First part of an incredible story that shows just how broken our public “health” apparatus is: very, very broken
Last year, I wrote to let you know that the CDC was refusing to release its post-marketing safety data for Covid-19 vaccines from its v-safe system to the public, despite our legal demands for this data on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN).
The CDC refused to release this data even though it had documented the data was in a form that could already be released to the public (meaning, it was “deidentified” or clear of any personally identifying information) because Oracle, a private company, already had access to this deidentified data.
Well, after multiple legal demands, appeals, and two federal lawsuits, the CDC finally capitulated and agreed to a court ordered schedule compelling it to produce the data. Now that ICAN, and therefore the public, have received the check-the-box portions (as opposed to the free-text field portions) of this data, the data itself may explain why the CDC refused to release it without a fight.
V-safe’s data shows that 7.7% of its approximate 10 million users reported having to receive medical care after receipt of a Covid-19 vaccine, and over 70% of those users sought outpatient/urgent clinical care, emergency room care, and/or were hospitalized.
I can already hear the retort: surely these were anti-vaxxers reporting the need for medical care! Far from. All v-safe users received the Covid-19 vaccine. Anti-vaxxers don’t get the shot. Not only were these folks not against the shot – again, because every one of them got the shot – they are likely mostly vaccine enthusiasts. This is evidenced by the fact that most of the individuals who registered for v-safe did so between December 2020 and April 2021; in fact, around 9 million of the approximate 10 million users registered during this period. This was the time, you may recall, when many people were clamoring over each other to get the shot. When they were spending hours online searching for vaccine availability and making appointments. When love songs were literally being sung about the vaccine.
This was also early in the rollout when CDC recommended, and many states followed, a phased rollout, offering the first vaccines to healthcare workers and to long-term care facility residents. It was during this period that people signed up for v-safe to participate in its rollout, excited to be part of the vaccine program. (One can assume that more healthcare workers than elderly long-term care residents signed up for a smartphone-based program). This also pre-dates most vaccine mandates in the country.
The data submitted by the 10 million v-safe users therefore may be a good reflection of the experience of the larger population of 265 million Americans who received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine. To the extent it is not, if anything, these people (as enthusiasts and/or healthcare workers) were arguably more prone to underreport symptoms than to overreport.
The data itself is disconcerting but even more incredible is the CDC’s stonewalling the release of the data, the process needed to obtain the data, and how the CDC used, or dare I say misused, the data over the last year and a half. This story, in many ways, reflects all that is wrong with so-called public “health” authorities. It shows the serious danger resulting when the CDC’s policies, public claims, and reputation become indistinguishable from its need to defend a product at almost all costs.
To make it manageable to tell and digestible to folks with busy schedules, I will tell the story in several parts released over the coming days and weeks.
The v-safe story continues in Part 2, which will explain what is in v-safe and why you should care. And trust me, you should care, as v-safe is likely the best evidence that exists regarding the safety profile of this product. As I tell the story, I will endeavor through these posts to respond to the torrent of inquiries regarding v-safe, the fight to get the data, and the data itself, which I have already received.
I will leave you with a short appearance I had on Fox News discussing the v-safe data.
November 26, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
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There follows a letter from Dr. Angus Dalgleish, Professor of Oncology at St George’s University of London, to Dr. Kamran Abbasi, the Editor in Chief of the BMJ. It was written in support of a colleague’s plea to Dr. Abbasi that the BMJ make valid informed consent for Covid vaccination a priority topic.
Dear Kamran Abbasi,
Covid no longer needs a vaccine programme given the average age of death of Covid in the U.K. is 82 and from all other causes is 81 and falling.
The link with clots, myocarditis, heart attacks and strokes is now well accepted, as is the link with myelitis and neuropathy. (We predicted these side effects in our June 2020 QRBD article Sorensen et al. 2020, as the blast analysis revealed 79% homologies to human epitopes, especially PF4 and myelin.)
However, there is now another reason to halt all vaccine programmes. As a practising oncologist I am seeing people with stable disease rapidly progress after being forced to have a booster, usually so they can travel.
Even within my own personal contacts I am seeing B cell-based disease after the boosters. They describe being distinctly unwell a few days to weeks after the booster – one developing leukaemia, two work colleagues Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and an old friend who has felt like he has had Long Covid since receiving his booster and who, after getting severe bone pain, has been diagnosed as having multiple metastases from a rare B cell disorder.
I am experienced enough to know that these are not the coincidental anecdotes that many suggest, especially as the same pattern is being seen in Germany, Australia and the USA.
The reports of innate immune suppression after mRNA for several weeks would fit, as all these patients to date have melanoma or B cell based cancers, which are very susceptible to immune control – and that is before the reports of suppressor gene suppression by mRNA in laboratory experiments.
This must be aired and debated immediately.
Angus Dalgleish MD FRACP FRCP FRCPath FMedSci
Angus Dalgleish is a Professor of Oncology at St George’s, University of London.
November 26, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, War Crimes | COVID-19 Vaccine, UK |
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An investigation into British and American collusion with the terror groups that kidnapped and murdered western hostages in Syria
On 19 August, 2014, ISIS released a video of the beheading of American journalist James Foley who was kidnapped by the terrorist organization in 2012 while reporting on the conflict in Syria.
Foley’s shocking execution became one of the most widely followed news stories of the Syrian war. Foley’s killer, Mohammed Emwazi, popularly known as “Jihadi John” by the western media, was a Kuwaiti-born Brit from West London. In the Foley execution video, Emwazi’s unmistakable London accent can be heard.
However, what is less known about the notorious ISIS member, was that he travelled to Syria as part of a “terror-funnel” established by British intelligence, and abducted Foley while fighting for an armed group known as Katibat al-Muhajireen – or the Emigrants Brigade – which enjoyed direct support from British intelligence. Many members of al-Muhajireen, including Emwazi, then helped lay the foundation for the rise of ISIS by joining the terror group with its establishment in April 2013.
Further, for a period of Foley’s captivity he was being held in a prison jointly controlled by another armed group, Liwa al-Tawhid, or the Monotheism Brigade, which operated under the Free Syrian Army (FSA) umbrella and received aid directly from US intelligence. Some of this included arms being sold onto ISIS, including to the group leader holding James Foley.
In other words, although James Foley’s murder occurred in the deserts of Raqqa, it arguably began in more familiar places, namely London and Washington.
The terror-funnel
In 2009, former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas was told by top UK officials that “Britain was organizing an invasion of rebels into Syria.”
This involved sending British jihadis to Syria through a pipeline established by UK intelligence decades before, to fight in Bosnia and Kosovo against Serbia. According to former US federal prosecutor John Loftus, British intelligence had used the London-based Al-Muhajireen Movement to recruit Islamist militants with British passports for the war against the Serbs.
The Al-Muhajireen, later known as al-Ghurabaa and Islam4UK was a Salafist religious movement established in Britain in 1996 by exiled Syrian cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed, who, as journalist Nafeez Ahmed details, was a long-time informant for UK intelligence, meeting regularly with MI5 agents throughout the 1990s.
Bakri himself acknowledged his role in training jihadists to be dispatched abroad, in an interview with The Guardian in May 2000.
A month after the 7 July, 2005 attacks in London, in which suicide bombers targeted the city’s transport system, killing 52, Bakri left the UK for Lebanon. Although former Muhajireen members participated in the attack, the British Home Office did not prevent Bakri from leaving the country but did ban him from ever returning.
By 2009, Lebanese security forces were accusing Bakri of training Al-Qaeda members, while Bakri himself boasted: “Today, angry Lebanese Sunnis ask me to organize their jihad against the Shi’ites … Al-Qaeda in Lebanon … are the only ones who can defeat Hezbollah.”
Jihadi John
But who was Mohammed Emwazi? As the Guardian reported, Emwazi came to Britain with his family from his native Kuwait as a young boy. After attending the University of Westminster to study Information Technology, Emwazi became politically active as part of a group of West Londoners who followed an Islamic preacher named Hani al-Sibai. Some members of the group took part in jihadi training camps in Northern England and Scotland and were being monitored by M15.
