Increase in Miscarriages, Stillbirths Directly Linked to COVID Shots, Data Show — Health Officials ‘Should Have Known’
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 28, 2023
A major increase in spontaneous abortion among pregnant women was directly linked to the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine in Switzerland, according to a new analysis by statistician and Luzern University professor Dr. Konstantin Beck.
Beck, a former adviser to the German Minister of Health and the Swiss Parliament, analyzed publicly available Swiss and German data from scientific publications, health insurance companies and the Swiss Federal Office of Statistics (FOS).
He found that miscarriages and stillbirth rates in 2022 corresponded directly to COVID-19 vaccination among pregnant women in Switzerland nine months earlier.
And, he said, vaccine makers and public health officials either knew or could have known this information at the time, if they cared to look. Instead, they presented the information to the public in a way that obscured the risks.
Beck presented his groundbreaking research findings on Wednesday to Doctors for Covid Ethics.
Also, contrary to public statements by Swiss authorities that, “There is no relevant excess mortality among young people ” in Switzerland, Beck’s re-examination of the government’s own data reveals significant patterns of excess mortality among young people emerged in late 2021 and early 2022.
He said these findings show that during the COVID-19 pandemic, “We exposed the most vulnerable unnecessarily to new risks that outweigh by far the original pandemic risk.” And that “today, more and more heavy consequences of our Corona measures pop up in our official statistics, but only a few are interested to know [about them].”
“By analyzing the rollout of these vaccines, especially for pregnant women and their unborn, I found plain evidence from the very beginning that rethinking and postponing the vaccination strategy would have been imperative,” he said.
COVID shots led to ‘the baby gap’
Switzerland saw a historic drop in the rate of live births in 2022.
Every month that year, there were fewer births than there had been on average over the previous six years, for an overall reduction of 8.5% in the national birth rate, according to Beck’s analysis.
In some places, the drop was even more significant — Zurich had a 16.5 % drop in its birth rate.
The last comparable drop in births, 13%, Beck said, was during the 1914 mobilization of the Swiss Army at the start of World War I.
The 2022 plummet in birth rates came on the heels of a small “Corona baby boom” — a 3% spike in birth rates in 2021, that had followed the pandemic lockdown.
According to data compiled by analyst Raimund Hagemann, COVID-19 vaccination rates among Swiss women in 2021 and early 2022 corresponded very closely to the drop in birth rates nine months following vaccination.
Figure 1 (below), which adjusts the birth rate timeline by nine months to account for the time of pregnancy, shows this strong correlation between rates of vaccination and decline in the birth rate — the two numbers mirror one another.
Figure 1
Researchers have offered a few different hypotheses for this “baby gap,” which Beck evaluated.
Some proposed a behavioral explanation, hypothesizing that people changed their behavior out of fear associated with the pandemic itself or the associated economic uncertainty.
But Beck said this hypothesis did not match historical behavior patterns — the baby boom itself happened in the middle of World War II. And, it can’t account for the baby boom that followed the beginning of the pandemic, when public fear and unemployment were both at their height.
He also dismissed the hypothesis that COVID-19 infection reduced fertility. If that were the case, he said, there would not have been a 2021 spike in the birth rate following the first wave of infection in 2020, and there was no evidence of reduced fertility following the Omicron virus wave.
In fact, Beck said, there is no evidence of reduced fertility at all. On the contrary, the data show women were becoming pregnant at the same rates as before the pandemic.
Using German health insurance data — because Swiss data are not yet available — he showed the number of women seeking pregnancy tests and visiting doctors to be treated for pregnancy remained constant throughout 2021 and 2022.
There was even slight ongoing growth, and a spike related to the mini-baby boom of 2021.
That makes COVID-19 vaccine-induced spontaneous abortion the most plausible hypothesis for the drop in birth rates — because the same number of women were becoming pregnant, but fewer of them were carrying their pregnancies to term.
Supporting that claim, data from German health and Swiss insurers show that beginning in the fourth quarter of 2021, there are clear and significant increases in the number of pregnancy complications treated and in the length of hospital stays following birth — both of which had been trending downward for years.
German data also indicate that the number of stillbirths was up 20% in the fourth quarter of 2021.
Although data on stillbirths were not available for Switzerland, he said, there is no reason to believe that it would be substantively different.
‘Anyone who had read the leaflet, would have been informed’ of dangers
The vaccines’ impact on pregnancy was not simply a tragic and unanticipated outcome, because it was already evident in the vaccine manufacturers’ own data or lack thereof, Beck said.
Anyone who had “read a leaflet from the manufacturer,” he added, “would have been informed” that there were no pregnancy data, but that there were serious concerns about the possible effects of vaccines on infants.
The German version of the Moderna Spikevax warning said, essentially, “We have no clue what the risk is for pregnant women. There are no good controlled studies done. There is not enough data available,” Beck said.
