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Virologists push back on more regulation of viruses made more lethal in the lab

By Emily Kopp | U.S. Right To Know | April 27, 2022

Virologists pushed back on the possibility of tighter regulation of viruses tweaked in the lab to be more lethal at a public meeting Wednesday.

An enhanced pandemic potential pathogen is a virus or microbe that has gained increased transmissibility —  capacity to spread from person to person and reverberate throughout a population —  or virulence — capacity to cause serious disease.

Experiments that are reasonably anticipated to generate deadlier pathogens are supposed to receive heightened oversight from the Department of Health and Human Services under what is nicknamed the HHS “P3CO,” short for the pandemic potential pathogen committee.

Though established just a few years ago, critics say the committee’s work is hidden from public view, suffers from glaring loopholes and needs a reboot. Work that contributes to vaccine development or results from viral surveillance efforts in nature is exempted from this extra layer of review, for example.

Speculation by some in the U.S. intelligence community that SARS-CoV-2 may have seeped out of a lab at the pandemic’s epicenter may have prompted a public meeting to consider whether current policies are adequate. Reporting irregularities by a nonprofit partner of the lab involved in gain-of-function research on coronaviruses and funded by the National Institutes of Health called EcoHealth Alliance has also led many to conclude the P3CO needs to apply to more research projects and be more accountable to the public.

One million Americans have died of COVID-19. A review by the U.S. intelligence community last summer about whether the novel coronavirus spilled over from an animal or spilled out of a lab was inconclusive.

The Office of Science and Technology Policy and NIH cohosted the meeting Wednesday.

White House COVID-19 testing czar Tom Inglesby was harshly critical of the existing framework. His top recommendation: Scientists should be required to explain in detail the goals of undertaking such research in the first place, and why less perilous methods could not reach the same goal.

“There must be an extraordinary and public justification,” he said. “I do think there are experiments we shouldn’t do.”

But lobbying groups representing virologists and other life scientists pushed back.

“The systems of review should not be a solution looking for a problem,” said Felicia Goodrum, president of the American Society for Virology.

Goodrum said regulation risks “tying two hands behind our backs” when it comes to modeling pandemic risks.

Goodrum added that the inherently unpredictable nature of manipulating viruses means that it’s unwieldy to determine whether or not an experiment will make a virus more dangerous, so the regulations should be lax.

“We must be careful about dichotomizing research as simply either ‘risky’ or not because it is not possible to absolutely predict the biology of a virus with the committee,” she said.

But Gregory Koblentz, director of the biodefense graduate program at George Mason University, said that an EcoHealth Alliance grant that funded research that made coronaviruses more deadly by swapping their spike proteins is emblematic of lapses in oversight at NIH.

The research was not regulated as gain-of-function work, but NIH did add language to the grant requiring extra reporting if the viral engineering led to viruses that were 10 times more pathogenic. (The chimeric viruses proved to be much more pathogenic than even that threshold, but EcoHealth Alliance did not report it.) That language amounts to a “tacit admission” that NIH reasonably anticipated the work was gain of function, Koblentz said.

Stefano Bertuzzi, CEO of the American Society for Microbiology, conceded that labs should report more often to Congress and that scientists could do a better job allaying public concerns, but stated that the framework is otherwise sufficient.

Bertuzzi signaled he is concerned that Congress could step in.

Labs taking steps toward greater transparency “helps guard against well intended but sometimes overly prescriptive legislative approaches that could undermine the important work that needs to take place.”

Gigi Gronvall, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said that the “breathless hyping of risks” overshadows strong existing biosafety measures, such as U.S. efforts to train maximum containment labs abroad.

Asked which risks have been misunderstood, Gronvall said that “there is a lot of gray” and that the proper expertise is needed to interpret gain-of-function experiments, but did not go into further detail.

Indeed, some experts called for decreased transparency for controversial research. Colorado State University Biosafety Rebecca Moritz called for limiting the scope of public records requests. U.S. Right to Know has submitted a public information request for records about the university’s research on bat coronaviruses in collaboration with EcoHealth Alliance, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The documents raise questions about the contagion risks, for example, of shipping of bats and rats infected with dangerous pathogens.

Kanta Subbarao, director of the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza, disputed the idea that research that contributes to vaccine development or results from surveillance should be included in the framework.

Many representatives of the life science and biodefense fields emphasized weighing any regulation against lost opportunities for science. But members of the public who participated in the meeting were much more skeptical of the value of certain gain-of-function work.

Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute, said that the public should not be surprised by controversial gain-of-function experiments for the first time in scientific papers, long after the research has been approved and completed.

Chan called for controversial experiments to be published on preprint servers and the genomes of novel viruses to be deposited into publicly available databases within a year of discovery.

She also called for greater transparency from private “virus hunting” organizations and middlemen between the NIH and labs, an apparent allusion to the EcoHealth Alliance and the Global Virome Project.

Kevin Esvelt, a biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said creating novel viruses in the lab, combined with the ease of synthesizing viruses from a genome sequence, poses a national security threat.

“More Americans have died of COVID than would perish if a Russian Topol SS-25 thermonuclear warhead were to be detonated in the center of Washington, DC,” said Esvelt. “Pandemic viruses can be more lethal than thermonuclear weapons. That makes them a proliferation concern.”

May 7, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

US ‘directly’ involved in Ukraine conflict – Moscow

Russian State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin
Samizdat | May 7, 2022

Washington should be added to a “list of war criminals” as it is now directly participating in “hostilities” in Ukraine, Chairman of Russia’s State Duma Vyacheslav Volodin claimed on Saturday, citing media reports about alleged US intelligence-sharing with Ukraine.

US President Joe Biden has told senior intelligence officials that “counterproductive” leaks about data sharing with Ukraine should stop, NBC reported on Friday.

Though there was no official reaction to the report from the US authorities, Volodin took to Telegram to comment on it. “The United States is taking part in hostilities in Ukraine. US President Biden, demanding to stop leaks about the exchange of intelligence information with Ukraine, admitted that Washington had been exposed,” he wrote.

Volodin said that the Ukrainian government, which he described as the “Kiev Nazi regime,” not only relies on weapons from the West, but also on the “assistance of American intelligence forces.”

The Duma chairman wrote that Washington “essentially coordinates and develops military operations” in Ukraine, and is therefore directly participating in the “hostilities” against Russian forces.

“For the crimes committed in Ukraine by the Kiev Nazi regime, the US leadership should also be held accountable, adding to the list of war criminals,” Volodin concluded.

However, the Pentagon earlier dismissed some of the media reports and specifically denied that the US had provided data allowing Ukrainian forces to strike Russia’s Black Sea flagship ‘Moskva’ off the coast of Odessa last month.

“The Ukrainians have their own intelligence capabilities to track and target Russian naval vessels, as they did in this case,” said US military spokesman John Kirby.

Russia insists that its missile cruiser wasn’t attacked, but sank on April 14 after a fire that had broken out on board caused ammunition to explode.

