Children ages 12 to 17 who received the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine face a heightened risk of heart inflammation, according to a new U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) study.
But because the study only identified a safety signal for two heart conditions — myocarditis and pericarditis — in children “these results provide additional evidence for the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines in the pediatric population,” FDA researchers concluded.
Cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough said he disagreed. “My concern is that these data represent a gross under-reporting of the frequency and severity of COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis,” McCullough told The Epoch Times.
“There have been > 200 papers in the peer-reviewed literature and over 100 fatal documented cases largely among young men, peak ages 18-24 years, some with autopsy-proven COVID-19 vaccine heart inflammation resulting in death,” McCullough added.
In the study, published Monday in JAMA Pediatrics, FDA researchers examined health outcomes in more than 3 million children who received the Pfizer mRNA vaccine through mid-2022.
They found the number of cases of both myocarditis, a form of heart inflammation, and pericarditis, inflammation of the tissue surrounding the heart, were high enough to meet the criteria for a safety signal.
The researchers also found reports of myocarditis and pericarditis cases among vaccinated children ages 5 to 11, but not enough to trigger a safety signal, they said.
Conclusions ‘pretty ludicrous’ and ‘political,’ experts say
Norman Fenton, Ph.D., professor emeritus of risk at the Queen Mary University of London, called the claim that the results provide additional evidence that the vaccines are safe in children “pretty ludicrous.”
He said that conclusion didn’t make sense given that the signal was both strong and “likely underestimated given some obvious weaknesses of the study” and also that children of that age are at no risk from COVID-19 but at higher risk of getting COVID-19 if they are vaccinated.
Dr. Kirk Milhoan, a pediatric cardiologist, told The Defender the safety claim didn’t hold up because the study identified two safety signals. “The signal is what indicates they are not safe,” he said.
He said with previous children’s vaccines such as RotaShield, the first vaccine to prevent rotavirus gastroenteritis, about 100 vaccine-related cases of intussusception, or folding of the intestine, led to the conclusion that it was unsafe and it was withdrawn from the market. But with myocarditis in young people, he said, “we’re at thousands,” and the cases are likely undercounted.
Experts question study’s methodology
The researchers reviewed medical records from healthcare claims filed in three commercial health insurance claims databases run by Optum, HealthCore and CVS Health.
They examined insurance claims made for different possible vaccine-related adverse events within a window of time following vaccination that varied for the different events studied.
They found 153 cases of myocarditis or pericarditis among children ages 12 to 17. The children sought care for their symptoms within seven days of vaccination on average.
The researchers’ study period began in December 2020, when the FDA authorized Pfizer’s vaccine for emergency use and ran through May or June 2022, depending on the database.
The FDA also monitored the databases for 18 other potential adverse events that included anaphylaxis, Bell’s palsy, Guillain-Barré syndrome hemorrhagic stroke and others, but the study reported that none of the other conditions met the criteria for a safety signal.
Some experts questioned the study’s methodology, noting that the risk windows were short given that some effects can take time to express themselves and that the signal threshold for some criteria was set so high they would have to occur at double the rate in the unvaccinated to be recognized as a signal.
They also said categories of outcomes were sometimes overly narrow, and some adverse events were not even considered.
“I think the idea that they look at only 20 very specific AEs [adverse events] then declare them safe upon not finding anything is very myopic,” Hebrew University lecturer Joshua Guetzkow, Ph.D., wrote in an email.
Experts also said the study didn’t account for the effects of the “healthy user bias,” where people who take up certain treatments tend to be healthier than people who don’t, usually related to socio-economic factors.
Research has shown that people who decide to get vaccinated tend to be healthier than people who don’t.
In this case, all of the people in the study were vaccinated, fully insured for the entire duration of the study and able to visit a doctor who maintained their continuous health records.
Milhoan added that prior to COVID-19, it wasn’t common practice for scientific papers to make public health acknowledgments at the end of the papers.
Previously, he said, researchers wouldn’t imply recommendations, they would just say, “This is what we found medically.” He added, “These public health claims aren’t scientific, they’re political.”
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.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky made an unexpected trip to Britain last week on a whistle-stop tour of European capitals, pleading for more powerful and longer-range weapons to use in his war against Russia.
What was hard to ignore once again was the extent to which the UK is playing an outsize role in Ukraine.
Last year, shortly after the start of the war, the then-prime minister, Boris Johnson, hurried to Kyiv – presumably on Washington’s instructions – apparently to warn Zelensky off fledgling peace talks with Moscow.
At around the same time, the Biden administration made clear it favoured an escalation in fighting, not an end to it, as an opportunity to “weaken” Russia, a geo-strategic rival along with China.
Since then, the UK has been at the forefront of European efforts to entrench the conflict, helping to lobby for the supply of weapons, training and military intelligence to Ukrainian forces.
British tanks and thousands of tank shells – including, controversially, some made from depleted uranium – are being shipped out. Last week, the UK added hundreds of long-range attack drones to the inventory.
And an unspecified number of £2m-a-blast Storm Shadow cruise missiles, with a range of nearly 300km, have started arriving. Last week Ben Wallace, Britain’s defence secretary, said the missiles were already in use, adding that Kyiv alone was deciding on the targets.
Storm Shadow allows the Ukrainian military to strike deep into Russian-annexed parts of Ukraine – and potentially at Russian cities too.
A recent leak revealed that the Pentagon had learnt through electronic eavesdropping of Zelensky’s eagerness for longer-range missiles so that his forces were “capable of reaching Russian troop deployments in Russia”.
Lip service
Britain now pays little more than lip service to the West’s claim that its role is only to help Ukraine defend itself from Russian aggression. The supply of increasingly offensive weapons has turned Ukraine into what amounts to a proxy battleground on which the Cold War can be revived.
During Zelensky’s visit to the UK last week, Johnson’s successor, Rishi Sunak, effectively acted as an arms broker for Ukraine, joining with the Netherlands in what was grandly dubbed an “international coalition” to pressure the Biden administration and other European states to supply Kiev with F-16 fighter jets.
Washington appeared not to need much cajoling. Three days later, Biden dramatically changed tack at a G7 summit in Japan. He effectively gave a green light for US allies to supply Ukraine not only with US-made F-16s but similar fourth-generation fighter jets, including Britain’s Eurofighter Typhoon and France’s Mirage 2000.
Administration officials surprised European leaders by suggesting the US would be directly involved in the training of pilots outside Ukraine.
After a highly staged “surprise” visit by Zelensky to the summit at the weekend, Biden said he had been given a “flat reassurance” that the jets would not attack Russian territory.
British officials, meanwhile, indicated that the UK would start training Ukrainian pilots within weeks.
‘Rightful place is in Nato’
No 10 has made clear that Sunak’s purpose is to build “a new Ukrainian air force with Nato-standard F-16 jets” and that the prime minister believes “Ukraine’s rightful place is in Nato”.
These statements seem intended once again to block any potential path towards peace. President Vladimir Putin repeatedly spoke out against Nato’s growing, covert involvement in neighbouring Ukraine before Russia launched its invasion 15 months ago.
“The prime minister believes “Ukraine’s rightful place is in Nato”
It is hard to imagine that the UK is heading off-script. More likely, the Biden administration is using Britain to make the running and soften up Western publics as Nato becomes ever more deeply immersed in the military activities of Russia’s neighbour.
Ukraine is being gradually turned into the very Nato forward base that first set Moscow on course to invade.
At the same time, Britain appears to be exploiting the Ukraine war as a showcase for its weaponry. After the US, it has been the largest supplier of military equipment to Ukraine.
This week it was reported that UK arms exports hit a record £8.5bn, more than double last year’s total. The last time Britain was so successful at selling weapons was in 2015, at the height of the Syrian war.
Risk to health
Europe’s weapons largesse is, we are told, the precondition for Ukraine to mount a long-awaited counter-offensive to take back territory Russia has seized in the eastern and southern parts of Ukraine.
Speaking candidly in Florence this month, Josep Borrell, the European Union’s top diplomat, ruled out peace talks. Ukraine needed massive supplies of arms because otherwise “Ukraine will fall in a matter of days”, he said.
Borrell’s warning not only suggested the precariousness of Ukraine’s situation but implied that, out of desperation, its leaders might be prepared to approve ever riskier combat scenarios.
