The powerful are wealthy, and the wealthy are powerful. They’ll also often go to great lengths to avoid paying taxes. Those are the conclusions from some 12 million financial files leaked to reporters last week and covered widely.
Known as the Pandora Papers, the revelations were handed to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and then picked up on Sunday by the BBC and The Guardian newspaper. The secret documents reveal how some 400 former and current world leaders, government officials and billionaires have funnelled their money through offshore accounts to buy property incognito and avoid paying taxes.
Oh, and in case you wondered what the fuss is all about, it all somehow leads back to Russia and President Vladimir Putin – though quite how is never properly explained. Suffice it to say that readers are meant to be shocked at the apparent corruption of the world’s elites, led by the most corrupt of them all – the Russians. Curiously though, none of those exposed are Americans. This may be because the American tax system allows its wealthy citizens to evade taxes without resorting to offshore companies. Or it could have something to do with the fact that the OCCRP is funded by, among others, the US Agency for International Development and the US Department of State.
Regardless, its discovery that the wealthy are good at tax evasion is hardly a huge surprise. Moreover, the revealed transactions all appear to be entirely legal.
For instance, the papers discuss how King Abdullah of Jordan purchased properties worth £70 million ($95 million) in the US and UK via a network of offshore companies. They also show how the wife of former British prime minister Tony Blair avoided paying over £300,000 ($408,651) in stamp duty by setting up a company to purchase a building from the offshore organization that owned it. But neither transaction was illegal. As lawyers for King Abdullah noted, it is “common practice for high profile individuals to purchase properties via offshore companies for privacy and security reasons.”
If there’s a scandal here, it’s that countries like the UK have set up their financial systems in such a way as to allow the wealthy to avoid stumping up the money that ordinary folk has to pay. Oddly, though, that’s not the way that the press has decided to play the story. Instead, the words “Russia,” “Putin,” and “Kremlin” have led the way, as if clever tax dodges were somehow part and parcel of a web of corruption leading back to Moscow.
So it is that BBC’s lead story starts off with a big picture of Putin, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliev, and King Abdullah, before telling readers that the leak “links Russian President Vladimir Putin to secret assets in Monaco.” Meanwhile, on The Guardian’s website, the biggest headlines all mention Russia, referring to “the Kremlin,” a “Russian tycoon’s links to alleged corruption” and “Putin’s inner circle.” A group of headshots of several prominent world leaders sits atop the Guardian headlines, with Putin’s head by far the largest of them all.
This is odd, because the name “Vladimir Putin” never appears in the Pandora Papers even once.
This doesn’t stop The Guardian mentioning the name “Putin” no less than 50 times in an article entitled “Pandora papers reveal hidden riches of Putin’s inner circle.” The obsession with a person not even mentioned in the papers seems rather excessive. Moreover, the alleged “inner circle” consists of just two people, and no evidence is provided to connect Putin to those persons’ financial dealings. In short, the “link” to Putin is decidedly thin.
The nature of the alleged connection is that in 2003, a wealthy Russian woman named Svetlana Krivonogikh purchased a luxury flat in Monaco via a complex network of offshore companies. The Russian media outlet Proekt has alleged that in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Krivonogikh was Putin’s lover and gave birth to his daughter, allegations that have never been substantiated.
In short, 20 years ago, somebody who may, or may not, have been Putin’s lover bought an apartment in Monaco. That’s it. As stories go, it’s not very exciting.
Nor is the other Putin “link” revealed in the papers. Krivonogikh’s apartment purchase was supposedly set up by a British accountancy and tax firm whose other clients include a long-standing friend of the Russian president – Gennady Timchenko.
And, that’s it, folks. That’s all that The Guardian has got. It can’t even come up with some allegedly crooked dealings by Timchenko and his British pals. And it most definitely doesn’t show that Putin himself is stashing cash away in Monaco, or anywhere else for that matter. But that doesn’t stop The Guardian’s ever-reliable mis-reporter Luke Harding from stirring up the dirt.
For Timchenko, you see, was a founder of Swiss-based oil trading company Guvnor, which is worth several billion dollars. This provides Harding with an opportunity to bring up allegations made by Moscow political scientist Stanislav Belkovsky that Putin is the real owner of Guvnor, supposedly making him a multi-billionaire.
The problem with Belkovsky’s claim is that absolutely no evidence has been produced to substantiate it. The entire story is one completely unconnected person’s entirely unsupported allegation. One would imagine that journalists devoted to reporting reliable information would give it a wide berth. Harding, however, devotes nearly 150 words to repeating the claim in depth. You can tell that he wants you to believe it.
It is a very curious piece of journalism. A set of leaked documents that have absolutely nothing to do with Putin are used as an excuse to throw out lots of articles mentioning his name over and over, and as an opportunity to dig out old and unverified rumours that are entirely irrelevant to the story in question.
The problem, one suspects, is that having got their hands on millions of pages of financial documents showing the wheelings and dealings of the rich and powerful, the massed ranks of Western journalism were left with the awkward reality that none of it shows any obvious wrongdoing. In fact, it’s all completely above board. There’s no scandal there – save for that of the fact it’s legal in the first place. So one has to be invented. At which point, Harding et al. turn to their favorite targets – Russia and Vladimir Putin – and make them their focus of attention. It’s a fairly shoddy tactic.
So what do the Pandora Papers actually tell us? Nothing about Russia. Merely that there are rich people out there; that power and money go together; and that the wealthy have the means and opportunity to exploit tax loopholes that ordinary mortals do not. In short, the rules favor the rich. Not quite the bombshell some had hoped for.
Paul Robinson is a professor at the University of Ottawa. He writes about Russian and Soviet history, military history and military ethics, and is the author of the Irrussianality blog.
The plan, devised by the Canadian Joint Operations Command, relied on propaganda techniques like those used during the Afghan war. What on earth is going on in the upper echelons of Ottawa?
High-up elements of the Canadian Forces have been waging psychological operations on the public over Covid-19 to manipulate their emotions and thoughts, and to gauge their reactions. While this is not uncommon around the world, getting caught is.
A new article in Canada’s National Post states that the Canadian Joint Operations Command used “propaganda techniques similar to those employed during the Afghanistan war” on the Canadian public.
The Post cites a December 2020 investigation by retired Major-General Daniel Gosselin, who was asked to look into it by then-Chief of the Defence Staff General Jon Vance.
According to the article, the federal government was innocent and not aware of the plan – a claim I find unbelievable, considering the amount of gaslighting and knowingly pointless regulations the government has subjected Canadians to since the start of the pandemic scare.
The plan involved “shaping” and “exploiting” information, the Post noted, to “head off civil disobedience by Canadians” and “bolster government messages about the pandemic.”
Among the stranger aspects was scaring Canadians with stories of a wolf invasion.
This, according to the Post, involved Canadian Forces’ military information operations staff forging a letter from the Nova Scotia government warning about wolves on the loose, in September 2020.
The Post claims the letter’s release was inadvertent, and basically ran with the Canadian Forces’ claim that this was down to a few bad apples, reservists who “lacked formal training and policies governing the use of propaganda techniques.”
Canadian journalist Dan Dicks, who was among the first to report on and analyze the wolves story, noted at the time that it was a classic example of a psychological operation.
Dicks has also pointed out what the National Post omitted, highlighting:
“They created a fake letter from the government saying there are dangerous wolves, and they set up loudspeakers in the area, projecting out wolf noises. This isn’t just research, this isn’t just a training exercise, they’re actively engaging in this psychological operation to scare people using loudspeakers.
‘Psyops’, he noted, is a term used “to denote any action which is practiced mainly by psychological methods with the aim of evoking a planned psychological reaction in other people,” and they are “aimed at influencing a target audience’s value system, belief system, emotions, motives, reasoning, or behaviour.”
