Dismal UK CFD auction results may be a landmark moment
The Government has today announced the results of the fifth auction of Contracts for Difference subsidies for renewable electricity generation. Its has been a failure, and may represent a landmark moment for renewables policy.
Only 3.7GW of new capacity has bid successfully, mostly through small projects, as compared to nearly 12GW last year. There were no bids for offshore wind, the UK’s flagship renewable generator.
Participants in the auction bid for guaranteed prices, below a cap set by ministers in advance of the auction. The cap for offshore wind was set at £44/MWh (in 2012 prices, equivalent to around £70/MWh today). This is higher than successful bids in the past, yet no wind farm developers felt able to bid at this price. Wind industry claims that this is due to rising prices are implausible – CfD contracts are index-linked.
While offshore wind’s failure to bid may be surprising to some, perhaps even to the Government, it will come as no shock to those familiar with the long-term capital and operating cost trends for wind power, as revealed in audited financial statements. Costs have not been falling dramatically as the industry claimed. All around the world the wind industry is in trouble for the same reasons; costs remain high, and high levels of subsidy are needed to reward investors.
In addition, the latest auction round closes down the loophole that allowed windfarms to reap huge windfall profits by failing to activate their contracts so that they could benefit from higher prices in the open market.
The fact is that wind power, wherever, is an expensive way of generating energy. That isn’t surprising either; wind is a physically low-quality fuel and the cost of turning it into electricity is intrinsically high.
The previously successful low bids for offshore wind were unrealistic, a point we made at the time. Even when built, wind farms delayed taking up their contracts so they could operate on a merchant basis, taking advantage of temporarily high wholesale prices.
Importantly, the cap for onshore wind bids in this round of the CFD auction was higher than that for offshore, at £53/MWh (2012 prices). There were a substantial number of successful bids at this price, though they are all located in Scotland, where land rents are lower and where the developers can expect to make extra income through the infamous “constraint payments”, where a wind farm is paid to reduce output. (Demand in Scotland is low and the grid links to England are congested, limiting exports.) Even so, we doubt that these successful onshore bids are strongly economic.
Andrew Montford, director of Net Zero Watch, said:
Government seems to have believed the spin about falling offshore wind costs, and set a low cap on bids for new contracts, thus calling the wind industry’s bluff by accident. Doubtless, the industry will now beg for new and higher subsidies, blaming inflation and supply chain problems. Government should not believe this spin. As global experience shows, wind power is extremely and intrinsically expensive.”
Dr John Constable, energy editor of Net Zero Watch, said:
The CfD auction results are symptomatic of a wider failure of wind power around the world. The industry is in a crisis from which it is unlikely to recover, because its costs are simply too high to be sustainable. The time has come for Government to admit that renewables have failed, and to start looking at realistic energy policies.
September 9, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular | UK |
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Dr Ros Jones, the founder of CCVAC and long-term critic of the Government’s advisory body on vaccine policy JCVI, has just written to them again to ask why, in defiance of the evidence, are they recommending an autumn booster for healthy 12-64s who live with an immunocompromised household member. Here she explains her concern.
SCARY and ill-informed headlines like ‘New Covid fears as kids return to school and daily rates numbers double in a month’ have given grist to the government’s mill that an increase in Covid cases justifies them in bringing forward the autumn booster programme from October to September 15.
If you think this is irrelevant for most healthy children, it is not. The proposed schedule, though excluding the majority of healthy under-64s, recommends that perfectly healthy 12-64s get a booster if they are a household contact of someone with immunosuppression, for example someone who has been under cancer treatment. Once again guilt is being exploited. Whose needs do parents prioritise, their healthy teenage son or daughter or their elderly immunocompromised mothers and fathers? The simple answer is they have to do neither: their child does not need a booster for his or her own health and it is abundantly clear that the vaccines do not prevent infection or transmission, and may well have the opposite effect. There is good evidence that repeated boosters actually increase the likelihood of infection, particularly in the first week or two after vaccination, quite apart from all the other immediate and long-term potential risks of harm.
This is why I, with more than one hundred health professionals and academics, have once again written to Professor Wei Shen Lim, chairman of the JCVI’s Covid-19 committee, to point out the total lack of logic or indeed ethics in the current guidelines. The letter is published below and can also be found on the Hart group website here: Professor Lim, how can boosters protect others? – HART (hartgroup.org)
***
4th September 2023
Professor Wei Shen Lim and all members, Joint Committee of Vaccination and Immunisation
Rt Hon Stephen Barclay MP, Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Care
cc Dr Camilla Kingdon, President, Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health
Dear Professor Lim and Mr Barclay,
re: JCVI advice for Covid-19 vaccination of healthy young adults if living with an immunocompromised household member
I, and many of my co-signatories, have written to you on several occasions since May 2021[i], when you were first deliberating over whether to recommend Covid-19 gene-based vaccines for healthy children, given the lack of any robust safety data on these new mRNA technologies and the acknowledged low impact of SARS-CoV-2 on children.
It is very gratifying to see that this autumn’s booster programme [ii] has now been dropped for almost all healthy under-65s. However, there is one group still being offered a booster that causes us serious concern, namely the offer of a booster to healthy over-12s if they have an immunocompromised household member. We set out our reasons below.
1. It is clear that Covid-19 vaccines are failing to prevent infection by or transmission of SARS-CoV-2.
2. There is now good evidence that multiple boosters actually increase the likelihood of a SARS-CoV-2 infection [iii].
3. There is good evidence of a specific rise in infection risk in the first 7-10 days after vaccination, thus putting family members at increased rather than reduced risk [iv],[v].
4. The more recent omicron variants are poorly covered by the original vaccines, but even the newer bivalent boosters generate a much lower response against the non-Wuhan sequences in the vaccines, indicative of immune imprinting [vi].
5. The potential benefit of vaccination now for healthy young adults is low, and for children is effectively zero, given the poor efficacy of the vaccines and the high prevalence of naturally-acquired immunity [vii].
6. The safety profile of these vaccines is woefully inadequate for use in a healthy low-risk population, especially children, giving a poor risk : benefit balance. The hazard of myocarditis, recognised early on as an increased risk in younger age groups [viii], has still been poorly delineated, but risks as high as 1 in 25 are reported for subclinical myocarditis in a recent study from Switzerland [ix], confirming similar findings from Thailand. Although symptoms usually resolve quickly, scarring has been demonstrated on cardiac MRI scans [x] and has been found to persist at 6-12-month follow-up [xi]. Pfizer’s own 5-year follow-up study is not due to report until 2027; likewise a large FDA-sponsored study in the US [xii].
7. Many other adverse effects have been reported and listed in our previous letters [xiii], [xiv], perhaps the most worrying of which is the deleterious effect on the immune system [xv],[xvi]. Basic pharmacokinetics of these products are only just being reported, with a paper this week, as we write, reporting findings of vaccine-derived spike protein persisting in the circulation for many months (or longer) after vaccination [xvii],[xviii]; with serious implications for prolonged effects of any vaccine injuries.
8. The issue of excess all-cause deaths in younger age groups in 2022 and 2023 has yet to be properly investigated and a link to vaccines cannot be ruled out until this is done[xix].
9. Even if there was good evidence that vaccination could protect vulnerable household contacts, there would be major ethical concerns around asking children to take a vaccine with any potential risks of harm, to protect family members. The Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights [xx] Article 4 and Article 7 make it clear that all medical interventions must be in the best interest of the individual concerned, particularly in the case of children who are not able to give consent. If a booster was in the best interests of a healthy 12-17-year-old, then surely the JCVI would be recommending it for all, but it is clear that these children are being offered the vaccine merely in a likely unsuccessful attempt to benefit other household members.
10. Whilst it may be argued that technically these products have now been approved and are therefore no longer a research tool, these ethical principles and the precautionary principle must still apply, especially since the approval itself is still based on much less evidence than would be expected for other drugs.
Please could you urgently provide the following, under a FOI request:
- minutes of the meetings at which these decisions were made;
- calculations of numbers of healthy 12-17-year-olds (and of all household members aged 12-64) needed to vaccinate to prevent the hospitalisation of one vulnerable family member;
- any legal advice taken on how these unnecessary booster doses to children comply with UK and international law.
