CDC « Aletho News

Our Digital Panopticon

The CDC has been using phone tracking data to monitor schools and churches. The CIA has also been spying on Americans, with no judicial oversight and without congressional approval.

By Aaron Kheriaty, MD | Human Flourishing | May 4, 2022

Yesterday, Vice broke the story that during the previous two years, as the headline announced, “The CDC tracked Millions of Phones to See If Americans Followed COVID Lockdown Orders.” According to documents obtained by Motherboard, the CDC used phone location data to monitor schools and churches, and wanted to use the data for applications beyond covid: “The documents also show that although the CDC used COVID-19 as a reason to buy access to the data more quickly, it intended to use it for more-general CDC purposes.” The recovered CDC documents, dating from 2021, state that the data “has been critical for ongoing response efforts, such as hourly monitoring of activity in curfew zones or detailed counts of visits to participating pharmacies for vaccine monitoring.”

The documents contain a long list of what the CDC describes as 21 different “potential CDC use cases for data.” These include, among others, monitoring curfews, neighbor-to-neighbor visits, visits to churches and other places of worship, school visits, and “examination of the effectiveness of public policy on [the] Navajo Nation.” Other use cases mentioned in the documents include public health issues beyond covid, such as “research points of interest for physical activity and chronic disease prevention such as visits to parks, gyms, or weight management businesses” as well as “exposure to certain building types, urban areas, and violence.”

Although the data the CDC purchased from the controversial broker, SafeGraph, was aggregated and designed to show trends, “researchers have repeatedly raised concerns with how location data can be deanonymized and used to track specific people.” Researchers have repeatedly demonstrated that that unmasking specific users from these aggregated human mobility datasets is possible. One research team studied fifteen months of human mobility data for one and a half million individuals and published their results in Nature: Scientific Reports: “In a dataset where the location of an individual is specified hourly and with a spatial resolution equal to that given by the [mobile phone] carrier’s antennas, four spatio-temporal points are enough to uniquely identify 95% of the individuals.” They coarsened the special and temporal data and still found “even coarse datasets provide little anonymity.”

“SafeGraph offers visitor data at the Census Block Group level that allows for extremely accurate insights related to age, gender, race, citizenship status, income, and more,” one of the CDC documents reads. Due to its questionable practices, SafeGraph was banned from the Google Play Store in June 2021, which meant that meant that any app developers using SafeGraph’s code had to remove it from their apps. The company includes among its investors the former head of Saudi intelligence. This is where the CDC went to get its tracking data, paying SafeGraph $420,000 for access to one year of data.

Evidence also emerged recently that the CIA, like Israel and Canada, has been similarly using unauthorized digital surveillance to spy on Americans. After supporting vaccine mandates in 2021, the ACLU finally took an interest again in civil liberties in 2022. They expressed alarm when newly declassified documents revealed that the CIA has been secretly conducting massive surveillance programs that capture Americans’ private information.

Like the Israeli spy agency Shin Bet, our federal intelligence agency was spying not on suspected terrorists but on ordinary Americans, with no judicial oversight and without congressional approval, as the ACLU noted: “This surveillance is done without any court approval, and with few, if any, safeguards imposed by Congress to protect our civil liberties.” They concluded: “These reports raise serious questions about what information of ours the CIA is vacuuming up in bulk and how the agency exploits that information to spy on Americans. This invasion of our privacy must stop.” Though ACLU arrived a bit late to the party, as the old saw has it, better late than never.

U.S. Senators Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, both Democrats and members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called for declassification of relevant CIA documents. In a letter of April 13, 2021 which they made public, the two senators expressed concern that the CIA program was “entirely outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection [of data], and without any of the judicial, congressional or even executive branch oversight that comes from [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—FISA] collection.” Despite Congress’s clear intent, with the support of the American people, to limit warrantless collection of Americans’ private records, the senators warn, “these documents reveal serious problems associated with warrantless backdoor searches of Americans, the same issue that has generated bipartisan concern in the FISA context.”

There is a broader legal context for these extra-legal developments in mass surveillance of civilian populations. Since the war on terror began, Western nations have legislatively scaled up their increasingly intrusive networks of mass surveillance (often referred to with the euphemism “bulk collection”). The last decade has seen such measures passed in the U.K., France, Australia, India, Sweden, and other countries—not to mention the AI and facial- and gate-recognition enabled surveillance in China, technology that Xi is already exporting to eager rogue regimes around the globe.

May 4, 2022 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Deception | CDC, CIA, Human rights, United States | Leave a comment

Kickbacks, Corruption & Scandal: The History of the CDC

By Michael Bryant | OffGuardian | April 29, 2022

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) was founded in 1946 as a backwater quasi-governmental agency with a negligible budget and a handful of employees tasked with a simple mission: “prevent malaria from spreading across the nation.”

Seventy-five years later it has metastasized into a multi-billion dollar bureaucratic behemoth that oversees and controls virtually all aspects of public health programs, policies and practices across the United States.

The CDC is the primary US national public health agency tasked with “protecting America from health, safety and security threats” and advertises that it will “increase the health security of our nation.”

Guidelines and recommendations by the CDC set the standards for mainstream medicine in America and are considered the de facto rules by which public health departments and most institutions throughout the country must operate.

The CDC’s pledge to the American people vows that it will:

“be a diligent steward of the funds entrusted to our agency, base all public health decisions on the highest quality scientific data that is derived openly and objectively and place the benefits to society above the benefits to our institution.”

This high-minded mission statement gives the impression that the CDC will, above all else, work diligently and honestly to protect the health of all Americans. A careful review of the CDC’s history and current mode of operation indicate a stark contrast between these noble words and how the CDC actually functions.

OZ HAS SPOKEN

“The CDC has enormous credibility among physicians, in no small part because the agency is generally thought to be free of industry bias. Financial dealings with bio-pharmaceutical companies threaten that reputation.”
Marcia Angell, former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine

In the mainstream media vortex, questioning the state religion of CDC decrees and guidelines lands one firmly in the camp of the “conspiracy-minded,” accused of practicing sorcery or some manner of medieval medical quackery.

In the minds of many Americans the CDC represents the final word on “all matters health-related.” To question this omnipotent bureaucratic agency is to challenge sacred health commandments and cast doubt on the medical establishment itself.

The widely accepted belief about the CDC holds that it is a governmental agency which functions outside of health industry relationships and consequently operates free from the monied interests of the health management sector. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Despite this reputation, further scrutiny reveals that the CDC falls far short of its stated purpose. As the scope and budget of this agency has ballooned over the years, including a war chest of corporate contributions, we have to ask ourselves, “Does the CDC fulfill its mission statement of protecting public health or is it now just another bloated quasi-governmental agency that works on behalf of its donors?”

Contrary to its disclaimer that “the CDC does not accept commercial support”, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) reported, in 2015, that “the CDC does receive millions of dollars in industry gifts and funding, both directly and indirectly.”

A petition filed in 2019 by several watchdog groups contends that the CDC’s assertion that it is free from influence peddling and has “no financial interests or other relationships with the manufacturers of commercial products” are “indisputably false.”

The petition goes a step further asserting that the CDC, “knows the claims are false, because it has procedures to address from whom and under what circumstances it accepts millions of dollars from contributors, including manufacturers of commercial products.”

This allegation is supported by multiple examples from the CDC’s own Active Program’s Report.

For instance, Pfizer Inc. contributed $3.435 million since 2016 to the CDC Foundation for a program on the prevention of Cryptococcal disease.

Programs like these became commonplace as early as 1983 largely due to Congressional authorization which allowed the CDC to accept “external” gifts:

made unconditionally… for the benefit of the [Public Health] Service or for the carrying out of any of its functions.”