Canadian journalist James Corbett likewise commented on this at the time, pointing out how a rumour is floated to see how the public reacts:
“This entire coordinated campaign to convince an entire public of a threat that doesn’t exist, in order to test how they will react to that, what will the public respond to and how will they respond? That really speaks volumes to the world we are living in. And you really think they are going to do all of that, but they are never going to use that for any nefarious purposes?”
An article in the Ottawa Citizen noted at the time that Canada’s Department of National Defence claimed: “The fake letter wasn’t meant to be released to the public and an investigation is underway to determine how that happened. The letter was an aid for the propaganda training.”
The department also claimed to not know why the loudspeaker was set up to transmit wolf sounds.
I guess a member of the public who read the letter must have taken it upon themselves to set up the loudspeaker then, hey?
The same Ottawa Citizen article cites Bard College professor Emma Briant, who specializes in researching military propaganda, calling the stunt a “major violation of ethics.”
UK “anti-masker” razor-blade poster hoax
The “shaping” and “exploiting” of information on Covid-19 to gauge and shape the public mood is, of course, not unique to Canada. To give another example, in May 2020, the UK Column obtained a leaked internal document of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) from March 26, 2020, which advised:
“Use the media to increase the sense of personal threat. Use the media to increase the sense of responsibility of others. Use the media to promote positive messaging around actions. Tailor the messaging and use and promote social approval for desired behaviours.”
I recently spoke to UK-based journalist Iain Davis on a variety of issues pertaining to fear porn and media hype around the issue of Covid-19.
In our interview, Davis spoke of another hoax that appeared on the BBC last July: a Cardiff woman who claimed she had been cut by a razor blade allegedly stuck on the back of an ‘anti-mask’ poster.
What the BBC did not bother investigating was that the poster in question was laminated, thus stiff, and the razor blade stuck flat to the back of it, making it virtually impossible that the woman had actually cut herself.
“When you took it off the wall, it would have been like a card, not a piece of paper you could scrunch up, it would have been a stiff card,” David said.
Nor did the BBC question why she threw away the ‘evidence’ instead of turning it over to the police she had contacted. They didn’t look into her apparent history of outlandish and improbable claims, like being disemboweled and walking to hospital holding her intestines in, nor her admitted history of self-harming, lending credence to the likelihood she staged the sliced-hand photo.
While this story seemingly originated from an unstable individual, it was pushed unquestioningly by British state-owned media.
Further, as Davis noted, the nonsensical razor poster story re-emerged two months later, this time with London transport warning of “anti-mask posters with razor blades.”
In this story, the Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union cited by the BBC actually said it wasn’t aware of any razor-blade incidents. Yet the BBC ran with the claims nonetheless (using the previous unstable person’s photo to support the claims).
These were not the first razor-blade poster stories, though. In 2020, the BBC and other media ran stories claiming razor blades (and needles) had been put behind anti-5G posters, again not providing any actual evidence to back the claims.
Anti-mask, anti-5G… and ‘razor-blade posters’. Clearly, this looks like another psyop to indoctrinate the public into equating people who have legitimate and science-based concerns about particular issues as being not only bat-s**t crazy, but dangerous, a menace to society.
But these stories are being cooked up in underhand ways by some powerful forces that shouldn’t be engaged in these matters, while the masses actually concerned about these issues are raising their concerns in peaceful manners: petitions, peaceful demonstrations, scientific papers… All that is easily obscured by a few tabloid stories with screaming headlines.
According to Davis, the point is “to seed the idea into the public imagination to associate people that question vaccines with extremism, ultimately with terrorism. There is a lineage going back quite a few years where you can see this narrative being seeded into the public consciousness. It has really ramped up in the last couple of months.”
Indeed, in November 2020, the Ottawa Citizenrevealed the Canadian Forces’ desire to “establish a new organization that will use propaganda and other techniques to try to influence the attitudes, beliefs and behaviours of Canadians,” noting they’ve already spent over $1 million to “train public affairs officers on behaviour modification techniques of the same sort used by the parent firm of Cambridge Analytica.”
While noting nominal opposition and concern by the defence minister, the Citizen reported that “work is already underway on some aspects of the plan and some techniques have been already tested on the Canadian public,” as well as that “a series of town halls were already conducted last week for a number of military personnel on the strategies contained in the draft plan.”
Dan Dicks, in his commentary on the wolves scare story, aptly opined, “It frustrates me so much that the government is actively trying to silence me as being ‘fake news’ or putting out ‘false information’, when they are actively engaged in propaganda campaigns to distribute false information designed to scare Canadians.”
Indeed, we who speak out on uncomfortable issues are censored, ostracized, and labeled as ‘conspiracy theorists’, while governments are actively spewing misinformation and manipulating the masses.
The scene: a British nuclear submarine. A detective has been sent to investigate the death of a sailor. When she asks the Naval Commander why there needs to be so much secrecy, as Britain is not at war, he responds ‘That is an illusion. We have always been at war’.
The series, entitled ‘Vigil’ is the BBC’s most watched drama of the year, and has been well publicised, attracting an audience of 10.2 million over its first week. It depicts a fight with an illusive, ruthless adversary that successfully manages to infiltrate a UK submarine to ‘knock out Britain’s nuclear deterrent’, killing British citizens in the process. The murder weapon of choice is a nerve agent; can you guess who the enemy is yet?
Of course it’s Russia. Nuclear submarines, nerve agent, a treacherous opponent; from the opening sequence with video footage of Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev projected onto a submarine, the audience is under no illusion as to who this adversary is. Nowadays, the British public almost expects it to be Russia.
For years now the UK population has been schooled on ‘evil Russia’ across all media platforms – from the news to TV dramas to films – with the line between fiction and reality becoming increasingly blurred. One of the most Googled questions about the ‘Vigil’ drama series is ‘is it real?’ This is hardly surprising given the sheer volume of anti-Russian content, with cinema often dramatising real life events and vice versa.
Take the Skripal case, for instance. The apparent poisoning with ‘Novichok’ of the former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter took place just a few months after a British/American TV series ‘Strike Back’ was released, in which a ‘rogue Russian biochemist‘ was working on a substance of the very same name. That was probably the first time that western audiences had ever heard the word ‘Novichok’, and yet, by extraordinary coincidence, it was to appear on our TV screens just a few months later, in the news. The finger of blame was immediately pointed at Moscow, just as preparations were being made for Russia to host the 2018 world cup. The timing could not have been worse for the Kremlin, and yet it helped Britain considerably in its bid to discredit Russia in its hosting of the sporting event.
TV and cinema being used by governments as instruments to sway and foster public opinion is nothing new. In the book ‘Propaganda and empire: the manipulation of British public opinion, 1880-1960’ John M MacKenzie explores the plethora of ways the British government promoted imperialism throughout the empire’s existence, not only through cinema, but using everything from cigarette cards to school textbooks. During the war, the British Ministry of Information also pumped out films with instructive government messaging under the direction of Humphrey Jennings. These documentaries were more about what to do and what not to do, promoting slogans such as ‘grow your own’ and ‘make do and mend’ to aid the war effort on the home front.
The ‘Vigil’ drama obviously had a considerable budget. And its political function is twofold; it highlights the ‘threat’ from Russia, and the question of the Trident’s future in an independent Scotland. By playing up the idea of a real, imminent danger from Russia, it persuades the viewer of the importance of retaining Britain’s nuclear deterrent. As tensions grow between East and West, and Boris Johnson pursues his ‘Global Britain’ strategy, we will no doubt see more programmes emphasising Britain’s military strength countering Russia and let’s not forget, China. Sadly, such manipulation of the population doesn’t encourage understanding between peoples and instead, fosters division and discrimination. At best it is Britain using Russia as a scapegoat to bolster its sense of national pride; at worse, it is laying the groundwork for a future conflict with Russia.