In 2009, Emwazi traveled to Tanzania with two friends from the group, Bilal el-Berjawi and Mohamed Sakr. Assumed to be traveling to Somalia to join Al-Qaeda affiliate Al-Shabab, MI5 had the men detained in Dar es Salaam and subjected them to lengthy interrogations before forcing them to return to the UK. Both Berjawi and Sakr later succeeded in traveling to Somalia and were killed in US drone strikes.
Emwazi continued to be monitored by MI5 and was prevented from traveling to his native Kuwait in 2010, where he allegedly wished to marry. Emwazi claimed he was interrogated and harassed at Heathrow Airport by MI5, and complained of his treatment to CAGE, a London-based advocacy group led by former Guantanamo detainee Moazem Begg which focuses on Muslim detainees. CAGE then began an advocacy campaign on Emwazi’s behalf.
Yet Emwazi was then somehow later able to travel to Syria. The Daily Beast reported that this seemed odd, given that Emwazi had been “described as a core member of an extremist network linked to the al Shabab group in Somalia during a court hearing as far back as 2010” and had been tracked by MI5 for at least five years. “His links to terror networks were well known—and yet, he was released by the authorities” to travel to Syria.
Journalist Nafeez Ahmed reports that according to former British counterterrorism intelligence officer Charles Shoebridge, British authorities “turned a blind eye to the travelling of its own jihadists to Syria, notwithstanding ample video and other evidence of their crimes there,” because it “suited the US and UK’s anti-Assad foreign policy.”
Ahmed notes this “terror-funnel is what enabled people like Emwazi to travel to Syria and join up with [the Islamic State] – despite being on an MI5 terror watch-list. He had been blocked by the security services from traveling to Kuwait in 2010: why not Syria?”
Upon arriving in Syria in August 2012, Emwazi joined an armed group known as Katibat al-Muhajireen. Journalist James Harkin reports that according to Jejoen Bontinck, a Belgian jihadi that fell out with his brigade and was imprisoned for a time with Foley, most British jihadis traveling to Syria joined Katibat al-Muhajireen.
A “deep embarrassment”
Crucially, Katibat al-Muhajireen enjoyed support from UK intelligence services. This is evidenced by the terror trial of Swedish citizen Bherlin Gildo, who according to the Daily Mail fought for Katibat al-Muhajireen as well.
The Guardian reports that Gildo was detained while transiting through Heathrow Airport having been accused by British authorities of attending a terrorist training camp and receiving weapons training between 31 August, 2012, and 1 March, 2013 – as well as possessing information likely to be useful to a terrorist.
However, the terror trial collapsed “after fears of deep embarrassment” to the British security services. This was because, as Gildo’s lawyer explained: “British intelligence agencies were supporting the same Syrian opposition groups as he [Gildo] was.”
British intelligence support for Katibat al-Muhajireen was further confirmed when former Guantanamo detainee Begg of CAGE was also tried on terror charges. Begg had also traveled to Syria several times in 2012 and provided physical training to foreign fighters from Katibat al-Muhajireen in Aleppo, as reported by Foreign Policy. Begg made his latest trip to Syria in December 2012.
As a result, Begg was later detained by British authorities and accused of attending a terrorist training camp. The Guardian reported, however, that Begg was freed after MI5 “belatedly gave police and prosecutors a series of documents that detailed the agency’s extensive contacts with him before and after his trips to Syria,” and which showed that MI5 told Begg he could continue his work for the so-called opposition in Syria “unhindered.”
In short, Emwazi traveled to Syria through a pipeline established by UK intelligence, and then joined an armed group, Katibat al-Muhajireen, that was supported by British intelligence, but which was viewed as a terrorist organization by the British police.
“Kidnapped by the one who killed him”
James Foley was an American freelance journalist who reported from Iraq and Afghanistan before traveling to Libya in 2011 to cover the NATO-led war on Muammar Gaddafi’s Libyan government. While in Libya, a close colleague of Foley’s was shot and killed by Libyan security forces, who also detained and imprisoned Foley for 44 days.
In 2012, Foley began making trips to Syria to report on the conflict for the Global Post and AFP, including in July when armed opposition groups, the Al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front and the FSA’s Liwa al-Tawhid, invaded the city.
In October 2012, Foley published an article from his time in Aleppo suggesting that the opposition armed groups enjoyed little popularity among the city’s residents. Foley noted that “many civilians here are losing patience with the increasingly violent and unrecognizable opposition,” which was “deeply infiltrated by both foreign fighters and terrorist groups.”
This ran contrary to mainstream narratives about the Syria conflict, which suggested the armed opposition groups were comprised of army defectors fighting for democracy and enjoying strong popular support.
In November 2012, Foley was returning to Turkey after a reporting trip with British journalist John Cantlie. After stopping at an internet café in the town of Binnish, the pair’s taxi began heading for the border when it was overtaken on the road and forced to stop by a van full of armed men. Among them was Muhammad Emwazi.
James Harkin explains that according to two European hostages who had been held with Foley but later freed, the kidnapping gang that took Foley and Cantlie was led by Emwazi. “[Foley] was kidnapped by the one who killed him,” one of the freed Europeans told Harkin: “I am sure of that.”
Emwazi participated in Foley’s abduction just two months after arriving in Syria. Note that this was during the period Katibat al-Muhajireen was receiving support from British intelligence, as shown by the periods when Gildo and Begg attended Katibat al-Muhajireen training camps.
According to a US Department of Justice indictment, Emwazi was joined by two of his fellow Brits, Alexanda Amon Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh, in the operation to abduct Foley. Emwazi, Kotey, Elsheikh, and one other Brit, Aine Davis, were later collectively known as the “Beatles,” initially by their captives due to their British accents, and later by western media.
Foley’s critical coverage of the US and UK-backed armed groups occupying Aleppo, coupled with the British Foreign Office effort to control the narrative of the war in the media – including by “waging information warfare in Syria by funding media operations for some rebel fighting groups” – raises the question of whether UK intelligence officials ordered the Muhajireen militants to kidnap Foley. On this point we can of course only speculate.
Collaborations with ISIS
According to the Belgian jihadi Bontinck, Emwazi and his fellow Beatles continued serving as Foley’s guards at various times, and passed him to Aleppo’s ISIS leader, Abu Athir, sometime in the late spring or early summer of 2013. By this time, they had pledged allegiance to ISIS.
This raises the question of whether Emwazi, and the other British Muhajireen fighters continued to enjoy support from UK intelligence after joining ISIS as well.
By August 2013, Foley was being held by ISIS in a prison in the basement of the Aleppo Children’s Hospital, along with several other foreign hostages.
Another American journalist, Theo Padnos, had previously been held in the same prison, but as a captive of the Nusra Front. As the Washington Post reported, Nusra had established a headquarters at the Aleppo Children’s Hospital in 2012, which it shared with Liwa al-Tawhid, the US-backed FSA faction.
According to the New York Times, after ISIS “caliph” Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi announced the creation of ISIS, the Nusra brigade sharing the children’s hospital headquarters with Liwa al-Tawhid pledged loyalty to ISIS.
Liwa al-Tawhid then continued to share the headquarters with ISIS, and its leader, Abd al-Qader al-Salah was criticized for his cooperation with ISIS. Killed by a Syrian government airstrike in November 2013, the New York Times noted that Salah “ultimately made accommodations with ISIS that, to some of his allies, were at best disappointing and at worst ugly. Though he had welcomed journalists and aid workers, when Islamist groups began kidnapping them, even holding hostages at a compound he shared with ISIS in Aleppo, he made no public moves to stop it.”
Liwa al-Tawhid’s collaboration with ISIS had come into the spot-light in August 2013, while Foley was languishing in prison in the two groups’ Aleppo headquarters.