The leaflet also recommended against vaccination for breastfeeding mothers, but strongly recommended it for pregnant women, Beck said.
“But isn’t pregnancy usually preceding breastfeeding?” he asked, “And what should you then do after giving birth to get rid of vaccination?”
On April 20, 2021, Pfizer sent its report regarding the mRNA vaccine and pregnancy to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), according to the Pfizer documents.
The following day, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) published preliminary findings on COVID-19 vaccine safety in pregnant women based on an analysis of V-safe and the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
On April 23, in a White House press conference, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky recommended pregnant women get vaccinated based on the findings of that paper.
The paper explicitly stated that researchers found no safety signals with respect to pregnancy or neonatal outcomes in the third trimester, but that it could make no conclusions about the first or second trimesters.
Given that the first and second trimesters are the highest risk periods for pregnancy, Beck said, the NEJM paper concedes the researchers didn’t know what additional risks the vaccines might pose to pregnant women at their most vulnerable time.
The paper also included an irrelevant comparison of the most frequent symptoms post-vaccine between pregnant and non-pregnant women, and used live birth as the only measure of the potential health effects on the newborn.
And perhaps most importantly, it explicitly stated that “The most frequently reported pregnancy related adverse events were spontaneous abortion.”
The paper reported 46 spontaneous abortions related to vaccination out of 104 total reported. That, Beck said, is a 73.1% increase in spontaneous abortion.
Making calculations based on that NEJM data, Beck found that the reported vaccination rate of 75% of pregnant women in Switzerland, 1 in 10 pregnancies ends in a miscarriage or stillbirth.
He concluded that alternative existing hypotheses can’t account for this phenomenon, and the vaccine-induced miscarriage hypothesis corresponds to both the manufacturer’s data and the relevant findings reported as the basis of the CDC’s campaign to vaccinate pregnant women.
125% spike in pulmonary embolism, cardiac arrest and stroke, and cerebral infarction among children ages 0-14
The presentation also raised a series of concerns about the impacts of COVID-19 vaccination on young people and how statistical manipulation can obscure those potential effects.
Based on several examples of how the health and mortality of young people worsened over the course of the vaccination period, Beck posed the question, “Why did we vaccinate children? I mean, they were not the target group of this virus.”
An examination of data from major health insurers, for example, showed that during 2020-2021, people ages 19-39 had the highest growth in healthcare costs, while they typically have the lowest costs, indicating a change in the health of that demographic.
Data on the frequency of pulmonary embolism, cardiac arrest and stroke, and cerebral infarction among children ages 0-14 showed a 125% spike in events. While the numbers were still small, they went from an average of 20 events per year over the several preceding years to a total of 45 events in 2021.
A second look at data analysis by the FOS, which had reported that there was no excess mortality for young people in 2022, raised red flags, Beck said.
Excess mortality measures the difference in reported deaths versus expected deaths in a given period. Baseline projections of excess mortality are typically based on previous averages.
Re-analyzing the FOS mortality data, but keeping the expected number of deaths in line with previous averages — which the FOS had not done — Beck found a 12% increase in overall excess mortality.
When he analyzed the excess mortality by age groups, Beck found that for young adults ages 20-39, there was a spike in excess mortality beyond normal expectations in late 2021 and in 2022. And for children ages 0-19, he identified a similar trend.
Excess mortality data, he said, can be easily hidden by widening confidence intervals for predictions, combining demographic groups with different health profiles or changing the baseline expected number of deaths to hide variation, which made it possible for Swiss officials to announce there was no excess mortality for young people.
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
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.
‘Health Program or Military Program’? White House Taps Military Official to Lead New Pandemic Policy Office
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 26, 2023
Just weeks after ending the COVID-19 national and public health emergencies and the resignation of COVID-19 Response Coordinator Ashish Jha, the White House launched its Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy (OPPR).
Retired Major General Paul Friedrichs, a military combat surgeon, will lead the office, the White House said.
According to the White House, the OPPR will be “a permanent office in the Executive Office of the President (EOP) charged with leading, coordinating, and implementing actions related to preparedness for, and response to, known and unknown biological threats or pathogens that could lead to a pandemic or to significant public health-related disruptions in the United States.”
The OPPR will take over the duties of President Biden’s COVID-19 and monkeypox response teams, including “ongoing work to address potential public health outbreaks and threats from COVID-19, Mpox, polio, avian and human influenza, and RSV [respiratory syncytial virus],” the announcement stated.
The OPPR also will oversee efforts to “develop, manufacture, and procure the next generation of medical countermeasures, including leveraging emerging technologies and working with HHS [U.S. Department of Health and Human Services] on next generation vaccines and treatments for COVID-19 and other public health threats.”