Despite the caveat that these donations must be geared towards public health, the reality is these contributions come with strings attached. As noted earlier in the BMJ report, Pharma funds given to the CDC for specific projects return to Pharma pockets via marketing and sales.

The spigot of funding initiated through Congressional permission would open full blast a decade later, with the creation of the CDC Foundation.

THE CDC FOUNDATION

The CDC Foundation was created by Congress in 1992 and incorporated two years later to “mobilize philanthropic and private-sector resources.”

Once established, the CDC Foundation became the primary pass-through mechanism utilized by a cornucopia of corporate interests to exert influence over various aspects of the CDC. Large pharmaceutical companies contributed millions of dollars each year to the “separate, philanthropic CDC Foundation.“

The CDC Foundation would then “donate philanthropically” Big Pharma contributions to the CDC itself. This sleight of hand ensured the CDC could maintain they never accepted money directly from Big Pharma.

A decade after its inception the Foundation had quickly raised $100 million in private funds “to enhance the CDC’s work.”

Some have argued that once this avalanche of monied interests was unleashed, the agency itself was transformed into the primary marketing arm of the Pharmaceutical Industry creating a hornet’s nest of ethics violations, outright corruption and opened up a slew of questions as to who the CDC actually works for.

Was the CDC Foundation truly established as a philanthropic enterprise or as a way to conceal conflicts of interest?

Did this massive influx of corporate cash cede control of the CDC to the medical and pharmaceutical industry and their financiers, allowing them to control the direction of “public” health policy?

Would business oriented, for-profit medical programs, using the CDC’s imprimatur, come to dominate public health policy?

Those questions seemed to have their answer in the CDC Foundation’s donor list which reads like a ‘Who’s Who’ of pandemic profiteers and philanthropic mercenaries.

Major sources of cash for the Foundation include the GAVI Alliance, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Fidelity Investments, Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust, Microsoft Corporation, Imperial College London, Johns Hopkins University, Google, Facebook, Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp., Johnson & Johnson Foundation and the omnipresent ‘do-gooders’ at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

INTERNAL PROBLEMS

In 2016 a group of concerned senior scientists from within the CDC wrote a letter to then CDC Chief of Staff Carmen Villar alleging that the CDC “is being influenced and shaped by outside parties… [and this] is becoming the norm and not the rare exception.”

The transgressions cited in that letter include: “questionable and unethical practices,” “cover up of inaccurate screening data” and “definitions changed and data cooked to make the results look better than they were.”

The scientists went on to note that the CDC, “essentially suppressed [findings] so media and/or Congressional staff would not become aware of the problems” and “CDC staff [went] out of their way to delay FOIAs and obstruct any inquiry.”

The indictment also claimed that CDC representatives had “irregular relationships” with corporate entities that suggested direct conflicts of interest.

While criticisms of the CDC have increased in recent years, a look back at their history reveals a long list of misconduct and questionable practices.

SCANDALS ‘R’ US

As far back as 1976 the CDC was creating mass medical terror campaigns in order to procure increased funding and justify mass vaccination programs. The infamous 1976 swine flu scandal sought to inoculate 213 million Americans for a pandemic that didn’t exist. By the time the program collapsed in late 1976, 46 million Americans were needlessly injected– despite the knowledge that neurological disorders were associated with the vaccines. This resulted in thousands of adverse events including hundreds of incidents of Guillain-Barre Syndrome.

This deception was meticulously exposed by Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes.

At the onset of the mass vaccination program, Dr. David Sencer – then head of the CDC – when pushed on national TV, admitted there had only been “several [swine flu] cases reported worldwide and none confirmed.” When asked if he had encountered “any other outbreaks of swine flu anywhere in the world”, he bluntly answered, “No.”

The program moved forward.

In contrast to the CDC’s publicly stated position as “protector of public health,” this type of misconduct would become standard operating procedure and serve as the template for future invented pandemics.

A growing rap sheet of scandals would come to define the CDC’s existence.

In 1999 the CDC was accused of misspending $22.7 million appropriated for chronic fatigue syndrome. Government auditors said they could not determine what happened to $4.1 million of that money and the CDC could not explain where the money went.
In 2000, the agency essentially lied to Congress about how it spent $7.5 million that had been appropriated for research on the hantavirus. Instead the CDC diverted much of that money into other programs. “One official said the total diverted is almost impossible to trace because of CDC bookkeeping practices, but he estimated the diversions involved several million dollars.”
In 2009, in the midst of the now infamous H1N1 swine flu hoax the CDC was forced to recall 800,000 doses of swine flu vaccine for children for a pandemic that never materialized.
In 2010 Congress discovered that the CDC “knowingly endangered DC residents regarding lead in the drinking water.” A Congressional report found that the CDC did not properly warn residents of high levels of lead in the DC drinking water and “left the public health community with the dangerous and wrong impression that lead-contaminated water is safe for children to drink.”
In 2016 The Hill reported on two scandals at the CDC. One involved the “cover up” of “the poor performance of a women’s health program called WISEWOMAN.” The allegations asserted that within the program, “definitions were changed and data ‘cooked’ to make the results look better than they were” and the CDC actively suppressed this information.
The other scandal involved ties between Coca-Cola and two ‘high-ranking’ CDC officials. The two scientists were accused of manipulating studies about the safety of sugar laden soft drinks. Two days after these connections were revealed one of the accused CDC scientists retired.

These scandals were brought to light by the CDC Scientists Preserving Integrity, Diligence and Ethics in Research, or CDC SPIDER.

As part of their statement these scientists remarked:

our mission is being influenced and shaped by outside parties and rogue interests…. What concerns us most, is that it is becoming the norm and not the rare exception.”

Their complaints were filed anonymously “for fear of retribution.”

Another dodgy, yet textbook, example of the incestuous nature of Big Pharma’s Revolving Door was the case of former CDC commander Julie Gerberding. As director of the CDC from 2002 to 2009 Gerberding, “shepherded Merck’s highly controversial and highly profitable Gardasil vaccine through the regulatory maze.”

From there she moved on to a cozy and highly profitable position as Merck’s vaccine division president and curiously lucky enough to cash in her Merck stock holdings at opportune times.

Another in a series of collusion scandals hit the CDC in 2018 when director Brenda Fitzgerald was forced to resign as she was caught buying stock in cigarette and junk food companies, the very companies the CDC regulates.

THE CDC AND THE VACCINE INDUSTRY

Although the CDC does not regulate the pharmaceutical industry, the agency’s policies and recommendations have profound implications for drug makers. Nowhere is this more apparent than national vaccination policy- in particular the CDC Child and Adolescent Immunization Schedule.

Despite pushing the world’s most aggressive vaccination campaign the facts on the ground show a decidedly different reality than CDC advertisements would lead us to believe on the efficacy of this campaign.

With the expanded vaccine schedule no demonstrable positive returns in children’s health outcomes have accompanied the windfalls to the pharmaceutical industry. Chronic disease in American children has skyrocketed from 6% to 54% in the past 40 years and the United States holds the lamentable distinction of the highest infant mortality rates in the developed world.

Some point out that the CDC currently operates as chief vaccine sales and marketing agent for Big Pharma buying, selling and distributing vaccines even as the agency has direct conflicts of interest by holding multiple patents on vaccines and various aspects of vaccine technologies. Compounding this deceptive state of affairs, the CDC poses as a neutral scientific body that assesses vaccine safety while mandating increased vaccine doses to the American people.

While the CDC does not sell vaccines directly, it does receive royalties from companies who acquire licenses to their technologies.