And thanks to British meddling, the heavy toll of casualties as the war rages on – among the Ukrainian population and Russian soldiers, as well as potentially inside Russia’s borders too – may be felt not just over the coming months but for decades.
In March, Declassifiedbroke the story that some of the thousands of tank shells Britain is supplying to Kiev are made of depleted uranium (DU), a radioactive heavy metal produced as waste from nuclear power plants.
Keir Starmer’s opposition Labour party has said it “fully supports” the UK government’s supply of these armour-piercing shells to Ukraine, despite the long-term risk they pose to those exposed to the chemically toxic contamination left behind.
DU shells fragment and burn when they hit a target. One analyst, Doug Weir, from the Conflict and Environment Observatory, told Declassified that the ammunition produces “chemically toxic and radioactive DU particulate [microscopic particles] that poses an inhalational risk to people”.
Nonetheless, British ministers insist the threat to human health is low – and worth the risk given the military gains in helping Ukraine to destroy Russian tanks.
Cancer deaths
As Declassified has highlighted, however, a growing body of evidence following the use of such shells by the US in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and by Britain and the US in Iraq a decade later undermines these reassurances.
Italian courts have upheld compensation claims against the country’s military in more than 300 cases where Italians who served in the police or as soldiers in Bosnia and Kosovo have died of cancer after being exposed to DU.
Many thousands more Italian former service-people are reported to have developed cancers.
In 2001 Tony Blair’s government downplayed the role of DU in Italy’s deaths to avoid upsetting the new administration of George W Bush. Both leaders would soon approve the use of DU rounds in Iraq, though the UK admitted a “moral obligation” to help clean up some of the contamination afterwards.
The West has taken little interest in researching the effects of DU weapons in Iraq, even though local civilian populations have been the most exposed to its contamination. DU shells were used extensively during both the 1991 Gulf war and more than a decade later during the US and British-led occupation of Iraq.
Nonetheless, Iraqi government statistics suggest the rates of cancers leapt 40-fold between the period immediately before the Gulf war and 2005.
The city of Fallujah, which the US devastated after the 2003 invasion, is reported to suffer “the highest rate of genetic damage in any population ever studied”. Birth defects are said to be roughly 14 times the rate in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki regions of Japan, where the US dropped atomic bombs.
In 2018 the British government reclassified a 1981 report into the dangers of DU weapons by the Ministry of Defence’s Atomic Weapons Research Establishment it had made available three years earlier.
Meanwhile, James Heappey, the armed forces minister, has misleadingly suggested that international bodies such as the World Health Organisation and the United Nations have found no long-term health or environmental hazards associated with DU weapons.
But as Weir toldDeclassified in March: “None of the entities cited by the MoD has undertaken long-term environmental or health studies in conflict areas where DU weapons have been used.”
In other words, they simply don’t know – and possibly don’t care to find out.
Weir added that the WHO, UN and International Atomic Energy Agency had all called for contaminated areas to be clearly marked and access restricted, while at the same time recommending that risk awareness campaigns be targeted at nearby communities.
British officials have also recruited the Royal Society to their efforts to claim DU is safe – as the US did earlier, in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, citing two of its reports published in 2001 and 2002.
However, the Royal Society has vocally distanced itself from such claims. A spokesperson toldDeclassified that, despite the British government’s assertions, DU was no longer an “active area of policy research”.
Back in 2003, the Royal Society rebuked Washington, telling the Guardian that soldiers and civilians in Iraq “were in short and long term danger. Children playing at contaminated sites were particularly at risk.”
At the same time, the chairman of the Royal Society’s working group on depleted uranium, Professor Brian Spratt, also warned that corroding shells could leach DU into water supplies. He recommended removing ordinance and conducting long-term sampling of water supplies.
Voices silenced
By lobbying for more overtly offensive weapons and introducing DU shells into the war, Britain has raised the stakes in two incendiary ways.
First, it is driving the war’s logic towards ever greater escalation, including nuclear escalation.
Russia itself possesses DU weapons but is reported to have avoided using them. Moscow has long warned that it regards use of DU in Ukraine in nuclear terms: as the equivalent of a “dirty bomb”.
In March Putin responded to the UK’s decision to supply DU tank shells by vowing to move “tactical” nuclear weapons into neighbouring Belarus. Meanwhile, his defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, said it put the world “fewer and fewer” steps away from “nuclear collision”.
But Britain is also creating a situation where a catastrophic move, or miscalculation, by either Russia or Ukraine is becoming ever more likely, as events last week highlighted only too clearly.
Russia struck a military ammunition depot in western Ukraine, creating a giant fireball. Rumours suggested the site may have included British DU shells.
Whether this is true or not, it is a reminder that Moscow could hit such a storage site, intentionally or not, spreading contamination widely over a built-up area.
With Ukraine soon to be in possession of a full array of offensive weapons, largely courtesy of the UK – not only long-range drones, cruise missiles and tanks but fighter jets – it is not hard to imagine terrifying scenarios that could quickly bring Europe to the brink of nuclear conflict.
Moscow hits a DU ammunition depot, exposing a large civilian population to toxic contamination. Ukraine retaliates with air strikes deep inside Russia. The path to a nuclear exchange in Europe has never looked closer.
Those who warned that peace talks were urgently needed rather than an arms race in Ukraine are looking more prescient by the day. For how much longer can their voices continue to be silenced, not only by western leaders but by the western media too?
On the 19th of May, the Financial Times quoted the British Minister of Defense, Ben Wallace, stating that the West could face the threat of full-scale war with Russia and China by the end of the decade and proclaimed defence preparation a paramount task for Western countries.
One has to wonder what universe Mr. Wallace and his boss, Rishi Sunak, are living in since Britain is engaged in war with Russia right now, has, with every step, every hostile action, set itself up for a full-scale war, a full-scale catastrophe, which they cannot prevent. Why Britain would go to war with China as well as Russia when China has not threatened it and is oceans away, no one can explain in rational terms. Yet, this is the British rhetoric, the fetishistic parroting of the words of their lord and master, the USA.
Many argue that statements, a war is not happening, that it is something that exits only in the future, are desperate attempts to fool the British people, to lie to them about their government’s intentions and what is coming. Others argue that they are signs that the British government has no sense of reality. But, in the end, one has to conclude that they are both at the same time.
Worse, these statements speak of a government, that seems to think it is untouchable, that the war with Russia will be limited in geographic space to Ukraine, that Britain’s participation in the war against Russia will have no direct consequences for Britain and its people, that Russia will not dare to follow military and political logic and conduct military strikes against Britain. Nothing could be further from the truth, yet the British establishment, dreaming of its past, is unable to accept reality, is leading the British people towards disaster, as the gathering storm of war edges ever closer to their shores.
The deluded thinking in Britain is an extension of the same psychosis that grips all the halls of power in the western world, a psychosis that has its roots in the deeply troubled societies which have developed in the west and whose causes will be the subject of study of future social scientists and historians if there are any. In fact, these governments display observable and classical symptoms of paranoia and delusional disorders, leading to the complete break with reality that constitutes psychosis. This is a very dangerous state of affairs because someone who is delusional, who has no grip on reality, who cannot make distinctions between reality and imagination or wishful thinking, will make decisions and take actions that are dangerous to everyone around them, in this case, Russia, and beyond, the whole world.
Just after Russia began its Special Military Operation, Britain declared its support for Ukraine along with the rest of NATO and announced it would supply it with weapons and munitions to fight Russia. Maria Zakharova, the Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman, in response, stated that NATO states providing weapons to Ukraine could be hit in strikes.
Ms Zakharova said:
“Do we understand correctly that for the sake of disrupting the logistics of military supplies, Russia can strike military targets on the territory of those NATO countries that supply arms to the Kyiv regime?
“After all, this directly leads to deaths and bloodshed on Ukrainian territory. As far as I understand, Britain is one of those countries.”
The Russian defence ministry, after several attacks inside Russia backed by NATO, has repeatedly said:
“We would like to stress that the direct provoking by London of the Kyiv regime into such activities attacking Russian territory, should there be an attempt to realise them, will immediately lead to our proportional response.”