The White House National Security Council has admitted, however, that the US is “regularly providing detailed, timely intelligence to the Ukrainians on the battlefield to help them defend their country against Russian aggression and will continue to do so.”

This statement apparently did not come as a surprise to Moscow. On May 5, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists that the Russian authorities know the US, the UK and NATO “on a permanent basis” transmit intelligence and other data to Kiev but this would not “hinder the achievement of the goals set during the special military operation.”

Russia attacked its neighboring state following Ukraine’s failure to implement the terms of the Minsk agreements, signed in 2014, and Moscow’s eventual recognition of the Donbass republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. The German- and French-brokered Minsk Protocol was designed to give the breakaway regions special status within the Ukrainian state.

The Kremlin has since demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join NATO. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked and has denied claims it was planning to retake the two republics by force.

May 7, 2022 Posted by | Militarism, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Beaten & Denied Safe Exit: French Journalist Presents Eyewitness Accounts of Azov Crimes in Mariupol

By Oleg Burunov | Samizdat | May 7, 2022

Late last month, Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu announced that Mariupol had been liberated from Ukrainian forces, and that order can now be restored in the city. Shoigu, however, stressed that the “remaining radicals” were still under siege at the Azovstal steel plant.

French independent journalist Anne-Laure Bonnel has presented eyewitness accounts of the crimes of neo-Nazis from the Azov Battalion in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol at an informal UN Security Council meeting.

Bonnel, in particular, showed a video of an interview with an unnamed male resident of Mariupol, in which he explained that he had managed to flee the city by secretly making his way along the coast of the Sea of ​​Azov.

According to him, Azov Battalion members “occupy residential houses, beat people and don’t let them leave their homes”.

“I know for sure that people are not allowed out of their houses, they are hit with buttstocks and forced to stay at home. The Azov Battalion won’t let anyone either walk through nor leave by car. I personally know a person who was simply not allowed to leave,” he claimed.

Another resident of Mariupol named Anna said that she had not heard anything about humanitarian corridors, arguing that the Ukrainian military deployed military hardware, including armoured personnel carrier, in the courtyards of residential areas.

She was echoed by one more Mariupol resident, Ilya Klochko, who said that Azov Battalion members “deployed howitzers to residential areas and shot from there”, adding that he’d heard nothing about humanitarian corridors.

The eyewitnesses spoke as Russian troops continue to block the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, with humanitarian corridors operating throughout Saturday. According to Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) officials, a total of 176 civilians had already been evacuated from the territory of the Azovstal plant, where the remaining Ukrainian forces have been hiding since the takeover of the port city by the Russian troops.

Liberation of Mariupol

In late April, Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu told President Vladimir Putin that Mariupol “was liberated by the Russian armed forces and the People’s Militia of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR)” and that “the remnants of the nationalist formations took refuge in the industrial zone of Azovstal”.

Putin, in turn, called the assault on Azovstal pointless and ordered it to be cancelled. He explained that it is necessary to think about saving the lives of Russian soldiers and officers, ordering the Azovstal zone to be blocked.

At the time the DPR declared its independence from Kiev in 2014, Mariupol was the second-largest city of the Donbass republic after Donetsk. It was taken by Kiev’s forces back that same year. Since the beginning of Moscow’s special military operation on 24 February, the Russian troops and Donbass militias have been pushing Ukrainian forces from the city. During the liberation of Mariupol, witnesses reported numerous crimes committed by the Ukrainian militants in the city, including taking hostages and using civilians as human shields.

May 7, 2022 Posted by | War Crimes | | Leave a comment

More Than 8,000 New COVID Vaccine Injuries Reported to VAERS, CDC Data Show

By Megan Redshaw | The Defender | May 6, 2022

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) today released new data showing a total of 1,255,355 reports of adverse events following COVID-19 vaccines were submitted between Dec. 14, 2020, and April 29, 2022, to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). VAERS is the primary government-funded system for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S.

The data included a total of 27,758 reports of deaths — an increase of 226 over the previous week — and 226,703 serious injuries, including deaths, during the same time period — up 1,937 compared with the previous week. There were 8,224 additional total adverse events reported to VAERS over the previous week.

Excluding “foreign reports” to VAERS, 813,021 adverse events, including 12,779 deaths and 81,271 serious injuries, were reported in the U.S. between Dec. 14, 2020, and April 29, 2022.

Foreign reports are reports foreign subsidiaries send to U.S. vaccine manufacturers. Under U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations, if a manufacturer is notified of a foreign case report that describes an event that is both serious and does not appear on the product’s labeling, the manufacturer is required to submit the report to VAERS.

Of the 12,779 U.S. deaths reported as of April 29, 16% occurred within 24 hours of vaccination, 20% occurred within 48 hours of vaccination and 59% occurred in people who experienced an onset of symptoms within 48 hours of being vaccinated.

In the U.S., 575 million COVID-19 vaccine doses had been administered as of April 29, including 339 million doses of Pfizer, 217 million doses of Moderna and 19 million doses of Johnson & Johnson (J&J).

Every Friday, VAERS publishes vaccine injury reports received as of a specified date. Reports submitted to VAERS require further investigation before a causal relationship can be confirmed.

Historically, VAERS has been shown to report only 1% of actual vaccine adverse events.

U.S. VAERS data from Dec. 14, 2020, to April 29, 2022, for 5- to 11-year-olds show:
U.S. VAERS data from Dec. 14, 2020, to April 29, 2022, for 12- to 17-year-olds show:
  • 31,504 adverse events, including 1,808 rated as serious and 44 reported deaths.
    The most recent reported death involves a 14-year-old girl from Tennessee (VAERS I.D. 2238618) who died after receiving her second dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. According to the VAERS report, the girl had a previous history of cancer but was hospitalized 29 days after receiving her second dose of Pfizer with severe COVID-19 and COVID pneumonia. She became “critically ill,” developed respiratory failure and bradycardia and later died.
  • 65 reports of anaphylaxis among 12- to 17-year-olds where the reaction was life-threatening, required treatment or resulted in death — with 96% of cases attributed to Pfizer’s vaccine.
  • 650 reports of myocarditis and pericarditis — two fewer than last week — with 638 cases attributed to Pfizer’s vaccine.
  • 166 reports of blood clotting disorders — 1 fewer than last week — with all cases attributed to Pfizer.
U.S. VAERS data from Dec. 14, 2020, to April 29, 2022, for all age groups combined, show:

Megan Redshaw is a staff attorney for Children’s Health Defense and a reporter for The Defender.

May 6, 2022 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

Do the Pfizer “data dumps” really mean anything?

By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | May 5, 2022

The latest batch of Pfizer’s Covid vaccine files just dropped. 80,000 pages of patient files and “trial data” and so and so on.

You can read them all here.

The question is, do they really tell us anything we don’t already know?

The big revelation doing the rounds at the minute is that the vaccines were never trialled with, and were specifically not recommended for, pregnant women.

But is this new information?