We look forward to hearing from you as a matter of urgency before the commencement of the vaccine booster rollout to healthy 12-17-year-olds .
Yours sincerely
Dr Rosamond Jones, MD, FRCPCH, retired consultant paediatrician, convenor of CCVAC (Children’s Covid Vaccines Advisory Council) and many others….
Professor Anthony J Brookes, Professor of Genomics & Health Data Science, University of Leicester
Professor Angus Dalgleish, MD, FRCP, FRACP, FRCPath, FMedSci, Professor of Oncology, University of London; Principal, Institute for Cancer Vaccines & Immunotherapy
Professor Richard Ennos, MA, PhD. Honorary Professorial Fellow, University of Edinburgh
Professor John A Fairclough, BM BS, BMed Sci, FRCS, FFSEM(UK), Professor Emeritus, Honorary Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon
Professor David Livermore, BSc, PhD, retired Professor of Medical Microbiology
Professor Karol Sikora, MA, MBBChir, PhD, FRCR, FRCP, FFPM, Honorary Professor of Professional Practice, Buckingham University
Professor Roger Watson, FRCP Edin, FRCN, FAAN, Honorary Professor of Nursing, University of Hull
Professor Keith Willison, PhD, Professor of Chemical Biology, Imperial, London
Lord Moonie, MBChB, MRCPsych, MFCM, MSc, House of Lords, former parliamentary under-secretary of state 2001-2003, former consultant in Public Health Medicine
Dr Roland Salmon, MBBS, MRCGP, FFPH, former Director, Communicable Disease Surveillance Centre (Wales)
Dr Ali Ajaz, Consultant Psychiatrist
Dr Shiraz Akram, BDS, Dental surgeon
Dr Victoria Anderson, MBChB, MRCGP, MRCPCH, DRCOG, General Practitioner
Julie Annakin, RN, Immunisation Specialist Nurse
Wendy Armstrong, Practice Nurse
Helen Auburn, Dip ION, MBANT, NTCC, CNHC, Registered Nutritional Therapist
Dr Ancha Bala-Joof, MBChB, MRCGP, General Practitioner
Dr Michael Bazlinton, MBChB, MRCGP, DCH, General Practitioner
Dr Mark A Bell, MBChB, MRCP(UK), FRCEM, Consultant in Emergency Medicine, UK
Dr Michael D Bell, MBChB, MRCGP, retired General Practitioner
Dr Ashvy Bhardwaj, MBBS, DRCOG, MRCGP (2018)
Dr Alan Black, MBBS, MSc, DipPharmMed, Retired Pharmaceutical Physician
Dr Gillian Breese, BSc, MB ChB, DFFP, DTM&H, General Practitioner
Dr Ian Bridges, MBBS, retired General Practitioner
Dr Emma Brierly, MBBS, MRCGP, General Practitioner
Dr Elizabeth Burton, MB ChB, Retired General Practitioner
Dr David Cartland, MBChB, BMedSci, General practitioner
Dr Peter Chan, BM, MRCS, MRCGP, NLP, General Practitioner, Functional Medicine Practitioner
Dr Bernard Choi, MBBS, MRCGP, DCH, DRCOG, General Practitioner
Michael Cockayne, MSc, PGDip, SCPHNOH, BA, RN, Occupational Health Practitioner
Mr Ian F Comaish, MA, BM BCh, FRCOphth, FRANZCO, Consultant ophthalmologist
James Cook, BN, MPH, NHS Registered Nurse
Dr Clare Craig, BMBCh, FRCPath, Pathologist
Dr David Critchley, BSc, PhD, 32 years in pharmaceutical R&D as a clinical research scientist
Dr Sue de Lacy, MBBS, MRCGP, AFMCP UK, Integrative Medicine Doctor
Dr Christine Dewbury, retired General Practitioner
Mr Keith Dewbury, retired Consultant Radiologist
Dr Jayne Donegan, MBBS, DRCOG, DCH, DFFP, MRCGP, homeopathic practitioner, retired NHS GP
Dr Damien Downing, MBBS, MRSB, private physician
Dr Jonathan Eastwood, BSc, MBChB, MRCGP, General Practitioner
Dr Jonathan Engler, MBChB, LlB (hons), DipPharmMed
Dr Elizabeth Evans, MA(Cantab), MBBS, DRCOG, Director UKMFA
Dr Chris Exley, PhD FRSB, retired professor in Bioinorganic Chemistry
Dr Brian Fitzsimons, MBChB, DipOccMed, FRCGP, General Practitioner, Occupational Health Physician, Pre-Hospital Emergency Care Practitioner
Dr John Flack, BPharm, PhD. Retired Director of Safety Evaluation at Beecham Pharmaceuticals 1980-1989 and Senior Vice-president for Drug Discovery 1990-92 SmithKline Beecham
Dr Charles Forsyth, MBBS, FFHom, Ecological and Homeopathic Physician (Retired)
Dr Sheena Fraser, MBChB, MRCGP (2003), Dip BSLM, General Practitioner
Sophie Gidet, RM, Midwife
Dr Jenny Goodman, MA, MBChB, Ecological Medicine
Dr Ali Haggett, Mental health community work, 3rd sector, former lecturer in the history of medicine
Mr David Halpin, MBBS, FRCS, Orthopaedic and trauma surgeon, retired
Alex Hicks, MEng, MCIPS, Compliance Director (Supply Chain)
Mr Anthony Hinton, MBChB, FRCS, Consultant ENT surgeon, London
Dr Richard House, PhD, CPsychol, AFBPsS, CertCouns, Chartered Psychologist, former senior lecturer in Psychology (Roehampton) and Early Childhood (Winchester), retired psychotherapist
Dr Keith Johnson, DPhil, former patents officer
Dr Timothy Kelly, MB BCh BSc, NHS doctor
Dr Tanya Klymenko, PhD, FHEA, FIBMS, Senior Lecturer in Biomedical Sciences
Dr Caroline Lapworth, MB ChB, General Practitioner
Dr Branko Latinkic, BSc, PhD, Molecular Biologist
Dr Theresa Lawrie, MBBCh, PhD, Director, Evidence-Based Medicine Consultancy Ltd
Dr Jason Lester, MRCP, FRCR, Consultant Clinical Oncologist
Dr Felicity Lillingstone, IMD DHS PhD ANP, Doctor, Urgent Care, Research Fellow
Dr Nichola Ling, MBBS, MRCOG, Consultant obstetrician and digital advisor to NHS England
Katherine MacGilchrist, BSc (Hons) Pharmacology, MSc Epidemiology, CEO, Systematic Review Director, Epidemica Ltd
Dr C Geoffrey Maidment, MD, FRCP, retired consultant physician
Mr Ahmad K Malik, FRCS (Tr & Orth), Dip Med Sport, Consultant Trauma & Orthopaedic Surgeon
Dr Ayiesha Malik, MBChB, General Practitioner
Dr Kulvinder S. Manik MBChB, MRCGP, MA(Cantab), LLM, Gray’s Inn
Dr Fiona Martindale, MBChB, MRCGP, General Practitioner in out-of-hours
Julie Maxwell, MBBCh, MRCPCH, Associate Specialist Community Paediatrician
Dr Fatou Mbow, MD(Italy), MRCGP, DFFP, General Practitioner
Dr Sam McBride, BSc(Hons) Medical Microbiology & Immunobiology, MBBCh BAO, MSc in Clinical Gerontology, MRCP(UK), FRCEM, FRCP(Edinburgh), NHS Emergency Medicine & geriatrics
Kaira McCallum, BSc, retired pharmacist, Director of strategy UKMFA
Mr Ian McDermott, MBBS, MS, FRCS(Tr&Orth), FFSEM(UK), Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon
Dr Janet Menage, MA, MBChB, retired General Practitioner
Dr Franziska Meuschel, MD, ND, PhD Affiliations, IDF, BSEM, Nutritional, Environmental and Integrated Medicine
Dr Scott Mitchell, MBChB, MRCS, Associate Specialist, Emergency Medicine
Dr Alistair J Montgomery, MBChB, MRCGP, DRCOG, retired General Practitioner
Dr Alan Mordue, MBChB, FFPH, Retired Consultant in Public Health Medicine & Epidemiology
Margaret Moss, MA(Cantab), CBiol, MRSB, Director, The Nutrition and Allergy Clinic, Cheshire
Dr Claire Mottram, BSc Hons, MBChB, Doctor in General Practice
Dr Greta Mushet, MBChB, MRCPsych, retired Consultant Psychiatrist in Psychotherapy
Dr Angela Musso, MD, MRCGP, DRCOG, FRACGP, MFPC, General Practitioner