According to The New York Times, Friedrichs, set to take office Aug. 7, will have the authority to “oversee domestic biosecurity preparedness.” He will work on the development of next-generation vaccines, ensure adequate supplies in the Strategic National Stockpile and “ramp up surveillance to monitor for new biological threats.”
Several medical, biosecurity and civil liberties experts questioned the selection of a career military and biosecurity individual to head a new office charged with pandemic preparedness.
They also told The Defender they saw parallels between the White House’s establishment of the OPPR and ongoing United Nations (U.N.) efforts to draft a global declaration on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response (PPPR).
‘Is OPPR a health program or a military program?’
Friedrichs, a board-certified physician, is currently a special assistant to the president and senior director for Global Health Security and Biodefense at the National Security Council.
He previously served as joint staff surgeon at the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) and as medical adviser to the Pentagon’s COVID-19 task force.
Throughout his career, the White House said, Friedrichs worked closely with federal, state, tribal, local and territorial government partners, as well as industry and academic counterparts.
According to the White House:
“As the United States’ representative to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Committee of Military Medical Chiefs, he worked closely with many of America’s closest allies and partners throughout the pandemic and in developing medical support to the Ukrainian military.”
In his previous roles at the National Security Council and DOD, Friedrichs was a strong proponent of COVID-19 vaccines and countermeasures.
The Times reported that, in a February speech, Friedrichs said, “The military health system became the pinch-hitter that stepped in to help our civilian partners as we collectively struggled to work through that pandemic.”
In a February 2022 podcast, Friedrichs praised the COVID-19 vaccines and also appeared to blame those who were unvaccinated for placing “stress on our system.”
And in remarks shared in January 2022 with the Association of the United States Army, Friedrichs asked military families to continue holding off on gatherings so that service members are “able to do the things that our nation depends on them to do.”
Does Friedrichs’ appointment signal more vaccine mandates?
Describing Friedrichs’ appointment as “a joke and a fraud,” Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., a bioweapons expert and professor of international law at the University of Illinois who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, told The Defender :
“DOD has routinely enforced experimental medical vaccines on U.S. Armed Forces, in gross violation of the Nuremberg Code on Medical Experimentation — that is, a Nuremberg crime against humanity — from today’s COVID-19 ‘vaccines’ and going all the way back in recent history to the ‘vaccines’ that produced Gulf War sickness starting in 1990-1991, when Friedrichs was a U.S. Military medical doctor.
“Of 500,000 U.S. troops inoculated, 11,000 died and 100,000 were disabled. I do not recall that Friedrichs was among the handful of courageous and principled military medical doctors who refused, as a matter of principle, to inflict Nuremberg crimes on our own troops. Did he? That needs to be investigated.”
Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D., author of “Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom,” said the selection of Friedrichs, who supported military vaccine mandates, may signal similar future mandates for the general public.
“We should not forget that the DOD mandated the COVID-19 vaccine for service members,” Rectenwald said. “The OPPR will mandate vaccines for the nation.”
And writing on her blog, Dr. Meryl Nass, an internist, biological warfare epidemiologist and member of the Children’s Health Defense scientific advisory committee, questioned if the OPPR plans “to use the military’s OTA [other transaction] authority again to bypass the FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] and vaccinate us with untested junk that turned out to be poison, like it did for COVID.”
Is OPPR “a health program or a military program?” Nass wrote.
Nass told The Defender that if the main purpose of the OPPR was to respond to pandemics and pandemic threats, an epidemiologist or infectious disease doctor would have been tapped to head the office instead of a military general.
Similarly, Dr. David Bell, a public health physician, biotech consultant and former director of Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund, told The Defender :
“COVID-19 demonstrated that the sort of interventions envisioned by the pandemic preparedness lobby such as lockdowns and coerced mass vaccination, have poor public health outcomes.
“Public health should be concentrated on informing the public to make personal decisions about health, rather than the population-control approaches we saw for COVID-19 that are most profitable to the corporate world. We must hope this new health bureaucracy is more independent of vested interests, and will take an evidence-based approach.”
Nass suggested that Friedrich’s selection belies a broadly encompassing biosecurity agenda, which would include censorship of non-establishment medical information, surveillance and mass, or mandatory, vaccination, tied to U.N. and World Health Organization (WHO) “pandemic preparedness and response” efforts.
A ‘WHO globalist worldwide medical and scientific police state’ here in the U.S.?
Other experts also noted the similarities between the name of the OPPR, the U.N.’s draft PPPR and a similar recent agreement among WHO member states.
Still in “zero draft” form, the PPPR is scheduled to be discussed by the U.N. General Assembly in September 2023. It would also be tied to the WHO’s proposed pandemic treaty and amendments to the International Health Regulations.
Similarly, a June 28 document from the WHO said, “Member States … have agreed to a global process to draft and negotiate a convention, agreement or other international instrument under the Constitution of the World Health Organization to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.”