On 4 August, Tawhid commander Abd al-Jabbar al-Okaidi, who also served as the head of the FSA’s Aleppo Military Council, was filmed celebrating the capture of the Menagh Air Base in the Aleppo countryside with ISIS commander Abu Jandal. Okaidi praised the ISIS fighters and referred to them as “brothers” for their help in capturing the airbase.
The video of Okaidi celebrating with the ISIS commander proved embarrassing to the Obama administration, because US ambassador to Syria Robert Ford had crossed the border to Syria to meet with Okaidi a few months before, in May 2013 – and because Okaidi was considered the main conduit for US–provided non-lethal aid to armed opposition groups in northern Syria.
McClatchy reports that in response to the Menagh video, Ford called Okaidi directly to complain, saying that it had created “a public relations nightmare for the Obama administration, which was trying to show Congress and the American public that it was boosting moderates and isolating extremists on the battlefield.” However, as McClatchy notes, “When the importance of the jihadis became undeniable, Obama administration officials were irate.”
Okaidi had also previously spoken openly of his collaboration with ISIS, again referring to ISIS commanders as “brothers” and indicating that he communicated with them daily in an interview with pro-opposition Orient TV.
Buying weapons from the FSA
Abu Athir, the ISIS leader in Aleppo holding Foley, had similarly kind words for Okaidi’s FSA. Al-Jazeera quoted Abu Athir as stating in July 2013 that, “We are buying weapons from the FSA. We bought 200 anti-aircraft missiles and Koncourse anti-tank weapons. We have good relations with our brothers in the FSA.”
The Koncourse missiles had in turn been provided to Okaidi’s Liwa al-Tawhid courtesy of the CIA. According to reporting by the Los Angeles Times, Koncourse missiles were provided to FSA groups such as Tawhid via the CIA’s regional allies, while CIA officers trained FSA fighters in the use of these weapons in Jordan and Turkey starting in November 2012.
In August 2013, a month after ISIS leader Abu Athir boasted of buying Koncourse missiles from the FSA, a video emerged of Okaidi’s Liwa al-Tawhid fighters also using Koncourse anti-tank missiles in the fight at Menagh airbase.
This suggests that Okaidi was receiving Koncourse missiles from his CIA handlers, and was then selling some of them to his ISIS counterpart, Abu Athir.
Ambassador Ford had himself been involved in the CIA effort to provide these weapons to Okaidi and the FSA. According to journalist Michael Gordon of the New York Times, Ford traveled to Langley, Virginia in 2012 to meet with then-CIA director David Petraeus to plan providing weapons covertly to the Syrian opposition.
Recall that US-favorite Okaidi was the FSA leader in Aleppo and claimed to communicate daily with his ISIS counterparts during this time. If pressed by Ambassador Ford, Okaidi could have therefore inquired with Abu Athir about Foley and the other foreign hostages held by ISIS in August 2013.
Dragging their feet
In January 2014, a civil war broke out between ISIS on the one hand, and Nusra, Liwa al-Tawhid, and other opposition factions on the other, in which ISIS was expelled from Aleppo city but took full control of Raqqa, which would go on to serve as its de-facto Syrian capital. Foley and other foreign hostages were then moved to Raqqa, while ISIS massacred most of the Syrian prisoners it had held in Aleppo before evacuating.
In the following months, ISIS freed 15 European hostages after receiving ransoms averaging some two million euros, whether from the captives’ governments, families, or insurers. However, the US government refused to pay a ransom for Foley.
Further, Ambassador Ford’s State Department threatened to prosecute Foley’s parents if they paid a ransom, which deterred them from raising funds for that purpose.
ISIS pointed to this in their English-language magazine, Dabiq, explaining that “As the American government was dragging its feet, reluctant to save James’s life,” other hostages had been spared after ransoms were paid.
British-backed militants
On 19 August, 2014, Foley was beheaded by Emwazi, who shortly thereafter also executed journalist Steven Sotloff, and aid workers David Haines, Alan Henning, and Peter Kassig, as well as 22 Syrian soldiers. John Cantlie’s fate is still unknown.
Emwazi was killed in a US airstrike in Raqqa on in November 2015. However, two of his fellow Beatles, Alexanda Amon Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh, were later captured alive, and stood trial in the US. Both were convicted of participating in Foley’s abduction and killing and sentenced to life in prison.
It is no coincidence that Kotey and Elsheikh were tried in US courts. Any effort to prosecute them in the UK would have quickly collapsed, because British intelligence were supporting the very same armed group – Katibat al-Muhajireen – in which they and Emwazi were members when they abducted Foley. A UK trial would have proved a “deep embarrassment” for British intelligence, just as the attempted prosecutions of Bherlin Gildo and Moazem Begg had been.
In short, James Foley was abducted, held captive, and later murdered by militants from an armed group that received direct support from British intelligence. These militants fought in a dirty war to topple the Syrian government orchestrated by US planners, including Ambassador Ford.
Weapons sent by Ford and his CIA counterparts were given to another armed group, Liwa al-Tawhid, which shared a prison with ISIS during the time Foley was held there, and which sold some of these weapons to the ISIS commander then holding Foley.
Not only Foley but hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed as a result of the US and UK-led dirty war on Syria. The murder of James Foley is just one atrocity among countless others for which both Washington and London are responsible as a result of their effort to effect regime change in Syria.
November 26, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | CIA, ISIS, Obama, Syria, UK, United States |
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Top public health empty suit is a pandemic planner and propagandist
Dr. Ashish Jha
At at press briefing on November 22, White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator, Dr. Ashish Jha, reiterated that God gave us two arms in order to receive multiple vaccines and boosters. I write “reiterated” because he made the same stupid remark at a press briefing back in September.
I wasn’t surprised when the Biden Administration appointed Dr. Jha to serve as its Covid Czar. As we recount in our book, Dr. Jha was the minority witness at Senator Ron Johnson’s November 19, 2020 hearing on Early Outpatient Treatment. This hearing began with testimony from Drs. Peter McCullough, Harvey Risch, and George Fareed on the safety and efficacy of repurposed, FDA-approved drugs for treating COVID-19—especially in the disease’s early stage—to prevent hospitalization and death.
Following their testimony, Dr. Jha testified that their observations and findings were erroneous. In fact, he claimed, there were no effective early treatments for COVID-19, and that our best and only hope was the vaccine that was then in development.
An especially dramatic and somewhat comical moment in the hearing occurred when Dr. George Fareed said, “I wonder if Dr. Jha actually treats patients by the way he talks.” Senator Johnson took this remark as a cue for querying Dr. Jha.
“Have you treated any Covid patients,” Senator Johnson asked.
“I have not, sir,” Dr. Jha replied. We recount this scene in the following excerpt from The Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex:
Dr. Jha had splendid academic credentials to match his splendid manners, but at this moment he lost a lot of credibility. It was perhaps the equivalent of an aeronautical engineer admitting that he’d never flown in a plane, or a marital counselor admitting he’d never been married.
He implied that Professor Risch—a distinguished epidemiologist twenty years his senior—was categorically wrong in his interpretation of the data. Then he implied that Dr. Fareed’s observations as a treating physician were an illusion—that the high-risk patients who received the Zelenko Protocol would have recovered in the same dramatic way without the intervention.
This was probably the most notable moment in the hearing. Since graduating from medical school in 1970, Dr. Fareed had logged fifty years as a medical researcher and treating physician. It would be hard to find a doctor in the entire country with more clinical experience. He testified to the U.S. Senate that he’d successfully treated 1,000 high-risk COVID-19 patients. A few minutes later, a doctor 25 years his junior—one who’d never treated a single COVID-19 patient—asserted that “there is now clear consensus in the medical and scientific community” that a key ingredient of Dr. Fareed’s treatment protocol doesn’t work. In effect, Dr. Jha told Dr. Fareed to reject the evidence of his own eyes and ears.
Shortly after the hearing, Dr. Jha published an opinion piece for the November 24, 2020, edition of the New York Times titled “The Snake-Oil Salesman of the Senate.” He opened with likening the event to a contagion.