The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) plays a major role in this scheme. The 12 member ACIP Committee has extraordinary influence on the health of virtually all US citizens as it is the body tasked with “adding to and/or altering the national vaccine schedule.”

The CDC and various members of this committee, in what can charitably be called ‘conflicts of interest’, currently own and have profited from an array of vaccine patents. These include vaccine patents for Flu, Rotavirus, Hepatitis A, Anthrax, West Nile virus, SARS, Rift Valley Fever, and several other diseases of note.

Other patents held by the CDC encompass various applications of vaccine technologies including Nucleic acid vaccines for prevention of flavivirus infection, aerosol delivery systems for vaccines, adjuvants, various vaccination testing methods, vaccine quality control and numerous other vaccine accessories.

THE CDC AND COVID: THE ROAD TO COVID HELL IS PAVED WITH CDC OBFUSCATIONS

Besides, as the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect. – Jonathan Swift

As the central organization commissioned with “protecting America from health, safety and security threats,” the CDC was presented its most significant assignment in its controversial history when the Covid Crisis of 2020 spread to the shores of the United States.

The CDC would shift into hyperdrive offering up all manner of advice, guidelines, regulations, decrees and laws impacting virtually every aspect of life across the country. Most of these decrees represented radical departures from past epidemiological principles.

During this existential ‘crisis’ the CDC would initiate an extraordinary campaign of rolling and shifting regulations. This onslaught of new “guidelines” included face coverings, social distancing, contact tracing, quarantines and isolation, Covid testing, travel regulations, school closures, business procedures– little of everyday life did not come under the influence and control of the CDC machinery.

No stone was left un-micromanaged— even the mundane task of washing hands was transformed into a 4 page baroque ritual, video included, via CDC guidelines. It seemed the only thing notably omitted from CDC “expert guidelines” during this teachable moment was nutrition and exercise.

CHANGE WITH THE CHANGING SCIENCE™

This onslaught of edicts and definitions shifted on a weekly basis creating a climate of confusion and chaos. When questioned, the CDC would sternly proclaim “the science is settled.”

When politically expedient they reconfigured their protocols artfully asserting “the science evolved.”

Standard definitions became fungible when convenient.

While the most visible and contentious dissembling concerned the efficacy of masks – dozens of comparative studies clearly illustrated their ineffectiveness and harms – there were far more profound and disturbing manipulations emanating from the ever-shifting sands at CDC headquarters.

One of the more egregious examples of CDC duplicity occurred on March 24,2020 when the CDC changed well established protocols on ‘how cause of death’ would now be reported on death certificates, exclusively for COVID-19.

This seemingly benign modification became a watershed moment launching a process by which many deaths would be erroneously coded as U07.1 COVID-19. This led to massive COVID-19 death misattribution, was used to ramp up the fear and used as justification for the assemblage of draconian Covid policies.

Critics have called for a full audit of the CDC noting that, “These changes in data definition, collection, and analysis were made only for Covid” in violation of Federal guidelines. In a statement to Reuters, the CDC said:

it made adjustments to its COVID Data Tracker’s mortality data on March 14 because its algorithm was accidentally counting deaths that were not COVID-19-related.”

Two years after the problematic change in certification, the CDC would commence the process of removing tens of thousands from its “Covid death” toll.

THE COVID VACCINE

As the Covid crisis unfolded, all of the long and winding roads ended up in the same place: experimental mRNA gene therapies which were sold as ‘vaccines’ and advertised as a panacea to extricate the world from this ‘crisis.’ The CDC, as trusted go-to government body and chief marketing representative, was tasked with leading the country to safer shores and peddling Pharma’s latest cash cow to the American public.

To sell these experimental injections the CDC relied on the ever handy marketing mantra of “safe and effective”. Consistent with past maneuverings, CDC communiques on the mRNA injections were chaotic when not outright duplicitous.

Certain problems cropped up almost immediately as it was discovered that this sales pitch was dependent on flawed study designs and data that was clearly massaged and manipulated.

The very same CDC that originally touted Covid injections as being able to “stop transmission” took an abrupt U-Turn admitting they couldn’t.

Once the “vaccine” rollout was in full swing the CDC, true to form, ignored all warning signs.

As early as January 2021 safety signals pointed towards potential dangers of these controversial injections. Adverse reactions were either downplayed or completely ignored. Risk-benefit analysis was also kept off the table even as the data painted a not-so-rosy portrayal of “safe and effective.”

The CDC’s reputation took another hit when it was reported that large swaths of Covid data had been hidden from public scrutiny and independent analysis. This added to the pile of pandemic policy scandals and further tarnished the CDC’s veneer as a reliable public health agency.

POSTSCRIPT

The story of CDC kleptocracy parallels the story of contemporary US government institutions. From its humble beginnings as an agency with a mission to manage the swamp, it has degenerated into a bloated bureaucracy that has become a full fledged member of the swamp.

That the CDC isn’t telling the truth to Americans on important matters of public health is in plain sight. It is no surprise that polls show public confidence in the CDC plummeting and, in the mind’s of many, the agency’s once honorable bubble has burst.

Accusations of CDC corruption no longer exist exclusively in the skeptical minds of government critics; they have become commonplace denunciations backed by mountains of easy-to-access evidence. No conspiracy is needed as a litany of scandals have come to characterize ‘business as usual’ at the CDC.

“Can we trust the CDC?”

To find the answer ask a different question.

“Who owns the CDC?”

Michael Bryant is a freelance journalist/activist and researcher who presently focuses primarily on issues surrounding health freedom. His work has appeared on HealthFreedomDefense.org

April 30, 2022 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | CDC, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Gates Foundation, GAVI Alliance, United States | Leave a comment

When will these vaccine zealots wake up to the truth?

By Guy Hatchard | TCW Defending Freedom | April 24, 2022

WE should not understate the naivety of the government, media and scientists during the pandemic. The tabloid-style stories of severe Covid outcomes, the authoritative voice of Dr Anthony Fauci (who has financial conflicts of interest), the allure of the word vaccine, and the exaggerated death toll in foreign lands all combined into a convincing call for immediate and coercive action. Yet behind the stories, the highly profitable pharmaceutical PR system was running at full steam playing on the fear factor. New Zealand fell head over heels in love. Love knows no reason and that was certainly the case here.

New Zealand is a long way from the rest of the world. We have a tradition of proud independence and self-sufficiency, but we rolled over and played Follow the Leader. No one in a position of influence struck a note of caution, especially not our Prime Minister. We instituted the largest public borrowing programme in our history and spent it on a US mega corporation with a poor safety record and a history of punitive malpractice judgments. The government instituted saturation advertising of vaccine safety and efficacy, and then followed up with mandates, sackings and social exclusion. Our media shouted down those few asking questions.

Times, however, have changed. The respected and conservative Wall Street Journal (WSJ) has aired concerns about poor regulatory decisions at the US Food and Drug Agency (FDA) over booster shots. It joins a growing international chorus of highly qualified and influential voices.

On April 3, in an opinion piece entitled ‘FDA Shuts Out Its Own Experts in Authorising Another Vaccine Booster’, Dr Marty Makary, a surgeon and public policy researcher at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, wrote: ‘The FDA last week authorised Americans over 50 to get a fourth Covid vaccine dose. Some of the FDA’s own experts disagreed, but the agency simply ignored them.’

Eric Rubin, editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine (arguably the world’s most influential medical journal) and a member of the FDA advisory committee on vaccines told CNN last month: ‘I haven’t seen enough data to determine whether anyone needs a fourth dose.’

Dr Cody Meissner, also a member of the FDA vaccine advisory committee and chief of paediatric infectious diseases at Tufts Children’s Hospital in Boston, agreed: ‘The fourth dose is an unanswered question for people with a normal immune system.’