When governments started “recommending” the Covid vaccine to pregnant women in the Summer of 2021, everybody who had been paying attention knew that position was not backed up by any data at all.

OffG got temporarily banned from twitter for pointing this out.

More broadly speaking: Of course the vaccines were never tested on pregnant women, they were never properly tested on anybody.

It takes 10 years to safely produce and trial a vaccine, not 18 months. And what “trials” they claim to have done in that year and a half were a complete sham.

In a way, the “not recommended for pregnant women” disclosure is actually good for Pfizer.

Behind a facade of being legally mandated to publish these files, it’s now become public knowledge that Pfizer (allegedly) told people not to give the vaccine to pregnant women, but many countries did it anyway.

This shifts the blame (and potential legal liability) away from Pfizer and onto the governments in question.

A good example of how “forced disclosure” can be used to reinforce and direct a narrative, through a pretence of reluctance.

Going further, shouldn’t we be asking: Can we trust anything in these documents at all?

Just because Pfizer has been (apparently) legally “forced” to release them doesn’t mean they are important, relevant or even real. Who’s verifying the documents? Who’s auditing Pfizer to make sure they release everything? The US government? Some other government or agency?

Do you trust them?

The real damning documents – if such ever existed – have likely been shredded, burned and buried in 20 feet of concrete by now…and that doesn’t matter, because we already know everything we will ever need to know about these Covid “vaccines”:

  1. They were not subject to proper long-term testing.
  2. They have totally unknown long-term side effects.
  3. They allegedly “treat” a “disease” with a 99.85% survival rate.
  4. They don’t prevent infection.
  5. They don’t prevent transmission.
  6. The manufacturers are legally protected from being sued in the event they kill you.

Pfizer can release all the documents they want, nothing will change these facts…only distract from them.

May 5, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Why requiring transplant recipients to be vaccinated is indefensible and objectively evil regardless of the scientific merits

Covid Vaccines are not remotely similar to other conditions that are typically required of or used to rank transplant patients.

By Ashmedai | May 2, 2022

One of the more pernicious and morally shocking developments surrounding the covid vaccines is hospitals forcing transplant recipients (and sometimes even their families) to be vaccinated with one of the covid vaccines.

I have heard a number of people defend this vile practice, who were genuinely convinced that there was nothing wrong with it. None of these individuals were “evil”, or anything close. Yet, they genuinely did not see a concern or dilemma that would disqualify the whole policy, or even one that would at least counsel a more thoughtful review before taking such a momentous and consequential step.

It is therefore worthwhile to present a clear explanation why, even assuming that transplant recipient vaccination is objectively beneficial as a purely scientific matter, mandating vaccination as a prerequisite for receiving a transplant is destructive to society and evil.

The following are a few of the more salient reasons why mandating recipient vaccination as a condition to remain eligible to receive a transplant, even assuming that transplant recipient vaccination are objectively beneficial as a purely scientific matter, is unjustifiable, destructive, and evil:

Breaks the Social Compact of Society:

    • Discriminates on the basis of a controversial political/social issue
    • Politicizes and undermines the trustworthiness of the medical community
    • Weaponizes the medical community / medical institutions in the “culture wars”
    • Drives the Balkanization of society

Is Intrinsically Immoral:

    • Such a mandate inflicts tremendous psychological torment upon people who are already suffering the stress and physical torment of a life-threatening disease
    • Erodes the ethics and character of medical professionals, so they regard some people as “inferior” and therefore undeserving of or not worth being treated
    • This is a policy that cannot be plausibly portrayed as being “in the best interests of patients”
    • Catch-all: Will cause considerable stress to the entire society

The Broader Context that Informs how People View Such a Mandate – The Medical Community no longer possesses the moral authority or credibility to make this sort of policy decision:

    • The already heavily damaged reputation and image of the medical community due to covid policies so far
    • A sizable minority today believes (if not outright majority) that hospitals and doctors are possibly complicit in the deaths of millions around the world and the unimaginable suffering of hundreds of millions more

Breaks the Social Compact of Society:

Discriminates on the basis of a controversial political/social issue

The reality of the current situation is that the covid vaccines are one of the preeminent issues at the forefront of the body politic in the country. This is therefore automatically a consideration when making policies on behalf of society, which any decisions regarding the prioritization scheme of transplant recipients are.

Decisions broadly affecting the whole of society that discriminate or persecute a faction/s of society break the social compact and erode or destroy the moral legitimacy of the major institutions through which political and social power and ideology are disseminated and enforced.

Specifically for this point, discriminating against a political or social minority – and surely where it is literally determining by proxy who lives and who dies – is by definition apartheid in both spirit and practice.

It goes without saying that apartheid policies are both harmful to a healthy and functioning society and evil.

Politicizes and undermines the trustworthiness of the medical community

Enacting a policy that is inextricably intertwined with a highly visible social or political controversy unavoidably conveys – regardless of whether it’s true – that the medical community is:

(A) a political actor that has

(B) vested political interests and objectives – such that it will

(C) pursue using the resources at its disposal

(D) even if/when they are in conflict with the neutral practice of medicine.

The damage from such overt political overtones and imaging (to say the least) to the practice of medicine, and the implications for the physical and mental health of the broader society, is something that does not require elaboration.

Importantly, this is true even for many of the people who agree with vaccination, because they also perceive that the medical community is “allying” with them to promote a political cause. The worse the reputation of the medical community is tarnished with political entanglements, the more difficult it becomes to rehabilitate subsequently.

Weaponizes the medical community & medical institutions in the “culture wars”

The participation of the medical community to coerce political compliance at gunpoint transforms the medical community (more than it is already) from a shared societal institution to a partisan one that one side views as a hostile force or enemy and the other views as a means to achieve political or social objectives.

This is true not just regarding people’s perception, but regarding the medical community itself. Even if the medical community would be starting off as an objective and non-partisan actor, committing such an overtly political act affects how the medical community will view and think of itself going forward (and the truth is that the medical community is by no means starting off from a “non-partisan” disposition).

The obvious (i.e. uncontroversial as factual observations regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with the underlying position of either side here) societal harms that flow from this are manifold. Transforming the shared social institutions of science/medicine into a partisan weapon will cause the following negative consequences (among others; ‘shared’ is an increasingly tenuous proposition these days):

  • undermines trust in the practice of science
  • undermines the integrity of medical scientists by creating and incentivizing political objectives that take precedence over scientific integrity
  • causes a sizeable portion of society to regard doctors and medical professionals as enemies, which is harmful both to patients who will then not receive the same standards of medical care and to doctors who will suffer constant harassment and demoralizing stresses
  • encourages the propagation of propaganda as everyone is now incentivized to either deify or demonize medical practitioners and institutions regardless of the factual merits of any specific issue or incident

A society must have shared institutions that are not “playable characters” in the everyday social or political maelstroms that are the domain of politics in order to function and survive as a single political entity.