Johanna Ross is a journalist based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Richard Sharp, BBC Chairman, is likely to back proposals to increase regulation of the world’s largest social networks and platforms to combat “fake news” and “disinformation.”
It is pertinent to ask “urgent questions” about these platforms, since platforms have allowed lies, conspiracy theories, and falsehoods to spread rapidly, the chairman claimed in a speech to the Royal Television Society convention.
Since assuming office in February, Sharp will make his first significant public statement, calling for an update to outdated Communications Act of 2003, calling for a crackdown on speech online.
He continued stating that he wants the BBC “to define itself globally as a pre-eminent purveyor of facts in the disinformation age.”
Sharp also claimed that “The pandemic and ‘infodemic’ that has spread alongside have left us in no doubt of how vulnerable we all are. But it has also suggested that some are more vulnerable than others…. The magnetic draw of conspiracy theories in our societies is getting stronger. And we can no longer pretend it doesn’t have real-life consequences – whether it’s pulling down 5G masts, driving down vaccine take up, or leaving the results of democratic elections in doubt, ” Televisual reported.
Even though the provision of fact-checking services and coordinating efforts between platforms and credible news organizations to detect misinformation is important, Sharp alleged more needed to be done.
“There are urgent questions to be answered about the future media world we want to live in. We need to rethink the regulatory environment in this country – and replace a Communications Act that predates Facebook with one that can deliver on a clear vision,” the chairman said.
“But we also need to look at where the digital world comes up against the fundamental rights, freedoms and privacies we sign up to as societies and individuals. Does the principle of media freedom need to be redefined and re-enshrined for the digital age? Do we need to claim our personal data as a human right, rather than an asset to be bought and sold?”
IN HER INTRODUCTION to ‘A State Of Fear’, Laura Dodsworth writes, “We don’t like to believe we can be manipulated, let alone that we have been manipulated – this book may hurt.”
Hurt it will, pitilessly exposing by turns the damage that fear has done to us over the past year, the way that terror eclipses reason or common-sense, and the way it has been weaponised to control us by the Government’s behavioural scientists. If you care about the future of liberty and democracy in the UK, this book will not help you sleep at night. It may however find a place at the top the pile on your bedside table: its hard-hitting chapters read once with shock and maybe, for some, a degree of incredulity, but then referred to again with increasing belief and conviction as a new revelation, campaign or headline brings home a key theme or passage.
It’s well researched and rigorously factual, but passion and anger shine through every page. They turn it from a dry analysis into a page-turning thriller in which we repeatedly discover ourselves as protagonist, victim, or supporting cast. The anecdotes and observations resonate with moments from our own lives over the past eighteen months, making personal the revelations about the polished levers and engines which generated them.
In a book about fear, perhaps the most frightening point of all is just how easy it now is to control a democratic society through the levers of behavioural science. Without debate or public consent, the Government has built capabilities in department after department to control how we think, feel, and act subliminally using cutting-edge psychology, research and communication. The advent of Covid-19 turbocharged these teams, which were headed by the SPI-B behavioural science committee and handed almost unlimited power and money. As the discipline with the greatest representation on SAGE, behavioural scientists carried more weight in the pandemic even than virologists and medical experts.
Likely anticipating the charge that she has succumbed to the dark theories of those who smell conspiracy in every action of Government, Dodsworth has rigorously researched and checked her claims. What emerges is comprehensive, informative and authoritative: page after page rings true and makes one nod as an anecdote of the past year strikes a chord.
Dodsworth vividly illuminates not just the effects fear has had, but how it influences us and why we are so prone to these extreme reactions. The expert insight and personal testimony show both how fear was created and how it took control of the population, often driving victims to extremes of behaviour that they view in hindsight as totally out of character.
Little here is speculative: the book deals in what we can see and know of events over the past year. It draws on highly-placed sources, though sadly many of those with real inside knowledge are quoted anonymously as they were too frightened of losing their careers to go on the record. This inevitably raises questions over the credibility of their claims, but it’s impossible to dismiss what they say because the substantiation is robust, the evidence convincing, and it so often chimes with personal experience.
At one point, a source in Government is quoted as saying,
“Hancock is quite paranoid and a total ‘wet’. He’s a real panicker.”
This will surprise few people – we can all see Hancock’s shortcomings – but these moments of recognition are important in building our understanding of the way in which politicians moved so quickly from championing freedom to enforcing repression. ‘The fear spread from the health department to the other departments and they all fell under the spell of the SAGE scientists foretelling doom’.
This was a different kind of fear to that felt by the public: fear not of the illness itself, but of its political fall-out. Politicians were terrified of failing in any step which might later be found to have saved lives. The virus might not represent a deadly threat to the vast majority of British people, but it could certainly be lethal to their own prospects for electoral success.
An insider tells Dodsworth that ministers fear ‘they’ll get hauled through the press for their own mistakes and that’s worse for them than ruining people’s businesses.’
This spectre still stalks Whitehall. I’m told that from March 2020 onwards, any Civil Servant minded to reject tough restrictions has simply been asked, ‘what will you tell the Inquiry?’ Few are brave enough to resist that threat. Yet it only works one way – deaths and suffering from Covid-19 may bring retribution. Deaths and suffering caused by restrictions are so unimportant to the decision-makers that they have not even bothered to consider whether the harm of measures may outweigh the benefits. Recovery has been campaigning since its launch for the coming Covid-19 inquiry to be comprehensive, investigating the full impact of the measures taken, positive and negative: this is why it’s so important.
We now know beyond question that the consequences of the Government action will be devastating for many, from the thousands who have not been treated or diagnosed with cancers over the past year to the millions whose livelihoods have gone. The mental health impact alone has been enormous and experts warn that some will bear the scars for life – including many children. This is vividly brought to life via the personal experiences which preface each chapter of the book.
Yet fear sells above all else. Broadcasters have enjoyed unprecedented viewing figures while Covid-19 has raged. An Ofcom report in September found that the average UK adult spent 6 hours 25 minutes watching content in April 2020 – up by an hour and a half from 2019.
That kind of power over eyeballs brings huge influence and profits, so broadcasters who gorge on drama and sensation grow fat. The reporters who provide it win pay rises and awards. For them, the best scientist is not the most accurate or eminent expert, but the one who produces the most wild and exciting prediction: the one which will really get viewers scared.
Reporters rush from No.10 conference to Covid ward with breathless anticipation of a child at a theme park racing from the dodgems to a rollercoaster. It’s what happens next that matters: the next scary number, the next variant. Checking whether the last prediction came true is dull. Boring old cancer and heart disease may be the bigger killers, but they’re old news. No-one has pushed a camera in the face of the grieving relatives of a cancer patient who was turned away for treatment or a worried oncologist. If you want to be heard, you have to talk Covid.
The pressure on Government is no longer to do what is best for the country, but what is best for the story. Over and over again, this leads to poor decision-making. Leaders are rewarded not for good policy, but for media-friendly sound-bites. Today, the business of Government has become less about doing what is right and more about doing what will play out best on the airwaves. Managing the opinion of the country has become more important than managing the country. Behind closed doors, our leaders have taken the logical next step.
Dodsworth reveals how successive governments have assembled a vast interconnected machine for producing and weaponizing fear with the explicit aim of controlling behaviour. Those who operate it argue that their intentions are good.