A third member of the committee, Dr Paul Offit of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, went further. He told the Atlantic magazine that he advised his 20-something son to forgo the first booster.

Two top FDA officials, Marion Gruber, Director of the FDA Office of Vaccine Research and Review and her deputy Paul Krause, quit the FDA in September last year complaining of undue pressure to authorise boosters and a lack of data to support their use.

Unbelievably, the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) rubber-stamped the FDA decision to approve a second booster without even convening its panel of external independent vaccine experts.

The WSJ article described the effect of boosters as fleeting, mild and short-lived. It sounded a note of alarm saying that neither the CDC nor the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) had made a priority of studying vaccine complications. Moreover their VAERS data collection and analysis process is incomplete and inadequate. In other words, the safety investigation to date of adverse effects of mRNA vaccination is incomplete and potentially misleading.

The central question raised by the WSJ opinion piece is, why wouldn’t the US regulators wish to undertake accurate and complete investigation of adverse effects of mRNA vaccination? Have pharmaceutical interests been able to influence decision-making at the FDA to their own commercial advantage at the expense of safety considerations?

The British Medical Journal agrees. On March 16 it published an article which said: ‘Evidence-based medicine has been corrupted by corporate interests, failed regulation and commercialisation of academia.’

The lessons are obvious. We have stifled debate and slavishly followed FDA advice. Now there is a need for revaluation and debate. We have travelled a long way down a one-way street, but it appears to be a dead end. The triumphant articles published about a survey of vaccine-resistant people born in Dunedin was a low point in uncritical mainstream media publishing. We have to regain an objective voice.

A paper published on April 5 in the New England Journal of Medicine found that any measurable protective effect of the fourth inoculation (which in any case, it found, is very small in absolute terms) disappeared after just eight weeks. Moreover a paper in the Lancet on April 8 admitted that boosters carry a risk of additional side-effects. Both these papers, however, skirted the obvious safety questions in favour of weak praise for vaccine orthodoxy.

In contrast the WSJ article asked the important question: ‘Who is actually getting serious about measuring the extent of adverse events, rather than continuing to urge uncritical acceptance of a largely ineffective vaccine?’

So far New Zealand media have steered clear of such questions. Dr Ashley Bloomfield, chief executive of the country’s Health Ministry, has refused to institute mandatory reporting of adverse events following mRNA Covid vaccination and he has excelled at denying vaccine exemptions to those injured by the first shot. Silence is no longer tenable, although in actuality it never was. Questions have to be asked. No ifs or buts. Overseas media outlets of the thinking kind are waking up.

If we can’t face debating rationally with our critics, we are drifting on to the rocks of ignorance and prejudice.

Time for us to wake up.

April 24, 2022 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science | CDC, COVID-19 Vaccine, FDA, New Zealand, NIH, United States | 2 Comments

Why We Sued to Overturn the Federal Travel Mask Mandate — And Why We Won

By Leslie Manookian | The Defender | April 22, 2022

In America, the ends don’t justify the means. There are legal guardrails in place to protect our basic liberties and rights — even during a pandemic.

That was the message in the decision handed down Monday by a federal judge in our lawsuit to overturn the federal travel mask mandate.

Since early 2021, anyone traveling on a plane, bus or train, or anyone who used a shared ride service — or even walked into an airport or train station — was compelled to wear a face covering, often for hours at a time.

President Biden, on his first full day in office, signed an executive order on mandatory masking.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), citing a public health emergency, promulgated the order just eight days later.

The CDC circumvented a required notice and comment period and issued no scientific justifications for the specifics of the order.

Americans were supposed to take the government’s word for it, put on our masks and ask no questions.

But when flight attendants announced — repeatedly on each flight — that compliance is required “by federal law,” did you ever wonder: what federal law?

I did. And it led us at the Health Freedom Defense Fund to file suit against the mandate in federal court.

With assistance from our lawyers at the Davillier Law Group, we learned there is no “federal law” compelling masks for travel.

The CDC does not have the statutory authority to issue a sweeping mandate requiring masking. Nor does the agency have the authority to penalize Americans for non-compliance.

The Biden administration claimed its mask mandate was rooted in authority granted under the Public Health Service Act.

However, a careful reading of that law shows Congress never intended to grant such sweeping powers. In fact, the law is limited and specific, as the court pointed out in its decision.

One of the bigger red flags for the court was the CDC’s claim it could bypass a period of public notice and comment.

The CDC cited the pandemic “emergency” as justification for bypassing notice and comment.

Yet, as we all recall, by early 2021, the pandemic had been wreaking its havoc for nearly a year, yet the agency had proposed no such travel mask mandate.

It is hard to justify requiring emergency powers and circumventing all citizen comments when the CDC was marking time on masks for more than a year.

Indeed, if a mask mandate was key to the pandemic battle, Congress could have enacted such a bill, with debate, transparency and accountability. It did not.

In fact, public comment is at the core of credible and transparent regulatory policy because it allows for flaws and pitfalls to be cited and hopefully corrected.

Despite telling us all for years to “follow the science,” the CDC cited no scientific research to justify the mandate, nor did it offer justification for choosing the age of 2 for its exemption — clearly indicating the agency arbitrarily chose that age.

An abundance of research in major medical and scientific publications, including in the Journal of the American Medical Association, details the negative effects of prolonged mask-wearing, including among medical professionals and the military.

The CDC also ignored the serious, and medically verified, concerns voiced by Americans about how mask-wearing creates severe anxiety, as the two individual plaintiffs in our case detailed.

Clearly the federal government simply brushed away bona fide questions about mask efficacy and risk, and chose not to cite rationale of its own.

The government’s rationale is what we parents say often when our children question our demands: “Because I said so.”

That approach usually doesn’t work well with kids — and it sure falls short in setting policy for hundreds of millions of Americans.

As our lawsuit pointed out, never has a president entered an executive order mandating that every American citizen be required to don a type of garment or device, whether when traveling or otherwise, for any reason whatsoever.

And the U.S. Constitution certainly doesn’t grant the president power to enact nationwide edicts just because Congress failed to pass legislation he deems needed.

So now that you can choose to fly or ride mask-free, remember: Even in response to a pandemic, your government cannot do what it wants, when it wants and to whom it wants.

We are governed by laws, not the preferences of elites, and the Constitution is not suspended in an emergency.

Leslie Manookian is president and founder of Health Freedom Defense Fund, a nonprofit which seeks to rectify health injustice through education, advocacy and legal challenges to unjust mandates, laws and policies that undermine our health freedoms and human rights.

© 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 23, 2022 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | CDC, Covid-19, Human rights, United States | 1 Comment

TSA mask mandate

By Vinay Prasad | April 20, 2022

Just imagine we had a competent CDC who ran a cluster Random Controlled Trial of cloth masking mandate in airplanes and measured spread. It could even be factorial design and test different ventilation filters. Imagine the trial was negative– a judge would not need to strike down the mandate. It would have fallen by scientific consensus.

Imagine now it were positive. We could have a discussion about the effect size, if it varies by case rate at the flight origin city or traveller origin cities. We could discuss when the tradeoff might be worth it, and when it might be not worth it.

Imagine the trial was large. It could be powered for interaction by age. Do cloth masks protect babies or is it a false reassurance? Does it protect immunocompromised? Or again, false reassurance?

Imagine the trial had arms for different rules. An ok to snack arm or a no snacking arm. Does it work with a rule modification?

We ran zero such trials. The CDC ran no studies. No one knows the answer to these questions, despite their bluster. The truth is it seems highly implausible that wearing a mask on one ear lobe, while eating pretzels for an hour works.