In April, when the UK announced it was sending depleted uranium tank shells to Ukraine, Russia said it would respond and did so, destroying those munitions in Ukraine just after they arrived, and now a radioactive cloud is drifting west towards Europe and the UK. Russian warnings of the danger of this happening were ignored.
On May 11, Ben Wallace announced a further act of aggression against Russia with the decision to send Storm Shadow cruise missiles to Ukraine, which have since been used to attack civilian centres in Russia. Again, Russia stated clearly that there would be a military response to this action.
On May 23, during his visit to Laos, Deputy Head of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev issued another warning, on the day Russian security forces destroyed the Ukrainian raiding force that attacked civilians in the Belgorod region, an openly terrorist action backed by the UK and the other NATO states. From Vientiane, he stated,
“The North Atlantic alliance does not take the threat of nuclear war seriously enough, thus making a big mistake. NATO is not serious about this scenario. Otherwise, NATO would not have supplied such dangerous weapons to the Ukrainian regime. Apparently, they think that a nuclear conflict, or a nuclear apocalypse, is never ever possible. NATO is wrong, and at some point events may take a completely unpredictable turn. The responsibility will be placed squarely on the North Atlantic Alliance,”
Medvedev pointed out that no one knows whether the point of no return has been passed,
“No one knows this. This is the main danger. Because as soon as they provide something, they say: let’s supply this, too. Long-range missiles or planes. Everything will be all right. But nothing will be fine. We will be able to cope with it. But only more and more serious types of weapons will be used. That’s what the current trend is.”
But Russia can strike using its conventional weapons as well, against which the UK has no defence whatsoever.
Still, the British attitude towards these warnings is to call on the magic of “legality” as if they can weave a protective cloak around the island with incantations. Yet, everyone knows that to use incantations to ward off danger, the formula used must have mojo or force; otherwise the words have no effect.
In 2022, for example, then Deputy Prime Minister, Dominic Raab, hit back, after Russia suggested it could target British military installations over its support for Ukraine, by branding the Kremlin’s claim “unlawful.” Wallace, Sunak, and others have repeated this claim multiple times.
Raab, and the rest, can only be right if Britain had maintained its neutrality in the war between Ukraine and Russia. But, as we know, this is really a war by the USA, Britain and their NATO mafia against Russia and has been all along. Ukraine is the present battlefield. So, for Britain to claim that it has maintained neutrality is an absurdity.
A neutral state violates neutrality by breaching its obligation to remain impartial, to not participate in the conflict. It violates neutrality by supplying warships, aircraft, arms, ammunition, military provisions or other war materials, either directly or indirectly, to a belligerent, by engaging its own military forces, or by supplying military advisors to a party to the armed conflict, by allowing belligerent use of neutral territory as a military base, or for the storage of war material or passage of belligerent troops or munitions in neutral territory, by furnishing troops to a belligerent, or providing or transmitting military intelligence on behalf of a belligerent are also examples of violations of neutrality.
A State’s neutrality ends when the State becomes a party to an armed conflict, or, in other words, a belligerent. A State becomes a belligerent under the law of neutrality by either declaring war; or participating in hostilities to a significant extent, or engages in systematic or substantial violations of its duties of impartiality and non-participation.
Britain meets all the requirements of a co-belligerent, that is, of a party to the war with Russia; it not only supplies munitions and weapon systems to Ukraine with the objective of attacking Russia and Russian forces in Ukraine it has a direct role in directing the war against Russia, including sending military officers and soldiers to advise and operate with the Ukrainian forces, by preventing any peace negotiations – we remember the action of Boris Johnson just as Ukraine and Russia were about to conclude a peace settlement – by the training of Ukrainian soldiers in Britain and transporting them to the front, by supplying the Ukrainian forces with reconnaissance and intelligence data, actively sending aircraft close to the war zone for this purpose, by providing communications systems, by providing financial aid to Ukraine at the same imposing economic warfare measure on Russia, euphemistically termed “sanctions. These conditions apply to all the NATO allies, of course, but Britain’s role is an especially egregious one.
In fact, Britain’s aggression against Russia began much earlier than 2022. Britain, as part of NATO, supported the insurgency in the Caucasus region in the mid-1990s. Britain took part in the aggression against Yugoslavia in 1999, part of the strategy to attack Russia, eliminating a potential Russian ally, just as Hitler did in 1941. The Georgian attack on Russian forces in 2008 was also supported by NATO.
All through this period, the UK government and media put out a constant stream of propaganda against Russia, culminating in the wild claims by the British that Russia tried to use novichok nerve poison to kill two Russian citizens, the Skripals, in the UK. That incident had one objective, to prepare the minds of the British people for war with Russia. That no one has seen or heard from the Skripals for several years now, that Britain rejects Russia’s right to meet with them to see if they are all right, is never mentioned in the West. They have disappeared, their fate unknown, two expendable pieces on the chessboard of war.
Lastly, Russia claims, with some evidence to back up their claims, that the UK was involved, with the US and other NATO nations, in the attack on the NordStream Pipeline, an act of war against both Russia and Germany, though the Germans, still occupied by US forces, are required to accept this humiliation and keep quiet.
So British claims that Russia has no legal right to retaliate against it are absurd. Britain, as with all the NATO countries, cannot claim to have a neutral status in the war. It has become in law and in fact a party to the war.
It follows that any action taken by Russia against the UK to force the UK to stop its assistance to Ukraine and end its participation in the war against Russia will be legitimate under international law and justified under the ancient military doctrine that a nation cannot suffer the attack of another without retaliating to stop the attack and making sure that another attack will not follow.
The NATO gang’s claim of acting in “collective self defence,” a phrase Ben Wallace likes to use a lot, so that they can claim to maintain a neutral status, is not a valid or logical one and does not apply. It is clear that the USA and NATO have been planning an attack on Russia for a long time, and the Ukraine war is a part of this attack. The conspiracy to commit aggression has been developed over decades. Part of the preparation for the war was the overthrow of the elected government of Ukraine and the installation in its place of a puppet government that was then used to attack the Donbass and Russia itself. They now openly admit that the Minsk Accords were a ruse to stall Russia while they prepared the Ukrainian forces for war against Russia.
Further, they cannot rely on Article 5 of the NATO Treaty, since that clause can only be invoked if there is an unprovoked Russian attack on a NATO country. But when a NATO country attacks Russia, and here we have them all joining in the attack, it is the aggressor and therefore cannot claim to be are acting in self-defence. It is also important to bear in mind Article I of the NATO Treaty, since it requires NATO to act in conformity with the UN Charter. It states
Article 1
The Parties undertake, as set forth in the Charter of the United Nations, to settle any international dispute in which they may be involved by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security and justice are not endangered, and to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.
But the NATO nations have done the exact opposite. They have blocked peace at every turn and push Ukraine to keep the war going. Their forces are directly involved. They have even attempted to expand their military bloc by inviting Finland and Sweden to join the war alliance, in order to increase the forces available to them, with one purpose, to prosecute the war against Russia. They now openly state their objective is to destroy Russia. So, the NATO nations are not only active co-belligerents in the war, they are, in fact, the main protagonists of the enemy camp that Russia faces. They are, therefore, all legitimate targets.
But is an attack likely, and what will its nature be, and what will be the consequences? These are questions only the Russian General Staff can know and foresee. We can only speculate. But speculation can be useful, especially for the British people to realise the danger their criminal government is putting them in.
Medvedev warns again of the dangers of nuclear war, but Russia has no need to resort to that to retaliate against Britain. Conventional stand-off weapons will be more effective, and what can the UK do if a strike on military airfields takes place, on port facilities, to stop the shipment of weapons, on army bases where Ukrainian soldiers are trained, on warehouses storing munitions and weapons marked for shipment to Ukraine, or eliminating the UK Trident nuclear submarine force in Scotland, or any number of other targets they could select? They can do nothing.
The National and Defence Strategies Research Group based in the UK stated in a report on Britain’s air defences in 2016, that,
“Since the withdrawal from service of the Bloodhound missile system in the 1980s, the UK’s Air Defence posture has diminished to mainly a homeland benign airspace policing and point defence posture for deployed forces. The UK no longer has a comprehensive, integrated, or robustly layered short to long-range Air Defence capability, nor a credible or enduring operational capacity.”