Dr Sarah Myhill, MBBS, Dip NM, Retired GP, Independent Naturopathic Physician
Dr Chris Newton, PhD, Biochemist
Dr Rachel Nicoll, PhD, Medical researcher
Tim Nike, Specialist Neurological Physiotherapist
Sue Parker Hall, CTA, MSc (Counselling & Supervision), MBACP, EMDR. Psychotherapist
Dr Dean Patterson, MBChB, FRCP. Consultant Cardiologist
Dr Christina Peers, MBBS, DRCOG, DFSRH, FFSRH, Menopause Specialist
Rev Dr William J U Philip MB ChB, MRCP, BD, Senior Minister The Tron Church Glasgow, formerly physician specialising in cardiology
Dr Angharad Powell, MBChB, BSc (hons), DFRSH, DCP (Ireland), DRCOG, DipOccMed, MRCGP, General Practitioner
Dr Gerry Quinn, PhD, Microbiologist
Dr Jessica Robinson, BSc(Hons), MBBS, MRCPsych, MFHom, Psychiatrist and Integrative Medicine Doctor
Dr Jon Rogers, MB ChB (Bristol), retired General Practitioner
Mr James Royle, MBChB, FRCS, MMedEd, Colorectal Surgeon
Dr Charlie Sayer, MBBS, FRCR, Consultant Radiologist
Sorrel Scott, Grad Dip Phys, Specialist Physiotherapist in Neurology, 30 years in NHS
Dr Rohaan Seth, BSc (Hons), MBChB (Hons), MRCGP, Retired General Practitioner
Dr Rajendra Sharma, MBBCh, BAO, LRCP&S(Ire), MFHom, Private Doctor, Medical Director, Dr Sharma Diagnostics
Natalie Stephenson, BSc (Hons) Paediatric Audiologist
Dr Noel Thomas, MA, MBChB, DObsRCOG, DTM&H, MFHom, Retired Doctor
Dr Livia Tossici-Bolt, PhD, NHS Clinical Scientist
Dr Helen Westwood, MBChB (Hons), MRCGP, DCH, DRCOG, General Practitioner
Dr Carmen Wheatley, DPhil, Orthomolecular Oncology
Dr Samuel White, MBChB, MRCGP, Functional Medicine Specialist, former General Practitioner
Dr Ruth Wilde, MBBCh, MRCEM, AFMCP, Integrative & Functional Medicine Doctor
Dr Stephanie Williams, Dermatologist
Dr AZ, MBChB, NHS Specialty doctor
[i] https://www.hartgroup.org/open-letter-to-mhra-17-05-2021/
[ii] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-autumn-2023-vaccination-programme-jcvi-advice-26-may-2023/jcvi-statement-on-the-covid-19-vaccination-programme-for-autumn-2023-26-may-2023
[iii] Shrestha NK, Burke PC, Nowacki AS et al. Effectiveness of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 Bivalent Vaccine, Open Forum Infectious Diseases 2023;10 (6): doi.org/10.1093/ofid/ofad209
[iv] Shrotri M, Krutikov M, Palmer T et al. Vaccine effectiveness of the first dose of ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 and BNT162b2 against SARS-CoV-2 infection in residents of long-term care facilities in England (VIVALDI): a prospective cohort study. Lancet Infect Dis. 2021. doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(21)00289-9
[v] Bar-On YM, Goldberg Y, Micha, M et al. Protection by a Fourth Dose of BNT162b2 against Omicron in Israel, N Engl J Med 2022; 386:1712-1720. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2201570
[vi] Fujita S, Uriu K, Pan L et al. Impact of Imprinted Immunity Induced by mRNA Vaccination in an Experimental Animal Model, The Journal of Infectious Diseases, 2023;, jiad230, https://doi.org/10.1093/infdis/jiad230
[vii]https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1131409/appendix-1-of-jcvi-statement-on-2023-covid-19-vaccination-programme-8-november-2022.pdf
[viii] Oster M, mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine-Associated Myocarditis, 2022, https://www.fda.gov/media/153514/download
[ix] Buergin N, Lopez-Ayala P, Hirsiger JR et al. Sex-specific differences in myocardial injury incidence after COVID-19 mRNA-1273 booster vaccination. European Journal of Heart Failure 2023. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ejhf.2978
[x] Jain SS, Steele JM, Fonseca B et al. COVID-19 Vaccination–Associated Myocarditis in Adolescents. Pediatrics 2021; 148 (5): e2021053427. doi.org/10.1542/peds.2021-053427
[xi] Yu CK, Tsao S, Ng CW et al. Cardiovascular Assessment up to One Year After COVID-19 Vaccine-Associated Myocarditis. Circulation 2023; 148(5): 436–439. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10373639/
[xii] https://www.nymc.edu/news-and-events/news-archives/us-fda-awards-dr-supriya-jain-19-million-to-support-research-on-covid-19-vaccine-associated-myocarditis.php
[xiii] https://www.hartgroup.org/open-letter-to-the-jcvi-pause-vaccines-for-children-pending-urgent-review/
[xiv] https://www.hartgroup.org/open-letter-to-the-jcvi-2/
[xv] Uversky VN, Redwan EM, Makis W, Rubio-Casillas A.IgG4 Antibodies Induced by mRNA Vaccines Generate Immune Tolerance to SARS-CoV-2’spike Protein by Suppressing the Immune System. Vaccines 2023; 11(5): 991. https://doi.org/10.3390/vaccines11050991
[xvi] Noé A, Dang TD, Axelrad C et al. BNT162b2 COVID-19 vaccination in children alters cytokine responses to heterologous pathogens and Toll-like receptor agonists. Front Immunol 2023; 14:1242380. doi.org/10.3389/fimmu.2023.1242380
[xvii] Castruita JAS, Schneider UV, Mollerup S et al. SARS-CoV-2 spike mRNA vaccine sequences circulate in blood up to 28 days after COVID-19 vaccination. APMIS 2023; 131: 128-132. https://doi.org/10.1111/apm.13294
[xviii] Brogna C, Cristoni S, Marino G et al.Detection of recombinant Spike protein in the blood of individuals vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2: Possible molecular mechanisms. Proteomics Clinical Applications 2023; https://doi.org/10.1002/prca.202300048
[xix] https://vigilantnews.com/post/excess-mortality-just-got-even-worse-ed-dowd-drops-alarming-new-data
[xx] https://www.unesco.org/en/legal-affairs/universal-declaration-bioethics-and-human-rights
September 8, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, UK |
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The vast majority of the population of Haiti is unvaccinated for COVID-19 but the impoverished Caribbean nation recorded virtually no deaths from the virus.
Haiti remains one of the least vaccinated countries in the world while also showing the lowest Covid death rate.
As of the end of April, just 254 people have died in Haiti from what authorities agree constitutes Covid, according to reports.
However, this figure is likely overblown considering SARS-CoV-2 has never even been isolated and proven to exist.
Compared to the United States, which currently has a COVID-19 death rate of around 1,800 per one million people, Haiti has a Covid death rate of just 22 per one million people, or 0.0022% – basically 0 percent.
NPR admits in a report about Haiti that Covid restrictions were never enforced there.
Nobody there wears a mask, people are mostly unvaccinated, and daily life is normal with busy and crowded buses and markets.
For most Haitians, the pandemic never happened.
“And Haiti hasn’t yet administered a single COVID-19 vaccine,” NPR‘s Jason Beaubien further reveals.