The CDC failed it’s social contract. It implemented a policy and never generated evidence. This turned a scientific question into a political one. Naturally battle lines were drawn.

Finally a judge comes in and throws out the mandate. Many people are upset with the judge. But the judge didn’t fail you. The CDC failed you. It never ran a trial. It never generated knowledge. It kept us in the dark. It should be no surprise that it lost it’s power and legitimacy. It proved it does not deserve the power it was was entrusted by the people. It failed to use science to reduce uncertainty. We should be ashamed of the organization. I certainly am.

April 22, 2022 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | CDC, Covid-19, United States | Leave a comment

CDC Weighs ‘Upgrades’ to COVID Vaccines as Booster Strategy Fails

By James Lyons-Weiler | PopularRationalism | April 21, 2022

According to CNN, CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) continue to “mull over” what’s next for Covid-19 boosters, and indeed are even considering what the “upgrades” Covid-19 vaccines. There are indications that they know that “entirely different vaccine formulations could be needed”.

Currently, additional booster doses are recommended only for certain people with weakened immune systems and adults 50 and older.

CDC quoted Dr. Sara Oliver, one of CDC’s epidemic intelligence service officers with the Division of Viral Diseases, who provided a robust soundbite:

“Policy around future doses require continued evaluation of Covid-19 epidemiology and vaccine effectiveness, including the impact of both time and variants, and the ability of doses to improve this protection.”

The specifics CNN cited Oliver as seeing CDC needing to take into account include recent case counts, hospitalization rates, and vaccine effectiveness in the US, and also – shocking – including whether it’s waning over time. They also cited that she thought CDC should weigh “the impacts of circulating coronavirus variants”.

We know vaccine effectiveness is unacceptably low – and given Dr. Fantini’s results may actually be negative, indicating disease enhancement.

Oliver stated that the evolution of the virus will be an important consideration for considering “platforms” for future COVID-19 vaccinations.

It’s not hard to read between the lines here. Readers of PopularRationalism already know that the mRNA vaccines have proven to be worse than a dismal failure. This is CDC putting the word out that a second round of vaccine development is expected, and is about the closest we’ll ever see to CDC admitting the vaccination program has flopped.

And it’s surprising to see ACIP being focused on future “effectiveness”. Clearly, if newly formulated vaccines are proposed, they will be a square one in terms of the regulatory stage of development, and we should be seeing data on efficacy, which is a measure of a vaccine’s ability to reduce transmission in a prospective randomized clinical trial, not effectiveness, which is measured using real-world data.

As the real-world data on COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness came in, it was quite bad, so the net was lowered from “preventing transmission” and “reducing new infections” to “producing an antibody response”.

So far, according to USASpending.Gov, the US has now spent over 3.63 trillion dollars in its response to COVID-19. According to the US Center for Economic Studies, the US suffered record-smashing loss of -9.5% of its GDP in 2020, and over 30% shrinkage in economic growth.

Nevertheless, both Pfizer and Moderna are taking a stab at vaccines meant to be available against Omicron, but it is doubted whether the variant will be around long enough to even be targeted by the new vaccines. Pfizer is hoping for a vaccine that will remain effective for more than a year, while Moderna’s non-peer-reviewed preprint containing data from their internal study of the efficacy of their bivalent vaccine was cited by CDC with the careful caveat that the preprint had “not been peer-reviewed or published in a professional journal.”

In the heyday of the pandemic, Pfizer and Moderna could get away with sending FDA assurances that they would share data mentioned in press releases once the FDA gave EUA or full-out approval. Now that the fog of the pandemic has lifted, it seems that the standard practice of labeling press releases, such as Moderna’s recent one on their bivalent vaccine as “Forward Looking Statements” is in place, so I suspect Moderna, Pfizer and the SEC got my memos.

Due to evidence of lack of efficacy and need, FDA, Pfizer and Moderna have delayed further consideration of COVID-19 vaccines for young children until June, according to Politico (SeekingAlpha, Politico).

Unfortunately, the companies are still communicating “success” as equivalent with “antibody response” when we all know (or at least my immunology students know that they really should be measuring and reporting memory B-cell responses and the degree of match between the antibodies produced by B-cells upon reinfection and whatever variant or variants have taken over after Omicron is a distant memory.

CDC also shared that Kaiser Permanente – which profits from vaccine sales – was in the driver’s seat of the CDC’s ACIP committee, with Dr. Matthew Daley, ACIP Vaccine Working Group Chairperson and senior investigator at the Kaiser Permanente Institute for Health Research issuing “marching orders” to the rest of ACIP to be “be more proactive than reactive” on the future of Covid-19 vaccinations.

This article is just a reminder to those who need it that #ParentsAreWatching, and that #ScientistsAreWatching, too.

April 21, 2022 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science | CDC, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, United States | Leave a comment

COVID persists, but the COVID vaccine narrative has taken on so much water, the powers that be have stopped bailing

They are going to let these vaccines slowly sink

By Meryl Nass, MD | April 16, 2022

There has been so much bad news about the vaccines in the last few months, it even leaked into the mainstream media. I think the cabal’s plan, at least in the US but probably everywhere, is to stop propping the ludicrous vaccine claims up and allow them to die a natural death. I explain why below.

There was just too much bad news, too few getting boosted, too much resistance from parents. Getting 8 or 10 doses into everyone was not going to happen. The terrified obedient masses were becoming fewer and fewer.

For example, here is one story that got lots of traction: ABC News covered the fact that “At least 72 COVID cases in the fully vaccinated resulted from the Gridiron dinner.” Not only did Nancy Pelosi test positive, but several other members of Biden’s Cabinet and many other Washingtonian glitterati did too. All of whom had to have been vaccinated in order to attend.

There was plenty of happy talk that the afflicted politicians in DC had only mild COVID cases. Good for them. But, if vaccinations caused them to become asymptomatic spreaders instead of spreaders with symptoms, who would know to stay home while sick, the vaccines could actually be doing more harm than good in terms of transmission. They could be causing more COVID cases, not less.

By now, it has to be apparent to everyone who walks by a newsstand or turns on the TV that the media are begging much too hard for more shots.

It must be obvious to all that the shots do not prevent spread and therefore there is no logical way you can mandate them. Because if my shot does not protect you (and only with lots of fairy dust will it protect me) why would you have any interest in whether or not I am vaccinated?

Once you stop caring about my vaccination status, the cabal’s nexus of control starts to fall apart. That was their ace in the hole. Time for them to move on to something else.

The kicker for childhood vaccines: the NY state Department of Health study of vaccine efficacy in children. After 2 months, efficacy in the 5-11 year olds had fallen to 12%. In other words, 7 out of 8 vaccinated kids derived no benefit after 2 months, only risk. The data were derived from 365,000 children, and apparently there was no way CDC could spin them, or 12% was the best spin they could put on the data. This report is a huge obstacle to universal child vaccinations. The cabal cannot surmount it.

It is important to mention again–because we keep forgetting–that while the vaccines are nominally licensed for adults, in fact you can only find the EUA (unlicensed) product in the US, and legally an EUA is experimental–and therefore forcing someone to be vaccinated is a Nuremberg violation and a violation of federal law.

The imposition of mandates for these experimental gene therapy products is therefore a crime, being committed by states, federal government and certain companies and other institutions. It seems that because US law was not designed for situations in which the government is the criminal, it has been very difficult to use the judicial system to change what is happening. But surely if this persisted much longer an honest judge somewhere would finally rule that the vaccines are experimental and the COVID mandate house of cards would then collapse. Like Humpty Dumpty (it is Easter today after all):

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put COVID mandates together again

What else has been happening that undermines the vaccine story? Well, in addition to all the collapsing athletes, there is now a large collection of mayors suddenly dropping dead throughout Germany.