And a separate but similar set of proposals — part of the U.N.’s “Pact for the Future” and “Our Common Agenda” — would give the U.N. secretary-general unprecedented emergency powers not only for pandemics but seemingly for an unlimited range of other potential crises. The U.N. will discuss these proposals in September 2024.
Boyle told The Defender the OPPR is “obviously being coordinated with the U.N. [and] the Biden administration to establish the effective functioning of a WHO globalist worldwide medical and scientific police state here in the United States.”
“You need the mentality of an unprincipled military medical major general to do that,” Boyle said. “All the trains will run on time.”
Rectenwald drew similar connections, telling The Defender the OPPR and Friedrichs’ selection:
“Signifies the militarization of pandemic responses in the U.S., in line with the ‘global governance’ measures outlined by the U.N.’s Pandemic Preparedness, Prevention and Response declaration.
“This new wing of the executive branch is the means by which this ‘global governance’ (read: one-world totalitarian system) is being introduced to the U.S., using pandemic preparedness as the pretext.”
Notably, proposals for a government “pandemic preparedness” office date at least as far back as October 2020, when the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) issued an extensive set of recommendations calling upon the U.S. government to “adopt a robust strategy for domestic and global pandemic preparedness.”
The report recommended that the U.S. “finally treat pandemics as a serious national security threat, translating its rhetorical support for pandemic preparedness into concrete action.”
According to the CFR, this would entail “bolstering the White House’s leadership role in preparing for and responding to pandemics, improving congressional input into and oversight over executive branch efforts, reforming the CDC so that it can perform more effectively, and clarifying the often confused division of labor across federal, state, and local governments in pandemic preparedness and response.”
“The president should designate a focal point within the White House for global health security, including pandemic preparedness and response,” the report added. “This office would have lead responsibility for coordinating the multiple federal departments and agencies in anticipating, preventing, and responding quickly to major disease outbreaks.”
OPPR reports to Congress required only every 5 years, not annually
The establishment of the OPPR resulted from the passage of the PREVENT Pandemics Act in December 2022.
The bill, introduced by Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and the now-retired Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), passed as part of an omnibus spending bill, contained a requirement for the creation of a White House pandemic preparedness and response office.
Though the bill was passed in December 2022, the White House was unable to immediately establish a pandemic preparedness office and name a director.
A Politico report in May said these efforts were “hindered by concerns over whether [the office] will have the influence within the administration and the financial resources needed to fulfill its broad mission — especially as COVID plummets down the list of political priorities.”
According to the White House announcement, OPPR will “Develop and provide periodic reports to Congress” as required by law, including drafting and delivering to Congress “a biennial Preparedness Review and Report and Preparedness Outlook Report every five years.”
On her blog, Nass wrote, “Instead of the more customary yearly reports, the reporting to Congress is being delayed considerably, perhaps until after many of us have died from the countermeasures — a great way to evade oversight.”
In a separate blog post, Nass also observed that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention requested $20 billion for “pandemic preparedness” in its fiscal year 2024 budget.
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.
Remember the Atrocities of the Korean War, Not the Propaganda
By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | July 27, 2023
Today is the 70th anniversary of the armistice that ended the fighting between North and South Korea. Almost 40,000 American soldiers died pointlessly in that conflict. If politicians and policymakers were honest and prudent, the Korean War would have vaccinated America against the folly and evil of foreign intervention. Instead, the war was retroactively redefined. As Barack Obama declared in 2013, “That war was no tie. Korea was a victory.”
The war began with what Harry Truman claimed was a surprise invasion on June 25, 1950, by the North Korean army crossing the dividing line with South Korea that was devised after World War II. But the U.S. government had ample warnings of the pending invasion. According to the late Justin Raimondo, co-founder of Antiwar.com, the conflict actually started with a series of attacks by South Korean forces, aided by the U.S. military:
“From 1945-1948, American forces aided [South Korean President Syngman] Rhee in a killing spree that claimed tens of thousands of victims: the counterinsurgency campaign took a high toll in Kwangju, and on the island of Cheju-do—where as many as 60,000 people were murdered by Rhee’s U.S.-backed forces.”
The North Korean army quickly routed both South Korean and U.S. forces. A complete debacle was averted after General Douglas MacArthur masterminded a landing of U.S. troops at Inchon. After he routed the North Korean forces, MacArthur was determined to continue pushing northward regardless of the danger of provoking a much broader war. By the time the U.S. forces drove the North Korean army back across the border, roughly 5,000 American troops had been killed. The Pentagon had plenty of warning that the Chinese would intervene if the U.S. Army pushed too close to the Chinese border. But the euphoria that erupted after Inchon blew away all common sense and drowned out the military voices who warned of a catastrophe. One U.S. Army colonel responded to a briefing on the Korea situation in Tokyo in 1950 by storming out and declaring, “They’re living in a goddamn dream land.”