It turns out that Haiti had its own version of Tony Fauci, a man named Dr. Jean “Bill” Pape, who headed up a commission during the “pandemic” to deal with the fallout. In the end, however, the commission was dissolved because Haiti was, and continues to be, COVID-free.
“The reason mainly is because we have very, very few cases of COVID,” Pape said about why the commission was ultimately disbanded.
GHESKIO, the local health agency that Pape heads, also closed its COVID units last fall due to a lack of patients.
While the Western world is stricken with hordes of “fully vaccinated” people who are now sick as dogs, Haiti is back to normal thanks to its rejection of the shots.
“Sometimes it’s two, sometimes zero, sometimes it’s 20 cases,” Pape said.
“But we are not seeing a second wave as we thought would happen.”
Unlike much of the rest of the world, Haiti remained open during the “pandemic.”
Outdoor markets were never closed, and people there continued working because sheltering in place and remote employment are not things that the average Haitian can afford.
“Most people don’t wear a mask,” Pape added, noting that Haitians continued working as normal throughout the pandemic because “if they don’t work, they don’t eat – their family doesn’t eat.”
When AstraZeneca tried to peddle its COVID injection in Haiti, the Haitian government denied a shipment of it.
It turns out that the medical community in Haiti heard about all the “rare” side effects of the jab and thus rejected it.
“COVID did not impact us as badly,” said Dr. Jacqueline Gautier, who serves on the national technical advisory group on COVID vaccination in Haiti.
“People don’t think [the vaccine] is worth it, actually.”
Another factor that makes Haiti an incredible success story compared to other nations is the fact that its population is very young.
The average age in Haiti is around 23, while in the United States, it is closer to 40.
Younger people tend to have stronger immune systems than older people.
And without COVID jabs to destroy them, Haiti’s millions of unvaccinated people fared well compared to the rest of the world.
“Also, there are many other major problems the country is facing,” Gautier added.
“So people don’t see COVID as our major, as a major, problem for us.
“And who can blame them?”
September 8, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Haiti |
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Years before emerging as Kiev’s top private weapons trafficker, ex-legislator Serhiy Pashinsky played a key role in the 2014 US-backed coup which toppled Ukraine’s democratically-elected president and set the stage for a devastating civil war. Though the notoriously corrupt former Ukrainian parliamentarian was condemned by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a “criminal” as recently as 2019, a lengthy exposé by the New York Times has now identified Pashinsky as the Ukrainian government’s “biggest private arms supplier.”
Perhaps predictably, the report makes no mention of evidence implicating Pashinsky in the 2014 massacre of 70 anti-government protesters in Kiev’s Maidan Square, an incident which pro-Western forces used to consummate their coup d’etat against then-President Viktor Yanukovych.
In an August 12 report on Ukraine’s new weapons-sourcing strategy, the New York Times alleged that “out of desperation,” Kiev had no option but to adopt increasingly amoral tactics. The shift, they say, has driven up prices of lethal imports at an exponential rate, “and added layer upon layer of profit-making” for the benefit of unscrupulous speculators like Pashinsky.
According to the Times, the strategy is simple: Pashinksy “buys and sells grenades, artillery shells and rockets through a trans-European network of middlemen,” then “sells them, then buys them again and sells them once more”:
“With each transaction, prices rise – as do the profits of Mr. Pashinsky’s associates – until the final buyer, Ukraine’s military, pays the most,” the Times explained, adding that while using multiple brokers may technically be legal, “it is a time-tested way to inflate profits.”
As the seemingly endless supply of cash from Western taxpayers provides a bonanza for arms manufacturers such as Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, it similarly benefits war profiteers like Pashinsky. His company, Ukrainian Armored Technology, “reported its best year ever last year, with sales totaling more than $350 million” — a whopping 12,500% increase from its $2.8 million in sales the year before the war.
Pashinsky is not the only racketeer benefitting from the elimination of anti-corruption measures in wartime Ukraine. Several suppliers previously placed on an official blacklist after they “ripped off the military” are now free to sell again, according to the Times investigation. The outlet downplayed this as an unfortunate, but ultimately necessary measure.
“In the name of rushing weapons to the front line, leaders have resurrected figures from Ukraine’s rough-and-tumble past and undone, at least temporarily, years of anticorruption [sic] policies,” the Times asserted, describing “the re-emergence of figures like Mr. Pashinsky” as “one reason the American and British governments are buying ammunition for Ukraine rather than simply handing over money”:
“European and American officials are loath to discuss Mr. Pashinsky, for fear of playing into Russia’s narrative that Ukraine’s government is hopelessly corrupt and must be replaced.”
However, even the seemingly critical Times report overlooks a key aspect of Pashinsky’s unsavory biography. Conspicuously absent from the coverage was any explanation of his role in carrying out the infamous massacre of anti-government activists and police officers in Kiev’s Maidan Square in late February 2014.
A defining moment in the US-orchestrated overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government, the death of 70 at the hands of mysterious snipers triggered an avalanche of international outrage that led directly to the ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych. Even today, these killings officially remain unsolved.
However, firsthand testimony by individuals who claimed to have helped carry out the false flag attack suggest Kiev’s most prolific gun runner was intimately involved in the grisly affair.
Maidan massacre organizer ‘takes no prisoners’
In November 2017, Italy’s Matrix TV channel published eyewitness accounts by three Georgians who say they were ordered to kill protesters by Mamuka Mamulashvili. Then the top-ranking military aide to Georgian president Mikhael Saakashvili, Mamulashvili later founded the infamous mercenary brigade known as the Georgian Legion, whose fighters were widely condemned after they published a gruesome video of themselves gleefully executing unarmed and bound Russian soldiers in April 2022.
The documentary, “Ukraine: The Hidden Truth,” features an Italian journalist’s interviews with three Georgian fighters allegedly sent to orchestrate the coup. All described Pashinsky as a key organizer and executor of the Maidan massacre, even alleging the corrupt arms dealers provided weapons and selected specific targets. The film also featured footage of him personally evacuating a shooter from the Square, after they had been caught with a rifle and a scope by protesters and surrounded.
One of the Georgian fighters recalled how he and his two associates arrived in Kiev in January, “to arrange provocations to push the police to charge the crowd.” For almost a month, however, “there were not many weapons around,” and “molotov [cocktails], shields and sticks were used to the maximum.”
This changed around mid-February, they said, when Mamualashvili personally visited them alongside a US soldier named Brian Christopher Boyenger, a former officer and sniper in the 101st Airborne Division, who personally gave them orders they “had to follow.”
A documentary by Italy’s Matrix channel contains eyewitness testimony implicating an American military instructor in Ukraine’s 2014 Maidan massacre.
Pashinky then personally moved them along with sniper rifles and ammunition to buildings overlooking Maidan Square, they alleged. At that point, Mamualashvili reportedly insisted that “we have to start shooting, so much, to sow some chaos.”
So it was that the Georgian fighters “started shooting two or three shots at a time” into the crowd below, having been ordered to “shoot the Berkut, the police, and the demonstrators, no matter what.” Once the killing was over, Boyenger moved to the Donbas front to fight in the ranks of the Georgian Legion, which Mamulashvili commands to this day.
In the meantime, Ukrainian journalist Volodymyr Boiko, who headed the civic council of the Prosecutor General Office of Ukraine after Maidan, has alleged that in order to obscure his role, Pashinsky personally hand-picked the figures leading the official investigation into the massacre, and even bribed the prosecutor who headed it.
Despite these shocking claims, Pashinsky’s involvement in the Maidan massacre has never been officially investigated, let alone punished, and his most recent experiences with the Ukrainian judicial system suggest it is unlikely to be heavily scrutinized by officials in Kiev. While a member of Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada, he was arrested for shooting and wounding a pedestrian in a traffic-related dispute, but was ultimately acquitted in 2021.
When Israeli journalists confronted Pashinsky about his role in the Maidan massacre, the arms dealer warned that they would be tracked down in their home country, where his associates would “tear them apart.” They could be forgiven for believing it was not an idle threat; there is a troubling tendency for Pashinky’s detractors to end up viciously beaten or shot dead in the street.