In Australia, Queensland’s health minister just admitted that ambulances are being summoned for a lot more calls for cardiac events and sudden deaths: 40% more to be exact. Thanks to Igor Chudov for following this story, and including a video of the clueless minister admitting it, but having no idea why…

Then there were the 3 insurance companies, one each from the US, India and Germany, that admitted there were about 40% more deaths than expected in working-age people in the second half of 2021. The German official who blew the whistle, a CEO or VP, was immediately fired, which is a strong indication he was telling the truth.

Three doctor whistleblowers released a large cache of data from the military’s DMED database showing huge increases in service-member deaths. There has been a lot of confusion about these data. In part, that is because the military then reissued its data for the preceding several years, making the 2021 comparison look less dire. Mathew Crawford has some ideas about what really happened to the data. The only thing that is absolutely clear so far is that there has been a coverup, and the health of vaccinated members of the military appears to have taken a dive. But we don’t know how deep.

Everyone in the world must have heard the term ‘myocarditis’ by now, and knows that it is a vaccine injury. A lot of people also know that CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said post-vaccination myocarditis was extremely “rare but mild,” except it isn’t and she lied. The rate of myocarditis she cited is at least 10 times too low. About 1 in 2000 young men aged 18-24 sought care for this diagnosis after getting their second mRNA shot.

In fact, CDC was so intensely worried about blowback regarding its recommendation to vaccinate teens (despite the risk of myocarditis) it got the heads of about 20 professional medical organizations to sign on to a declaration supporting CDC’s recommendation. Wonder how much CDC paid for that. Getting such back-up was an unusual move, but perhaps unsurprising for risk-averse bureaucrats who worry about their own butt but not anyone else’s. Rochelle even mentions these “cosigners” from many medical organizations in her ABC-TV interview. Collecting a bunch of “co-signers” is actually the proof that CDC knew its vaccine recommendation was going to considerably harm children.

While no one in a federal health agency has admitted it, many people must be aware that myocarditis is only the tip of the COVID vaccine injury iceberg. Myocarditis got attention because it’s life-threatening and almost always happens within 4 days of the second shot–it can’t be written off as coincidence, the way heart attacks, strokes, pulmonary emboli, sudden deaths and perhaps many other diagnoses have been.

As if there wasn’t enough bad vaccine news, there was information from the Medicare database that FDA posted last July, but it only recently got attention. FDA revealed that heart attacks, pulmonary emboli, disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC, a life-threatening, bleeding plus clotting disorder) and ITP (another bleeding disorder) were related to the Pfizer vaccination in Medicare beneficiaries. FDA promised to study this rigorously, but instead remained silent, and subsequently has never denied the relationship.

And then there is ivermectin. So many ivermectin stories have been leaking into the popular press. Tennessee’s legislature made ivermectin essentially an over-the-counter drug last week. New Hampshire’s house voted in favor of this as well, while the NH Senate is now taking it up. Kansas and several other states gave healthcare providers an immunity guarantee for the use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for COVID. Kansas also strengthened religious exemptions, effectively undermining school vaccine mandates.

Coupled with stories about lawsuits against hospitals for refusing to supply ivermectin to dying relatives, like this one, people are finally realizing there is probably something to this drug, and they have been cheated. They were given a shot that barely works, is unsafe, and they were stopped from getting the good drug. And what if they lost their business to the lockdowns? There must be a lot of anger simmering by now. I imagine the Great Reset cabal must be worried about this, and has decided to loosen its grip for the moment and hopefully let off some citizen steam.

There is more surprising vaccine news. While many institutions are still imposing mandates (and we need to find out what $ carrots were given to universities and other entities to impose illegal mandates of experimental vaccines) in other, surprising places the mandates are disappearing. Out west in Woke Land, the Washington state Department of Health said it would not require COVID vaccines to attend school after all. Despite Gavin Newsom’s 2021 executive order mandating vaccines for school kids as soon as they are licensed, California’s Department of Health has just done the same thing that Washington’s did: killed the COVID vaccine mandate for the 2022-23 school year.

This is why I am convinced the ship is turning. Those states’ health departments take their orders from CDC and DC. I do not think FDA is going to be issuing any more fake licenses for COVID vaccines. [I say fake because a) the vaccines do not meet licensure criteria, and b) after issuing the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines licenses for adults, neither licensed product has been distributed in the US for actual use.] The unvaxxed kids will be spared. Hallelujah!

During the April 6, 2022 Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) meeting, which I live-blogged and summarized, both briefers and committee members acknowledged that the neutralizing antibody titers that have been used as a surrogate for immunity in order to issue EUAs, were in fact not valid surrogates.

This had been obvious for awhile, but a recent Israeli study in healthcare workers made it crystal clear. While neutralizing antibody titers rose tenfold after a fourth vaccination, by 2 months out the Pfizer vaccine had only 30% efficacy against infection, and the Moderna vaccine had only 11%. So the high antibody titers were, in fact, meaningless.

This is really important, because Pfizer and Moderna have been relying on titers to get their vaccines okayed for the younger age groups, those below 16 and 18 respectively. They don’t have data showing the vaccines are actually reducing cases by 50% or more, which is the standard FDA said was necessary. They don’t have data showing that the vaccines prevent serious cases or deaths, another standard.

Up until now, FDA accepted titers in lieu of actual efficacy results from clinical trials to issue its EUAs for children–but with the recent VRBPAC admissions, which must have been planned in advance (otherwise why did multiple people at the meeting discuss it as settled fact when they had never mentioned it before?) FDA can no longer do so.

Another thing that happened at the VRBPAC meeting was that Peter Marks, the head of FDA’s Center for Biologics and highest FDA official there, said that if a new type of COVID vaccine is developed for the next booster, then the current vaccines would no longer be used, because it would be too confusing (according to STAT). I believe this was another effort to prepare us for the demise of the current mRNA vaccines.

The fall of the vaccines means the fall of the vaccine passports. This ought to slow down the imposition of CBDCs and all-digital money for a bit. If we don’t have to show our vaccine certificate to go shop, eat, etc., (and people stop being fearful of catching something from each Other) people will be a lot less inclined to “show their papers” to go about their lives. It’s our job to explain over and over that this was how the Nazis maintained control.

Here I read the tea leaves

If there is a new vaccine waiting in the wings, FDA and its briefers were not telling us about it at the VRBPAC meeting, which was the time to do so. For right now, I think the current crop of vaccines and the vaccine passports are going away. I don’t think the authorities anticipate another severe COVID wave in the foreseeable future… as most people now have Omicron immunity. The COVID fear will dissipate.

The original Wuhan strain appeared out of nowhere. No natural progenitor could be found. And the original Omicron strain appears to have also originated in a lab. If I was a member of the Great Reset cabal, I would be quite hesitant about releasing yet a third lab-engineered virus on the population. Because millions of people will be looking for one, and it won’t take long before its laboratory provenance is discovered. Then the pitchforks might really come out.

On the other hand, I do believe the cabal has bet the farm on their Reset, they can’t go back, and they are simply moving on to another means of accomplishing it besides COVID. The over-the-top WHO Treaty/Constitution and its amendments designed to assume sovereignty over the world in the event of a pandemic is an ambitious Plan B.

But I don’t think it will fly. Too many people know the WHO was wrong about virtually everything regarding management of this pandemic, not to mention the 2009 swine flu. And then there was that little matter of WHO undertaking the SOLIDARITY Trial, in which WHO officials deliberately poisoned over 1,000 COVID patients with excessive doses of hydroxychloroquine and in many cases failed to obtain signed informed consents. The WHO could be liable for manslaughter.