Drives the Balkanization of society

The most prominent consequence of the politicization and weaponization of the medical community and institutions is that it is a Balkanization of society. Regardless of the factual or scientific merits, even the perception by one faction that another faction is trying (and succeeding) in hijacking and corrupting the medical establishment is the fraying of the society as an organized political and social unit. To actually go ahead and do so is more damaging by orders of magnitude. Medical care is possibly the most foundational institution in a society – consider that the most consequential apartheid policy (besides for outright slavery) is the proscription of medical care by political or social affiliation. Thus proscribing medical care for a highly visible and prominent social faction within society – even if it wouldn’t be an outright death sentence for the patients restricted from medical treatment as is the case here – is tantamount to a declaration of [civil] war against anyone politically affiliated with the group targeted by the mandates.

It should also go without saying that you can’t have a functional society if whether your life and your human rights can be legally and socially vindicated depends upon on your political affiliation or ideological coadunation. There is no rational universe where this is an acceptable tradeoff for the conjectured benefits of restricting transplants to vaccinated patients.

Transplant Vaccine Mandates Are Intrinsically Immoral:

Such a mandate inflicts tremendous psychological torment upon people who are already suffering the stress and physical torment of a life-threatening disease

Any policy decision must consider the entire picture, not just the virtues of the preferred course of action.

Transplant vaccine mandates are dealing with a population that is exclusively comprised of people who are already under extreme suffering that is hard to contemplate or understand for someone bereft of this sort of experience. Adding distress to people already so tormented would therefore be warranted only if there was an exceptionally pressing concern. Even if the covid vaccines are somewhat beneficial as a purely scientific matter to patients awaiting an organ transplant, the marginal benefit of vaccination is hardly something that is so massive that imposing a vaccine mandate – in the context of everything else articulated in this article – can even be plausibly entertained let alone imposed. (The marginal benefit is the absolute risk reduction in all-cause morbidity/mortality gained from vaccination, not the “relative” risk reduction which is not relevant to assessing the real-world value of vaccination.)

Erodes the ethics and character of medical professionals, and influences and/or habituates them to regard some people as “inferior” and therefore undeserving of or not worth being treated

A policy of ‘either you acquiesce to vaccination or you die’ conveys to medical practitioners a clear message that people who reject the covid vaccines are not worthy of medical treatment. This is true regardless of the scientific merits of a (theoretically) objective cost/benefit analysis. Contingency of life-or-death treatment upon a political behavior or choice internalizes to medical practitioners and laypeople alike that it is appropriate to proscribe treatment to people because of political affiliation, so much so that we will even consign them to death. Medical apartheid on the basis of political or social faction characteristics is quite literally in the mold of the ideology and policies implemented in Germany in the 1930’s. Such a comparison is sufficient to retire any further consideration by itself of transplant vaccine mandates.

Such a dynamic is also corrosive to compassion and empathy — two attributes that are already in short supply in healthcare settings these days. The deprivation of treatment, especially in circumstances that are exceptionally heartwrenching, forces practitioners at minimum to suppress their sense of compassion. For many, the internal dissonance between their sense of compassion and the cruelty being inflicted on defenseless patients (& the relegation of a political class to “2nd class citizens”) that some would be complicit in will lead them to zealously embrace rationalizing that the unvaccinated are less than fully human. This is precisely how otherwise civilized people can be indoctrinated into an ideology that if unchecked ultimately enables them to commit or be complicit in the commission of atrocities.

(Requiring adherence to personal behavior standards – such as not consuming alcohol or drugs – whose medical rationale is obvious and apparent to everyone and which have already been standard requirements for decades is an entirely separate matter that has nothing to do with this discussion, and is something that requires its own lengthy dissertation to properly explore and flesh out.)

Like every other enumerated argument here, this point is true regardless of the factual merits of vaccination for transplant patients.

This is a policy that cannot be plausibly portrayed as being “in the best interests of patients”

Medical ethics is organized around the proposition that all decisions or policies must be in the best interests of patients. It is hard to imagine more blatant disregard of patients’ welfare than compromising the integrity and viability of the entire edifice of healthcare provision in the country as millions of people are less able and/or willing to seek and receive medical care as a result of all of the other points articulated above and below (and it is also not in the patients’ best interests for medical treatment to be withheld without which the patient will perish).

Contumeliously discarding the millennia-old foundational ethical principium of medicine ominously portends the possibility of medicine and healthcare unanchored to an ethical North Star.

Catch-all: This will cause considerable stress to the entire society

Polls consistently reveal that people of all social and political affiliations are suffering considerable stress. Policies that antagonize or that are erosive to the body politic spur or inflame the already burdened and fraying psyche of the populace. Even those advantaged by politically prejudicial persecution cannot escape the stresses that beset even those that have the upper hand politically, such as the worry that someday you will become a victim to the same social or political forces, or the stresses of living in a society where the social fabric is frazzled and fragmented. Especially in light of the current mental health apocalypse presently afflicting the country, it surely behooves the medical community to avoid further exacerbating the already overwrought stressors in people’s lives.

The Broader Context that Informs how People View Such a Mandate – The Medical Community no longer possesses the moral authority or credibility to make this sort of policy decision:

The reputation and image of the medical community has already been brutally savaged by the performance of the medical establishment throughout the covid crisis, especially the govt health agencies which are the backbone of the medical community’s authority and credibility. Moreover, at least a sizeable minority of the country believes that hospitals and doctors are complicit in the deaths of millions around the world and the unimaginable suffering of hundreds of millions more through draconian isolation of psychologically/emotionally vulnerable patients, denial of covid treatment, society-wide lockdowns, and vaccine carnage.

As a result, the medical community has lost the moral legitimacy and expert authority that until now was taken for granted. This is a monumental shift that is hard to overstate. The medical community previously was accorded the considerable latitude and deference by society they needed to make life-and-death policy decisions that society wouldn’t reflexively view as illegitimate or political. Without unambiguous and widely conceded moral authority to make controversial life-and-death policy decisions, the medical community ceases to be trusted and neutral stewards whose decisions can determine who lives and dies. Instead, they are no better than any other partisan and unobjective actor with their own biases and agenda. Empowering what is rationally perceived by one half of society as a conflicted and dishonest political actor to determine who lives and dies on the basis of a political characteristic is inherently evil and lacks even a semblance of moral credibility.

This last point is worth restating: This is akin to having a republican decide that democrats are not eligible for transplants unless they switch party affiliation or vice versa. The disfavored group would rightly and accurately perceive that a government that proscribes them from receiving lifesaving treatment lacks legitimacy.

Caveats:

It is important to note that there are many heroic doctors and nurses who do not agree with these policies. In a similar vein, the impact of such a policy (and the other covid policies that are similarly evil or just plainly irrational) is not uniform on all healthcare practitioners – there is a wide range of resiliency and resistance to the mental and psychological influence of this sort of policy.

It is also important to note that there is already considerable damage along the lines of everything stipulated above, so for the most part transplant mandates are aggravating already belabored destructive social pathologies as opposed to initiating or creating new ones.