Nothing has changed since then, except to get worse. In other words, the UK is defenceless against modern Russian stand-off weapons.
I can remember, as a boy, my mother taking me several times on a bus through London. It must have been 1955 or so and I can remember mile upon mile of burnt-out blackened buildings, as far as the eye could see, especially in east London where entire districts were levelled by German bombs. The country, despite its heroic RAF fighter pilots, could not stop the bombing and then missile attacks which went on for five years.
The British government assured the people before that war, that all would be well, that they would have peace in their time. But they lied to the people then, as they are lying to them now. Britain was never the same after that war. It never really recovered from it. Once again, the British government, ever saluting the masters in Washington, leads the British people into a dangerous war, which they were never asked about, and which they do not want. It lies to them about the causes, it lies to them about the fighting, and it lies to them about the dangers they face, placing them in a distant future, and hides from them the consequences of its actions. The British people must be warned. Britain is at war, and no amount of bluffing and lying can protect them from the consequences their government is provoking. They are predictable and they will be catastrophic.
Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel Beneath the Clouds. He writes essays on international law, politics and world events.
Leaked secret US documents have revealed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been planning to escalate the current confrontation with Moscow by invading Russian villages, targeting Russia beyond the Donbass and the current conflict zone with longe-range missiles and even blowing up the Druzhba pipeline which provides NATO member Hungary with Russian oil, according to the Washington Post. Kiev’s plans for further exacerbating the crisis cross a number of red lines and should be a problem for Washington too, as US President Biden has already made clear to Zelensky that he and his Western allies want neither “to go to war with Russia” nor “a third world war”. However, paradoxically, the US seems to be pushing for precisely such escalation.
The possible scenarios are quite worrisome. In addition to the aforementioned developments, according to the same leaks, Ukraine was also planning to attack Russian forces in Syria, which would mean making the Eastern European conflict spill into the Middle East and thus risk spiraling out of control across Western Asia and subsequently maybe even the Caucasus, too. Some analysts have already pointed out that the Russian-Ukraine confrontation potentially intersects with the South Caucasus, which is already the stage for today’s Armenian-Azerbaijani war.
According to Pulitzer Prize winner American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh’ report, countries in the region such as Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and the Czech Republic, led by Poland are pressuring Zelensky to find a compromise and end the crisis, even by resigning himself if needed.
The conflict had been transitioning into a protracted phase and the US seems to be encouraging Kiev to intensify its hostilities along the whole front line. However any kind of trench warfare or proxy attrition war is extremely harmful for Ukraine – and would not be such bad news for Russia, who can go on with a minimal offensive strategy further exhausting Ukrainian forces.
A major problem, from an American perspective, is that the Ukrainian political elite and its military leaders seem to be increasingly inclined to ignore the advice and instructions of their Western benefactors. Besides the aforementioned bold plans against Russia, there have been other signs of it: Zelensky refused to withdraw troops from Artemovsk, for example, which resulted in Ukrainian defeat there. Kiev’s political and military elite itself are divided however, and a rising number of voices are reconsidering Zelensky’s ideas about “reconquering Crimea” and openly talking about compromising.
Moreover, in the US itself, according to Hersh’s intelligence sources, “some of the better intelligence about the war does not reach the president” and he “is said to rely on briefings and other materials prepared by Avril Haines, director of National Intelligence”, while CIA Director William Burns “has come around in opposition to some of the White House’s foreign policy follies.” This indicates that there is division within Washington’s “deep state” also over the issue.
Calls for escalation, both in Kiev and in Washington, might also be a sign of desperation. There clearly is no consensus in the United States’ own establishment regarding the matter of aid to Ukraine itself – Republican lawmakers are opposing it also due to the debt ceiling now and former President Donald Trump, who is still a Republican favorite, has promised to end it if re-elected. Corruption scandals abound in both US and Ukraine and recent reports about a $3 billion Ukraine aid “error” are part of the latest one. The truth is that American weapons’s manufacturers as well as Western ones have been profiting from prolonging the conflict while also selling obsolete military equipment. Moreover, Zelensky’s rebellious “stubbornness” can only increase such division within Washington and across the transatlantic alliance, as seems to be already happening in Eastern and Central Europe. All of that creates a very dangerous and unstable situation which is quite unpredictable.
Harvard political scientist Graham Ellison has warned that Western countries are trying to solve their own problems by escalating the Eastern European crisis and should it spiral out of control this could lead to dangerous war between the great powers involved.
The Western air defense systems Kiev is getting are in itself, for a number of reasons, not enough to protect Ukraine’s airspace, as I wrote. Neither are F-16s, for that matter. So far, Washington has been showing itself to be really willing to fight “to the last Ukrainian” (as in the cruel joke which Biden almost paraphrased in a December statement). Further escalation would show a willingness to fight if not literally to “the last European”, at least to something quite near it in terms of the damage to local economies and the migration/refugee crisis. It remains to be seen whether Europe in general and particularly Poland, Hungary and other nations in the region happen to also have a similar inclination – and for how long.
In one of the most grotesque votes ever taken in the Australian Senate, a majority of Senators voted NOT TO INVESTIGATE THE UNEXPLAINED NON-COVID EXCESS DEATHS WHICH HAVE OCCURRED SINCE THE INTRODUCTION OF THE COVID-19 “VACCINES”. This is horrifying and terrifying.
If there was any doubt whatsoever that our government is wilfully blind to the death and destruction they have caused… this is it. The vaccine linked deaths amount to a 737 planeload of passengers unexpectedly falling from the sky every week since January 2021 and our government is not even curious as to why.
As documented by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, more than 10,000 Australians above historical averages are dying of heart attack, stroke, cancer, diabetes, dementia and other neurological diseases since the COVID “vaccines” were released near the start of 2021. These numbers do not include COVID declared deaths. This is the worst death rate since WWII and our government has not offered a credible explanation for the deaths. This is more than incompetence and dereliction of duty. In my view, this is sinister.
This vote has astounded many including Dr. Philip McMillan. CLICK HERE to view short video.
Our local heroes who have fought to expose the truth about the dangers of the COVID “vaccines” include: Senators Antic, Babet, Hanson, Rennick and Roberts and Russell Broadbent MP. Remember their names. Remember.
Henry Kissinger, the foreign policy eminence grise who has advised half a dozen presidents, has caused the deaths of over 3 million people, according to an Intercept report published Tuesday in observation of the realpolitik strategist’s 100th birthday.
While critics of the Nixon-era secretary of state and national security adviser often describe him as a war criminal for his pivotal role in numerous US-backed genocides and coups, the report argues Kissinger’s body count has been widely underestimated, particularly regarding the secretive, highly illegal expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia in the 1970s.
Between the genocides he sponsored in East Timor and Bangladesh, the continent-wide terrorism, coups and death squads of Operation Condor in Latin America, the fomenting of civil wars in Southern Africa, and his carpet-bombing of Cambodia and Laos under the guise of chasing the Vietnamese, Kissinger is believed to be responsible for over 3 million civilian deaths – more if one counts the casualties that have resulted from advice he gave the private sector.
Kissinger has ‘only’ acknowledged that his actions caused the deaths of 50,000 Cambodians and blames the Vietnamese, the supposed targets of the US’ bombing campaign (the coordinates of which were logged incorrectly so as to be recorded as legal strikes within Vietnam). Intercept reporter Nick Truse argues the number is closer to 150,000, pointing to numerous documented examples of egregious and deliberate undercounting of civilian casualties. The figure represents more than six times more civilians than the US has killed in airstrikes since 9/11.
Transcripts from the Intercept’s “exclusive archive” of declassified US military documents from a secret Pentagon war crimes task force reveal it was Kissinger’s decision to relay then-president Richard Nixon’s drunk, belligerent trash talk about Cambodia into coherent instructions to the Pentagon to begin a “massive bombing campaign” in the country in 1970.
Kissinger’s now-infamous directive to shoot “anything that flies on anything that moves” exploded the secret war, tripling the number of bombings by the end of the year. He allegedly approved all 3,875 individual bombings of the war, and the bombers dropped over 257,000 tonnes of explosives on Cambodia in 1973 alone.