It’s the old paternalist thinking with a high-tech upgrade. People can’t be trusted to make the correct choices if they are given access to information and left to decide for themselves. So they must be subliminally ‘nudged’ in the right direction (or, during Covid-19, bludgeoned). Information which might disrupt the narrative is suppressed. Those who choose for us won’t admit the possibility that they could get it wrong. We, the ordinary people, are fallible; they are not. As Dodsworth says,
“Nudge is clever people in government making sure the not-so-clever people do what they want.”
All this was already happening prior to Covid-19. Yet it was little studied. A colossal machine was assembled out of public sight without any consideration as to the ethics and consequences, since those involved saw their goals as good and the ends as justifying the means.
As Dodsworth finds, its workings are wrapped in shadow. Attempting to dissect its component parts, she identifies some of the departments involved, but beyond confirming their existence, no-one in Government will answer her questions. In a book which contains many shocks, not least is how much of all this is being hidden from us in our supposedly free and democratic society. Not only are our strings to be pulled without our conscious knowledge, the details of how and why we are being manipulated must be hidden from us, lest we see through the tricks and hold the puppet-masters to account.
Behavioural science regards the mass of humanity as no more than rats in a maze, to be prodded down one alley and forbidden another. The scientists wish to control the rats: they do not accept that the rats should have any control over them.
These are disturbing claims, but the more they are researched, the more substantiation can be found. For example, she refers to the questionable role of Ofcom in enforcing a distorted narrative across the broadcast media, citing the guidance issued to broadcasters on 23 March 2020. This says that any report featuring content around Covid-19 which ‘may be harmful’ will be subject to statutory sanction.
As she points out, these comparatively innocuous words in practice force broadcasters to censure a huge amount of critical content, even where it is accurate, especially where it tends to calm fears or reassure people, since fear has been used to maximise compliance with restrictions.
An online search reveals that this was followed by additional Ofcom guidance on 27 March 2020, which is chillingly explicit. For example, it prohibits the broadcasting of ‘medical or other advice which… discourages the audience from following official rules and guidance.’ There’s no ambiguity here. Ofcom is telling broadcasters that they cannot allow informed, expert opinion, no matter how accurate or important, if it conflicts with the official guidance. This is extraordinary.
It gives added bite to her central point: ‘any regulator charged with upholding freedom of expression – as is the case with Ofcom – should proceed to restrict that freedom only on a closely reasoned basis. That is something Ofcom has manifestly failed to do.”
In the process, it has turned our theoretically impartial broadcasters into mere cheerleaders for restrictions. She argues that what they report is no longer news: “There is a word for only sharing information which is biased and used to promote a political cause: propaganda.”
Could the BBC have done more to preserve its integrity? When reporting restrictions were imposed on it during the Gulf War, it prefaced reports with a reminder that restrictions were in place. It could have done the same here, alerting viewers to the controls on pandemic reporting. It chose not to do so and therefore the public is unaware that anything has changed.
Her interview with Piers Robinson, Co-Director of the Organisation for Propaganda Studies, concludes with the stark warning, ”It is not inconceivable that we are walking into an absolute nightmare in which freedom of speech and debate become significantly curtailed.”
It’s one of many moments in the book where you catch yourself thinking, ‘can this really be happening?’ It’s hard to believe that we have lost so many freedoms without a whisper from the supposed parliamentary Opposition, or that a leader who has championed our liberties so loudly in the past has moved so decisively to remove them.
‘A State Of Fear’ is essential reading if you want to understand how majority backing for the uniquely repressive response to Covid-19 was engineered so quickly. It’s a deeply troubling tale. However, it raises broader concerns about a world in which the combined power of psychology, technology, media and research are increasingly being used to dictate our choices without our knowledge or consent.
These questions go to the heart of our humanity and the kind of world we want for ourselves and our children. How many of us really want to live in fear, even if it means we are protected from our own misjudgements? Can governments be trusted with subliminal tools so powerful that they can instruct us what to think? With ‘A State Of Fear’, Laura Dodsworth has launched a vital debate.
Recovery formed last October to campaign for the Five Reasonable Demands for good government during Covid-19, a moderate, balanced alternative to the Government’s damaging approach to Covid-19, which experts have warned will end up costing many more lives than it saves and the Government itself says has already cost the country as much as the entire Second World War.
Jon Dobinson, is a co-founder and Campaign Director of Recovery, and MD of award winning advertising agency Other. He is a former D&AD judge and Chair of the Creative Jury of the International Business Awards.
Ben Rich repeats the BBC’s frequent lie, that climate change is making hurricanes stronger, expressed of course in the usual “scientists say” way. These are his exact words:
“Climate scientists believe that global warming is making them stronger”
It is of course true that some scientists say this, but equally many hurricane experts maintain the opposite, something you might have thought the BBC would have reported.
And, given this is supposed to be a “Climate Check”, you might have thought the BBC would actually have provided some facts, rather than just opinions. The IPCC were quite clear in their last Assessment Review, AR5:
IPCC AR5
They could find no evidence whatsover of any “significant observed trends” in tropical cyclone activity over the past century. All they could find was an increasing intensity of North Atlantic hurricanes since the 1970s, which hurricane experts such as Chris Landsea believe is part of the multidecadal cycle, the AMO. This is borne out by the fact no that robust trends in major hurricanes has been found in the North Atlantic in the past 100 years.
Little has changed in the latest AR6, which can still find no long term trends.
One particular omission in the video is the role of wind shear, high level winds which act to break up hurricanes. While Rich mentions this factor, he omits to tell viewers that scientists believe that global warming will increase wind shear.
This Climate Check has little to do with facts, and is little more than propaganda.
This is another fairy tale to scare the kids which comes around once a year without fail:
The number of weather-related disasters to hit the world has increased five-fold over the past 50 years, says the World Meteorological Organization. … Full article
In fact, according to the BBC’s own chart, the number of disasters has declined in the last decade, hardly supporting their story.
But why do disasters seem much more common now than in the 1970s, when even the IPCC says there is no evidence that weather is getting more extreme? Simple- better reporting systems mean that we record weather events now that would have been missed in the past.
We have, of course, been down this road before! The WMO data comes from Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) database EM-DAT. CRED, who only began publishing data in 1998, themselves warned in 2004 that earlier data was incomplete:
Despite this warning, false claims that weather disasters are on the increase keep being made. Last year, it was the UN, and the before it was the left wing IPPR. And as surely as night follows day, their claims are faithfully trumpeted by the BBC and the rest of the gullible [alarmist] media.
AN insight into the propaganda currently putting our world at risk of a Covid vaccine disaster was provided by a BBC News report yesterday, dismissing fears that the vaccines could harm fertility or cause miscarriages.
The report especially criticises Dr Mike Yeadon, the former Pfizer senior researcher who last week reiterated his concerns about particular risks from the vaccines to women of child-bearing age.
As so often in these acrimonious arguments, some of the report’s targets are ‘Aunt Sallies’ drawn from the internet. People who cannot believe their governments could be so foolhardy as to medicate millions with an experimental product post angry and often exaggerated claims.
Yesterday’s BBC ‘reality check’, however, begins by mentioning a relevant Japanese study that has caused several leading researchers (see here, here and here) much concern. So let’s fact-check the BBC fact-checker.
Most governments, in line with World Health Organisation guidance, have not required manufacturers to show what happens to their vaccine once injected into the body. Japan appears to have been unique in requiring such a ‘biodistribution’ study, performed mainly on rats.
Under the heading ‘A study shows the vaccine accumulating in the ovaries – False’, the BBC report claims:
1. The theory comes from a misreading of the study, which ‘involved giving rats a much higher dose of vaccine than that given to humans (1,333 times higher)’.
In fact, the study (commissioned by Pfizer) used a 50 microgram dose, hardly more than the 30 micrograms standard dose in Pfizer’s human trial. Even if we acknowledge that rats are more than 100 times smaller than humans, the figure of 1,333 times higher is FALSE. Besides, if the study in rats was to give meaningful results, the researchers could be expected to use a proportionately larger dose in these tiny animals.