However, this does not detract from the intensity or imperative of the arguments raised. The fact of the already-widespread devastation underscores how critical it is to reverse these developments – meaning that exacerbating them is that much more unconscionable.

Conclusion

Medical institutions are integral to the translation of medical and scientific knowledge into practice in a manner that will be accepted by the various major factions of society (there are always going to be fringe lunatic groups or cults that repudiate any sort of governing political bodies no matter what). A society without a shared epistemology cannot survive, as there can be no agreement on how to determine factual truth. The medical establishment institutions are fiduciaries to the entire population, granted awesome powers over society, and therefore commensurately responsible for the broader social impact of their actions (something that the medical literature en masse freely embraces, one need only look at the hundreds of papers condemning the medical community for their role in promoting “health inequities” and systemic racism).

It is not just prudent but obligatory to consider the political climate when weighing a policy choice that implicates and will resonate through the exigent political and social realities on the ground such as they are. One would think it would be common sense to go to the farthest practical extreme to avoid even the hint of appearing partisan or political, never mind actually further inflaming the divisive and increasingly weaponized political tensions. This is by no means even remotely controversial. The typical standards that society holds critical non-partisan institutions to is that they must avoid “even the appearance of” conflicts of interest, partisanship, etc. – recusals for these reasons are routine in the legal world for instance.

One would also be forgiven for thinking that the medical community would be embarrassed to be caught openly embracing the same fundamental political philosophy that animated the Nazi’s systematic denudement of the medical community back then of the ethical code synonymous with the practice of medicine.

Enacting a policy that in practice is political discrimination is irreconcilable with both basic medical ethics and the responsibility of the medical community to scrupulously avoid even the appearance of partisanship or other non-medical entanglements. There is no justification or defense for such an egregious lapse of judgement.

May 2, 2022 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Now will the BBC retract its lies over vaccine threat in pregnancy?

By Kathy Gyngell | TCW Defending Freedom | April 29, 2022

‘WHAT I’ve Seen in the Last Two Years Is Unprecedented’: Physician on Covid Vaccine Side Effects on Pregnant Women. This was Wednesday’s front-page headline on the US newspaper Epoch Times.

You may remember how from early on in the Covid vaccine roll-out the former Pfizer chief Mike Yeadon, as part of his many warnings against the new gene ‘vaccines’, strongly advised against jabbing pregnant women. Not only had there been no pre-clinical reproductive toxicology testing but research on rats showed that the vaccine accumulated in the ovaries. Needless to say the BBC was first out of the traps to dismiss fears that the vaccines could harm fertility or cause miscarriages, and to target Yeadon personally. It put out a special propaganda (News) ‘reality check’ report claiming that the study showing the vaccine accumulating in the ovaries was ‘false’.

It did not take long for TCW’s Neville Hodgkinson, an experienced medical and science journalist, to show just whose claim was false. Once again, however, the BBC got away with it, as have others in ‘authority’. 

Will there be any retraction or apology now senior obstetricians are putting their heads above the parapet to report on what they have been seeing amongst their patients?

Dr James Thorp is one such, an extensively published 68-year-old US specialist in obstetrics and gynaecology as well as maternal-foetal medicine, who has practised for more than 42 years. He told Epoch Times that he sees 6,000 to 7,000 high-risk pregnant patients a year and that many complications among them are due to the Covid vaccines.

‘I’ve seen many, many, many complications in pregnant women, in moms and in foetuses, in children, offspring, foetal death, miscarriage, death of the foetus inside the mom,’ he said, adding that what he has seen in the last two years is unprecedented.

Thorp goes on to explain that although he has seen a visible increase in foetal death and adverse pregnancy outcomes associated with the Covid-19 vaccination, attempts to quantify them ‘are hampered by the imposition of gag orders on physicians and nurses’ imposed in September 2021.

You can see the full article here – it is well worth reading.

The tragedy is, as Mike Yeadon comments in the article, that ‘adverse impacts on conception and ability to sustain a pregnancy were foreseeable’. They were, and he did his best to warn us of them, but all the BBC was interested in was discrediting him.

To remind the BBC, this is what he said then, to a Truth for Health Foundation conference, about the special dangers to women of child-bearing age from the gene-based vaccines, as reported by Neville Hodgkinson. 

‘We’re being lied to . . . The authorities are not giving us full information about the risks of these products . . . The first is that we never, ever give experimental medicines to pregnant women. The thalidomide tragedy of the 1950s and 60s, in which a new product for morning sickness gave rise to at least 10,000 birth malformations, taught us that babies are not safe and protected inside the uterus, which is what we used to think. Interference by a chemical or something else at a critical stage of development could lead to irreparable damage.

‘Our government is urging pregnant women and women of childbearing age to get vaccinated, and they’re telling them they’re safe. And that’s a lie, because those studies have simply not been done. Reproductive toxicology has not been undertaken with any of these products, certainly not a full battery of tests that you would want.

‘That’s bad enough. Because it tells me there’s recklessness. No one cares. The authorities do not care what happens. But it’s much worse than that.’

Yeadon said he had seen a copy of the biodistribution report obtained from the Japanese regulator. To his horror, he said, ‘what we find is the vaccine doesn’t just distribute around the body and then wash out again, which is what you’d hope. It concentrates in the ovaries of rats, at least 20-fold over the concentration in other background tissues like muscles. And a general rule of thumb in toxicology is: if you don’t have any data to contradict what you’ve learned [from the animal studies], that’s the assumption you make for humans.

‘So my assumption at the moment is that these vaccines are concentrating in the ovaries of every female who has been given them. We don’t know what that will do, but it cannot be benign and it could be seriously harmful.’

His third concern, shared by a German doctor in a petition to the European Medicines Agency eight months ago, is that the spike protein produced by the vaccine ‘is faintly similar – not very strongly – to an essential protein in your placenta, something that’s absolutely required for both fertilisation and formation and maintenance of the placenta’.

The worry was that an immune response to the spike protein might cause antibodies to bind to the placental protein as well.

There was more. He concluded: ‘I think you can only expect that that is happening in every woman of childbearing potential. What the effect will be, we can’t be certain, but it can’t be benign.

‘So I’m here to warn you that if you are of child-bearing potential or younger, so not at menopause, I would strongly recommend you do not accept these vaccines.’

May 1, 2022 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Vaccine Rollout Correlates With 25% Spike in Cardiac Arrest Emergency Calls for Young Adults, Study Finds

By Will Jones | The Daily Sceptic | April 29, 2022

Emergency calls for cardiac arrest and acute coronary syndrome in young people in Israel were significantly associated with the vaccine rollout, both first and second doses, spiking 25% higher than in earlier years, but not with COVID-19 prevalence, a study in the Nature journal Scientific Reports has found.

Using data from the Israel National Emergency Medical Services (EMS) from 2019 to 2021, the study looked at the volume of cardiac arrest and acute coronary syndrome EMS calls in the 16-39 year-old population. It found an increase of over 25% in both call types during January-May 2021, compared with 2019-2020, but no significant increase in calls correlating with COVID-19 infection rates.