There was a super-spreader event last week in the United States Senate. It wasn’t the coronavirus, however, that was spreading, but misinformation. … The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held a hearing about early treatment for COVID-19. Yet instead of a robust discussion about promising emerging therapies or what Congress might do to accelerate such treatments, the conversation was all about the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine. … Neither Ron Johnson, the Wisconsin Republican senator nor his chosen witnesses—three doctors who have pushed hydroxychloroquine—displayed more than a passing interest in evidence. Intuition and personal experiences of individual doctors were acclaimed as guiding principles.[i]
Dr. Jha didn’t mention that he himself had focused his Senate remarks on hydroxychloroquine and hadn’t mentioned any “promising emerging therapies” apart from vaccines. He also didn’t state the names or credentials of the hearing’s witnesses or a summary of their findings or experiences. He compared them to the snake oil salesmen from the frontier past with their advocacy of the drug that President Trump had touted in the spring, implying they were equally lacking in medical sophistication.
“I was called reckless because I pointed to facts that could prevent people from getting the treatment,” he wrote, but he didn’t state these facts. The online version of his essay hyperlinked the word “reckless” to a similar hatchet job report on the hearing in the Washington Post. He claimed the witnesses had expressed a distrust of science and had even “suggested that scientists were part of a ‘deep state’ conspiracy to deny Americans access to lifesaving therapies.” This was, he asserted, “a powerful reminder that not even Congress is immune to toxic conspiracy theories…”
Dr. Jha’s New York Times opinion was, itself, evidence that early treatment of COVID-19 was the subject of a well-orchestrated smear campaign. Why else would such a distinguished academic pen such rank propaganda against his colleagues and their work? That he was personally stung by the revelation that he’d never treated a single COVID-19 patient could only partly account for it.
A possible answer to this question may be gleaned from Dr. Jha’s remarks at a January 10, 2017, Georgetown University conference titled “Pandemic Preparedness in the Next Administration.”
Like the participants at the October 2019 Pandemic Simulation Exercise at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Jha predicted that a devastating pandemic “is going to come at some point.” Dr. Fauci, the keynote speaker, made a more precise prediction.
“There is no question that there will be a challenge to the coming administration in the arena of infectious diseases,” he proclaimed. “The thing we’re extraordinarily confident about is that we’re going to see this in the next few years.”[ii]
As psychiatrist and author Peter Breggin, MD, remarked in his extraordinary book COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We Are the Prey, Dr Jha did not speak in a somber tone about the coming devastation. On the contrary, he emphasized that he was excited about the ambitious project of helping the U.S. and other governments, and equally excited about the many pandemic preparation events in Georgetown and Cambridge that lay ahead. The conference was, he said, the “beginning of a journey.”[iii]
Dr. Jha and his colleagues were animated with the same excitement that denizens of the military-industrial complex would feel at the prospect of a coming war in which they would assume leadership positions. At last, they would be able to deploy all of their forces. With the recognition that the coming war was inevitable, they could call upon the government to allocate far more resources for new technologies, weapons systems, bases, and military organizations. In an atmosphere of such heady excitement, the suggestion of defusing the coming war with diplomacy wouldn’t be received with much enthusiasm.
The irony of Dr. Jha’s excitement is that, when the pandemic he predicted arrived three years later, he didn’t attempt to treat patients or scramble to find consultants to intervene against the disease before it wrecked bodies and imprisoned people in hospitals. Instead, he penned propaganda against hydroxychloroquine and against Drs. McCullough, Risch, and Fareed. Why was the New York Times Editorial Board compelled to publish his misleading account of the Senate hearing? Did the editors even watch the C-SPAN recording of it?
It’s not plausible that their motive was a concern about hydroxychloroquine’s safety. Dr. Jha himself conceded in his testimony that he wasn’t particularly concerned about safety, so why the vast and ceaseless quibbling about whether its efficacy for outpatients had been proven? As Senator Johnson had said in the hearing, this makes no sense.
[i] Jha, Ashish, MD. The Snake Oil Salesmen of the Senate. New York Times, Nov. 24, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/opinion/hydroxychloroquine-covid.html
[ii] Georgetown University Center for Global Health Science & Security, Pandemic Preparedness in the Next Administration. January 10, 2017. https://ghss.georgetown.edu/pandemicprep2017/
[iii] Breggin, Peter R, MD and Ginger Ross Breggin, COVID-19 AND THE GLOBAL PREDATORS: WE ARE THE PREY. Ithaca: Lake Edge Press, 2021, p. 259.
November 25, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, New York Times, United States |
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More than two years ago, an Anglo-Norwegian team of scientists demonstrated unique ‘fingerprints’ of laboratory manipulation in the Covid virus. They argued that the evidence as good as proved that the virus had originated in a lab rather than evolving naturally. The manipulation, which made a bat virus a danger to humans, was exactly as envisaged by American and Chinese researchers who had been working on a vaccine aimed at reducing the impact of any such future outbreaks.
A paper describing these findings, co-authored by London University vaccines expert Professor Angus Dalgleish, was suppressed in both the US and UK. Internationally, the World Health Organisation, leading science journals and others made a huge effort to persuade us that Covid was a natural occurrence – and that we should spend a lot more money to fight any such future threats.
However the paper was uploaded by the Norwegian website Minerva in July 2020, and an update appeared on the website in May 2021 which I reported here.
Now an American expert in the field, who previously dismissed the lab-origin theory, has reached exactly the same conclusion. ‘The body of evidence supporting a lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 is overwhelming, far more so than most realise,’ says biologist and analyst Dr Alex Washburne in a newly published ten-page report.
He studied transmission of infections from bats to people for many years before Covid. ‘Pathogen spillover is common,’ he writes, ‘and so for much of the pandemic I kept an open mind about a laboratory origin yet remained firmly entrenched in my prior belief of a zoonotic [animal] origin. However . . . the totality of evidence has completely changed my mind.’
Before Covid, Dr Washburne was working with a team funded by a US Defense Department grant aimed at pre-empting pandemics by studying whether some strains of animal viruses were more likely to cause human disease than others.
He says it takes a lot of effort to find and examine naturally occurring viruses, and so ‘there is a clear temptation to make new viruses, such as chimeric viruses or viruses passaged in human cells. If we made a virus more capable of infecting people, it might reveal the essence of human-infective viruses and help us prepare vaccines before a pandemic ever happens.
‘Engineer and evolve a novel pandemic-capable virus to create a vaccine against the virus before it causes a pandemic, and you might win a Nobel Prize . . . provided nothing goes wrong.’
He describes how in March 2018 a proposal to do just that was drawn up by EcoHealth Alliance (a global non-profit with the slogan ‘Standing Between You and the Next Pandemic’) with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China and other international collaborators.
The plan was to sample bat coronaviruses, assemble cloned copies of the viruses in the lab, introduce genes that might make them a threat to humans, and test the resulting chimeric viruses in the lab at Wuhan.
‘Find, engineer, and evolve human-infectious viruses capable of causing a pandemic, develop a vaccine against them, and pre-empt a pandemic . . . provided nothing goes wrong.’
DARPA, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, turned down the proposal on safety grounds.
But the group had alternative sources of funding, including a biodefence grant from the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The fact that SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Wuhan, with an exact fingerprint of the proposed manipulation, and a geographic pattern inconsistent with its having emerged from animal trade, ‘ought to tilt the scales towards a laboratory origin’, Washburne says.
He adds that ‘as a scientist, I can’t tell you how badly I want scientists to have not opened Pandora’s Box. It took enormous amounts of self-examination and self-criticism to question my own cherished belief in the theory of a zoonotic origin’.
He might have been able to change his mind sooner if the findings of the Anglo-Norwegian team had been examined at the pandemic’s outset.
The team’s findings were exactly in line with those now highlighted by Washburne. They found that the virus’s so-called spike protein had six inserts, ‘unique fingerprints . . . indicative of purposive manipulation’, which allowed it to infect and damage a wide range of human cells. They showed how these and other features of the virus were linked to laboratory work published by the Chinese and American researchers.