September 7, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Ukraine |
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By Lucas Leiroz | September 7, 2023
The US appears to be less and less concerned about the risks of escalation in its proxy conflict with Russia. In yet another irresponsible and anti-humanitarian maneuver, the Biden government announced its decision to send depleted uranium (DU) weapons to the Kiev regime. As is well known, these weapons are extremely dangerous for everyone involved in the conflict, including the soldiers who use them. But the western side does not seem to care about these issues, planning only to prolong hostilities as long as possible.
The announcement was made on September 6, with Pentagon’s spokespersons informing the media that DU munitions will be included in a new military aid package valued at 175 million dollars. The munitions are expected to be used on more than thirty M1 Abrams tanks previously shipped to Ukraine. In addition to radioactive weapons, artillery, anti-tank equipment and other types of arms are also included in the package.
Although the US has already taken several escalating measures and violated many Russian red lines, this is the first time that the country has announced its intention to send radioactive shells to Ukraine. So far, only the UK has sent DU weapons to Kiev. With the US assisting in this supply, the situation worsens significantly, removing any hope of easing tensions in the short term.
As well known, the effects of these weapons on human health are disastrous. There are several reports about the negative impact of DU ammunition on the lives of soldiers and civilians in the regions where it was used. Cancer, fetal deformity, deficiency of fertility and several other diseases are linked with the handling of DU ammunition. Commenting on the arrival of these weapons in Ukraine months ago, Doug Weir, an expert linked to the Conflict and Environment Observatory, explained that “[DU munitions] fragment and burn, generating chemically toxic and radioactive DU particulate that poses an inhalational risk to people.”
Despite evidence of health problems caused by DU arms, they are considered “low” risk by the British and Americans. This is why they were used on a large scale in NATO’s invasions against Serbia and Iraq, generating thousands of victims. The excuse for considering them “low risk” is that depleted uranium has a low radiation level, but this does not appear to be a solid argument, as obviously it does not have to be highly radioactive to be toxic and dangerous to human health.
Another important aspect to be discussed is how to classify these weapons according to international law. Since they are radioactive, there are experts who believe it appropriate to classify them in the same way as nuclear weapons. Other experts consider this interpretation exaggerated, since the radiation level of DU ammunition is low, but even so, there seems to be a consensus that the correct thing would be to ban them given their risks and their little strategic relevance.
These ammunitions are generally used to pierce armor vehicles and hit tanks. Despite giving a certain advantage to the side that uses them, their role can normally be performed on the battlefield by other types of weapons, which do not emit substances that are so toxic to human health. Russia, for example, has been efficient in neutralizing enemy tanks using artillery, drones and mines, without any radioactive substance. So, these weapons are obviously replaceable by other less dangerous ones, which is why they should be banned once and for all.
In addition to a lack of concern for human health and the environment, the American attitude also reflects a kind of “despair”. The US is running out of conventional weapons to send to Kiev, which is why it has recently started sending banned weapons, such as cluster munitions, and now even radioactive ones, such as DU. With the massive destruction of NATO equipment on the battlefield, Washington is becoming unable to continue producing conventional weapons for its own forces and for Kiev simultaneously, so it is now turning to controversial and illegal arms in the Ukrainian aid packages.
On Russia’s side, the stance remains one of avoiding escalation and trying to neutralize the radioactive threat with high-precision strikes. Most of the DU ammunition previously supplied by the British was prevented from being used on the battlefield due to the Russian attack on Khmelnitski in May, which destroyed the depot where the weapons were stored. With this kind of high-precision strike, Moscow prevents these ammunitions from being used against innocent civilians, who are the main targets of the Kiev regime.
The Russian response could be much tougher, even nuclear, since DU ammunition can be considered nuclear weapons, as they do not have specific regulation in international law. However, unlike the West, Moscow continues to maintain a posture of avoiding escalation as much as possible.
Lucas Leiroz, journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant.
You can follow Lucas on Twitter and Telegram.
September 7, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Iraq, Serbia, Ukraine, United States |
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The UN condemned the use of depleted uranium ammunition on Wednesday, after the US government said it would send Ukraine a number of such rounds for M1 Abrams tanks as part of a $175-million military aid package.
“We are against the use of depleted uranium ammunition anywhere in the world,” Farhan Haq, the deputy spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, told TASS.
Haq’s comments came after the Pentagon revealed that an unspecified number of 120mm DU rounds will be sent to Ukraine as part of the newest package of military assistance. The anti-tank rounds are intended for use by the 30-odd M1 Abrams tanks promised to Kiev by the White House in January. The first batch of tanks are supposed to be delivered later this month.
Washington is following in London’s footsteps in providing the controversial munitions to Kiev. The UK sent a number of DU rounds to Ukraine earlier this year, intended for use with its Challenger 2 tanks. The delivery of DU ammunition was teased by the Wall Street Journal in June and leaked to Reuters last week.
The British military dismissed Moscow’s objections to the use of the toxic heavy metal by saying the ammunition had “nothing to do with nuclear weapons or capabilities.” The US has also insisted the munitions are not radioactive, citing studies by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that DU residue “does not pose a radiological hazard to the population of the affected regions.”
Critics who seek to ban DU ammunition have pointed to skyrocketing rates of cancer and birth defects in places like Iraq and Serbia, claiming that uranium dust is toxic when handled or inhaled.
Anonymous British and American officials have glibly dismissed Russian concerns about environmental contamination, suggesting instead that Moscow was afraid of the “highly effective” rounds.
The US and its allies have sent over $100 billion worth of weapons, ammunition and military equipment to Ukraine over the past 18 months, while insisting that this does not make them a party to the conflict. These deliveries have included cluster munitions banned by most NATO members. Ukraine reportedly has to account for their use directly to the Pentagon. Russia has documented multiple instances in which such ordnance was used against civilian targets.
September 7, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Environmentalism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | DU, Ukraine, United States |
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The U.K.’s Royal Society — acclaimed as the world’s oldest scientific academy — last week issued a report saying there was “clear evidence” that lockdowns, masks, contact tracing, travel restrictions and other nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) were effective at reducing COVID-19 transmission “in some countries.”
However, in an article published Wednesday in UnHerd, Kevin Bardosh, Ph.D., research director at Collateral Global — which is “dedicated to researching, understanding and communicating the global impacts of policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic” — called the report “deeply flawed,” saying it revealed “an unfortunate detachment from reality in our prestigious scientific institutions.”
Bardosh called out the report, particularly for its use of the word “unequivocally,” which stated:
“In summary, evidence about the effectiveness of NPIs applied to reduce the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 shows unequivocally that, when implemented in packages that combine a number of NPIs with complementary effects, these can provide powerful, effective and prolonged reductions in viral transmission.”
Bardosh, whose work has focused on the epidemiology and control of human, animal and vector-borne infectious disease in over 20 countries, is co-author of more than 50 peer-reviewed publications.
In this 2022 analysis of the unintended consequences of COVID-19 vaccine policy, published in BMJ Global Health, Bardosh and co-authors concluded: “mandatory COVID-19 vaccine policies have had damaging effects on public trust, vaccine confidence, political polarization, human rights, inequities and social wellbeing.”
Failure to ‘evaluate the harmful consequences’ of policies
Bardosh said the central problem with the Royal Society report — and similar work like last year’s Lancet Commission report and Nature’s review — is that they fail to comprehensively evaluate the harmful consequences of pandemic policies.
Instead they “exclude or minimize the uncomfortable outliers and data that question orthodoxy and sidestep the hard policy questions.”
Without such critical inquiry, “simple narratives and comfortable popular projections” become entrenched, said Bardosh, in part by the mainstream media’s constant repetition of messages — like “masks worked” and “lockdowns slowed the spread” — and by admonitions to not question the conclusions or the authorities or institutions responsible for pushing them.
Among the most glaring yet unexamined consequences, according to Bardosh, are the hundreds of millions of people pushed into poverty and food insecurity by COVID-19 pandemic mandates and the lost educational opportunities for children.
In another article in UnHerd, Bardosh called out the U.K. COVID-19 inquiry — after more than 40 child rights charities and advocates issued a “scathing indictment” — saying it “must address the harms to children,” and that “lockdown ‘experts’ need to be held to account.”