The main finding of this study concerns with increases of over 25% in both the number of CA [cardiac arrest] calls and ACS [acute coronary syndrome] calls of people in the 16-39 age group during the COVID-19 vaccination rollout in Israel (January-May, 2021), compared with the same period of time in prior years (2019 and 2020). Moreover, there is a robust and statistically significant association between the weekly CA and ACS call counts, and the rates of first and second vaccine doses administered to this age group. At the same time there is no observed statistically significant association between COVID-19 infection rates and the CA and ACS call counts. This result is aligned with previous findings which show increases in overall CA incidence were not always associated with higher COVID-19 infections rates at a population level, as well as the stability of hospitalisation rates related to myocardial infarction throughout the initial COVID-19 wave compared to pre-pandemic baselines in Israel. These results also are mirrored by a report of increased emergency department visits with cardiovascular complaints during the vaccination rollout in Germany as well as increased EMS calls for cardiac incidents in Scotland.

While several studies have found severe myocarditis to be a rare adverse effect of the vaccines, the study authors note that myocarditis is often missed, and in fact has been found to be likely responsible for 12-20% of unexpected deaths in adults under 40 in normal times.

Myocarditis is a particularly insidious disease with multiple reported manifestations. There is vast literature that highlights asymptomatic cases of myocarditis, which are often underdiagnosed, as well as cases in which myocarditis can possibly be misdiagnosed as acute coronary syndrome (ACS). Moreover, several comprehensive studies demonstrate that myocarditis is a major cause of sudden, unexpected deaths in adults less than 40 years of age, and assess that it is responsible for 12-20% of these deaths. Thus, it is a plausible concern that increased rates of myocarditis among young people could lead to an increase in other severe cardiovascular adverse events, such as cardiac arrest (CA) and ACS. Anecdotal evidence suggests that this might not be only a theoretical concern.

The results, shown visually in the following graphs, are unmistakable, with clear corresponding spikes in vaccination numbers and emergency calls.

The study does not look at death rates in the age group, but data elsewhere show a clear spike in deaths during the period.

SPR/CBS

Surely it’s well past time these experimental vaccines (in Israel’s case, Pfizer), rushed to market in record time, are withdrawn for younger people.

April 30, 2022 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

1.2 Million Reports of Injuries After COVID Vaccines, VAERS Data Show

By Megan Redshaw – The Defender – April 29, 2022

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) today released new data showing a total of 1,247,131 reports of adverse events following COVID-19 vaccines were submitted between Dec. 14, 2020, and April 22, 2022, to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). VAERS is the primary government-funded system for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S.

The data included a total of 27,532 reports of deaths — an increase of 183 over the previous week — and 224,766 serious injuries, including deaths, during the same time period — up 1,930 compared with the previous week.

Excluding “foreign reports” to VAERS, 810,171 adverse events, including 12,672 deaths and 80,743 serious injuries, were reported in the U.S. between Dec. 14, 2020, and April 22, 2022.

Foreign reports are reports foreign subsidiaries send to U.S. vaccine manufacturers. Under U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations, if a manufacturer is notified of a foreign case report that describes an event that is both serious and does not appear on the product’s labeling, the manufacturer is required to submit the report to VAERS.

Of the 12,672 U.S. deaths reported as of April 22, 16% occurred within 24 hours of vaccination, 20% occurred within 48 hours of vaccination and 59% occurred in people who experienced an onset of symptoms within 48 hours of being vaccinated.

In the U.S., 572 million COVID-19 vaccine doses had been administered as of April 23, including 338 million doses of Pfizer, 215 million doses of Moderna and 19 million doses of Johnson & Johnson (J&J).

Every Friday, VAERS publishes vaccine injury reports received as of a specified date. Reports submitted to VAERS require further investigation before a causal relationship can be confirmed.

Historically, VAERS has been shown to report only 1% of actual vaccine adverse events.

U.S. VAERS data from Dec. 14, 2020, to April 22, 2022, for 5- to 11-year-olds show:
U.S. VAERS data from Dec. 14, 2020, to April 22, 2022, for 12- to 17-year-olds show:
  • 31,455 adverse events, including 1,803 rated as serious and 44 reported deaths. The most recent reported death involves a 14-year-old girl from Tennessee (VAERS I.D. 2238618) who died after receiving her second dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. According to the VAERS report, the girl had a previous history of cancer but was hospitalized 29 days after receiving her second dose of Pfizer with severe COVID-19 and COVID pneumonia. She became “critically ill,” developed respiratory failure and bradycardia and later died.
  • 65 reports of anaphylaxis among 12- to 17-year-olds where the reaction was life-threatening, required treatment or resulted in death — with 96% of cases attributed to Pfizer’s vaccine.
  • 649 reports of myocarditis and pericarditis — two fewer than last week — with 637 cases attributed to Pfizer’s vaccine.
  • 165 reports of blood clotting disorders — 1 fewer than last week — with all cases attributed to Pfizer.
U.S. VAERS data from Dec. 14, 2020, to April 22, 2022, for all age groups combined, show:

Megan Redshaw is a staff attorney for Children’s Health Defense and a reporter for The Defender.

© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.

April 29, 2022 Posted by | War Crimes | | Leave a comment

FDA Rubber-Stamps Remdesivir for Infants Without Evidence of Safety, Efficacy

By Madhava Setty, M.D. | The Defender | April 27, 2022

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Monday approved the use of the antiviral therapy, remdesivir, to treat COVID-19 in infants four weeks and older.

Dr. Patrizia Cavazzoni, director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said in a press release:

“As COVID-19 can cause severe illness in children, some of whom do not currently have a vaccination option, there continues to be a need for safe and effective COVID-19 treatment options for this population.

“Today’s approval of the first COVID-19 therapeutic for this population demonstrates the agency’s commitment to that need.”

According to the press release, the FDA’s decision to approve the therapy, marketed under the name Veklury, is supported by a clinical study conducted on infants 4 weeks and older weighing a minimum of 6.6 pounds.

The study is underway and will not be completed until February 2023. There are no published results.

However, Gilead Sciences, maker of remdesivir and sponsor of the study, provided the following details in a company press release:

  • A total of 53 hospitalized pediatric patients were enrolled in the clinical study.
  • 72% suffered adverse events.
  • 21% suffered serious adverse events determined to be unrelated to the drug.
  • Three children died from either underlying conditions or COVID-19.

Nevertheless, Gilead Science assured that “no new safety signals were apparent for patients treated with Veklury.”

The study was of single-arm, open-label design.

A single-arm study has no control group, making it impossible to compare its effectiveness against standard of care.

Open-label means participants and investigators were aware they were receiving the drug, making it impossible to separate placebo from drug effect.

Studies show little or no benefit

Beyond the absence of any publicly available data on the efficacy and safety of this drug in humans of this age, available studies on older subjects indicate remdesivir offers no more than a meager benefit to those who survive its use.