2. ‘Only 0.1 per cent of the total dose ended up in the animals’ ovaries, 48 hours after injection. Far more – 53 per cent after one hour and 25 per cent after 48 hours – was found at the injection site. The next most common place was the liver (16 per cent after 48 hours), which helps get rid of waste products from the blood.’
No mention of the study’s finding that the jab was cleared at a vastly lower rate from the ovaries, in particular, as well as from the spleen and adrenals, compared with the injection site and the liver. So there IS accumulation in the ovaries. Verdict: FALSE.
3. ‘The vaccine is delivered using a bubble of fat containing the virus’s genetic material, which kick-starts the body’s immune system. Those promoting this claim cherry-picked a figure which actually referred to the concentration of fat found in the ovaries. Fat levels in the ovaries did increase in the 48 hours after the jab, as the vaccine contents moved from the injection site around the body. But, crucially, there was no evidence it still contained the virus’s genetic material.’
In fact, the study itself states that the distribution in the body of the vaccine’s active component ‘is considered to depend on the LNP distribution’ – the lipid nanoparticles, or ‘bubbles of fat’ as the BBC reassuringly calls them. So once again, the BBC’s assertion is FALSE.
4. Finally, the BBC ‘fact-checker’ challenges the claim that the study was leaked, ‘though it was in fact publicly available online’.
It is available now, but it certainly wasn’t. It was obtained through a request by international researchers to the Japanese regulatory agency. Anyone who actually looks at it will see immediately that every page is marked ‘Pfizer confidential’. And the translation is poor, indicating that it is a far from official release. Verdict: FALSE.
The BBC report goes on to criticise Yeadon, described as ‘a scientific researcher who has made other misleading statements about Covid’, for claiming that the spike protein produced by the vaccines is similar to one involved in forming the placenta. One of his concerns is that the protein might produce antibodies that could block pregnancy.
The BBC quotes a US fertility doctor who has not seen any such effect in a study of 143 of his patients, and who says he can’t see why antibodies produced in response to the vaccine could harm fertility while antibodies from a natural infection would not.
Apart from the tiny number of patients involved, compared with the billions taking the vaccine, it seems obvious that an injection now known to distribute a toxic component throughout the body could bring risks not present in a person whose immune system meets and deals with the virus naturally.
Yeadon worked for 32 years in the drug industry, leaving Pfizer ten years ago as the most senior scientist in charge of respiratory research. He went on to found his own biotechnology company, which he sold for hundreds of millions of dollars, and has been a consultant to 30 biotech start-ups.
He has said that the small minority of people who risk being killed by Covid-19 are probably better off taking the vaccine rather than not. But he spoke out again last week, at a Truth for Health Foundation conference called Stop The Shot, about the special dangers to women of child-bearing age from the gene-based vaccines.
‘We’re being lied to . . . The authorities are not giving us full information about the risks of these products,’ Yeadon said, listing three concerns about the impact of the vaccines in reproductive health, fertility and pregnancy.
‘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 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. ‘I’m entirely able to read and interpret it. And to my horror, 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.
He said a study has just come out which reinforces that concern. Researchers drew blood samples every few days from 15 women given the Pfizer vaccine. ‘They measured antibodies against the spike protein, which took several weeks to appear. They also measured antibodies against the placenta, and they found within the first one to four days an increase of two and a half to three times – so, 300 per cent – in the antibodies against their own placenta.
‘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.’
Pfizer themselves say on their website that available data on their Covid vaccine administered to pregnant women ‘are insufficient to inform vaccine-associated risks in pregnancy.’
Labour Party leader Keir Starmer has gone home to self-isolate this afternoon. The media has been told that one of his children has tested positive for covid.
According to the BBC:
A statement from his office said one of his children tested positive at lunchtime, but Sir Keir was doing daily tests and tested negative this morning.
Sir Keir was in the House of Commons for PMQs earlier. The PM and chancellor are also self-isolating after contact with the health secretary who tested positive.
This is the fourth time Sir Keir has had to self-isolate since the pandemic began. His spokesman said his family will also be self-isolating.
I’ve no proof whatsoever, but I call bullshit. The media has spent much of the past 48 hours discussing the NHS app and “pingdemic.” Millions of people have been pinged by the app and told to go home and isolate. It’s led to total chaos.
Business owners are tearing their hair out as staff shortages threaten the post-lockdown economic bounce. There are widespread reports that millions of younger people are deleting the app from their phones. Nobody wants to be forced into isolation, especially at this time of year.
The managers of the scamdemic, the entire political class and the media, are horrified that so many are deleting the wretched app. Maybe Johnson, Health Secretary Sajid Javid and Labour leader Keir Starmer have been sent to self-isolate to set an example.
You’d be well within your rights to ask me why. Because chaos is their desired outcome. They want to destroy the economy and cause a shortage of food and other products. They want to bankrupt businesses. They want to bankrupt you. Chaos is the plan.
Ordo Ab Chao. Order out of chaos. All roads lead to The World Economic Forum’s Great Reset. The people will only accept it when their worlds are turned upside-down.
The public is being manipulated 24/7 by the political class and the media working in tandem. They want you in a perpetual state of agitation and confusion. You become even more suggestible while in that low vibrational state.
There’s no covid now. There’s no threat if there ever was one. People should not be taking instructions from their phones to drop everything and rush home to isolate. It’s tyranny. People seem to be wising up to it and ditching the app. It’s about bloody time.
How convenient then, that the PM and the leader of the opposition party should be pinged and sent home, while at the same time the media is attacking anyone who suggests it’s time to move on and get on with our lives.
A newly released raft of government papers has revealed the British Broadcasting Corporation’s extensive involvement in spreading pro-London, pro-EU, and pro-NATO messaging across the Balkans.
In February, classified documents revealed that BBC Media Action (BBCMA), the ‘charitable arm’ of the British state broadcaster, was embroiled in a number of clandestine operations to “weaken the Russian state’s influence,” funded by the UK Foreign Office.
The exposure raised serious questions about the BBC’s international reputation as a ‘neutral’, ‘objective’ purveyor of news, and what implications its murky relationship with Whitehall has for its output more widely. A further tranche of leaked files, related to covert UK actions in the Balkans, amply reinforces that the organization serves as a cloak-and-dagger device for achieving London’s foreign policy goals.
The papers indicate that BBCMA has been operating across the region since 1996, conducting a wide variety of “media capacity-building, reform and change management” projects. Cited examples of its initiatives include “reforming [the] institutional structures” of Montenegro’s state broadcaster RTCG, working with Macedonian media to “effectively cover elections” and act as a “watchdog,” and supporting the development of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Public Broadcasting System.
The organization also targeted youth audiences in five separate Balkan countries with “an innovative multi-platform media project,” which aimed to “build young people’s capacity for civic participation.” The centrepiece was “social media-based educational web drama” #SamoKazem (Just Saying). Strikingly, viewers were directed to “offline activities to translate awareness into action for change,” strongly suggesting stirring teenagers to activism was the program’s ultimate objective.
Details of BBCMA’s extensive meddling in Serbia greatly reinforces the overtly political nature of its Balkan ventures. From 2007 to 2017 alone, it delivered “four large-scale projects” in the country, such as “a challenging undertaking” with Radio Television Serbia (RTS) over the course of two years “to assist in its transition from state to public service broadcaster,” and working to “professionalise” five local radio stations “to develop their capacity to hold local government to account.”