Will Russia and China really agree to give up their sovereignty to Tedros? China, maybe. Brazil? India? Indonesia? Japan? Nigeria? Can all of their leaders, and their local power centers, have been sufficiently corrupted to turn over their nations to the cabal? I think that could be a stretch.

I suspect the cabal will try their best to get a legal OK to take over the world with the upcoming WHO pandemic treaty, but it won’t fly. Too many people already know about these plans.

After the WHO, the cabal will move on to something else, Plan C. Climate catastrophe? Aliens? I’m guessing it will be a few years before we get hit with another nasty bug. By then maybe the fiat currencies will have finally crashed, and the cabal won’t have as tight control of the reins. By then, Fauci, Walensky, Biden, Macron, Johnson, Trudeau, Draghi will hopefully be unpleasant memories.

I am not thinking we will all sing kumbaya. I expect a good deal of misery as the cabal pushes all the levers at its disposal.

The Shanghai city and port closure (China’s largest city and the world’s largest port) seems to me a deliberate attempt to interfere with worldwide transit of goods and to reduce food availability. The Chinese know how to treat COVID. They make the drugs and herbs. There is no need for them to lock down.

We are finally understanding that all these awful government policies were deliberate — intended to cement control over and impoverish us. But maybe we can start to build something a whole lot better.

We are shaking loose of the educational indoctrination system, the ruination of our foods, the user-unfriendly and health-damaging healthcare system. We are starting to grasp that our governments acted with malice aforethought to stupefy and eventually enslave us.

People are breaking free and taking responsibility for their future. Where I live, people are learning self-sufficiency skills, creating home-schooling coops, building greenhouses and growing food. The migration to the countryside was deliberate.

A better life? It just takes everybody waking up. Despite all the acrimony we have faced, the time is ripe to help our fellows see things clearly. We have to love them, help them, meet them where they are at. Maybe it is just to talk about the Gridiron dinner. Or ivermectin. They won’t get it in a day. But keep trying. It is our only solution.

April 17, 2022 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | CDC, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, FDA, Human rights | 2 Comments

How Dangerous Are Masks for Children?

BY PAUL ELIAS ALEXANDER | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | APRIL 15, 2022

Our public health agencies such as the CDC and NIH, and television medical experts seem unable to address key health messages that could have a dramatic effect in reducing risk of severe sequelae in higher-risk populations such as the minority and African-American population to the scourge of SARS-CoV-2.

These agencies and media echo chambers squandered many opportunities to inform the public on simple yet very effective messaging (vitamin D supplementation, obesity control, early treatment etc.) that could have reduced morbidity and saved lives. They continue to. Not just for Covid-19, but for many other illnesses.

For example, obesity emerged as a potent super-loaded risk factor behind age in the harmful sequelae and a human target for SARS-CoV-2 in most studies, in addition to being elderly, frail and having comorbid conditions. Being younger with comorbid conditions also placed one at risk.

We knew this data very early on, maybe one month post-March 2020 yet the CDC etc. failed to either read the data, understand the data, or act on the data. It would have behooved our agencies to have addressed these risks in large-scale education programs for the populace and especially by calling for a reduction in body weight and particularly for the minority sub-groups (African-Americans).

In a similar light, studies showed that vitamin D supplementation for African-Americans has been associated with a lowered risk of severe disease and mortality from SARS-CoV-2. So the evidence was there; just the action by health agencies was absent.

Early ambulatory outpatient treatment with successful combination and sequenced antiviral agents, corticosteroids, and anti-clotting therapeutics should be used (and should have been used) widely to help the people at risk. The African-American community is aware that “Covid (is) a killer for the obese: like pouring gasoline on top of a fire.”

Unfortunately, more than two years into the pandemic, the manifest issue of public health education and sound policy decisions remain absent and aloof, given the erratic and confusing responses from the health and governing officials.

Now we face another looming concern: the potential danger of the chlorine, polyester, and microplastic components of the face masks (surgical principally but any of the mass-produced masks) that have become part of our daily lives due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Emergent reports, albeit nascent and anecdotal but nevertheless vitally important (and will be clarified and defined in time) regarding the manufacture of masks, where, “many of them (face masks) are made of polyester, so you have a microplastic problem… many of the face masks would contain polyester with chlorine compounds… if I have the mask in front of my face, then of course I inhale the microplastic directly and these substances are much more toxic than if you swallow them, as they get directly into the nervous system.”

A very recent 2022 British publication (Jenner et al. Detection of microplastics in human lung tissue using μFTIR spectroscopy) focused on polypropylene that is a component of the face masks and reported that such “microplastics were identified in all regions of the human lungs using μFTIR analysis.” Furthermore, “polypropylene and polyethylene terephthalate fibres were the most abundant.” Researchers concluded that inhalation was “a route of MP exposure.” And that this study “is the first to report MPs within human lung tissue samples, using μFTIR spectroscopy.”

There were also early reports of toxic mold, fungi, and bacteria that can pose a significant threat to the immune system by potentially weakening it. Of particular concern to us is the recent report of breathing in synthetic fibers in the face masks. This is of serious concern.

“Loose particulate was seen on each type of mask. Also, tight and loose fibers were seen on each type of mask. If every foreign particle and every fiber in every facemask is always secure and not detachable by airflow, then there should be no risk of inhalation of such particles and fibers. However, if even a small portion of mask fibers is detachable by inspiratory airflow, or if there is debris in mask manufacture or packaging or handling, then there is the possibility of not only entry of foreign material to the airways, but also entry to deep lung tissue, and potential pathological consequences of foreign bodies in the lungs.”

Reports are that “Graphene is a strong, very thin material that is used in fabrication, but it can be harmful to lungs when inhaled and can cause long-term health problems.”

There is a risk of potential inflammatory/fibrotic lung diseases because we are inhaling these materials in the masks now for two years with more duration to come and no end in sight. These substances might also be highly carcinogenic. Not just for us as adults but we must be very concerned about the risks especially to our children since they depend on us as mentors and guides for their decision-making.

These blue surgical masks pervade our lives. They remain ubiquitous. “Health Canada issued a warning about blue and gray disposable face masks, which contain an asbestos-like substance associated with “early pulmonary toxicity.” The warning is specific to potentially toxic masks distributed within schools and daycares across Quebec. Health Canada (and full praise to them)….“discovered during a preliminary risk assessment that the masks contain microscopic graphene particles that, when inhaled, could cause severe lung damage.”

Reports are and were that “for a while now, some daycare educators had expressed suspicion about the masks, which were causing children to feel as though they were swallowing cat hair while wearing them. We now know that instead of cat hair, children were inhaling the equivalent of asbestos all day long.”It appears to be a substance known as graphene.

What is indeed alarming is that “the SNN200642 masks that were being used all across Canada in school classrooms had never been tested for safety or effectiveness.” This is indeed a catastrophic failure by the regulators as these surgical face masks are linked to early pulmonary toxicity.

What is indeed frightening is that all of these blue and similar surgical face masks cause plastic fiber inhalation and the outcomes could be devastating, especially to our children. Yet it has pervaded and persons making Covid policy decisions do not seem to care about the harmful implications. These face mask plastics will degrade very slowly over time and as such, in the lungs it may remain and just build up to dangerous levels.

We do not even know what is an ‘acceptable’ level, for there should be none. There is debate that the immune system can attack such foreign objects, thus driving prolonged inflammation which may lead to diseases such as cancer. And reused masks which pervade our daily lives, and based on our personal experiences, do produce more loosened fibers.