The Chinese military attack resulted in the longest retreat in the history of America’s armed forces—a debacle that was valorized in the 1986 Clint Eastwood movie, Heartbreak Ridge. By 1951, the Korean War had become intensely unpopular in the United States—more unpopular than the Vietnam War ever was. Truman insisted on mislabeling the war as a “police action,” but it destroyed his presidency regardless. When the ceasefire was signed in 1953, the borders were nearly the same as at the start of the war.
While the friends of leviathan paint Truman as the epitome of an honest politician, he was as demagogic on Korea as Lyndon Johnson was on Vietnam. When Republicans criticized the Korean War as useless, President Harry Truman condemned “reckless and irresponsible Republican extremists” and “the false version of history that has been copyrighted by the extremists in the Republican Party.”
Perhaps the biggest disaster of the Korean war was that intellectuals and foreign-policy experts succeeded in redefining the Korean conflict as an American victory. As Georgetown University professor Derek Leebaert noted in his book Magic and Mayhem, “What had been regarded as a bloody stalemate transformed itself in Washington’s eyes; ten years later it had become an example of a successful limited war. Already by the mid-1950s, elite opinion began to surmise that it had been a victory.” Leebaert explained, “Images of victory in Korea shaped the decision to escalate in 1964-65 helping to explain why America pursued a war of attrition.” Even worse, the notion that “‘America has never lost a war’ remained part of the national myth, and the notion of having ‘prevailed’ in Korea became a justification for going big in Vietnam.” But as Leebaert noted, “in Vietnam, [the U.S. Army] had forgotten everything it had learned about counterinsurgency in Korea as well.”
On last year’s armistice anniversary, President Joe Biden proclaimed, “During the Korean War, nearly 1.8 million Americans answered the call to serve and defend the freedoms and universal values that the people of South Korea enjoy today.” The “call to serve” mostly came from summons from draft boards for military conscription. American media commemorations of the Korean War have almost entirely ignored perhaps the war’s most important lesson: the U.S. government has almost unlimited sway to hide its own war crimes.
During the war, Americans were deluged with official pronouncements that the U.S. military was taking all possible steps to protect innocent Korean civilians. Because the evils of communism were self-evident, few questions arose about how the United States was thwarting Red aggression. When a U.S. Senate subcommittee appointed in 1953 by Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) investigated Korean War atrocities, the committee explicitly declared that “war crimes were defined as those acts committed by enemy nations.” This same standard prevailed in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and practically any other place where the U.S. has militarily intervened.
In 1999, forty-six years after the cease fire in Korea, the Associated Press exposed a 1950 massacre of Korean refugees at No Gun Ri. U.S. troops drove Koreans out of their village and forced them to remain on a railroad embankment. Beginning on July 25, 1950, the refugees were strafed by U.S. planes and machine guns over the following three days. Hundreds of people, mostly women and children, were killed. The 1999 AP story was widely denounced by American politicians and some media outlets as a slander on American troops.
The Pentagon promised an exhaustive investigation. In January 2001, the Pentagon released a 300-page report purporting to prove that the No Gun Ri killings were merely “an unfortunate tragedy” caused by trigger-happy soldiers frightened by approaching refugees.
President Bill Clinton announced his “regret that Korean civilians lost their lives at No Gun Ri.” In an interview, he was asked why he used “regret” instead of “apology.” He declared, “I believe that the people who looked into it could not conclude that there was a deliberate act, decided at a high-enough level in the military hierarchy, to acknowledge that, in effect, the Government had participated in something that was terrible.” Clinton specified that there was no evidence of “wrongdoing high-enough in the chain of command in the Army to say that, in effect, the Government was responsible.”
But the atrocities against civilians had been common knowledge among U.S. troops 50 years earlier. As Charles Hanley, Sang-Hun Choe, and Martha Mendoza noted in their 2001 book, The Bridge at No Gun Ri, the Pentagon in 1952 “withdrew official endorsement from RKO’s One Minute to Zero, a Korean War movie in which an Army colonel played by actor Robert Mitchum orders artillery fire on a column of refugees.” The Pentagon fretted that “this sequence could be utilized for anti-American propaganda” and banned the film from being shown on U.S. military bases.
In 2005, Sahr Conway-Lanz, a Harvard University doctoral student, discovered a letter in the National Archives from the U.S. Ambassador to Korea, John Muccio, sent to Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk on the day the No Gun Ri massacre commenced. Muccio summarized a new policy from a meeting between U.S. military and South Korean officials: “If refugees do appear from north of U.S. lines they will receive warning shots, and if they then persist in advancing they will be shot.” The new policy was radioed to Army units around Korea on the morning the No Gun Ri massacre began. The U.S. military feared that North Korean troops might be hiding amidst the refugees. The Pentagon initially claimed that its investigators had never seen Muccio’s letter. Louis Caldera, who was Army secretary in 2001, declared, “Millions of pages of files were reviewed and it is certainly possible they may have simply missed it.” But Muccio’s letter was in the specific research file used for the official exoneration report.