The Intercept’s archive also revealed numerous brutal ground raids on Cambodian villages that have since been all but memory-holed; Truse confirmed via interviews with survivors that the raids were far deadlier than reported. While the airstrikes were frequently hushed up as “pilot error” – “errors” that were nevertheless repeated thousands of times – the US Army, in an internal investigation, actually blamed its press corps when ground troops were caught looting a village they had just raided.
Kissinger’s carpet-bombing of Cambodia paved the way for the Khmer Rouge, the genocidal dictatorship that killed 2 million Cambodians – 20% of the country’s population – which he privately (and approvingly) referred to as “murderous thugs” while helping them secure regional allies.
Kissinger has never been prosecuted – or even officially charged – with war crimes, nor has the US military made any systemic efforts to hold accountable the troops who actually did the killing.
Let’s make it simple, since now there are rumors flying around that he tried to blackmail Bill Gates regarding an affair he might — or might not — have had with a young but of legal age woman who was very good at playing chess.
Nobody has explained how Epstein made his money. He had a lot of it; you don’t buy an island and outfit it, never mind a nice big jet aircraft which is expensive to buy and also very expensive to maintain, fuel and staff without some source of income.
We all know, for example, how Elon Musk got his money. And Bernie Ebbers. And Ken Lay. And any one of myriad other very wealthy people. Whether ultimately it was discovered they were doing foul things or not the fact is that it was trivially easy to know exactly how they made their money, in the main.
Except for Epstein.
Therefore, by simple deduction, Epstein got his money because someone, or a group, were paying him and had the means to hide it from ordinary, routine surveillance that “outs” everyone else.
That in turn means one or more governments were doing it and none of them who had actual knowledge were adversarial to the others.
How do we know this?
Because it would have been to the adversary’s tremendous advantage, and a nation-state is immune to “mere arrest” for some trumped-up offense, to blow the lid off of it had that been the case.
Therefore it wasn’t.
Since the activities took place in and around the United States it is also therefore clear that one of the funding conduits was one or more agencies of and in the United States. There may be others but our government was one of them.
That is conclusive.
What is also conclusive is that all of the 535 members of Congress know this and none of them have done anything about it.
That includes your Congressperson and both of your Senators, in each and every case.
To restate just in case your IQ is smaller than your shoe size: One or more of our agencies suborned and used the sexual abuse of underage girls, along with the sexual coercion of women who had reached the age of consent, for reasons we do not have knowledge of but which can be reasonably believed to be underhanded, illegal or likely both. Such acts are criminal felonies even if the government performs them; there is no immunity for a US Government agency or instrumentality to fund activity leading to the rape of children.
This clearly did occur.
Whatever other gripes you may have with our government we, the people, clearly are willing to permit this to stand.
Today’s Los Angeles Times contains a letter to the editor from a North Hollywood person named Dave Simon, which states in part the following: “To this day, I have no regret that President Harry Truman saved many American lives as well of thousands of others all across the globe by ordering the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
Simon’s sentiment has always been the popular justification for the U.S. atomic bombings of the people in those two Japanese cities. The idea has been that without the bombings, it would have been necessary for the U.S. to have invaded Japan to secure its defeat, which would have necessarily entailed the deaths and injuries of thousands of U.S. soldiers.
Therefore, the argument goes, by killing and maiming hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians with the atomic bombings, and, equally important, implicitly threatening to continue doing so against other Japanese cities, the Japanese government was forced to surrender, thereby bringing a quicker end to the war, which thereby saved the lives of U.S. soldiers.
I have always opposed that reasoning. Targeting civilians is a war crime. That’s why Army Lt. William Calley, Jr., was charged with a war crime after he and his troops massacred civilians during the Vietnam War. Targeting civilians with an atomic bomb is no different from shooting them with an M-16. The bombing simply kills more people.
Would thousands of U.S. soldiers have died in an invasion of Japan? Of course. But that’s the nature of war. Soldiers die in war. To say that it is legitimate to kill women, children, and seniors in order to protect soldiers is highly illegitimate, from both a moral and a legal standpoint.
But as many people have pointed out, Japan was ready to surrender anyway. All that Japanese officials needed was an assurance that their emperor would not be executed, tortured, or abused. The U.S. refused to provide that assurance, pursuant to President Roosevelt’s policy that demanded “unconditional surrender.” It was a ridiculous policy, especially since after Japan’s surrender, the U.S. did not execute, torture, or abuse the emperor anyway.
Moreover, there are commentators who make a persuasive case that the real reason that President Truman ordered the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was to send a message to the Soviet Union, which was already being converted from WW2 partner and ally to the new official enemy of the United States.
There are also commentators who argue that Japan surrendered to the United States not because of the atomic bombings but rather to prevent the Soviet communists from taking control of Japan.
In any event, let’s jump forward to the current war between Russia and Ukraine or, as some contend, the current war between NATO and Russia.
Let’s assume that Russia is familiar with the popular U.S. justification for nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki — the justification that Dave Simon sets forth in his letter to the LA Times. Let’s assume that Russia drops an atomic bomb on Kiev, the capital and the most populous city of Ukraine, in order to shorten the war by securing Ukraine’s immediate surrender. By shortening the war, the lives of thousands of Russian soldiers would then be saved.
What would Simon and other supporters of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, including U.S. officials, say then? Would they defend Russia’s dropping an atomic bomb on Kiev on the same basis that they defend the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Or would they declare that Russia’s atomic bombing of Kiev constituted a grave war crime for targeting and killing civilians, even while continuing to justify the U.S. targeting and killing the civilian populace in Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
The US claims that the weapons sent to Ukraine are only used within the borders of the conflict zone, but it is increasingly clear that this equipment is being used by Ukrainian forces to carry out terrorist attacks in the undisputed Russian territory. Photos and videos shared on the internet show that US armored vehicles were used by pro-Kiev forces to attack Belgorod during recent terrorist hostilities. As expected, US officials are denying their involvement and suggesting the images are fake. Now, Washington needs to find a “justification” for the undeniable fact that its proxy regime is inappropriately and illegally using military aid provided by NATO.
The images are being published by Russian war correspondents who covered hostilities in Belgorod. It is possible to find among the equipment captured by the Russian forces several American-made weapons, including some armored vehicles such as M1151A1 Humvees and MaxxPro MRAP. The vehicles were mostly destroyed by Russian artillery or left behind by enemy soldiers as they tried to evade Russian fire.
Reacting to the case, the US authorities argued that there is not enough evidence to confirm the veracity of the photos and videos circulating on the networks. Speaking during a press conference, US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller emphatically expressed his skepticism about the veracity of the images, indicating that they could be some “fake” deliberately spread by the Russians to accuse the Americans. He made it clear that an official statement by Washington will only occur after the images are analyzed and there is absolute confidence on their accuracy.
“We’ve seen some of the reports circulating on social media and elsewhere making claims that US-supplied weapons were used in these attacks (…) I will say that we’re skeptical at this time of the veracity of these reports (…) We’ve seen a lot of reports on social media and fuzzy pictures on social media and a lot of kind of armchair intelligence analysts making claims (…) We’re skeptical that they’re accurate (…) We don’t have perfect clarity on the information (…) We’re looking at the same pictures you see, the same fuzzy images, and at this time, we are skeptical of their veracity”, Matthew Miller told journalists during a press conference.
Miller’s argument is vague and weak. Confirmation on the veracity of the images can be obtained in a short time through an expert analysis, which is enough to eliminate any doubts about the case. What Miller seems to be doing is avoiding giving a verdict on the subject, postponing the final assessment to a future that may take a long time or not even happen. With this, the US avoids giving a public response about the participation of its weapons in an illegal attack against Russia.
Some other American officials, however, are already using another argument. In an interview with journalists, the Pentagon’s press secretary, Air Force Brigadier General Pat Ryder, stated that his country has not approved any transfer of weapons to “paramilitary groups” outside the Ukrainian armed forces.
“So we’ve seen those reports [on images], something that we obviously continue to monitor very closely. I will say that we can confirm that the U.S. government has not approved any third party transfers of equipment to paramilitary organizations outside the Ukrainian Armed Forces, nor has the Ukrainian government requested any such transfers. So again, it’s something we’ll keep a close eye on”, he said.
His words come amid the current discussion about who really carried out the attack on Belgorod. Kiev alleges that those responsible for the attack were exclusively the neo-Nazi groups ‘Freedom of Russia Legion’ and ‘Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK)’, which are militias formed by expatriate Russian-born mercenaries.