In fact, this is why the World Health Organization (WHO) in November 2020 recommended against the use of remdesivir to treat COVID-19. The WHO only recently (April 22, 2022) updated its recommendation to support the drug’s use in patients who are at high risk for hospitalization.

Nevertheless, the FDA explains its long-standing support of remdesivir use in adults here, citing six studies that had the greatest impact on the agency’s position.

Here is a summary of the findings of each study from the FDA’s webpage:

  1. ACTT-1 Trial: Time to clinical recovery was shortened from 15 days to 10 through the use of remdesivir. There was no difference in mortality. The drug was no better than placebo when administered to patients who required high-flow oxygen, non-invasive respiratory support, mechanical ventilation or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation at baseline. A benefit was seen only in patients who required low levels of supplemental oxygen.
  2. Discovery Trial: There was no clinical benefit of remdesivir in hospitalized patients who were symptomatic for >7 days and who required supplemental oxygen. There was no difference in mortality between remdesivir and standard of care. Investigators judged three of 429 participants who received remdesivir died from the drug.
  3. WHO Solidarity Trial: Remdesivir did not decrease in-hospital mortality or the need for mechanical ventilation compared to standard of care. Four hundred and forty patients in this study were also enrolled in the Discovery trial above.
  4. Journal of the American Medical Association (moderate disease): After 10 days of treatment with remdesivir, clinical status was not significantly different from standard of care.
  5. New England Journal of Medicine (severe disease): No difference between five and 10 days of remdesivir treatment. No placebo group, thus “the magnitude of benefit cannot be determined.”
  6. PINETREE study: Three consecutive days of IV remdesivir resulted in an 87% relative reduction in the risk of hospitalization or death when compared to placebo.

As demonstrated, the first five studies used to justify the FDA’s approval of remdesivir showed little, if any, benefit to hospitalized patients with moderate or severe disease.

This is in contrast to the sufficiently proven benefit of off-label use of the previously licensed medications hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.

Only the PINETREE study investigated the benefit of remdesivir for outpatient use. In that study, the drug provided a substantial benefit in preventing hospitalization when given in three separate doses over three days.

However, only eight individuals under the age of 18 were enrolled in the study, and none were younger than 12.

The primary endpoint, a composite of COVID-19-related hospitalization or death from any cause, did not occur in the under-18 group.

In other words, the study — funded by Gilead Sciences — showed the drug offered no benefit in this cohort.

Nevertheless, in reporting on the FDA’s approval of remdesivir for infants and young children, CNN found someone to support the FDA’s decision.

CNN wrote:

“The FDA’s approval of remdesivir for young children is ‘great,’ said Dr. Daniel Griffin, an instructor in clinical medicine and associate research scientist in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at Columbia University.”

Safety ‘not established’ in pediatric patients

Not only is there scant evidence that remdesivir is an effective treatment for COVID-19, the drug’s safety is debatable.

With regard to its use in infants, even the FDA must acknowledge nobody knows how safe it is.

After all, the manufacturer’s label states:

“The safety and effectiveness of VEKLURY (remdesivir) have not been established in pediatric patients younger than 12 years of age or weighing less than 40 kg.”

With regard to pharmacokinetics (where the drug distributes in the body) the label states:

“The pharmacokinetics of VEKLURY in pediatric patients have not been evaluated.”

An indictment of the drug regulatory process

Let’s reflect on what the director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research said regarding the approval of remdesivir for treating COVID-19 in infants 4 weeks and older:

“As COVID-19 can cause severe illness in children, some of whom do not currently have a vaccination option, there continues to be a need for safe and effective COVID-19 treatment options for this population. Today’s approval of the first COVID-19 therapeutic for this population demonstrates the agency’s commitment to that need.”

To summarize:

  • Some children do not have a vaccination option.
  • They need a safe and effective treatment.
  • The FDA meets that need by approving a drug with no safety and efficacy record in children.

Safety and efficacy apparently can be conveniently established by fiat, not evidence.

In the end, the FDA’s approval of remdesivir is not an assurance of the drug’s safety and efficacy but an indication the agency is no longer interested in protecting the public from potentially harmful and ineffective therapies — or, in other words, in doing its job.

There will undoubtedly be doctors like Griffin who welcome this approval.

However, I don’t believe every pediatrician will accept the FDA’s guidance so readily.

It’s not easy to place an intravenous line to administer remdesivir in the tiny vein of an irritable baby coming from home with a positive rapid test. And then do it again the next day. And the day after that.

At some point, clinicians’ sensibilities will be challenged enough to compel them to actually examine how the FDA arrived at its conclusions.

Guidelines are meaningless if doctors choose not to abide by them.

Madhava Setty, M.D. is senior science editor for The Defender.

© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.

April 27, 2022 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Tribute to John Lauritsen, Author of ‘Poison by Prescription: The AZT Story’

By Celia Farber | The Defender | April 26, 2022

John Lauritsen — author, scholar, gay historian and critic of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s HIV/AIDS empire — has passed away. He is believed to have died on his birthday, March 5, at his home in Dorchester, Massachusetts at the age of 83.

He was in good health, and his death was unexpected.

Here’s a recent tribute video made by Jamie Dlux, just weeks before Lauritsen’s death:

“In my time I’ve been an antiwar activist, a gay liberationist, an AIDS dissident, a publisher, and an all-around freethinker,” Lauritsen wrote at Pagan Press, the publishing imprint he founded in 1982.

“I’ve spoken out when people with common sense kept their mouth shut. I’ve exposed fraud, punctured group fantasies and blasphemed against the prevailing superstitions.”

Though he wrote books on a wide range of esoteric subjects, Lauritsen was best known for his works that demolished the AIDS drug azidothymidine (AZT), including “Poison By Prescription.”

Links to several of John’s AZT articles and documents can be found here.

A Harvard-educated market research executive and analyst and member of Mensa, Lauritsen grew up in Nebraska. His father, an attorney, instilled in him a deep aversion to fraud that would run counter to the HIV/AIDS narrative, about which no questions were to be asked.

Lauritsen said about his HIV/AIDS books:

“I want them to stand for the record, so that no one, when the truth finally prevails, can pretend that there were no AIDS critics, or that we didn’t speak out.

“The terrible suffering, loss of life, propaganda, censorship, rumors, hysteria, profiteering, espionage and sabotage …. I maintain that AIDS reporters should be regarded as war correspondents … and that the salient characteristics of war coverage are also those of AIDS coverage.”

Lauritsen devoted his scholarship to aspects of gay history, but never went along with the revolutionary dictates ushered in by Larry Kramer’s ACT UP in the 1980s — beginning with Kramer’s demand that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approve a drug to treat AIDS fast, with no concern for safety or efficacy studies.

Lauritsen documented, meticulously and in a wry, distinctive voice, the bedrock of fraud that gave rise to AZT’s meteoric rise in the late 1980s. He did not mince words.