The authors wrote: ‘Since, regrettably, international access has not been allowed to the relevant laboratories or materials, since Chinese scientists who wished to share their knowledge have not been able to do so and indeed since it appears that preserved virus material and related information have been destroyed, we are compelled to apply deduction to the published scientific literature, informed by our own biochemical analyses.
‘We refute pre-emptively objection that this methodology does not result in absolute proof by observing that to make such a statement is to misunderstand scientific logic. The longer the chain of causation of individual findings that is shown, especially converging from different disciplines, the greater the confidence in the whole.’
The team also warned that vaccine-makers who failed to acknowledge the chimeric nature of the virus, and the toxicity of the spike protein, might unwittingly put the public at risk.
We now know that wittingly or not the vaccine-makers put out products which present an even bigger threat to health for some than the virus itself, and have been linked to tens of thousands of deaths and millions of adverse events. But because of the obstacles put in the way of a genuine understanding of the virus’s nature, regulators continue to assure the public that the products are ‘safe and effective’.
I believe there was high-level knowledge from the very start that this was not a naturally evolved virus, but a chimera – originally native to Chinese bats but manipulated in the laboratory to see if it could become a threat to humans.
If Covid really was a straightforward zoonosis – an infectious disease of animal origin – why was a global panic button pressed, leading to the ruinous lockdowns and other crisis measures which were to cost the UK £500billion over the next two and a half years?
Why did top scientists and public health officials persist in demanding panic measures long after it was clear that the threat from Covid was not as bad as had been feared?
Why did the G20 countries at their recent meeting in Bali sing the praises of Covid immunisation as a ‘global public good’, and flag up digital and non-digital ‘proof of vaccinations’ to facilitate ‘seamless international travel’?
Is it because of fears that another, more dangerous genetically engineered pathogen is in the pipeline?
Chinese scientists and public health officials are said to have predicted that World War Three will be fought with ‘a new era of genetic weapons’ which can be ‘artificially manipulated into an emerging human disease virus, then weaponised and unleashed in a way never seen before’.
This is clearly a subject with which governments and their intelligence agencies worldwide must be familiar. May I suggest that if that is the real fear, they should come clean about it, and stop treating us like idiots? That would do a lot to improve understanding, and help end a damaging crisis of confidence in science that could prove a lot more damaging than SARS-CoV-2 itself.
November 24, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Militarism, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine |
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On 24 Sept 2021, when CDC director Rochelle Walensky was asked if it was safe to receive a covid-19 vaccine while breastfeeding, her reply was unwavering:
“There is no bad time to get vaccinated,” said Walensky.
“Get vaccinated while you’re thinking about having a baby, before you’re thinking about having a baby, while you’re pregnant with your baby or after you’ve delivered your baby.”
But Walensky’s advice was not based on science. The safety studies had not been done.
It has been over a year since her comment, and a study published in JAMA found trace amounts of mRNA in the breast milk of mothers who’d received the Pfizer or Moderna covid-19 vaccine.
The researchers speculated that lipid nanoparticles containing mRNA, once injected into the arm, are transported via the lymphatic system to the mammary glands and expressed into breast milk.
Yes, it was a small study, and the mRNA was only detected in expressed breast milk for up to two days, but the authors stated:
Caution is warranted about breastfeeding children younger than 6 months in the first 48 hours after maternal vaccination until more safety studies are conducted.
Caution is warranted?
Aaron Kheriaty, psychiatrist and director of the Bioethics and American Democracy Program at the Ethics and Public Policy, Washington DC, has been critical of the “jab first, ask questions later” approach.
He says Walensky’s insistence about the safety of mRNA vaccines in breastfeeding women was “completely reckless” in the absence of adequate safety data.
“We don’t have evidence that it’s harmful, but we also don’t have sufficient evidence that it is safe for your baby, so that’s the first thing that needs to be said when there’s an absence of evidence,” says Kheriaty.
There are still many unknowns. Oral ingestion of mRNA bound to lipid nanoparticles has no demonstrated safety, and the pegylated product (a design of the mRNA vaccines) when ingested, can be rapidly absorbed through the gut lining.
“The safety studies should’ve been done right out of the gate. Until you actually do the studies, you cannot, at the same time, come out and say, don’t worry, this is safe. We have to inform people of the state of the science, we should tell them that the evidence is not clear,” he adds.
Public health authorities argued that pregnant women and their babies would face a greater risk of harm from covid than from the vaccine, but Kheriaty says it was guesswork.
“We didn’t know any of that. It was a theoretical risk. Childbearing women were excluded from the clinical trials, so we did not have that data.”
Childbearing women were coerced
Adam Urato, a maternal-foetal medicine specialist at MetroWest Medical Centre, Massachusetts, says vaccines have an important role to play in medicine, but admits that many of his patients have legitimate concerns about the unknown impact of covid-19 vaccines on pregnancy and breastfeeding.
“These women make good points. They should be listened to, and their judgement and decisions respected,” says Urato.
“After all, these vaccines are synthetic chemical structures. They are made in chemical manufacturing facilities. They aren’t ‘all natural’ substances. And, honestly, we just don’t know what all of the effects are going to be from using these vaccines during pregnancy and during breastfeeding,” he adds.
Urato rejects the media narrative that childbearing women are “victims of misinformation” if they have concerns about covid-19 vaccine safety.
“My patients are intelligent, they have good instincts and I think their concerns are valid. The idea that all of these women are misled, and uninformed ‘victims of misinformation’ is an insult to them,” he says.
When vaccine mandates were imposed across the globe, many pregnant and breastfeeding women were forced to get vaccinated under penalty of losing their jobs and those who declined, were accused of being anti-vaxxers.
“Pregnant women should be allowed to make personal health choices and decide what gets injected into their body, and the decision should be free from coercion,” says Urato.
Instead, doctors are being coached on ways to handle vaccine hesitancy. In Canada, for example, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario encouraged doctors to prescribe medication to manage anxieties about the vaccine or to recommend psychotherapy.
The precautionary principle
A recent article by British sociologist Robert Dingwall reminds us of the underlying principle of clinicians primum non nocere; the first duty of a doctor is to do no harm.
Dingwall writes that safety cannot be “assumed” but must be demonstrated. He says, “doing stuff just in case” or because “it might help,” is not sufficient.
“Emergency conditions do not justify the abandonment of the precautionary principle. If action is urgent, but benefits and harms are uncertain, then the actions or innovations must be temporary, provisional, and closely monitored with a view to withdrawing or halting them if their benefits are not proportionate to their harms.
Pandemic policies would have looked very different if the precautionary principle had been applied correctly.”
Urato agrees. He says that we will look back with regret at how public health authorities treated pregnant women.
“Vaccine mandates were a really cruel, uncompassionate, and inhumane way to treat pregnant women. The community needs to really learn from this awful episode and make sure nothing like this happens again.”
November 23, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Canada, CDC, COVID-19 Vaccine, Rochelle Walensky, United States |
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How do we move ahead in a post-pandemic era? And what are the lessons to be learned from our challenging recent history? Catholic psychiatrist and bioethicist Aaron Kheriaty has thought a great deal about these questions and his answers are found in his just-released book The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State (Regnery Publishing, 2022). The result is a brilliant mix of scientific observations, personal experiences, philosophical reflections, prudent policy prescriptions, and even a few speculative hints about dystopian possibilities of the near future.
Kheriaty, who lost his previous job as clinical psychiatrist and teacher at UC-Irvine in a dispute over mandated vaccines and natural immunity, begins the book in an unexpected time and place: 1947 Nuremberg. He does this to provide historical context for threats to freedom in our time. He briefly surveys the eugenics movement and its appropriation by the Nazi regime. Germany’s medical professionals were well-trained and as good as any in the world, but they lost their way. “Instead of seeing the sick as individuals in need of compassionate medical care, German doctors became willing agents of a sociopolitical program driven by a cold utilitarian ethos,” writes Kheriaty (xvii). After the war the revulsion at the perversion of medicine led to the Nuremberg Code, which emphasized informed consent as a cornerstone of ethical medical treatment.