Conway-Lanz’s 2006 book Collateral Damage: Americans, Noncombatant Immunity, and Atrocity after World War II quoted an official U.S. Navy history of the first six months of the Korean War stating that the policy of strafing civilians was “wholly defensible.” An official Army history noted, “Eventually, it was decided to shoot anyone who moved at night.” A report for the aircraft carrier USS Valley Forge justified attacking civilians because the Army insisted that “groups of more than eight to ten people were to be considered troops, and were to be attacked.”
In 2007, the Army recited its original denial: “No policy purporting to authorize soldiers to shoot refugees was ever promulgated to soldiers in the field.” But the Associated Press exposed more dirt from the U.S. archives: “More than a dozen documents—in which high-ranking U.S. officers tell troops that refugees are ‘fair game,’ for example, and order them to ‘shoot all refugees coming across river’—were found by the AP in the investigators’ own archived files after the 2001 inquiry. None of those documents was disclosed in the Army’s 300-page public report.” A former Air Force pilot told investigators that his plane and three others strafed refugees at the same time of the No Gun Ri massacre; the official report claimed that “all pilots interviewed…knew nothing about such orders.” Evidence also surfaced of massacres like No Gun Ri. On September 1, 1950, the destroyer USS DeHaven, at the Army’s insistence, “fired on a seaside refugee encampment at Pohang, South Korea. Survivors say 100 to 200 people were killed.”
Slaughtering civilians en masse became routine procedure after the Chinese army intervened in the Korean War in late 1950. MacArthur spoke of turning North Korean-held territory into a “desert.” The U.S. military eventually “expanded its definition of a military target to any structure that could shelter enemy troops or supplies.” General Curtis LeMay summarized the achievements: “We burned down every town in North Korea… and some in South Korea, too.” Yet, despite the hit-anything-still-standing bombing policy, most Americans believed the U.S. military acted humanely in Korea. Historian Conway-Lanz noted: “The issue of intention, and not the question of whose weapons literally killed civilians or destroyed their homes, became the morally significant one for many Americans.”
A million civilians may have been killed during the war. A South Korean government Truth and Reconciliation Commission uncovered many previously unreported atrocities and concluded that “American troops killed groups of South Korean civilians on 138 separate occasions during the Korean War,” The New York Times reported.
Truth delayed is truth defused. The Pentagon strategy on Korean War atrocities succeeded because it left facts to the historians, not the policymakers. The truth about No Gun Ri finally slipped out—ten presidencies later. Even more damaging, the Rules of Engagement for killing Korean civilians were covered up for four more U.S. wars. If U.S. policy for slaying Korean refugees (or anyone who “moved at night”) had been exposed during that war, it might have curtailed similar killings in Vietnam (many of which were not revealed until decades after the war).
Former congressman and decorated Korean War veteran Pete McCloskey (R-CA) warned, “The government will always lie about embarrassing matters.” The same shenanigans permeate other U.S. wars. The secrecy and deceit surrounding U.S. warring has had catastrophic consequences in this century. The George W. Bush administration exploited the 9/11 attacks to justify invading Iraq in 2003, and it was not until 2016 that the U.S. government revealed documents exposing the Saudi government’s role in financing the 9/11 hijackers (15 of 19 whom were Saudi citizens). The Pentagon covered up the vast majority of U.S. killings of Iraqi civilians until Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks exposed them in 2010.
When politicians or generals appear itching to pull the United States into another foreign war, remember that truth is routinely the first casualty. Governments that recklessly slay masses of civilians won’t honestly investigate and announce their guilt to the world. Self-government is a mirage if Americans do not receive enough information to judge killings committed in their name.
Jim Bovard is the Junior Fellow for The Libertarian Institute. He is the author of Public Policy Hooligan (2012), Attention Deficit Democracy (2006), Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (1994), and 7 other books.
Biden Regime Played Vital Role in Crimean Bridge Attacks – Sy Hersh
Sputnik – 27.07.2023
WASHINGTON – The Biden Administration played a vital role in both recent deadly attacks on the Crimean Bridge, providing Ukraine with the necessary technology, US journalist Seymour Hersh reported on Thursday, citing a US official.
“Of course it was our technology,” the US official was quoted by Hersh as saying. “The drone was remotely guided and half submerged—like a torpedo.”
When Hersh asked if there was any thought before the bridge attacks about the possibility of Russia’s retaliation, the official responded with “What will Putin do? We don’t think that far. Our national strategy is that Zelensky can do whatever he wants to do. There’s no adult supervision.”
On October 8, 2022, a car detonated on the Crimean Bridge, which connects the Crimean Peninsula with Russia’s mainland. Five people, including the driver of the truck, were killed. The bridge itself was seriously damaged.