The organization also delivered a huge three-year project for the European Union, which “strengthened media capacities for improving objective public information about all aspects of EU integration” – in other words, it assisted in the production of pro-Brussels propaganda.Vital work indeed, considering Serbian citizens remain by far the most skeptical about bloc membership.
Under the program’s auspices, BBCMA distributed a two-million-euro grant to 25 Serbian media platforms, and helped produce a staggering 174 separate TV programs, including the 15-part RTS series ‘What’s in It for Me?’ – which averaged 500,000 viewers per episode and won a national award for best EU-related documentary – and human trafficking docudrama ‘Sisters’, which was shown at the United Nations and won “numerous” awards.
Other files explicitly confirm that there is little meaningful distinction between the BBC and its charitable arm. In service of a Foreign Office effort to counteract allegedly falling levels of independence in Macedonian and Serbian media, which ran from November 2016 to March 2019, BBCMA created “a pool of local media professionals with the skills, knowledge and willingness to ensure digital media plays an effective role in fostering debate and accountability.”
Beneficiaries were said to have benefited from the British state broadcaster’s “wealth of experience and talent in creating quality journalism and compelling programmes,” with BBC journalists embedded in the organizations for which they worked in order to provide “mentoring/on-the job training, production support and co-production.” They were also granted access to the BBC Digital Lab, BBC studios, and BBC Blue Room.
The organization asserted in its Whitehall submissions that it considered the production of content to be a fantastic opportunity to “have [an] impact with Serbian and Macedonian audiences.” The consequences of its machinations aren’t certain, although it could be significant that one veteran BBC journalist assigned to the project was in charge of “masterminding” coverage of UK elections during their many years at the Beeb.
After all, the endeavor concluded not long before North Macedonia’s 2019 presidential vote, which pitted pro-EU, pro-NATO candidate Stevo Pendarovski against Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova, a more skeptical, pro-Russian figure. While the first round of the election produced a virtual tie, precipitating a runoff, Pendaraovski was comfortably elected in the second. What’s more, previously leaked files make abundantly clear that the Foreign Office sought to interfere directly in the process in other ways.
That the UK government is engaged in multiple cloak-and-dagger initiatives to influence politics and perceptions in the Balkans is sinister enough, without even considering the covert and overt role played by London in the blood-spattered breakup of Yugoslavia, the non-aligned, independent republic that once comprised most of the region. Given this history, BBCMA’s restructuring of RTS is rendered particularly disquieting.
On April 23, 1999, in the midst of the West’s protracted bombing campaign against Serbia, RTS’ headquarters in Belgrade, along with several radio and electrical installations throughout the country, were targeted for destruction by NATO missiles. In all, 16 journalists were killed in the strike and 16 more wounded, with many trapped in the rubble for days afterward.
In the face of significant international condemnation, high-ranking US and UK officials rushed to declare the bombing entirely justified. Then-Prime Minister Tony Blair defended it on the basis the station was part of “the apparatus of dictatorship and power” of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
“The responsibility for every single part of this action lies with the man who has engaged in this policy of ethnic cleansing and must be stopped,” he added.
Of course, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), a UN body established to prosecute crimes committed during the Yugoslav wars and their perpetrators, would eventually conclude Yugoslav troops had not in fact pursued a policy of ethnic cleansing, and Milosevic, who died in a UN prison in 2006, was posthumously exonerated of all charges.
The ICTY also considered whether the RTS bombing constituted a war crime, ultimately ruling that while its pro-government transmissions didn’t make the station a military target, as the action aimed to disrupt the state’s communications network, it was still legitimate.
Amnesty International branded the tribunal’s findings a miscarriage of justice, and contradictorily too, the judgment quoted NATO General Wesley Clark, who oversaw the overall campaign, as saying it was well-understood that the attack would only interrupt RTS broadcasts for a brief period, but “we thought it was a good move to strike it and the political leadership agreed with us.” In the event, it was off the air for a mere three hours.
Another motive for the hideous incident unexplored by the ICTY could well be that the station’s reporting on NATO’s almost-daily attacks on civilian and industrial infrastructure in Serbia was overly problematic for the military alliance, given its intervention was sold on humanitarian grounds. Nine days prior to the RTS bombing, as many as 85 innocent civilians were killed when NATO jets bombed a Kosovan refugee convoy.
While spokespeople initially claimed the tragedy was an “accident”, RTS subsequently broadcast a chilling recording of the pilot who delivered the deadly payload being repeatedly ordered to strike the convoy on the basis it was a “completely legitimate” target, despite them protesting that they couldn’t see any tanks or military hardware on the ground, just cars and tractors. If truth is the first casualty of war, purveyors of truth are surely the second.
n a perverse irony, though, the ICTY did record that NATO had warned Yugoslav authorities weeks prior that RTS may be caught in the crossfire, unless it acquiesced to broadcasting six hours of uncensored Western media reports per day to balance its coverage, thus making it an “acceptable instrument of public information.”
With the troublesome socialist federation of Yugoslavia now irrevocably smashed into pieces, Whitehall needn’t threaten the use of military force to compel Balkan media outlets to transmit pro-Western propaganda. It simply dispatches BBC staffers to their offices, under the bogus aegis of promoting media diversity, free expression, democracy, civic participation, and fostering debate, to ensure they remain “acceptable” instruments of public information.
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions.
In March 2021, the BBC reported that one of their investigative teams had, “Been tracking the human toll of coronavirus misinformation”. During this investigation they claimed to have found links to “assaults, arsons and deaths”. Worryingly, experts also told them that, “The potential for indirect harm caused by rumours, conspiracy theories and bad health information could be much worse”. Sounds like an interesting investigation, doesn’t it? Public service output at its finest, you might think. Just the kind of article we’d all like to read.
Alas. Not quite.
The problem with the BBC is that it simply can’t help itself. Having teed an ostensibly interesting story up in this open, investigatory journalistic type of way, its authors then proceed to devote a good-ish chunk of what follows to that most favourite of all BBC pastimes, namely, implicating Donald Trump in the act of mass murder. As with the butterfly so beloved of chaos theory (you know the one: that little blighter who’s always flapping his wings and causing tsunamis to crash into the coast of Bangladesh) no sooner have the BBC shown us Trump tweeting about the FDA’s preliminary research into hydroxychloroquine as a prophylactic against Covid than the magic of non-deterministic linear physics kicks in and people all over Nigeria and Vietnam suddenly start mopping up the old bleach-based products like vacuum cleaners.
In the end, then, the only interesting thing about this article is the way it reminds us just how little time and attention the BBC have paid to exploring the link that surely must exist between Covid ‘misinformation’ (as they themselves insist on calling it) and the huge rise in cases of psychosomatic disorder – health anxiety in particular – that we’ve witnessed in the UK since the dawn of the Age of Lockdown (2020-present). Let me explain what I mean.
And to do so, let me start by asking a question: what might disinformation likely to precipitate new, or to heighten existing, levels of anxiety amongst those suffering from psychosomatic disorders look like? How, in other words, might we define such a thing? Well, perhaps we might say that it would be information that unduly exaggerated the risks associated with Covid. Perhaps we might go further and say that it would represent the risks associated with Covid in a highly misleading and/or a sensationalist way. Come to think of it, perhaps we might end up concluding that it would look rather like the BBC’s recent article, ‘Long COVID funding to unearth new treatments.’ Below is the thumbnail picture accompanying the piece.