That code and other ethical agreements remained as part of the medical-bioethical landscape… until 2020. Kheriaty asserts that “[d]uring the covid pandemic, the public health and medical establishment once again abandoned the principle of free and informed consent to advance a supposed greater good” (xxi). Having laid the groundwork for his argument and narrative, he sums up by issuing this frightening declaration: “The unholy alliance of (1) public health, (2) digital technologies of surveillance and control, and (3) the police powers of the state—what I call the Biomedical Security State—has arrived” (xxii). While this probably seems like a heavy meal to digest, the reader can be assured that Kheriaty writes clearly and is grounded in scientific medicine and a solid ethical worldview. His story, while alarming, is neither conspiracy theory nor exercise in despair.
After the Nuremberg prologue, Dr. Kheriaty continues with four long chapters and an epilogue: “Locked Up: The Biomedical Security State”; “Locked Down & Locked Out: A New Societal Paradigm”; “Locked In: The Coming Technocratic Dystopia”; “Reclaiming Freedom: Human Flourishing in a More Rooted Future”; and, “Seattle, 2030.” Sprinkled throughout what could be a gloomy read, we encounter stories of solidarity and resilience. The author makes sure to show us that human interaction cannot — must not — be stymied by government interference in our lives and the functioning of society. “Consider the human goods we sacrificed to preserve bare biological life at all costs: friendships, holidays with family, work, visiting the sick and dying, worshipping God, and burying the dead” (14). But to resist or even question, we must know as much of a situation’s history as possible. Kheriaty lays out the pieces of the puzzle: states of emergency, agency capture of regulators by the regulated, loosening bonds of social cohesion, and the religion of scientism.
Scientism is distinct from science and scientific inquiry, Kheriaty points out. “The characteristic feature of science is warranted uncertainty, which leads to intellectual humility. The characteristic feature of scientism is unwarranted certainty, which leads to intellectual hubris” (54). In other words, scientism upholds so-called science as the only proper form of knowledge and rejects any questioning or skepticism. It is prone to misuse as a political tool and typically accompanies a materialistic worldview. That heavy-handed framework clashes with how science and medicine have long operated through trial and error, experimentation, imaginative solutions, and, most of all, respect for individual humans as made in the image and likeness of God.
Kheriaty’s own story makes for a fascinating sub-plot. As a doctor, ethicist, and teacher he was closely involved with figuring out how to respond to covid and help patients. As the lockdowns unfolded he encountered staggering amounts of fear, worry, and depression. His grasp of bioethics and knowledge of history led him to speak out against new methods of trying to control spread of the covid virus, especially when they superseded societal freedom and individual liberty. “Freedom of movement, of association, of domicile in one’s country of origin, and access to public spaces and public events—these quickly went from basic rights to special privileges conferred by governments as rewards for good behavior” (68). His medical training also led him to critique the development and imposition of a new and mostly untested vaccine. In his own case, he fought against a mandatory vaccination because of a prior covid infection. His argument at the time did not prevent him from being fired. He also touches on the devastating impact of restrictions on work and supply chains.
Indeed, that is one of the constant themes of this book: technology and safety should never eclipse the humanity of our lives. For instance, “[t]here is clearly no such thing as a medication—or a vaccine—that’s always good for everyone in every circumstance all the time” (137). Technology and cultural immersion endanger our sense of ourselves and nudge us to trade autonomy and dignity for convenience. “Today, routine biometric verification for things from mobile phones to lunch lines gets young people used to the idea that their bodies are tools used in transactions” (155). Connected to abuse of genetic and biometric data is the ominous specter of transhumanism, which Kheriaty characterizes as “clearly a religion—a particular type of neo-Gnostic religion” (167). To all these dehumanizing trends the author counsels resistance, but emphatically “nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience” (184).
The book’s final chapter lays out policy proposals for steering clear of dystopia. I found this chapter to be only somewhat persuasive. Kheriaty’s suggestions are certainly prudent and logical; however, they mostly deal with changing the political and medical climate. But bureaucracy and institutional entropy are like the invasive Japanese Knotweed in my back yard, which is to say impossible to eradicate. On other points Kheriaty is spot-on. “The first and most necessary step is to overcome our fear,” he writes (191). And [t]he enemy is not pain or illness. The enemy is fear. The enemy is hatred or indifference toward our fellow human beings” (192). Fear of death was manifest during the pandemic. As Catholics, we are taught to not fear death, but rather to spend our lives preparing for it and to live in a state of grace. During a pandemic or even “normal” times we can bear witness to Christ by living with courage and fighting fear. We can also resist mask mandates that dehumanize us and separate us from others, covering up our God-created uniqueness. Of importance to religious believers, we can engage with our faith authorities to make sure no one is abandoned again because “too many religious leaders and clergy unfortunately showed themselves during the pandemic to be willing chaplains to the new technocracy” (204).
Readers should not skip the epilogue, in which Kheriaty (a native of the Pacific Northwest) posits a dystopian Seattle in 2030. In this uncomfortable scenario, we are asked to consider what life might be like if current trends in pharmaceuticals and their marketing are joined with further developments in social control to create a two-tiered society reminiscent of many well-known alternative futures in literature and movies. Thankfully, Dr. Kheriaty lightens a somber story with some wry humor.
While The New Abnormal is not an explicitly Catholic book, Aaron Kheriaty founds it in Catholic principles of justice, humanity, clear philosophical first principles, subsidiarity, solidarity, and important spiritual goods. He brings in examples from classical and contemporary philosophy, C.S. Lewis, and George Orwell. The prose is clear but some of the concepts can be a little heady at times. This is a valuable piece of work from a man with unique qualifications. His is a prophetic voice calling us to understand and take action while never forgetting the God Who made us.
Greg Cook is a writer living in New York’s North Country with his wife. He graduated from Plattsburgh State College and The Evergreen State College. He is the author of two self-published books of poetry, Against the Alchemists and A Verse Companion to Romano Guardini’s ‘Sacred Signs’.
November 22, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States |
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Samizdat – 22.11.2022
MOSCOW – The Russian Embassy in Washington on Tuesday condemned the US reaction to the video believed to be showing a massacre of Russian prisoners of war by the Ukrainian military, saying that the US authorities enable a growing sense of impunity of neo-Nazis in Ukraine.
Earlier in the day, US Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice Beth Van Schaack said that the US was monitoring reports of the shooting of Russian prisoners of war in Donbass. She urged all parties to respect international law.
“We noted the statements of Ambassador-at-Large on International Criminal Justice Beth van Shack on the murder of captured Russian military personnel by Ukrainian neo-Nazis. The official refused to directly condemn the massacre of our unarmed soldiers, despite the confirmation of the authenticity of the relevant video materials by American journalists, who did not hush up the tragedy,” the Russian embassy said in a statement.
The US is nurturing an increased sense of permissiveness and impunity of neo-Nazi sympathizers in Ukraine by turning a blind eye to the violence of that kind.
“We have repeatedly stated that by supplying weapons to Kiev, by teaching criminals and mercenaries the art of war, by transferring intelligence the United States are becoming a side of the conflict. Russian-U.S. relations are thusly driven into a dead end,” the statement read.
Last week, Russia’s Defense Ministry said that the Ukrainian military deliberately killed 10 captured Russian soldiers.
On November 17, a video was circulated on the internet showing Ukrainian soldiers shooting surrendered Russians lying heads down. The Russian Human Rights Council said it would send the video to the OHCHR, the OSCE, the Council of Europe, and other international human rights organizations.
On November 18, the Russian Investigative Committee opened a criminal investigation into the execution of Russian POWs by the Ukrainian military.
On November 19, UN Spokesperson Farhan Haq said that the United Nations was calling for a full investigation of all reported human rights violations related to the execution of Russian POWs by Ukrainians.