On July 17, a submersible drone carried out another attack on the Crimean Bridge, killing a woman and a man and wounding their teenage daughter.
Ukraine Shipped Drugs and Russian Oil to Europe Under Cover of Grain Deal
In addition, the journalist reported that Ukraine shipped drugs and Russian oil under the cover of the UN-mediated Black Sea Grain Deal, an accord that was meant to bolster global food security.
Russia refused to extend the Black Sea deal last week, following its long-time criticism of the UN’s failure to facilitate its own grain and fertilizer exports as was required under the agreement.
The decision also came following the July 17 attack on the Crimean bridge with marine surface drones, which killed a couple who were driving across when the blast occurred and wounded their teen daughter.
US, Ukraine No Longer Project Counteroffensive Success, Russia Has Upper Hand
According to the correspondent, the US and Ukrainian military now abstain from making forecasts regarding future success in the counteroffensive because Russia has a clear advantage on the battlefield.
“The American and Ukrainian military are no longer making any predictions,” the US official was quoted by Hersh as saying. “The Ukrainian army has not gotten past the first of three Russian defense lines. Every mine the Ukrainians dig up is replenished at night by the Russians.”
The reality, the interlocutor clarified, “is that the balance of power in the war is settled. Putin has what he wants.”
Ukraine is not capable of returning Crimea, Donetsk, Kherson, Lugansk and the Zaporozhye Region, the official stressed, while Volodymyr Zelensky has “no plan, except to hang on,” the interviewee observed.
Ukraine launched a counteroffensive in early June, trying to break through the defense lines of the Russian armed forces in the Donetsk and Zaporozhye regions. Their attempts have been unsuccessful and resulted in heavy losses in armored equipment and manpower of Kiev’s forces, according to the Russian Defense Ministry.
Kiev regime kills Russian journalist with illegal US-supplied weapons
By Lucas Leiroz | July 24, 2023
Cluster munitions have already begun to generate civilian casualties in the Ukrainian conflict. Russian journalists were attacked with illegal US-supplied weapons, resulting in the injury of three people and the death of RIA Novosti’s war correspondent Rostislav Zhuravlev. Once again, the Kiev regime shows its terrorist nature, also having NATO’s co-participation in the crimes, as the alliance is responsible for supplying the weapons used in the murder of Russian civilians.
The attack took place in the Zaporozhye region. A civilian vehicle with journalists inside was hit by cluster bombs, injuring all the reporters, and killing Zhuravlev. According to information given by spokespersons for the “Rossiya Segodnya” group, the media crew was near the village of Pyatikhatki when it came under fire from Ukrainian forces. It is believed that they were in that area precisely to report the use of cluster munitions in some nearby residential zones.
Considering that it was not a military convoy, but just a civilian vehicle with journalists, the attack was illegal, contrary to basic rules of international humanitarian law. For this reason, Russian authorities have already commented on the case, classifying it as terrorism. It is well known that Ukrainian soldiers deliberately target and kill Russian media professionals, both on the ground war correspondents and commentators outside the combat zone – as previously seen in the cases of Daria Dugina and Vladlen Tatarsky. In this sense, Zhuravlev’s murder represents a continuation of the Ukrainian regime’s terrorist and anti-humanitarian practice of attacking the Russian press.
On social media, pro-Ukrainian militants reacted to the case by supporting the attack and “justifying” it with the allegation that Zhuravlev was a “military” or even a “war criminal”. To support this narrative, Ukrainian neo-Nazi activists spread photos of the journalist holding weapons and wearing military uniforms in the conflict zone. However, they omitted the fact that these photos are not recent.
Before becoming a war correspondent, Zhuravlev actually fought on the battlefield, having joined the Donbass militias in 2014, in the early months of the conflict. After completing his voluntary military service, Zhuravlev became an ordinary civilian journalist. He worked on the battlefield as a mere employee of Russian media agencies, not as a soldier, which makes the Ukrainian attack absolutely illegal.
Furthermore, it must be remembered that the attack was against a civilian car, with other media professionals inside. These other reporters, unlike Zhuravlev, did not have any military background. So, the tale spread by propagandists is not only false but also baseless, being easily refuted with a simple analysis of the case.
However, the most important point of this topic is the use of cluster munitions. As predicted by several experts, journalists and Russian officials, Kiev’s forces are actually using these weapons to kill civilians, deliberately targeting people that have no military involvement. There was a strong pressure for the US not to approve the delivery of these bombs to Kiev as their use could affect civilians as a side effect. However, what is happening now is even more serious. These weapons are not accidentally killing civilians, but are being purposefully used by the regime’s forces to target non-military Russian citizens.