As you can see, it depicts two masked patients, chaperoned by two masked nurses, who look unmistakably like they’re having to learn how to walk again. (And by the way, anyone who’s going to counter that it could just as plausibly be a depiction of two patients being tested for, say, oxygen carrying capacity or pulse rate during recovery from a respiratory illness like Covid would need to explain to me why it is that neither patient is shown to be wearing any tracking/monitoring equipment, and, in addition, why neither nurse is shown to be holding/studying any data monitors). The male patient in the foreground of the image looks particularly unsteady on his feet, relying heavily on the metal frame surrounding him for bodily support. One of the masked nurses stands next to him, watching his legs and feet intently, presumably scanning for any warning signs of imminent collapse or a stumble. Her right arm is stretching out towards him, and no doubt a guiding/supportive hand is resting on the patient’s shoulder. Just behind the male patient, you can also see the lower half of the wheelchair in which he will have been brought from his hospital ward and into this rehabilitation class.
But if that’s what it shows, then what kind of patient might actually need rehabilitation of this kind; rehabilitation, that is, in which patients are having to learn how to walk again? It’s the type of thing that you’d imagine is normally reserved for patients needing post-surgery rehabilitation; patients who’ve suffered spinal cord injuries, neurological disorders, car-crashes, amputations and the like. That’s big league, serious stuff. We’re essentially talking about a type of rehabilitative treatment for people who’re on the cusp of, or who’re already suffering from, life-changing injuries/illnesses.
So is this the type of treatment that people suffering from Long Covid are likely to need? I ask because as we’ve already established, it’s the type of treatment that’s depicted in the image the BBC have attached to an article entitled, “Long Covid funding to unearth new treatments” the first paragraph of which reads: “Thousands of people with ‘long Covid’ could benefit from the funding of 15 new studies of the condition, its causes and potential treatments”. To help us on the way towards answering this question, here’s what the NHS guide to the symptoms currently associated with ‘Long Covid’ has to say for itself:
Common Long Covid symptoms include:
extreme tiredness (fatigue)
shortness of breath
chest pain or tightness
problems with memory and concentration (‘brain fog’)
difficulty sleeping (insomnia)
heart palpitations
dizziness
pins and needles
joint pain
depression and anxiety
tinnitus, earaches
feeling sick, diarrhoea, stomach aches, loss of appetite
a high temperature, cough, headaches, sore throat, changes to sense of smell or taste
rashes
Now I’m no doctor, admittedly, but I’m not entirely satisfied that a programme of rehabilitative walking usually reserved for wheelchair bound patients in post-surgery recovery is going to prove particularly efficacious when it comes to the treatment of long Covid patients with earache, diarrhoea and changes of smell or taste. In fact, I’m not satisfied at all.
Indeed it rather seems to me that the BBC’s choice of image, when considered as an accompaniment to this particular article, might justifiably be described as misinformation; that is, as information that unduly exaggerates the risks associated with long Covid in a highly misleading or a sensationalist way.
By the way, do you like my definition of misinformation? Thanks. Perhaps it might interest you, then, to know it’s culled from the BBC’s own editorial guidelines. Specifically, therein we find “Section 3, Accuracy”, and, more particularly, “Sub-section 3.3.24”, which states that, “Reconstructions [which this image undeniably is] are when events are quite explicitly re-staged”, and that in order to abide by the BBC’s editorial guidelines, “They should normally be based on a substantial and verifiable body of evidence… [and they] should not overdramatise in a misleading or sensationalist way”.
On this basis, then, is it not the case that the BBC’s own reality-check team, that bastion of fairness and impartiality in a world gone wrong, should hold the organisation to account for spreading long Covid misinformation? Is it not an article that exaggerates and sensationalises the effects of long Covid? Further, is it not likely to generate additional, or indeed to heighten existing cases of, psychosomatic health disorders in the U.K.?
I guess if you’re the type of person who’s already suffering from heightened worry about your health, about lockdown, about physical contact with others, about viruses, about disease; I guess if you surf the web but never really read anything carefully; if you scan the thumbnails on the BBC’s news homepage but never click through to the articles; if you look at an article’s opening image and then only scan the first two or three paragraphs of text thereafter… then I guess, absolutely, it might indeed be considered ‘misinformation.’
“But isn’t this all just a little pedantic?” I hear you ask. “A bit nit-picky?” Oh, absolutely. And doesn’t it feel good to be playing the BBC at their own game for a change. So good, in fact, that you really must forgive me. I’m enjoying myself so much that I’m going to continue to be pedantic for a little while yet.
Because you see I guess, too, that if you’re prone to experiencing psychosomatic disorders of one kind of another, if you’re already well-known to your local GP surgery and A&E, then it might panic you quite a bit to think that the image the BBC have chosen to use here depicts a fate that might lie in store for you too if you ever contracted Covid and then experienced Long Covid. I guess too that if you’re that way inclined, then you might even feel you needed to take the vaccine, any vaccine, right this minute, no questions asked, jab jab jab, please, put it in me doctor, oh God, put it in me… and to hell with any kind of informed consent.
Jabbed or not, if you’re that way inclined then I guess you might nevertheless see that picture, that image of the Long Covid patient struggling to walk in the BBC’s article, and then, at some point later, get around to thinking that you’re experiencing the symptoms of Long Covid, that you’re really ill, that you’re dying, that you’re in need of immediate and very urgent medical attention, that you’ve got to go to A&E immediately because you might end up in a wheelchair unable to walk; I guess, too, that you might see that picture and then end up yo-yo-ing in and out of the healthcare system for the rest of your life, costing the taxpayer money, wasting valuable medical time, worrying that there’s a direct line of causality that “the science” has established between you coughing, you sneezing and you ending up in hospital needing a wheelchair to get you to your rehabilitative walking therapy sessions.
It’s strange, isn’t it? I mean, the BBC is normally so keen, so eager, to castigate others for disseminating what they’ve decreed to be Covid misinformation capable of causing or exacerbating existing physical disorders. Yet in the case of psychosomatic disorders – i.e. panic, hyperventilating, health anxiety, generalised anxiety, hypertension, depression, chills, gastrointestinal disturbances – they’re curiously reluctant to take up those same sanctimonious ‘fact-checking’ cudgels.
It’s a reluctance that matters, though, isn’t it? The sad and unfortunate thing about psychosomatic disorders is that those suffering from them are more likely than almost any other group in society to place unnecessary pressure on the NHS. After all, if you’re worried that you’re seriously unwell and/or in imminent danger of dying, where’s the first place you’re going to go? That’s right: a primary or secondary healthcare provider. The problem, of course, is that people who suffer from those types of disorders are neither seriously ill nor in imminent danger of dying. What they ‘are’ is suffering from severe anxiety. That’s not nothing, of course; but it’s hardly first responder or A&E type stuff, is it?
That this might constitute a problem during a global pandemic of a mild respiratory illness in which we’ve all been told to put our lives, businesses, careers on hold because the NHS is under massive existential pressure, seems obvious. If the NHS is already clogged up with respiratory tract illness and you then go and add a whole bunch of psychosomatic patients to the mix… well, you’ve got a problem, haven’t you? You’d think the BBC would care about that sort of thing, particularly given the pious, reverent tone it normally adopts when it’s representing the NHS. You’d think they’d want to provide balanced, calm, rational reportage of what was going on; reportage that was clear about the extremely low risk Covid poses to the vast majority of people in this country.
I wonder. Could it be that if we were to widen the scope of the concept of ‘misinformation’ to include not only information capable of causing physical harm, but also that likely to cause psychosomatic harm, we’d be forced to conclude that the BBC, with all its Covid exaggerations, its hyperbole, its uncritical, unreflexive treatment of “the science” handed down to it by SAGE, its failure to hold the Government to account, to approach statistics sceptically, to put case numbers into perspective, its obsession with filming death porn reports from inside hospitals (etc etc)… if we were to consider all of that as misinformation too, might we not end up concluding that the BBC has done as much damage to the psychological health and wellbeing of the nation it purports to inform, educate and entertain as Donald Trump ever did with his tweety-tweety chit-chat about preliminary research into hydroxychloroquine as a prophylactic against Covid? I wonder indeed.