November 22, 2022
Posted by aletho |
War Crimes | Russia, Ukraine, United States |
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Pfizer’s quest for blockbusters by hook or by crook
Author’s Note: The following post is an excerpt from The Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex, by John Leake and Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH. Please note that a special and very handsome hardcover edition, published by Skyhorse with a forward by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., will be released tomorrow (November 22).
Long before COVID-19 arrived, I was a close observer of the pharmaceutical industry. My great grandparents believed that pharmaceutical labs were at the forefront of progress, relieving suffering and extending life, and for the most part they were right. My paternal great grandfather owned a large chain of drugstores and was a benefactor of UT Southwestern Medical School. At the time of my birth, my maternal great grandmother gave me a generous gift of Pfizer stock. She had been impressed by Pfizer’s key role in discovering how to mass produce penicillin during World War II (in which her son was killed in action). Eighteen years later her gift paid for my university education. And then, in 1998, Pfizer received FDA approval to sell Viagra.
Pfizer initially developed the drug to treat high blood pressure and angina pectoris. However, as Pfizer’s researchers discovered in clinical trials, the drug was better at inducing erections than managing angina. And so, the company repurposed the drug for erectile dysfunction and launched a massive, global PR and marketing campaign—including seeking moral approval from Pope John Paul II and contracting the war hero and 1996 presidential candidate Bob Dole to be the brand’s poster gentleman—that succeeded in making Viagra a blockbuster. Fortunately for me, I still owned a large chunk of Pfizer stock. The price spiked in late 1998 and reached an all-time high in April of 1999. I sold my entire remaining position, which financed my early years as a freelance author, before my first book was published.
So, I learned firsthand why pharmaceutical companies seek to develop blockbuster drugs with fanatical zeal. Formulating a safe and effective new medicine to address a large, unmet need is very difficult and expensive. Performing clinical trials and obtaining FDA-approval is an arduous process that normally takes several years. Thus, if an opportunity for a new blockbuster presents itself, a big drug company like Pfizer will go to extreme lengths to seize it.
Three years after the release of Viagra, I learned that Pfizer was not the entirely respectable company my great grandmother had believed it to be. I arrived at this realization through my interest in British spy novels. In 2001 I lived in Vienna, around the corner from the Burgkino (Burg Cinema) which still played the 1949 film noir classic The Third Man on its big screen every weekend. I spent many a dreary winter Sunday afternoon watching the film. Based on the novella and screenplay by Graham Greene, The Third Man is a crime story about Harry Lime—an American running a medical charity in Vienna, who makes a killing selling penicillin on the bombed out, impoverished city’s black market. To increase his profits, he cuts the drug with other substances, thereby destroying its efficacy and causing the patients (including children) to die horribly from their infections.
In the film’s most iconic scene, the good guy (played by Joseph Cotton) meets his old friend Harry Lime (played by Orson Welles) on the Giant Ferris wheel in the Vienna Prater amusement park and tries to appeal to his conscience. At the wheel’s apex, the charismatic Harry opens the door, points down to people walking on the ground below, and says:
Look down there. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax. … Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t, why should we? They talk about the people and the proletariat; I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It’s the same thing. They have their five-year plans, and so have I.
I sensed that Graham Greene might have based the story on something he’d witnessed or heard about. Doing some research, I learned that Harry Lime was probably based on the British spy Harold “Kim” Philby, with whom Greene worked in British intelligence during World War II. Greene, it seems, discovered that Philby was a Soviet double agent long before he was exposed as such in 1963. Instead of ratting out his friend, he kept it to himself and left the intelligence service in 1944. Several pieces of evidence suggest that when he wrote The Third Man a few years later, he based it on his conflicted friendship with Philby.
John le Carré was also fascinated by Graham Greene and Kim Philby, and his thriller Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy—one of my all-time favorites—was inspired by the Philby story. His novel The Constant Gardener was published in 2001, and I read it with great interest. The story wasn’t set in Cold War Europe, but in Kenya, where a British diplomat’s wife is brutally raped and murdered. Upon closer examination, the diplomat realizes that she was about to reveal a horrifying crime committed by a pharmaceutical company, which murdered her in order to prevent the exposure.
The novel’s plot was reminiscent of a controversial drug trial performed by Pfizer in Kano, Nigeria in 1996 during a meningococcal outbreak. For the trial of its new antibiotic, trovafloxacin, Pfizer gave 100 children this new drug. The control group of 100 other children received the standard anti-meningitis treatment at the time—a drug called ceftriaxone. However, for the control group, Pfizer administered a substantially lower dose of ceftriaxone than the drug’s FDA-approved standard.
When the reduced dosing in the control group was discovered, it raised the suspicion that Pfizer did this in order to skew the trial in favor of its new drug. Five of the children who received trovafloxacin died, while six who received the reduced dose of ceftriaxone died. Other children apparently suffered grave injuries from the administration of the experimental antibiotic without their informed consent. The investigation and litigation that ensued was the stuff of a thriller, involving private investigators, bribery, blackmail attempts, and disappearing records. Thirteen years later, in 2009, Pfizer settled out of court with the plaintiffs.
In his author’s note, le Carré claimed that nobody and no corporation in the novel was based on an actual person or corporation in the real world.
But I can tell you this. As my journey through the pharmaceutical jungle progressed, I came to realize that, by comparison with the reality, my story was as tame as a holiday postcard.
In 2009, the same year that Pfizer settled with the trovafloxacin plaintiffs, the New York Times reported that a U.S. federal judge assessed Pfizer with the “largest health care fraud settlement and the largest criminal fine of any kind ever” for its illegal marketing of Bextra and three other drugs. The U.S. Department of Justice was unequivocal in characterizing Pfizer’s officers as guilty of grave criminal conduct at the expense of the American public.
November 21, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Corruption, Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | FDA, Pfizer |
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Samizdat – 20.11.2022
Ukrainian troops subjected the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant (NPP) to massive artillery shelling, damaging strategic facilities, an adviser to the head of Rosenergoatom, a subsidiary of Russian state nuclear energy corporation Rosatom, told Sputnik on Sunday.
“The Ukrainian military launched a massive strike directly at the station. Twelve rockets were fired. It is known that six of them hit the cooling system of reactors, two — hit the dry cask storage [of radioactive waste]. The consequences of the shelling cannot be determined yet since the risk of repeated attacks remains,” Renat Karchaa said.
None of the Zaporozhye NPP personnel were injured, according to Karchaa.
Located on the left bank of the Dnieper River, the Zaporozhye NPP is the largest nuclear power plant in Europe by number of units and output. During the military operation in Ukraine, launched by Russia on February 24, the nuclear plant and surrounding area went under the control of Russian forces and have since been shelled many times. Russia and Ukraine blame each other for the attacks.
An international mission led by IAEA chief Rafael Grossi visited the plant from August 31 to September 5. IAEA observers have since been staying at the plant on a rotational basis. Following the visit by the mission, the IAEA published a report in which it confirmed the shelling of the ZNPP.
November 20, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Environmentalism, Nuclear Power, War Crimes | Russia, Ukraine |
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As the saga surrounding the arrival of a Ukrainian S-300 surface-to-air missile on the soil of Poland, tragically taking the lives of two Polish civilians, unfolds, several narratives emerge. First is the hair-trigger Pavlovian response on the part of certain NATO nations (Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and the Czech Republic) to jump to conclusions, announcing that this incident was a clear-cut case of Russian aggression against a NATO member requiring a NATO response inclusive of extending air defense coverage into Ukraine, as well as the establishment of a no-fly zone over parts of Ukraine. The second is the confusion that reigned at the highest levels in Ukraine regarding this incident, up to and including the refusal on the part of the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, to acknowledge that the missile in question was of Ukrainian origin.
It appears that those NATO nations calling for the invocation of Article 4 of the NATO charter in the aftermath of the missile incident were primed to do so ahead of the fact. It also appears as if the actual launch of the missile was done without the knowledge and authority of the Ukrainian high command, including Zelensky and his top military advisors.