Furthermore, Russia sees the US as co-responsible for the crime. Since the US is the supplier of the weapons with which Kiev murders Russian civilians, then Washington is to blame for the attacks as well as the neo-Nazi regime. The Russian understanding on the subject should be shared by the entire international society, especially by organizations that defend international law and human rights. But unfortunately, biased opinions in favor of the West continue to be imposed on states and organizations, making it impossible to sanction countries that sponsor the war.
So, in the absence of diplomatic and legal alternatives to prevent the West from continuing to supply weapons that are used to kill civilians, Russia can only try to resolve the situation through military means. In this sense, severe responses from Moscow are expected in the near future, possibly intensifying attacks on Ukrainian command centers and weapons depots where cluster munitions are being stored.
Although Russian forces have repeatedly withheld retaliation to avoid escalating the conflict, the latest moves show that Moscow is no longer willing to tolerate violations of redlines. The cruise missile attacks on the ports of Odessa in response to the killing of civilians in Crimea made it clear that Moscow is ready to retaliate for crimes committed against its citizens.
Lucas Leiroz, journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant.
Risk of Stroke Skyrockets with COVID-19 Infection after Vaccination
Breakthrough within 21 Days of Shot Confers 8-Fold Risk of Ischemic Stroke
By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH | Courageous Discourse | July 23, 2023
Because the COVID-19 vaccines load the body with the genetic code for the thrombogenic and lethal Wuhan Spike protein, those who take a vaccine are vulnerable to a catastrophe if they get infected with SARS-CoV-2 after recently taking one of the shots.
Nahab and coworkers from Emory analyzed a statewide database of COVID-19 vaccine recipients. Approximately 5 million adult Georgians received at least one COVID-19 vaccine between December 2020 and March 2022: 54% received BNT162b2, 41% received mRNA-1273, and 5% received Ad26.COV2.S. Those with concurrent COVID-19 infection within 21 days post-vaccination had an increased risk of ischemic (OR = 8.00, 95% CI: 4.18, 15.31) and hemorrhagic stroke (OR =5.23, 95% CI: 1.11, 24.64).
This analysis shows one of many great dangers present in rapid vaccine development and rollout without sufficient data safety and monitoring. Stroke is a devastating outcome and it appears that a large number of debilitating cases could have been avoided if the COVID-19 vaccines were taken off the market in January, 2021 for excess mortality. The patients in this study would have been spared stroke and disability.
Nahab F, Bayakly R, Sexton ME, Lemuel-Clarke M, Henriquez L, Rangaraju S, Ido M. Factors associated with stroke after COVID-19 vaccination: a statewide analysis. Front Neurol. 2023 Jun 28;14:1199745. doi: 10.3389/fneur.2023.1199745. PMID: 37448752; PMCID: PMC10337778.
These data highlight the need for Spike protein detoxification, in other words, methods to reduce the burden of Spike protein within the body. We have a widely anticipated manuscript in press featuring an ambulatory triple combination regimen of nattokinase, bromelain, and curcumin which works proteolytically clear Spike while providing a low level of thrombolysis and control over inflammation.
FDA Approves Remdesivir in Kidney Patients after Failed Trial
By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH | Courageous Discourse | July 21, 2023
In a move that defies all regulatory convention, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a supplemental new drug application (sNDA) for the use of Veklury® (remdesivir) in COVID-19 patients with severe renal impairment, including those on dialysis. With this approval, Veklury is now the first and only approved antiviral COVID-19 treatment that can be used across all stages of renal disease but has no efficacy data to support its administration.
Gilead: July 14, 2023 FDA Approves Veklury® (Remdesivir) for COVID-19 Treatment in Patients With Severe Renal Impairment, Including Those on Dialysis
The phase 3 REDPINE trial failed to recruit sufficient subjects to assess efficacy. Instead of properly rejecting the application, the FDA went ahead and approved the drug with insufficient safety and efficacy data. The drug has struggled in recent years as patients commonly decline the antiviral since the November, 2020, WHO warning against inpatient use. Remdesivir can cause both kidney injury and liver damage, thus with no mortality benefit, many believe it should not be used.
The FDA approval action defies logic and will be added to a long list of acts that will be considered malfeasance and will be up for review when the commissioner and agency is finally called to justice.
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Jewish Guilt is the Discourse of The Goyim
By Gilad Atzmon | April 24, 2018
For quite some time the British have accepted that British Jewish organizations have hijacked the political discourse. As has happened in other Western countries, the British political establishment has engaged is a relentless rant against antisemitsm. Sometime the focus drifts for a day or two. An alleged ‘Russian nerve gas attack’ provided a 48 hour pause. Occasionally we bomb Arabs in the name of ‘human intervention’ only to realize a day or two later that we have, once again, followed a premeditated foreign agenda. But, somehow, we always return to the antisemitism debate, as if our media and politicians are a herd of flies gravitating to a pile of poop. … continue
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