Bardosh wrote:
“Children were not vectors of disease, despite pervasive media propaganda that toddlers would kill grandma. They were at minuscule risk from severe outcomes. Schools were never places of high transmission, something known as early as April 2020.
“Yet the expert classes, media and politicians hyped the risk to kids, dressing it up in a garb of unquestionable moralism that fed on our deepest fears: hurting children.”
What’s wrong with the Royal Society analysis?
The Royal Society report found individual NPIs in isolation had no effect on transmission, and it considered only the reduction of transmission in its overall analysis, not the illness or death outcomes, Bardosh pointed out.
In its analysis of lockdown and social distancing data, the Royal Society inconsistently applied targeting of time periods and effect sizes, and failed to distinguish between voluntary and mandated behavior change, he said.
Bardosh further criticized the report for relying heavily on observational studies from high-income countries and for cherry-picking cases from countries like South Korea, New Zealand and Hong Kong while ignoring those from Sweden, India, Haiti and Nicaragua.
“For the 17% of the world that could stay home (about 500 million people) during the height of global lockdown, reports are now written that render the other 83% invisible,” he wrote.
The report’s review of the evidence on masks, noted Bardosh, contradicts the recently updated meta-analysis of 78 randomized control trials (RCTs) by Cochrane which, while admitting the flaws in the study, nonetheless found “the pooled results of RCTs did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks” and “wearing N95/P2 respirators … may make little to no difference in how many people catch a flu-like illness.”
In his article last week about mask mandates, Bardosh also cited the recent RCT studies of community-wide cloth masking in Bangladesh and Guinea-Bissau during the pandemic, which found little to no benefit from the interventions.
Bardosh wrote:
“Before Covid, population-wide medical masks were not viewed as a particularly effective tool for respiratory viruses. In a 2018 address at the National Academy of Medicine, science writer Laurie Garrett stated that ‘the major efficacy of a mask is that it causes alarm in a person and so you stay away from each other.’”
The many downsides of facemask use also remained unexplored in the report. In his masking article Bardosh wrote:
“Oddly, the pro-mask narrative ignores the … harmful effects on social and emotional cognition, the toxicity of poorly manufactured masks, environmental pollution, psychological and physical discomfort (especially in people with a history of trauma or abuse), as well as increased social conformity to illogical bureaucracy and greater acceptance of mass surveillance technologies.”
Collateral Global in April brought together a group of 30 scholars, activists and experts from across the globe to discuss the impacts of pandemic restrictions in low- and middle-income countries — many of which were not considered in the Royal Society study, according to Bardosh.
They issued a report calling for focusing on human rights and centering local actors’ knowledge and experience, disaggregating risk based on local conditions, consistent public investment in healthcare across the world, open and accurate information flow from central authorities to regional areas and back, and for governments to avoid unnecessary and unworkable restrictions on movement, freedoms and the economy.
They also called out the acceleration of the global trend toward authoritarianism, the unlawful granting of emergency powers to the state and the manipulation of public opinion through the exploitation of fear.
Bardosh warned of a global policy “domino-effect” where lockdown policymaking in major countries invariably leads, through political pressure, to the herding of lower-income countries into the same mandates, regardless of the social and economic harm.
A new ‘lockdown doctrine’?
Despite the shortcomings of the Royal Society report, it is already being used as a rallying point for a new global preparedness vision, according to Bardosh, to make sure that NPIs such as lockdowns are rolled out early in the next pandemic.
This is part of the 100-day mission roadmap promoted by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness (CEPI), Bardosh said.
CEPI, a global partnership of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust and the World Economic Forum (WEF), was launched in 2017 in Davos, Switzerland, home of the WEF.
CEPI is closely connected to efforts to develop a vaccine for “Disease X,” raising over a billion dollars from governments and organizations such as the Gates Foundation.
According to the 100 Days website, “In preparing for Disease X, it’s important to be clear about the knowns and the unknowns: The X in ‘Disease X’ stands for everything we don’t know” and “What we do know is that the next Disease X is coming and that we have to be ready.”
CEPI recently hosted the Global Pandemic Preparedness Summit with the U.K. government “to explore how we can respond to the next ‘Disease X’ by making safe, effective vaccines within 100 days,” stating it has a $3.5 billion “pandemic-busting plan” that “will kickstart and coordinate this work.”
According to the Daily Mail, countries have pledged $1.5 billion for this plan.
Bardosh called this “our new lockdown doctrine.”
In a June article, he wrote that this doctrine represents the consolidation of the world’s resources toward pandemic preparedness and building “the critical infrastructure for rapid lockdown,” and that “Shutting down harder and faster next time is the wrong idea.”
Bardosh wrote:
“Sir Jeremy Farrar, previous director at the Wellcome Trust and current WHO [World Health Organization] Chief Scientist, warned the inquiry not to be complacent in our ‘new pandemic age.’
“Views expressed this week sounded similar to those outlined in Bill Gates’s recent book, ‘How to Prevent the Next Pandemic.’ The Gates Foundation has become the WHO’s second largest donor, giving it an oversized influence in determining the shape of future pandemic responses.
“In his book, Gates outlines a plan echoed so far in the U.K. inquiry: lock down fast and make reopening dependent on a vaccine.”
Bardosh warned the successful rollout of lockdowns, vaccines and therapeutics would require “mechanisms to shape public opinion, curtail civil liberties and deploy massive government spending programs.”
Bardosh sees the Royal Society report — driven by “powerful interests, spin and egos” — functioning as just such a mechanism, forming the latest brick in the wall of a new and expanding global command-and-control system.
“We have seen in the years since 2020,” he wrote, “that once you impose a slew of government mandates, repealing them is just as difficult.”
Bardosh hopes that “skeptical academic oddballs” like him can make enough noise to make a difference.
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.
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
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.
September 6, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | CEPI, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Gates Foundation, Human rights |
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To this day — almost 60 years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy — it would be impossible to convict any particular official of the U.S. national-security state of having participated in the plot to assassinate Kennedy. That’s because there simply is insufficient evidence to convict any one of them beyond a reasonable doubt.
Oh, sure, there is more than sufficient circumstantial evidence to convict some national-security officials of having had a motive to kill Kennedy, the motive being that they concluded that his policies posed a grave threat to “national security.” But motive would be insufficient to garner a criminal conviction in a court of law. The prosecutor would also have to show that the defendants actually participated in a plot to assassinate Kennedy.
However, if it were possible to indict the U.S. national-security establishment for the assassination, a prosecutor could establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s because of the two central points that I set forth in my books The Kennedy Autopsy and An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story.
First, the evidence establishes beyond a reasonable doubt that the military establishment conducted a fraudulent autopsy on Kennedy’s body on the very evening of the assassination.
Second, the evidence also establishes beyond a reasonable doubt that the CIA produced a fraudulent copy of the Zapruder film of the assassination on the Sunday following the Friday assassination.
At the risk of belaboring the obvious, there is no innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy or a fraudulent film. They necessarily convict the national-security establishment of the assassination itself. There is no way around that.
However, that leaves some people frustrated because they feel that the individual plotters within the national-security establishment went to their death beds having gotten away without being convicted and punished for their crime of having orchestrated the assassination of a U.S. president.
What they fail to realize, however, is that under U.S. national-security law, there is no reasonable possibility that those officials would have been convicted, even if the evidence conclusively established their guilt.
Here is why this is true.
The criminal prosecution of those military and CIA officials would have taken place in Dallas County. That’s because the JFK assassination was a murder case under Texas state law. The federal government had no jurisdiction over the crime, given that it was not a federal offense to assassinate a president at that time.
Let’s assume that the Dallas County prosecutor had more than sufficient evidence to convict those officials. Let’s assume hypothetically, for example, that he had a tape recording of the defendant’s planning the assassination. Let’s go even further and assume that the plotters, faced with that tape recording, openly, proudly, and patriotically confessed to having orchestrated and planned the assassination in order to protect “national security” from a president whose policies, they said, constituted a grave threat to “national security.”
Despite their confession, those officials would still not have been convicted under U.S. national-security law.