The Ukrainian government believes it has no responsibility in the case, as it was not its regular troops who operated the attack. Consequently, the American government wants to avoid any accusation of co-participation due to the use of its weapons, claiming that Washington delivers this equipment only to Kiev, not being responsible in case of use by paramilitary groups.
However, these arguments are inconsistent with reality and international law. These paramilitary groups are at the service of Kiev and directly obey the Ukrainian state, regardless of whether their legal status is one of regular troops or not. These militias are excluded from the norms of humanitarian law, but it means nothing regarding their affiliation with Ukraine, which is why Kiev must be seen as directly responsible for the Belgorod attack.
Accordingly, Kiev’s sponsors are also co-participants in the crime. If pro-Ukrainian terrorists use US weapons to attack Russian civilians in demilitarized territory it is because Washington gives such weapons to Kiev even though the US knows that there are terrorists working for that regime. So, as much as they want to deny it, the US and NATO are in fact co-authors of the attacks on Russia.
Lucas Leiroz, journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant.
When the Covid-19 vaccines rolled out, public health officials took great pains to downplay how the vaccines spread from the injection site. Articles with language like this were common: “Most of the mRNA vaccine stayed in the injection site muscle—where you get the shot.”
We now know the truth. The lipid nanoparticles, or LNPs, travel widely throughout the body. These LNPs carry the Frankenstein mRNA that causes the cells to produce spike proteins.
We initially got tissue biodistribution data from Japan which showed that significant lipid concentrations were found in the adrenal glands, bone marrow, liver, ovaries, spleen (and more) for at least 48 hours after injection.
And from the lawsuit that we brought against the FDA demanding the release of the Pfizer documents, we now know that this same data was also provided to the FDA. What is really troubling, however, is that this document was dated November 9, 2020—meaning, prior to any Emergency Use Authorization or public use of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine.
Having LNPs release their cargo into the cells of critical organs is very concerning. This is because many scientists will tell you that the spike protein produces an immune response, including inflammation. It is one thing to have inflammation in one’s bicep, but it is quite another to have it in your heart muscle, liver, ovaries, etc.
This is again why the government should not be in the business of promoting, let alone mandating, any product. It becomes impossible to acknowledge safety issues without self-incrimination. How often do you hear the government say, “Oops, you know that thing we told every American to inject into their body? Well, it actually can cause serious harm to a lot of people—our bad!” No. That rarely happens.
CONCLUDING REMARK
As I have written in the past, the lack of respect for individual and civil rights has wrought more harm on humanity than anything else. The American experiment was a rebellion against the idea that you must cede your rights to some overseers who know better and will make decisions on your behalf.
To that end, as I also often repeat, please send the following proposed legislation to your legislative representatives:
No law may require or coerce a person to receive or use a medical product, or impose a penalty or deprive a benefit for refusing a medical product or refusing to disclose whether a person has received a medical product.
Medical freedom is freedom. If you cannot get a job, go to school, or otherwise participate in civil society because you refuse a medical product, you are not free. What good are your rights if you can only exercise them at home by yourself? That is why medical freedom is a fundamental right that must be permanently fixed into the law of every civilized nation.
We are, as provided in the Declaration of Independence, indeed “endowed by [our] Creator with certain unalienable Rights” and to safeguard those rights “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” We must never yield to the tyranny of permitting others to dictate what can or must be placed, administered, or injected onto or into our bodies. For once that right is ceded, none truly remain.
Another whistleblower has reportedly come forward to corroborate the theory that last year’s terrorist attack on the Nord Stream pipelines were carried out by the US government.
Internet entrepreneur and political activist Kim Dotcom was reportedly contacted by an anonymous whistleblower who alleges the US government has long had the technical capabilities to covertly sabotage underwater pipelines, and even maintains sophisticated simulators to train military personnel how to do so.
In an open letter now published on Twitter, the anonymous figure says that they reached out to Dotcom in an effort to “give a clearer picture” of what happened in the early hours of September 26 of last year, when the Nord Stream pipelines which once pumped cheap Russian gas into the heart of Europe were suddenly blown up in what world leaders quickly identified as an intentional act of sabotage.
I am writing to you as a concerned citizen of the world, wishing for a peaceful resolution to the conflict in Ukraine. My identity is not of importance. What matters is the sharing of my story so that the world can understand…
While “working with contractors at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab in Maryland” over twenty years ago, the alleged whistleblower claims, “we were working on the Advanced Seal Delivery System (ASDS), a covert mini-submarine designed for the Navy Seals to carry out stealthy clandestine missions.”
“This submarine is transported on the back of nuclear submarines and detaches to execute its missions. I was chosen to work on this project, and my role was to assist in the programming of the full-sized, temperature-controlled simulator for the submarine on which the Navy Seals would train,” the whistleblower continued.
The simulator in question “featured screens that displayed a 3D simulation of the ASDS undocking from a nuclear submarine, executing its mission, and then returning to dock,” they wrote.
Having “spent countless hours in the simulator” and “piloted the simulator on simulated missions — just like the Navy Seal pilots would before their actual missions,” the whistleblower says mock pipeline sabotage mission were programmed into the software.
“Although I did not pilot a simulated mission specifically for the Nord Stream pipelines, I did simulate scenarios of covertly sabotaging pipelines” and “can confirm that the United States has had this capability for decades” and was “fully capable of executing the Nord Stream Sabotage.”
“Although speculation remains as to the exact method of explosives placement, I believe that the modern Advanced Seal Delivery System (ASDS) was utilized with Navy divers,” the whistleblower claimed.
Sputnik is unable to independently verify the claims contained in the letter, but the information presented appears to align with a shocking report detailing the Biden administration’s involvement which was published by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh in February.
Data from flight tracking service FlightRadar24 seems to confirm a Boeing P-8A Poseidon reconnaissance plane and a Sikorsky MH-60R Seahawk helicopter were both hovering just a few miles away from the pipelines at the time of the explosions. Both aircraft are outfitted with the “sonobuoy” technology needed to remotely detonate the C-4 charges allegedly placed on the pipelines by US forces.
University officials and proponents of the new facility argue the laboratory is necessary to enhance research capabilities looking into emerging diseases and viruses resulting from zoonotic — animal-to-human — transfer.
While CSU denies that gain-of-function research will occur at the laboratory, some researchers connected with the new facility previously were associated with actors involved with such research, including experiments conducted in Wuhan, China.
Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., a bioweapons expert and professor of international law at the University of Illinois, is concerned about the facility.
Boyle told The Defender :
“It is well known that Colorado State University has a long and ongoing history of specialization in weaponizing insects with biowarfare agents for delivery to human beings.
“This new lab will magnitudinally increase CSU’s offensive biowarfare capabilities, in gross violation of the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972 and my Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 that provides for life in prison.”
Area residents, including a local grassroots group, and bioweapons experts, also have raised concerns over the potentially risky research, involving deadly viruses, that will be conducted at the facility and the risk of a lab leak akin to that which may have occurred at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, and may have led to escape of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Christine Bowman leads a group of local citizens who formed the Covid Bat Research Moratorium of Colorado (CBRMC), a grassroots initiative opposing the new facility. The group has launched efforts such as a yard sign campaign to raise local awareness.
In an interview with The Defender, Bowman described being “stonewalled” by state and local officials and by CSU.
“We need answers as to how COVID-19 was modified to transfer from human to human before I will be satisfied that it’s okay to raise diseased bats to study in my neighborhood,” Bowman said.
“Now that we know that the COVID pandemic likely started from a lab leak in Wuhan, China, we are questioning the safety of continuing such research,” she added.
CSU receives ‘tens of millions of dollars’ in NIH research grants annually
According to The Colorodoan, the Chiropteran Research Facility, as it will be known, “would serve as a breeding facility to raise and care for bats of various species that can be used as research models in studies on a wide range of human viruses that are believed to have originated with bats.”
The laboratory will be constructed on the south end of CSU’s Foothills Campus near Fort Collins, at 3105 Rampart Road, within the Justin Harper Research Complex and adjacent to the university’s existing Center for Vector-Borne Infectious Diseases (CVID). It will consist of a 14,000-square-foot stand-alone bat vivarium.