Dr Freddie Attenborough is a former academic. You can see his substack account here.
FACT checkers at the BBC, Reuters and Snopes have been busy debunking the Covid vaccine ‘magnet challenge’. Social media including TikTok, Facebook and Instagram have been awash with videos showing people with magnets sticking to the exact spot on their arms where they had received a Covid jab. See some independently verified examples here.
All three companies went to great lengths to explain why a magnet cannot possibly cling to your skin, without experimenting on a single vaccinated person to see what would happen.
BBC fact checker Jack Goodman spoke to many who said the magnet challenge worked for them and ‘were genuinely curious as to why’. He didn’t provide them with answers; instead he focused on one TikTok prankster called Emily who admitted she’d licked a magnet as a joke and stuck it to her arm.
It has been left to independent associations, doctors and journalists to test the phenomenon. Not On The Beeb founder and award-winning director Mark Playne tracked down a woman called Lorraine whose Instagram post of a magnet sticking to the Pfizer vaccine site on her left arm went viral. The fact checkers said the video was a fake but none of them bothered to visit her and test for themselves.
Playne told me: ‘Lorraine’s son Carl demonstrated the spot of magnetism on his mother. Even though I was inches away, I asked Carl to take the camera so I could try for myself. Feeling a magnet being tugged out of your hand, by a subtle yet defined magnetic force from under the skin of a living human being, is quite a shock.
‘Sensing the magnet being repelled and trying to flip so that the correct polarity was in contact with the skin was mind-blowing.’
A group called the European Forum for Vaccine Vigilance (EFVV) representing 25 European countries, took the magnet challenge to the Belle-Étoile shopping centre in Strassen, Luxembourg. The organisation represents over 100,000 medical professionals and scientists, from pro-vaccine choice groups, who are fighting for the 258 million people in Europe who have no freedom of choice when it comes to vaccination.
EFVV randomly interviewed 30 vaccinated and 30 unvaccinated people between June 1 and June 5. There were 15 men and 15 women in each group.
Their published report says: ‘In the non-vaccinated group, the number of people showing attraction to the magnet was zero. In the vaccinated group, 29 of the 30 individuals showed attraction to the magnet. The magnet adhered to their skin without difficulty.
‘Two individuals, a nurse who was one of the first to be vaccinated, and a financial analyst, showed abnormal electric field emission. It seems that people who were vaccinated earlier are more electromagnetic than people who were vaccinated more recently. The magnet adheres faster and holds better than in freshly vaccinated people.’
Some participants were shocked and upset at the results. EFVV said: ‘It was an extremely disorienting experiment for some. One lady cried and said that she had not wanted to be vaccinated but was forced to by her employer because she was in contact with customers.’
The obvious questions are: what is in the vaccine to cause magnetic pull and what are the consequences for the magnetised?
A former GP who prefers to remain anonymous hypothesises, and she stresses that it is a hypothesis, that graphene oxide, a synthetic form of carbon which is being studied as a vaccine delivery method, is the culprit. Graphene oxide is magnetic.
Dr T said: ‘They want to say it is crazy for us to consider that such a thing could be in the vaccinations and yet the literature points to research being exactly in this area for years. And we have magnetic people after vaccination.’
None of the Covid vaccines used in the UK (Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Moderna) lists graphene oxide as an ingredient and all three companies deny its inclusion. So far, independent researchers have not managed to obtain empty vaccine vials for analysis, although international lawyer Reiner Fuellmich, whose Coronavirus Investigative Committee Corona Committee Foundation (corona-ausschuss.de) is gathering evidence surrounding the pandemic response, says some vials they have tested contain graphene oxide while others do not.
Chemical engineering researchers from Monash University, Melbourne, have studied whether superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs) could improve the efficiency of vaccine gene delivery, and Chinese scientists have studied graphene oxide for the same purpose.
The Graphene Flagship Project, a collaboration of 150 academic and research groups in 20 countries, is studying the safety of graphene oxide for many uses, including vaccines. The tests began in 2013 in the lab, and in animals, and are ongoing. The researchers warn that ‘there needs to be sound, science-based assessment of the potential impact on human health’ after they found it settled in the lungs, causing asbestosis-like illness. It also settled in the liver, caused cell death, mitochondrial dysfunction, changed the diversity in the gut and caused blood clots in mice after 15 minutes. We know that one of the few adverse reactions that has been accepted by the establishment are blood clots that can form in the brain and body, known as vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia (VITT). Last week AstraZeneca and Johnson and Johnson both announced they are studying their vaccines to see whether they can be modified to reduce blood clots.
Dr T, who has tested the magnet challenge on vaccine recipients herself, believes that graphene oxide is in the vaccine, and that it crosses the blood/brain barrier (BBB). The BBB is there to protect the brain from toxins, but scientists have been trying to breach it to treat diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. They discovered that polyethylene glycol (PEG), which is in the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA covid vaccines, can cross it and so can polysorbate 80, which is in the AstraZeneca vaccine. Both substances could allow graphene oxide through too.
Dr T thinks graphene oxide could be the ingredient affecting the 12 cranial nerves emerging from the mid-line structure in the brain and the brain stem. These nerves govern our mood, heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, digestion, sight, taste, pain, touch, hearing, balance, muscles inside the major organs, neck muscles and speech.
She said that damaged cranial nerves could account for the many serious neurological and physical adverse reactions reported to the Medicines Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the government body responsible for regulating all medicines in the UK.
The Yellow Card Scheme to July 9 shows 100,564 reports of headache and 9,649 of migraine. Eye disorders are 16,980 with blindness at 327. Psychiatric disorders stand at 20,856 and hallucinations at 1,183. Facial paralysis, including Bell’s Palsy, are 1,310, nervous system disorders 212,708, strokes and haemorrhages 2,207, Guillain-Barré syndrome 377, tremors 10,565 and dizziness 30,715. Pulmonary embolism, deep vein thrombosis, seizures, paralysis, nosebleeds, all types of haemorrhage, vertigo, and tinnitus account for another 23,907 reactions. That’s on top of the 1,440 reported deaths.
Maddie de Garay, 12, from Cincinnati, Ohio, who took part in Pfizer’s vaccine trial for 12-15-year-olds, suffered a serious adverse reaction with neurological and physical symptoms that include seizures, loss of bladder control, loss of memory and heavy menstrual cycles. She is now in a wheelchair and she is fed through a tube.
Dr T said: ‘Maddie’s mum Stephanie said her symptoms worsened after she received an MRI scan. MRI stands for magnetic resonance imaging. If there are magnetic nanoparticles in the vaccine, and someone has an MRI those microscopic particles will be attracted to the scanner – it’s the biggest magnet you can get. They will act like shrapnel, ripping through the brain, damaging everything in their path.’
If patients who believe they are vaccine-damaged experience worsening symptoms post MRI, that should surely be a red flag for doctors?
“As Mr. Yakub continued to preach for converts, he told his people that he would make the others work for them. (This promise came to pass.) Naturally, there are always some people around who would like to have others do their work. Those are the ones who fell for Mr. Yakub’s teaching, 100 per cent.” — The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, chapter 55 of Message to the Blackman in America titled “The Making of Devil”
“Three blessings a Jewish man is obligated to pray daily: ‘(Blessed art Thou,) Who did not make me a gentile; Who did not make me a woman; and Who did not make me a slave.’” — Babylonian Talmud, Menahot 43b–44a
The story of the Jewish American experience that most Jews want to believe, and want the world to believe, is one of almost endless historical victimhood. They insist that they fled anti-Semitic oppression in Europe, landing safely on Ellis Island long after the Civil War’s end in 1865, and certainly some did. … continue
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