“I don’t think ‘murder ‘is too strong a word to use when you have a drug like AZT, approved on the basis of fraudulent research,” he said in an interview.

About Kramer’s ACT UP, he said simply: “The group as a whole was a shill for Big Pharma.”

Lauritsen’s searing exposés on HIV/AIDS and AZT appeared frequently as cover stories in The New York Native, a biweekly gay periodical founded by Charles Ortleb in 1980 that went on to publish more than 50 of his articles.

The New York Native was the first periodical anywhere in the world to report on the then-new disease called AIDS, in 1981 — months before The New York Times.

It was also the first to publish an interview (by Lauritsen) of University of California, Berkeley virologist Peter Duesberg, Ph.D., as early as July of 1987 — the same year Duesberg’s seminal and controversial paper came out in Cancer Research dispatching HIV as the cause of AIDS, and retroviruses as causes of cancer.

The New York Native also was the first to publish Larry Kramer’s historic 1983 tirade, 1,112 and Counting, at the same time as Lauritsen published his first warnings to the gay community about the potentially lethal toxicities of amyl nitrites, or “poppers.”

Lauritsen compellingly documented the key role poppers played in the etiology of Kaposi sarcoma and immune collapse among gay men, and the nefarious role Fauci played in downplaying this association.

The principal manufacturer of poppers was AZT distributor Burroughs Wellcome, the company that, with Fauci’s help, became a primary beneficiary of the AIDS crisis.

Lauritsen and Kramer would stake out diametrically opposed positions on the post-AIDS gay political map.

Lauritsen was far better equipped to analyze and assess the growing, utterly dysfunctional field of HIV research and therapeutics, yet Kramer was the one who, despite his extreme temper, grew an immense and iconic reputation, leading to the formation of Gay Men’s Health Crisis and ACT UP.

The mainstream, red-ribbon and AZT-adherent dominant gay community grew increasingly furious with The New York Native, especially over Lauritsen’s “HIV denial” and AZT criticism.

They urged a community-wide boycott of the paper, which led to its demise on Jan. 13, 1997.

The AZT crusade thus became the hill Ortleb, Lauritsen and The New York Native died on, many years before it was called “cancel culture.”

“‘Cancel culture’ is too mild a term,” Lauritsen said in an interview. “These sanctimonious savages are culture destroyers.”

The tragic irony is this: In everything Lauritsen wrote about AZT, he was vindicated and proven correct, as documented in “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health,” by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

It is estimated some 300,000 gay men perished directly from exposure to high-dose AZT at the initial high doses given — anywhere between 1200 mg and 1800 mg.

In an interview with Tony Brown on PBS, Lauritsen said:

“What these drugs do — ACT and DDI and d4T — is very terrible. They take what’s called DNA synthesis, which is a process the body goes through whenever a new cell forms or when cells grow.

“It’s basically the life process. And these drugs terminate it. In other words, they believe that by stopping the life process they will stop HIV from replicating. And in fact, HIV is not replicating, no. So the theory behind it is crazy and the toxicities are deadly.”

AIDS itself he referred to as a “phony construct” and he despaired of the use of the word “queer” to describe gay men.

“John was funny, coolly intelligent, detached and yet passionate, a brilliant writer and journalist who saw through the illusions spun around the ‘AIDS epidemic’ right from the start,” Neville Hodgkinson, former science editor of the Sunday Times of London and veteran critic of HIV science, told The Defender.

It is impossible today to describe what an act of sustained courage and nerves of steel it took for Lauritsen to publish such stark critiques of AZT during those feverish years when it was billed as, and understood as, a life-saving drug — one that conferred sainthood upon ACT UP and the role it played in the lightning-fast FDA approval.

The U.K. documentary team Meditel, under the auspices of Joan Shenton, interviewed Lauritsen many times over the years, in several countries. Those interviews can be seen at Immunity Resource Foundation.

Lauritsen recently reflected, on Facebook, on history repeating itself:

“Re-reading ‘The AIDS War’s’ digital proof, I was struck by the horrors of the AIDS era that we’ve lived through — the ruthlessness and dishonesty of the AIDS Establishment — the comparisons with the COVID-19 horrors that we are going through now. May Truth finally prevail!”

Celia Farber is an investigative reporter who chronicled Anthony Fauci and Dark Pharma’s war on science and biology for various magazines since the late 80s, bringing wrath upon her name.

April 26, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

China calls out US war crimes

Samizdat | April 26, 2022

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin has lashed out at the EU and US for criticizing its domestic and foreign policies. Wang singled out the US, accusing Washington of war crimes in the Middle East, economic coercion, betraying its allies and spreading disinformation.

“The US purports to maintain the centrality of the UN Charter, but it is clear to anyone that the US is doing quite the opposite,” Wang told reporters at a press conference on Monday. Citing the US’ military interventions in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, Wang stated that Washington “brushed the UN aside and waged wars on sovereign states in wanton interference.”

“The US claims to respect human rights, but the wars of aggression launched by the US and its allies … killed over 300,000 civilians and made over 26 million people refugees,” he continued. “Yet, no one is held accountable for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The US even announced sanctions on the International Criminal Court who would investigate the war crimes of the US military.”

In addition to sanctioning a number of top International Criminal Court officials in 2020, the US maintains the ‘Hague Invasion Act’, giving its military permission to invade the Netherlands to free any American held at the court.

Wang then accused the US of using its economic might to coerce countries “whether they are big or small, faraway or nearby, friend or foe,” citing five decades of US sanctions on Cuba and four decades of such measures on Iran.

“When it comes to stabbing its allies such as the EU and Japan in the back, the US has never hesitated, as we have seen repeatedly,” he added, likely referring foremost to the US’ recent decision to undermine a nuclear submarine deal between France and Australia to further its ‘AUKUS’ alliance with the UK and Australia. China has repeatedly condemned this alliance as an American effort to build an “Asia-Pacific version of NATO.”

“Facts have proven that the US is the biggest spreader of disinformation, culprit of coercive diplomacy and saboteur of world peace and stability,” Wang declared. “From the US-EU dialogue to the AUKUS trilateral security partnership, the Quad and the Five Eyes Alliance, the US is using democracy, human rights, rules and order as a pretext to cover up its shady activities of creating division [and] stoking confrontation.”

Wang’s accusations, while incendiary, were not made out of the blue. Last week, US and EU officials held their third ‘Dialogue on China’, after which they issued a joint press release accusing Beijing of “repeated information manipulation” regarding the conflict in Ukraine, “recent incidents of economic coercion,” and alleged human rights abuses against the Uighur people in Xinjiang, all of which China denies.

The statement also called on China to peacefully resolve its disputes with Taiwan in accordance with the UN charter, and not to circumvent the US and EU sanctions on Russia. That’s despite the fact that those restrictions were imposed by the West unilaterally and have nothing to do with UN mechanisms put in place for such measures, leading Moscow to brand the move “illegal.”

April 26, 2022 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

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