According to CSU, the university “is a world leader in research on zoonotic infections. The University’s scientists have been studying bats and other vectors that transmit dengue fever, Zika and West Nile viruses for more than 30 years.”
Construction is scheduled to begin by this summer. The Colorodoan reported the facility is expected to open in fall 2024, while CSU said it will be completed by 2025.
CVID, formerly known as the Arthropod-born and Infectious Diseases Laboratory, was founded in 1984. According to The Colorodoan, it “currently houses the only captive breeding colonies of two species of bats used in its research.”
CVID’s website describes the facility as “a longstanding multi-disciplinary research and training center” whose researchers “have been successful in defining mechanisms of pathogen persistence and transmission, and developing new surveillance, control, and prevention strategies for vector-borne and emerging zoonotic diseases.”
“World-class facilities, including BSL-3 [biosafety level 3] laboratories and large insectary complexes, provide an outstanding scientific environment for researchers inside and outside CSU wanting to manipulate pathogens in vertebrate hosts and arthropod vectors,” the CVID website states.
In October 2021, the NIH awarded a $6.7 million grant to CSU’s microbiology, immunology and pathology department at the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences to construct the new bat vivarium.
Alan Rudolph, CSU’s vice president for research, told The Coloradoan the university will provide the remaining funds for the facility’s construction, the cost of which is expected to range between $8-9 million.
Rudolph said CSU receives “tens of millions of dollars” in NIH research grants annually.
‘Highly pathogenic’ agents will be housed at new facility
According to the minutes of the Feb. 3, 2022, meeting of CSU’s Board of Governors, the new facility is justified due to the capacity it will have to study “emerging zoonotic viruses that originate in bats and cause high mortality in humans: SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2, Ebola virus, Marburg virus, Nipah virus and Hendra virus.”
It is unclear under what biosafety level the new facility will operate, but Bowman told The Defender :
“From what I understand, this facility is slated to be a BSL2. But what’s to keep that from increasing in the future without approval or informing the general public? What guarantee do the residents of Fort Collins have that the lab won’t increase from a BSL2 to BSL4, where even more dangerous viruses will be studied?”
“Who decides what criteria we use for ‘concern’?” Bowman asked.
Rebecca Moritz, CSU’s biosafety director, said, “This will be the only facility like it in the United States,” and it will give students “the opportunity to learn directly from the researchers conducting this research in their classes.”
She added:
“CSU researchers have safely studied and worked with bats and other vectors for over 30 years. … Due to global warming and population growth, humans and animals are coming into contact more frequently and in ways not previously seen. This could result in an increased number of outbreaks and possibly pandemics.
“The main purpose of this facility will be to house bat breeding colonies for CSU researchers and researchers around the United States and the world. This facility will allow an expansion of CSU’s current work, including projects focusing on the role that bats play in disease transmission and the development of vaccines and therapeutics.”
“Personnel who will work in this facility will be highly trained and be required [to] adhere to strict biosafety and biosecurity practices,” Moritz claimed.
Moritz has spoken publicly about her involvement with gain-of-function research, including at the 2014 Gain of Function Symposium. At the time, Moritz was part of the Biosecurity Task Force at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Bowman said gain-of-function experiments are already being conducted at CSU and that the university is open about it.
“We are only aware that CSU is conducting gain-of-function on plants and mosquitoes because it is mentioned in the link they send to anyone who emails them or questions their research.”
Rudolph told The Colorodoan, “Bat research is not new to our campus; bat-research facilities are not new to our campus. It’s an expansion of existing work in existing facilities that have already made great impacts.”
Such research “helped us to develop vaccines, helped us to develop diagnostics to better determine who’s getting sick, why are they getting sick, when are they getting sick, and vaccines that help treat those people when they do get sick,” he added.
The Nipah virus, for instance, has a high human mortality rate ranging between 40 and 75%. It “causes a rapidly progressive disease, which includes acute respiratory infection and encephalitis that can lead to coma or death.”
Local activists ‘stonewalled’ by university, state, local officials
According to The Colorodoan, CSU’s campus planner, Gargi Duttgupta, told local authorities that the new facility would be approximately 316 feet north of the fence that marks the campus’ boundary with adjacent residential communities.
This may be too close for comfort for some area residents, who have attempted to engage with CSU and with local planning authorities to express opposition to the new facility and to obtain further information about its construction.
Their opposition led to the establishment of CBRMC, “a nonpartisan grassroots organization run on a budget of $0 by a group of concerned citizens from across the political spectrum.”
CBRMC says its mission is to put a moratorium on the construction of the new facility “until we first know what happened with the possible COVID bat lab leak and gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China.”
Some CBRMC members spoke at a Dec. 21, 2022, meeting of the Larimer County Planning Commission, expressing fears of a potential leak from the new facility, drawing comparisons with the suspected Wuhan lab leak.
But the planning commission unanimously approved the project. Lesli Ellis, Larimer County’s community development director, told The Colorodoan that no further approvals are needed before construction can commence.
According to The Colorodoan, “CSU officials insist that the new facility is merely an extension of work that has been done on its Foothills Campus for more than 30 years by the university and others, including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and U.S. Department of Agriculture.”
The CSU Foothills Campus houses labs operated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Wildlife Research Center and the Rocky Mountain Prevention Research Center — described as the “second-largest CDC lab outside of Atlanta.”
“Strict safety protocols will be in place to prevent the escape of a virus or infected bat,” The Colorodoan also reported.
Rudolph told The Colorodoan the facility will need only dozens to hundreds — not thousands — of bats, which will be acquired by the U.S. government, “quarantined well outside the United States and deemed safe and not sick before they come to us.”
CSU does ‘not have a good track record’ on safety
A Jan. 11 CSU “Q&A on why CSU labs are safe” denies that illegal bioweapons research will take place at the institution and quotes Moritz, who said, “We do everything possible to decrease the risks of our research.” However, she acknowledged “there is no such thing as zero risk in research.”
Bowman said CSU alone will oversee safety at the new facility, and she questioned the lab’s safety record.
Bowman told The Defender :
“After letting chronic wasting disease [CWD] leak from their labs at CSU, hundreds of thousands of the deer population were killed from the disease. They do not have a good track record of ensuring the safety or containment of diseases.
“I personally do not have the data for this claim, but I have heard many people cite this as fact and no one at CSU is refuting the claim.”
CWD, “a contagious neurological disease that affects members of the deer family, causing erratic behavior and weight loss that eventually results in death,” was identified in 1967. It is described as “a mysterious malady intricately tied to Fort Collins.” The federal government declared a CWD state of emergency in 2001.
The Colorodoan reported that CWD “was related to scrapie in sheep and goats, mad cow disease in cattle and the fatal variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans.”
As reported by Northern Colorado NPR affiliate KUNC, “Chronic wasting disease is not your garden variety infectious disease. It’s not bacterial, viral or even fungal. It’s caused by something we all have inside our bodies — something called prions.”
CSU is home to the Prion Research Center, which “studies the biochemistry, genetics, and pathogenesis of prions, the causative agent of incurable and often fatal diseases in humans and animals,” including bovine spongiform encephalopathy, classic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, CWD and scrapie.
According to the Prion Research Center, “Growing evidence also links the prion mechanism to proteins involved in the pathogenesis of other common neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, and forms an emerging area of the center’s studies.”
And in 2019, CSU reported that Prion Research Center scientists “have developed a new gene-targeted approach” to study CWS in mice. Described as a “real breakthrough,” the scientists “replaced the gene that encodes the prion protein in the mouse and replaced it with an exact replica of the code from either deer or elk.”
Researchers who spoke to The Colorodoan said that while it’s unclear if CWD originated in Fort Collins, it is hypothesized that it crossed species and spread there.
A U.S. Geological Survey map shows a significant cluster of CWD near Fort Collins and that cases identified elsewhere have been connected to the region.
“For the 16 [CWD] clusters in the first 40 years, the text mining process generated evidence supporting the trace back to Fort Collins for the first six clusters, five more clusters could be traced back to infected area linked to Fort Collins, and in 5 clusters the evidence supported an explanation for tracing the disease back to an area linked to Fort Collins.
“The evidence does not definitively exclude other theories for the disease origin. At minimum, Fort Collins was a primary catalyst in the widespread distribution of the disease.”