This could lead one to assess that Ukraine’s northern European NATO allies are simply looking for a fight with Russia with the kind of focused intensity of a lemming running toward a cliff, jumping on any story line which can be twisted and distorted in a manner designed to make NATO intervention in Ukraine viable to other, less enthusiastic member states.
Such an assessment would square with the notion, currently in favor amongst most NATO members and their compliant western media stenographers, that the Ukrainian S-300 missile impact in Poland was a tragic accident, with the missile in question being launched in response to a Russian missile barrage before suffering some sort of malfunction which sent it flying off course, toward its tragic destiny in a Polish farmer’s field.
From an analysis of the basic geometry of the Ukrainian air defense battlefield, this narrative does not withstand scrutiny. Incoming Russian missiles approach Ukraine from roughly an east-to-west trajectory. As such, Ukrainian air defense is layered to protect from a west-to-east perspective, with detection radars set up to pick up incoming targets as far out as possible, allowing tracking radars to be cued as needed to guide the surface-to-air missiles to their designated targets. Any S-300 missile fired against an incoming Russian target would be fired from a roughly west to east direction, following the radar beam toward its target. In short—a Ukrainian S-300 would be launched in a direction which is pretty much 180 degrees away from the path flown by the missile that hit Poland.
Generally speaking, if a missile malfunctions or loses radar track, it will continue to fly roughly in the same direction of launch. Any major deviation from this rule would mean that the control surfaces of the missile were malfunctioning or damaged, which means the missile would not be able to sustain a consistent trajectory and would as such tumble out of control. For the Ukrainian S-300 missile to have reached Poland, it would have required a fully functioning aerodynamic control system. In short, the missile did not malfunction.
Air defense missiles have, over history, had an inherent surface-to-surface capability. The nuclear-capable Nike-Hercules missile could be used in a surface-to-surface role. The Iraqis used Soviet-made SA-2 and SA-3 missiles as surface-to-surface missiles. And the SM-6 missile used by the US Navy and Army can strike targets both in the air and on the ground. While the S-300 was purposely designed as an air defense weapon (its warhead is a relatively small one, between 100 and 143 kilograms of high explosive), it could be used in a surface-to-surface mode simply by using its tracking radar to orient a beam in the desired direction, at an altitude which would permit a ballistic trajectory to be obtained once the missile expends its fuel. The missile would fly in the direction of the beam, and then fall to the ground in the desired arc.
In order to do this, however, a tracking radar beam would have had to have been employed in a manner which oriented it in the exact opposite direction of the incoming Russian targets, toward Poland.
In short, the Ukrainian S-300 which landed on Poland was not the result of an accident, but rather a deliberate action designed to have the missile impact Polish soil.
The Polish are investigating the circumstances surrounding the deaths of their two citizens. If, as it logically appears, the launch of the S-300 missile was a deliberate act, then Poland must view the Ukrainians as the perpetrators of a crime. As such, Poland should be demanding that the launcher and associated radars be removed from service and all records and data associated with the launch in question treated as evidence and turned over to the appropriate Polish prosecution authority. Likewise, all personnel involved in the launch of this missile must be detained and subjected to interrogation by trained criminal investigators.
Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, denies that Ukraine launched the missile in question, basing his belief on information provided by his senior air force and military commanders. If Zelensky is telling the truth, then there is a conspiracy within the Ukrainian military establishment to instigate a false flag incident designed to draw NATO into the conflict. Any investigation into the command-and-control procedures used in the launching of the missile that struck Poland should be able to determine how high up the chain of command this conspiracy existed.
Likewise, the hair-trigger-like response of Poland and the Baltic states in jumping to conclusions that blamed Russia for the attack on Poland despite their respective militaries knowing that the missile in question was Ukrainian, suggests a certain level of prior coordination between the perpetrators of the attack and those who immediately pointed an accusatory finger at Russia.
Let there be no doubt—any direct NATO-Russian military confrontation over Poland has the real potential to devolve into a general nuclear exchange between the US and Russia. Anyone in Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltics who are involved in a conspiracy to drag NATO into the Ukraine conflict by promoting a false-flag attack represents a direct threat against every human being on the planet.
The US and its more responsible NATO partners need to get to the bottom of what transpired regarding the Ukrainian S-300 attack on Poland. Any failure to identify this false-flag conspiracy, if it in fact exists, and to nip it in the bud, only raises the real probability that those involved in such a conspiracy will try again, and again, until they fulfill their suicidal objective of a NATO-Russian conflict.
November 19, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine |
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A look at its origins as it surges in youngsters around the world
Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) is surging around the world right now. Could this be due to “immunity debt” after lockdowns or because Covid and/or mass vaccination has messed around with our immune systems? The majority of young children have not been vaccinated against Covid, so the direct effect of vaccination can be ruled out here.
RSV is relatively mild for healthy adults but can be more dangerous to young children and the elderly. Every year there are approximately 30 million acute respiratory illnesses and over 60,000 childhood deaths caused by RSV worldwide.
But where did RSV come from?
According to Wikipedia it was first discovered in 1956 when researchers isolated a virus from a population of chimpanzees with respiratory illness. It was later realised that the chimpanzees actually caught the infection from their caretakers.
However, a different version of this story exists. As it is extremely unlikely that the real truth will ever come to light, you decide which version sounds more plausible, the Wikipedia entry above, or the alternative below. Please add any other details you have in the comments below.
Whilst Wikipedia is correct, in that RSV was first discovered in 1956, the story begins a year earlier in 1955.
This was a time when research was being undertaken into the mass production of the polio viral vaccine. In order to conduct the research, viruses were grown in monkey kidney cells. As a result hundreds of thousands of monkeys were shipped to the US.
In late 1955 a troop of chimpanzees at the Walter Reed Army Institute began coughing and sneezing. Morris et al isolated the agent that caused the respiratory illness in one of the chimps and called it Chimpanzee Coryza Agent Virus (CCA). The remaining 13 chimps all developed antibodies to this newly isolated virus.
As documented by Morris, a person working at the Institute started to experience respiratory infection and later developed antibodies to CCA. Once this worker had become infected, a new name was proposed – Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) and from then on, CCA was rarely used in medical literature.
They were curious about this new virus and so susceptible chimpanzees were inoculated intranasally with CCA virus. After a 3 day incubation period, this new troop of monkeys all got ill as well.
A year later, in 1957, Chanock and Finberg reported on recovery from infants with respiratory illness of a virus related to CCA. They said it is clear that their findings show that the viruses infecting the infants are indistinguishable from the CCA virus.
Subsequently, the virus was recovered from infants and small children with pneumonia or bronchiolitis in the Maryland-District of Columbia.
In the winter of 1958, Beem et al isolated a similar virus, with antigenic similarities, in Chicago.
By 1961, Lewis et al had isolated further specimens which looked like CCA.
Prior to July 1960, the influenza and parainfluenza viruses predominated in infant epidemic respiratory infections. In July 1961 the pattern changed abruptly with sudden increases in bronchiolitis and bronchitis, infrequent before. 58% were under 12 months, and patients under 4 years predominated. Infants with bronchiolitis and severe bronchitis yielded RCA not previously isolated. Deaths have occurred.
Many of the research papers said it was likely that the initial chimpanzee virus was the result of an infection passed to the troop by a human.
However, within five years of the discovery of this virus in chimpanzees, children went from predominantly being hospitalised by influenza to hospitalisation due to bronchitis linked to RSV.
Now, approximately one half of all infants become infected with RSV in their first year of life, almost all of them by the age of two. In the US alone, hospitalisation of children with RSV costs $300 million.
So there are two theories, one that the virus passed from a human to the chimps and the other that it passed from the chimps to humans. However, the fact that this virus was unknown in humans before the chimp got ill and within five years the predominant illness in children flipped from influenza to RSV suggests that the latter theory is correct.
November 18, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | COVID-19 Vaccine |
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