The defendants would have petitioned to remove the case to a federal district court, arguing that they were operating within the course and scope of their authority as officials of the national-security establishment when they orchestrated and planned the assassination.
The officials would have argued that the Kennedy assassination was nothing more than another regime-change operation, one based on the same grounds as other regime-change operations — that is, the protection of “national security” from a political leader whose policies posed a grave threat to “national security.”
They would have shown Kennedy’s betrayal of the CIA-trained Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs, his rejection of Operation Northwoods, his resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis that left Cuba permanently in communist hands, his befriending the Soviet Union in his Peace Speech at American University, his defense of the civil-rights movement that was considered to be a communist front, his Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviets, his order to withdraw U.S. troops from Vietnam, his outreach to the Cuban communist regime, and, most important, his determination to move America in a direction that was totally different from that desired by the U.S. national-security establishment. (See FFF’s book JKF’s War with the National-Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne.)
Undoubtedly, the federal judge would have granted the removal petition.
At that point, the officials would have sought immunity for what they had done. They would have shown that the removal of Kennedy from office was a national-security regime-change operation, no different from the U.S. regime-change operations conducted in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, and the Congo in 1961.
There is no question but that the federal judiciary, including the U.S. Supreme Court, would have upheld their claim of immunity and dismissed the prosecution.
How do we know that this would have happened? Because the federal courts have made it clear that they lack the jurisdiction, much less the competence, to second-guess any regime-change operation carried out by the U.S. national-security establishment. Thus, if a citizen of Iran, Guatemala, or Congo filed suit for wrongful deaths arising from those regime-change operations, the federal courts would have summarily dismissed the suits, holding that when it comes to regime-change operations, the national-security establishment is sovereign and supreme and that officials operating within the course and scope of their authority are immune from liability.
Even if the federal courts disagreed with the reasons for removing Kennedy from office, it would be irrelevant. That’s because under U.S. national-security law, it is the national-security establishment, not the federal courts, that has the final say on what constitutes a threat to “national security” and what needs to be done to resolve it. If the national-security establishment decides that the leaders of Iran, Guatemala, Congo, Chile, Iraq, the United States, or any other country pose a threat to U.S. “national security,” it wields the omnipotent, non-reviewable power to remove that threat. Moreover, its officials are immune from civil and criminal liability for orchestrating or engaging in such regime-change operations.
Where does the Kennedy assassination leave us then? It provides further confirmation of a central point that I have long made regarding the achievement of a genuinely free society: that an essential prerequisite to restoring our rights and liberties and our democratic processes is the dismantling of the national-security state form of governmental structure and the restoration of our nation’s founding governmental system of a limited-government republic.
September 6, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular | CIA, United States |
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The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) has a dedicated assassination program responsible for taking out Russian “collaborators,” the former head of the agency, Valentin Nalivaichenko, has claimed in an interview with the Economist.
According to the former official, the special SBU division dates back to at least 2015 and was formed from the elite fifth counterintelligence directorate, after Ukraine’s leaders at the time decided that imprisoning people was not enough.
“We reluctantly came to the conclusion that we needed to eliminate people,” Nalivaichenko told the British magazine.
The Economist noted that the unit has been linked to the assassinations of Donbass commanders such as Mikhail Tolstykh, aka ‘Givi’, who was killed in a rocket attack in 2017, Arsen Pavlov, aka ‘Motorola’, who was blown up in an elevator in 2016, and Aleksandr Zakharchenko, the first head of the Donetsk People’s Republic, who was killed in a restaurant bombing in 2018.
Ukrainian intelligence insiders also reportedly told the outlet that the SBU’s fifth directorate currently plays a “central role” in operations against Russia, and that it has carried out attacks such as bombing the Crimean Bridge.
According to the Economist, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky is “understood to authorize the most controversial operations,” while other decisions are often delegated.
Since the conflict between Russia and Ukraine broke out in February last year, Kiev’s security services are believed to have been responsible for several high-profile killings of Russian journalists and public officials. These include the August 2022 car bomb assassination of Darya Dugina – the daughter of Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin – and the killing of military blogger Maxim Fomin (also known as Vladlen Tatarsky) in a bomb attack in St. Petersburg in April of this year.
Several of the Ukrainian insiders interviewed by the Economist admitted that they were disturbed by the targeting of “mid-level” targets. “It makes me uncomfortable,” one former SBU fifth-directorate officer said, claiming that some killings were designed to “impress the president rather than bring victory any closer.” The former spy also admitted concerns that Kiev’s assassination campaign appears to be “driven by impulse rather than logic,” the outlet said.
Moscow has repeatedly accused Ukraine of adopting terrorist tactics, and has criticized its Western backers for allegedly turning a blind eye to its activities.
September 5, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Ukraine |
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The major German political parties will never investigate the pandemic response, because they are all complicit in it. Across the entire political landscape of the Federal Republic, the right-populist Alternative für Deutschland stands alone in its critical stance towards lockdowns and mass vaccination, and only in the state parliament of Brandenburg do they have sufficient seats to gather an investigatory committee on the transgressions of the Corona era. On Friday, 1 September, the AfD-convened Brandenburg Corona Committee summoned Robert Koch-Institut Chief Lothar Wieler (the German counterpart to Anthony Fauci) and Brigitte Keller-Stanislawski, head of the Department of Pharmaceutical Safety and Diagnostics at the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut. They were questioned for six hours on the Covid vaccines.
Journalists who eagerly reported Wieler’s every utterance during the Covid pandemic almost totally ignored his committee testimony. Among the few exceptions is Larissa Fußer, who has provided extensive reporting at Apollo News. The picture she paints is incredible: Neither the RKI, Germany’s public health authority, nor the PEI, our pharmaceuticals regulator, have taken even the most basic steps to evaluate the frequency or nature of vaccine injuries, or even the effectiveness of the vaccines in general. Technical problems, staff shortages, and the sheer extent of the data, has prevented them from fulfilling their most basic duties.
Keller-Stanislawski … reported her institute was massively overwhelmed, causing substantial delays in the evaluation of vaccine side effects that persist until this day. For example, she said, data from the “SafeVac” app released by PEI in December 2020 has yet to be analysed. The app was developed by PEI to allow easy reporting of adverse events. … They have received so many reports that they overwhelmed the technical infrastructure supporting the app. Data from 700,000 participants remain unprocessed …
Additionally, PEI staff were dramatically overworked. “There were people who only dealt with deaths and people who only dealt with myocarditis,” Keller-Stanislawski said. “We had much more work than before, all because of this vaccine. We had to get help from other departments because we didn’t have enough people to handle the adverse events.”
The PEI didn’t start evaluating adverse vaccination events yesterday. They’ve been doing this for many years, and yet somehow the world’s most safe and effective vaccine yielded so many adverse event reports that they literally broke their computers and made their routine safety evaluations impossible.
According to Keller-Stanislawski, data from the Association of Statutory Health Insurance and from insurance companies also remain to be evaluated. Although the RKI has developed a program that can process the insurance data, it requires further adjustments, which have yet to be carried out. The insurance data include, for example, doctors’ diagnoses in connection with Covid vaccination that could shed light on vaccine side effects. In other words … the PEI, whose task it is to investigate the safety of Covid vaccines, has published all their reviews on adverse events so far only on the basis of self-initiated reports from physicians and affected patients.
These reports are extremely laborious to prepare and physicians receive no remuneration for time spent writing them. The prevailing ethos among many doctors well through 2021 that the vaccines were “side-effect free” will also have disinclined many physicians even to think of associating health problems with the vaccines in the first place.
Also too, the RKI have never bothered to complete their own study of vaccine effectiveness:
The questioning of … Lothar Wieler … revealed, among other things, that the RKI has not proven on the basis of their own studies the effectiveness of the Covid vaccine. According to Wieler, such a study has been conducted, but it is still being evaluated. … Only shortly before, Wieler had told the committee that monitoring the effectiveness of vaccination was among the central tasks of the RKI.
So, it’s just the core role of the RKI, no big deal that they’ve never gotten around to it.