The paper noted, “As with COVID-19, government agencies can be reluctant to acknowledge potential culpability for releasing a devastating disease,” adding that “Ignoring the likely origin of this disease discounts the lax management of captive animals that has been the driving force for this biological disaster.”
Locals getting mixed messages from CSU officials
Local activists are concerned about a lack of communication between CSU officials, local authorities and the community, and contradictory statements they have received from CSU.
According to the CBRMC, CSU “gave citizens short notice on Nov. 30, 2022” about the public hearing, which was “held on the inconvenient date of Dec. 21, 2022 — snuck into holiday break.”
Since then, CSU has “not conducted any informational meetings with the public regarding their proposed research lab,” the CBRMC says on its website.
Bowman said a fact sheet about the facility was distributed at the meeting, stating that “SARS-CoV, SARS-CoV-2, MERS-CoV, Ebola virus, Marburg, Nipah virus and Hedra virus” would be studied at the lab, confirming information included in the February 2022 CSU Board of Governors report.
However, according to Bowman, Moritz said at the public hearing, “At this facility, we will not be able to study MERS, SARS-CoV-2 [or] Ebola viruses.”
“So, which is it, are they proposing to study these diseases in our backyard or not?” Bowman asked.
Bowman noted that the same fact sheet contains “a photo displayed prominently on the front with a person’s gloveless hand holding a bat.” She remarked:
“When you are touting the strength of your ability to do dangerous bat research with safety first and foremost, maybe you shouldn’t incorporate a photo of an irresponsible way to handle a bat.
“Couldn’t this be one way bat diseases transmit to humans and is proving our point that bats and humans shouldn’t mix, especially in a lab setting?”
An April 5 email from Greg Harrison, CSU associate vice president of Strategic Communications, to Bowman, said, “We do not have any public meeting about the facility scheduled at this time.”
This was despite a Jan. 24 email from Moritz to Bowman saying CSU was “working on a process to engage the public this spring to discuss the project and lab safety and security, as well as our commitment to the wellbeing of people in Colorado and around the world.”
Both emails are posted in CBRMC’s Facebook group. In the same group, Bowman referenced a March 15 Town Hall meeting with Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) where the issue was to be raised. According to Bowman, “Sen. Hickenlooper chose not to answer any [questions] re: concern over CSU’s COVID bat lab.”
Bowman said this was not the only instance where elected officials ignored the concerns of local residents. She told The Defender :
“The community has been sending this information to our elected officials, who have also stonewalled us. I got no response from Sen. Hickenlooper.
“The response I got from Sen. Michael Bennet [D-Colo.] spoke about diversity, equity and inclusion and did not address the subject of bat research at all. The mayor of Fort Collins [Jeni Arndt] says that it is not in her jurisdiction and was uninterested.”
Bowman said that local residents deserve answers. She told The Defender :
“I believe that the residents of this county, state, and this country deserve answers to our questions regarding any potential danger to the public from this type of research considering the mayhem and destruction that the COVID virus unleashed on mankind.
“We do not want a repeat, and I think we should be allowed to have some say in what happens in our backyard. The fact that CSU is stonewalling their neighbors speaks volumes.”
Collaboration between CSU scientists, NIH, EcoHealth Alliance on bat viruses
Documents obtained by USRTK following several Freedom of Information Act requests indicate that plans for the new facility date back prior to receipt of the NIH grant in 2021, while key figures involved with the laboratory are connected to the EcoHealth Alliance and prior research involving SARS-CoV-2.
According to USRTK, the documents reveal that in February 2017, personnel of the U.S. Department of Defense’s Cooperative Biological Engagement Program “announced a new global bat alliance,” which would “build and leverage country and regional capabilities to generate an enhanced understanding of bats and their ecology within the context of pathogens of security concern.”
This new alliance was a collaboration between CSU, EcoHealth Alliance and the NIH’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories with the goal of building a bat research facility at CSU.
USRTK’s documents reveal that this original alliance grew into a group which became known as Bat One Health Research Network, whose scientists, including CSU and Rocky Mountain Laboratories researchers, were developing “scalable vectored” and “self-disseminating” vaccines to spread contagiously between bats.
These vaccines are purportedly aimed at preventing “emergence and spillover” of potential pandemic viruses from bats to humans. However, at least as far back as 2020, concerns were raised about the unintended consequences of releasing genetically engineered self-spreading “vaccines” into the wild.
Bat One Health also harkens to the “One Health” concept, which purports to serve as “an integrated, unifying approach that aims to sustainably balance and optimize the health of people, animals and ecosystems,” but which some experts have argued lowers human health to the level of animals and aims to surveil and control all life on Earth.
Notably, the term “One Health” is said to have first been coined by the EcoHealth Alliance, which today is a strong proponent of this concept.
A March 30, 2020, email obtained by USRTK, from Tony Schountz, Ph.D., associate professor in CSU’s Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Pathology, to Jonathan Epstein, vice president for Science and Outreach at EcoHealth Alliance, discusses the importation of bats and rats infected with dangerous pathogens such as the Lassa virus.
In another set of emails from 2018, Schountz communicated with scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In an Oct. 30, 2018, email, Schountz proposed a “loose association” between CSU and the Wuhan lab, involving “collaboration on relevant projects” involving bat-borne viruses and arboviruses.
Indicating the connection between the research planned to take place at the new facility, and COVID-19, Rebekah Kading, Ph.D., assistant professor in CSU’s Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Pathology, said, “This facility is especially timely considering the current COVID-19 pandemic, since some groups of bats have an evolutionary association with coronaviruses.”
According to CSU, the university has a partnership with Zoetis, which it describes as “the world’s leading animal health company,” “for the construction in 2020 of an incubator research lab in the Research Innovation Center on the Foothills campus.”
Zoetis was previously Pfizer Animal Health, before separating from Pfizer in June 2013.
Big Pharma, NIH interested in developing vaccines related to viruses to be researched at new CSU facility
Big Pharma has shown interest in developing mRNA vaccines targeting many of the same deadly pathogens that will be researched at CSU’s new facility.
For instance, in July 2022, Moderna announced the launch of its Phase 1 clinical trial of the mRNA-1215 vaccine candidate, “designed to fight the Nipah virus.” The vaccine was developed in collaboration with NIAID’s Vaccine Research Center.
In an NIH statement, Fauci said “Nipah virus poses a considerable pandemic threat because it mutates relatively easily, causes disease in a wide range of mammals, can transmit from person-to-person, and kills a large percentage of the people it infects,” adding that “The need for a preventive Nipah virus vaccine is significant.”
Efforts to develop a Nipah virus vaccine date back to at least January 2017, when CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations) issued a call for proposals for the development of vaccines for the Nipah and Lassa viruses and MERS, soon after its official launch at that year’s meeting of the World Economic Forum.
EcoHealth Alliance researchers have long shown interest in viruses such as Nipah. A 2006 article in the Current Infectious Disease Reports journal titled “Nipah virus: impact, origins, and causes of emergence” was co-authored by Epstein, for instance.
At the time, Epstein was affiliated with the Consortium for Conservation Medicine, which later merged with the Wildlife Trust to become the EcoHealth Alliance.
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.”
By Jamal Kanj – Intifada-Palestine.com – January 14, 2011
Israel’s survival kit is: perpetuate conflict, insecurity to rationalize collective hate and finally playing victim.
Devoid of conflict, Israel implodes internally; without hate, Zionism loses its justification; and playing eternal victim to continue blackmailing the West. Absence of this holy trinity, Israel ceases to exist.
From its inception, the house of Zion has mastered exploiting adversarial powers to advance Israel’s cause. For instance, their influence over the Democratic Party in the US began with President Truman’s bid for 2nd term election in 1948.
Responding to strong opposition from Secretary of State General George Marshall and Department experts urging against recognition of Israel, President Truman replied: “I’m sorry gentlemen but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands [Jewish voters] who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of [voting] Arabs among my constituents”
Zionists influence over liberal American politics was matched with the doctrinal school of Conservative theoreticians aligning the Republican Party’s platform with Israel’s objectives. The Neoconservative Zionists, coined Zioncons, invented the “Clash of Civilization” concept to fight Israel’s wars. … continue
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