“I support Hamas” is not a radical or fringe view. It is almost certainly the view of the global majority. Here in the Arab world (400 million people) at least 399 million are perpetually glued to their proverbial chairs awaiting with proverbially bated breath the next statement from Abu Obaida, spokesman of Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades, and leaping up from those chairs to wildly cheer every time Hamas releases a new video of its fighters bravely blowing up an Israeli tank.
The Abu Obaida phenomenon is rather astounding. Five weeks ago he was an obscure figure. Today, he’s better known, and far more popular, than Che Guevara ever was. (Even at the height of his posthumous popularity, there were plenty of Spanish-speaking folks who didn’t like Che and what he represented; whereas today, you would be hard-pressed to find anyone among the world’s two billion Muslims with anything bad to say about Abu Obaida.)
So why are we not allowed to say what billions of people around the world think—even on Rumble, the “radical free speech” platform? The answer, of course, is that censorship is the last resort of powerful people who know they can’t win an honest debate. If “they” allowed us to debate whether or not we ought to support Hamas, it would quickly become clear that there are no good reasons not to, and plenty of excellent reasons to back the entire Palestinian Resistance including its current flagship franchise.
Don’t take my word for it. Read my 2600-word article “Why I Support Hamas, and You Should Too” and then scroll through the 440+ comments. Not one of those comments offers even the slightest pretense of a coherent and detailed rebuttal, or even a link to one. Instead, the only substantive reason not to support Hamas that anyone could come up with was that “it might be illegal” (it isn’t, at least in the US) and “it could ruin your career” (if your career requires cowardice, get another career).
The upshot is that there is really only one reason that Westerners who know the basics of who invaded and ethnically cleansed whom in Palestine don’t support Hamas: They are terrified of pushback from rich, powerful Zionist Jews. What they fail to recognize is that if you are afraid to entertain an idea because it might displease the powerful, you have no business involving yourself in the world of ideas in the first place.
Draconian Media Censorship Backfiring?
If they’re removing pro-Palestine videos on Rumble, you can imagine what all of the mainstream not-so-free-speech platforms are doing. Actually, you don’t have to imagine. Al-Jazeera reports:
At the end of last week, Thomas Maddens, a filmmaker and activist based in Belgium, noticed something strange. A video about Palestine that he posted to TikTok with the word “genocide” suddenly stopped getting engagement on the platform after an initial spike.
“I thought I would have got millions of views,” Maddens told Al Jazeera, “but the engagement had stopped.”
Maddens is one of the hundreds of social media users who are accusing the world’s largest social media platforms – Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube and TikTok – of censoring accounts or actively reducing the reach of pro-Palestine content, a practice known as shadowbanning.
Authors, activists, journalists, filmmakers and regular users around the world have said posts containing hashtags like “FreePalestine” and “IStandWithPalestine” as well as messages expressing support for civilian Palestinians killed by Israeli forces are being hidden by the platforms.
Since the above-referenced article was published on October 24, the censorship, like the genocide of Gaza, has gotten increasingly worse. Yet in spite of social media censorship, or maybe because of it, a gargantuan grassroots pro-Palestine movement has sprung up all over the world. Millions of people, maybe tens of millions, have been hitting the streets to support the Palestinian genocide victims—including, implicitly, the ones who choose to fight back. You can see pictures from some of those demonstrations between the 22’ and 24’ mark in the above-posted False Flag Weekly News video.
How did all those millions of people figure out that the Palestinian Resistance is right, and the Zionists wrong (not to mention evil), despite the blanket of censorship imposed by the Zionist billionaires who control most of the world’s media, including social media? It seems that the censorship, like the concentration camp wall around Gaza, has backfired. Rather than keeping people penned up and docile, it has angered them to the point that they are motivated to break through the wall and try to defeat their tormentors. The flood of pro-Palestine content on social media can’t be contained by even a billion-dollar outfit like the ADL that can hire people, and unleash AI programs, to run around sticking their fingers in the exponentially-increasing holes in the dike.
The on-the-ground journalists in Gaza are being murdered by the Israelis at an average rate of one journalist per day (with some seeing their entire families targeted and murdered, as Wael Al Dahdouh did).
Yet new journalists keep springing up to replace the murdered ones, just as new Resistance fighters arise to avenge those martyred by the Zionists. The images of the Gaza genocide they are capturing, while heavily censored by Zio-media genocide-enablers, are leaking through the blockade fast enough to awaken an ever-increasing number of people around the world. And every time someone discovers not only the horror of the #GazaGenocide, but also the censorship that itself constitutes a crime against humanity, that individual is likely to grow doubly enraged. Pretty soon that person will join the billions cheering the brave and brilliant military exploits of the underdogs.
At point-blank range, Hamas fighters engage and destroy an IDF Namer (Leopard) armoured personnel carrier in Al-Shati camp. The weapon used is a locally-produced tandem-charge Al-Yassin 105 round, fired from an RPG-7.
Hamas fighter uses a PG-7VT tandem warhead for the RPG-7 on an Israeli Merkava Mk IV tank equipped with a Trophy Active Protection System
A potential reason the APS didn't activate (beyond the tank being offline) is that the attack came from too close for the system to function pic.twitter.com/fZ02uZCDPn
Once you learn that the Zionists have been lying about everything—the “beheaded babies” and “attacks on civilians,” the actual facts about who really used tanks, rockets, and helicopter gunships to kill hundreds of Israeli civilians on October 7, and of course the larger context of the ongoing genocide of Palestine, there is no going back.
Ukraine will not join the EU if there is no resolution with Poland regarding a dispute over the exhumation of Polish victims of a wartime massacre by Ukrainians, said Deputy Polish Foreign Minister Paweł Jabłoński.
Between 1943 and 1944, around 100,000 Poles were slaughtered by the ultra-nationalist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in the Volhynia and Eastern Galicia regions of pre-war eastern Poland (today part of western Ukraine).
The killings still cast a shadow over Ukrainian-Polish relations despite the close bonds between the two countries forged by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Although there were many killings across several villages, the slaughter is collectively referred to as the Volhynia Massacre.
Pawel Jablonski said that a “significant dispute” over Polish demands to exhume victims of the massacre must be settled if Poland is to be an advocate for Ukrainian membership in the bloc.
Speaking to commercial radio station Radio Zet on Tuesday, Jabłonski defended the government’s record on exhumations.
“Exhumations in the first location, which have been the subject of talks with Ukraine, have already started (…) This is not actually Volhynia, it is another part, but they are also victims of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army,” Jabłonski said.
In response to the observation that this involved only a search operation with no consent yet for exhumations, the deputy minister replied: “We will work further on this so that it occurs as quickly as possible.”
“In our opinion, without a solution to this issue – and many Ukrainians already realize this – Ukraine cannot dream of joining the European Union,” Jabłoński added.
He warned that without a solution to the issue, “long-term reconciliation with Ukraine” cannot be achieved.
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