And then there is this insane tidbit:
The circumstances under which the Committee’s questioning took place were striking. For example, Lothar Wieler was accompanied by an employee of the Federal Ministry of Health, a certain Heiko Rottmann-Großner …. He testified that his task was to ensure that Wieler was complying with his leave to testify. As a civil servant, Wieler requires authorisation to provide information on matters that are subject to official secrecy. The authorisation regulates in detail the topics on which a witness in the civil service may not provide information.
According to media reports, Wieler’s authorisation was multiple pages long, while that of PEI bureaucrat [Keller-Stanislawski] was only one page. … [Rottmann-Großner] repeatedly gave hand signals to Wieler during the questioning, and occasionally he also passed notes to him. Committee members complained of this practice, and ultimately compelled [Rottmann-Großner] to sit two chairs further away from Wieler.
So Wieler came to testify before the Committee not only with extensive gag orders from the Karl Lauterbach’s Health Ministry, but with a special babysitter. Rottmann-Großner is not just anybody. He’s the former head of the “Health Security” subdivision of the Health Ministry; from Katja Gloger and Georg Mascolo’s 2021 book Ausbruch, we know that he was an eager and early advocate for lockdowns and other heavy restrictions, demanding a nationwide “shut-down” as early as 24 February, the very day the WHO endorsed Chinese mass containment.
It is hard for me to put into words, what a scandal this is. The Federal Republic forced literally millions of Germans to receive not just one, not just two, but at least three novel Covid jabs against a virus that posed genuine risk to very few of them. In many cases the state threatened unemployment for noncompliance, shut the unvaccinated out of public life for months, and even tried to mandate vaccination via the Bundestag. Despite these grave violations of personal autonomy and bodily integrity, the bureaucrats who supported these crimes and justified them with relentless lies about virological doom now plead that their offices simply don’t have the time to establish how safe or how effective the jabs they continue to promote actually were. It’s a lot of work bro, they’re understaffed you know, there’s so much data.
September 5, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | COVID-19 Vaccine, Germany, Human rights |
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A slow-motion car crash
To those of us well-versed in the biology and emerging safety data relating to the injections referred to as “covid vaccines”, what is playing out before us is like a slow-motion motorway pile-up: we can see it unfolding, causing immense harm, have no idea when it will stop, and feel powerless to do much about it.
At present, it is unknown for how long this ghastly experiment will continue and how much further harm will be caused.
However, unfortunately there are reasons to believe the following may well be the case:
- It will take much longer for the harms caused to be acknowledged by the “establishment” and so the injections will continue to be administered for some time yet – albeit to smaller and smaller groups as time progresses, and with varying degrees of enthusiasm in different locations.
- Even if the injections were to stop now, it is unknown how much the harms caused thus far have actually come to light, and how much may manifest over the ensuing years or even decades.
One category of reasons for the above is essentially political. We are referring here to the complete failure on the part of those we previously relied upon to ensure pharmaceutical interventions are safe. The reasons for this are willful blindness on the part of our regulatory authorities, combined with the by now rather obvious capture of these institutions by two different interested parties:
- Politicians who will apparently stoop to anything, including installing transnational coordinated censorship regimes, to keep their monumental errors hidden; and
- Big Pharma, desperate to ensure that their bonanza continues as long as possible.
But as well as the above there are some inherent biological reasons which may hinder and delay the ending of this unprecedented catastrophe.
For a variety of reasons which are listed below, many uncertainties remain concerning the biological action of repeated doses of the mRNA products. However, what is known suggests that many of the harms they cause are mediated by inflammatory and autoimmune processes induced (potentially) throughout the body.
To recap the principal mode of action, the lipid nanoparticles carry mRNA into some of the recipient’s cells. These cells express spike protein – which is foreign to the body. The body’s immune system creates antibodies to that protein, as well as attacking and destroying the cells which express the protein.
In contrast to the original claims made – that the product would be broken down in the deltoid (shoulder) muscle with little or no distribution throughout the body, it turns out that the product DOES become widely distributed – potentially to every organ system. Of course, this should not have been surprising, since the whole point of the lipid in the lipid nanoparticles is to make them able to cross membranes and become distributed, to help with their original role as conveyors of targeted drugs to cancerous cells.
Moreover:
- The amount of spike protein produced is uncontrolled and uncontrollable, as is the duration over which it is produced. High levels of spike antibodies have been found many months after injection, suggesting continued creation of the protein.
- The spike protein produced has inbuilt differences compared to the natural version – the replacement of uridine by pseudouridine – designed to ensure the mRNA is less degradable. Other changes (eg codon optimisation) may well alter the folding characteristics of the protein produced – with unknown consequences.
- It is thought that the spike protein my translocate to the nuclei of cells… cancer
- The repeated creation of spike from multiple injections may have deleterious effects, both on the ability to fight similar viruses (so-called “tolerance” created through changing the type of antibody created) through to immune exhaustion (reducing the body’s ability to fight other pathogens or cancers)
- The LNPs themselves (notwithstanding their “payload”) may well be pro-inflammatory in themselves…
- The significance of above-tolerance levels of DNA contamination left-over from the bacterial plasmids used in the high-volume manufacturing process are as yet unknown.
Much of the harm observed appears to be inflammatory or auto-immune in nature. Both these processes are usually chronic, not acute problems. It is perfectly possible that once started, they continue for months or even years. Notably, chronic inflammation is thought to have a central role in many of the chronic pathologies increasingly suffered by Westerners over the past few decades.
Hence the tail of visible harm could manifest over a long timeframe. Moreover, because chronic inflammatory and autoimmune processes, by their nature, build slowly over time, the individual is likely to become habituated to ill effects, until a critical event occurs after some longer period.
A good example of this is with coronary artery disease. It is thought that inflammation is an important part of the pathophysiology in which a “plaque” builds up in the arterial wall. This may be asymptomatic until it ruptures causing a total blockage resulting in a “heart attack”. If the injections are accelerating this inflammatory process, the course of the pathological process may appear identical to that previously seen in many people, although it has been brought on and accelerated beyond what that person would otherwise have experienced; however, because it is within the range of possible or even probable illnesses observed, it gets dismissed as “one of those things”.
Cigarette manufacturers used to deny their products caused lung cancer by pointing out non-smokers who suffered the same fate. It was, in fact, only by rigorous epidemiological analysis that the link could be unequivocally proven. For the covid injections, it is deeply concerning that authorities seem to be doing everything possible to hinder access to the data which would permit such analyses to be performed.
Another reason why harms may be difficult to identify is that in some cases the pathological processes may be merely reducing physiological reserve, something which can go unnoticed for years or decades. Most of the body’s systems have significant inbuilt redundancy, which is why a kidney, or a significant part of the liver, can be lost while still maintaining good physiological and biochemical control. But if someone loses a kidney, they are more likely to suffer renal failure as they get older and the efficiency of their kidneys declines, and the available reserve falls away. Likewise, if part of the heart is damaged when young (eg through myocarditis), they may well make a full recovery in the short term in the sense of being physiologically normal, but be more vulnerable to suffering from heart failure (where the heart can’t pump blood around the body sufficiently) after losing some more heart muscle tissue after – say – a heart attack in middle age.
Finally, it should be noted that because of the wide distribution throughout the body (something rather obvious given the wide range of reports in the various adverse event databases), the harms appear to be manifesting in an extremely wide variety of symptoms and disorders. These will be problematic to diagnose, requiring lengthy and complex investigation, with multiple pathologies being possible. Such profiles of types of harms have not generally been observed with pharmaceutical products before; in most cases, the adverse effects are more limited in scope, and more closely temporally related to dosing (though there are some exceptions).
In conclusion
It is not possible to say whether we are at the beginning, or near the end of, the harms caused by these agents.
A combination of what may be termed “political” reasons, together with the inherent biological characteristics of the mRNA “vaccines”, all mitigate against the injections being identified and accepted anytime soon as being the causative agent of significant and sustained harms being experienced by an unacceptably large number of people.
Moreover, it remains likely that they will continue to be administered for some time yet – at least to certain groups in certain places – prolonging and exacerbating the harms already caused.
September 5, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | COVID-19 Vaccine |
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