Dr. Richard Urso showed us just how dangerous these are by putting them under a microscope, revealing the melt-blown polypropylene plastic. Some masks even contain fiberglass and this is very dangerous as we know to inhale. We as parents make these decisions; we have to step back and question many of these decisions we are making that seem suboptimal. If it does not seem right, then you have to push back and question and demand the science, demand the data from these seemingly untethered experts.

We certainly did not get (across the last two years) and are not presently getting the due diligence and protection from public health experts, the relevant health agencies, and policy makers that we need.

Moreover, the mass media seems incapable of doing the investigative type of journalism to fully inform the populace on what the public needs to know. We close by reiterating the warning in the JAMA publication that “Face masks should not be worn by healthy individuals to protect themselves from acquiring respiratory infection because there is no evidence to suggest that face masks worn by healthy individuals are effective in preventing people from becoming ill.”

Every act has a consequence, and there is always risk. It is therefore imperative to weigh the consequences before embarking on a specific course of action. These are risk management decisions especially for parents and not because a Dr. Fauci type tells you to do something means that it is accurate or necessary. Just consider the nonsense we heard about double masking where he said use them one day only to then retract on another day.

Children come with a potent innate immune system that works tremendously well. At the same time and similarly, their immune systems are still being developed, and we have forced lockdowns, school closures, and masking on a developing child. We have no prior experience on the subsequent outcomes pertaining to children’s development, health, and well-being.

We may be faced with catastrophic consequences of what we did to our children over the last two years of unsound Covid restrictive policies, and allowed government technocrats to force these upon them. These are matters too important to nonchalantly disregard.

Dr. Paul Alexander is an epidemiologist focusing on clinical epidemiology, evidence-based medicine, and research methodology. He has a bachelor’s in epidemiology from McMaster University, and a master’s degree from Oxford University. He earned his PhD from McMaster’s Department of Health Research Methods, Evidence, and Impact. Paul is a former WHO Consultant and Senior Advisor to US Department of HHS in 2020 for the COVID-19 response.

April 15, 2022 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | CDC, Covid-19, NIH, United States | Leave a comment

Smiling US health chief shrugs off her Covid blunders

By James Rogers | TCW Defending Freedom | April 14, 2022

Dr Rochelle Walensky is director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the national public health agency of the United States.

Just over a year ago, on March 29, 2021, Dr Walensky publicly stated: ‘Vaccinated people do not carry the virus . . . and do not get sick.’

She also claimed that the Pfizer jab was 95 per cent effective at preventing Covid-19. Last month Dr Walensky answered questions at Washington University, St Louis, during which she admitted that her claim of 95 per cent Pfizer jab-effectiveness came from CNN, which based its report on a press release from Pfizer.

Walensky also claimed she was unaware the shots might lose effectiveness over time. Yet she’s a highly qualified public health official, and even 15-year-old science students know that cold/flu viruses are prone to mutations, which go a long way to altering a vaccine’s effectiveness. It was quite galling to hear her talk about ‘waning jab efficacy’, then casually smile, shrug her shoulders and say: ‘Science is not black and white, it’s not immediate . . . science is grey’ i.e. that nobody could be certain.

Contrary to Dr Walensky’s position in spring 2022, throughout 2021, the US authorities (and elsewhere) were so certain of jab efficacy that they insisted that everyone had to get jabbed. Never mind the psychological pressure and moral blackmail, they threatened serious consequences: fines, imprisonment, ‘no jab, no job’ and ‘no jab, no school’ mandates. They were so certain about jab efficacy that they threatened peoples’ livelihoods, careers, businesses and education. They were certain enough to foment severe discord in society, creating disputes and anxiety that damaged, fractured and destroyed marriages, families and friendships.

They pushed the jabs this hard, but they had no real idea how well they worked. Now we know that they don’t work at all; we also strongly suspect that the jabs actually make infection levels and illnesses worse, and this does not include jab-related deaths, conditions and illnesses that should result in the total withdrawal of these chemicals.

The Walenskys of this world were so certain, yet it in reality they were so wrong, so her airy dismissal of these errors in her interview was absolutely breath-taking.

A few questions also spring to mind:

Dr Walensky has a BA in biochemistry and molecular biology and a masters in public health from Harvard. She is a scientist. How is it possible that someone with such qualifications, and holding a position of such responsibility, doesn’t know that cold/flu viruses mutate?

Dr Walensky is also a MD. Has she forgotten the ethics and principles of informed consent? We’ll return to this point.

Why was the director the CDC accepting information about a new drug from its manufacturer (Pfizer) via CNN? Should the CDC accept the manufacturer’s own assessment and then tell the whole population with certainty that it is ‘safe and effective’? Shouldn’t they be doing their own thorough investigations and evaluations? Especially since mRNA technology was so new and untested.

Did it not occur to Dr Walensky that if the new, ‘safe and effective’ mRNA-based jab was not ‘effective’, it might not be all that ‘safe’ either? Did the possibility that the drug’s emergency authorisation ought to be withdrawn not occur to her? If it didn’t, her competence must be questioned. If it did, and she discussed it, we need to know a lot more details. If it did, and she dismissed it, she ought to be asked a lot more questions.

The US-based Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) pressure group has obtained data revealing that 70 per cent of the CDC staff who got Covid from August last year onwards were fully vaccinated. This raises other questions:

With such evidence in front of Dr Walensky, why didn’t the CDC withdraw support for government mandates?

Why didn’t Dr Walensky tell President Biden that he might think again before dishonourably discharging members of the armed services for declining a jab?

Why didn’t the CDC inform the American public that claims about jab efficacy were completely and utterly unreliable? Had they known that being jabbed didn’t stop people getting C-19 or passing it on, then many people may well have decided to decline consent to be jabbed – at least to their second and third shots – and thereby avoid post-jab effects, serious medical problems or even death.

Was it not completely unethical for Dr Walensky to withhold this important information? Was she not expressly bound to inform the public that there are risks involved in accepting an untested synthetic compound – and that it did not work as intended anyway? Did she wilfully deprive them of information that would have facilitated ‘informed consent’?

Dr Walensky has also publicly discredited the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which is co-administered by the FDA and the CDC. Does she not know that VAERS has revealed that the Covid jabs are the most damaging ever created? How can she pooh-pooh these VAERS figures when they are supported by WHO statistics: 2,457,386 reports of adverse reaction to C-19 jabs 2020-21, against 6,891 adverse reactions after smallpox jabs 1968-2021. Of course, smallpox is/was a much bigger threat than C-19.

How can Dr Walensky not know these numbers? Why has she not halted the jab roll-out? No matter how well she is supported by the American authorities and the MSM – who insist that criticism is ‘misinformation’ – this isn’t going to go away, especially if they insist that more jabs are needed every year or every six months.

People have stopped believing and are recovering belief in their own judgement, hopefully in sufficient numbers that dissuades them from jabbing their kids.

Surely Rochelle Walensky must resign. Given the damage that has been done to the physical, emotional and economic health of tens of millions, it’s not good enough to shrug one’s shoulders and say, ‘We weren’t sure’.

April 14, 2022 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | CDC, COVID-19 Vaccine, Rochelle Walensky | 3 Comments

6 Double Standards Public Health Officials Used to Justify COVID Vaccines

Madhava Setty, M.D. | The Defender | April 13, 2022

We are not only in an epidemiological crisis, we also are in an epistemological crisis. How do we know what we know? What differentiates opinion from a justified belief?

For nearly two years, the public has been inundated by a sophisticated messaging campaign that urges us to “trust the science.”

But how can a non-scientist know what the science is really saying?

Legacy media sources offer us an easy solution: “Trust us.”

Legions of so-called “independent” fact-checking sites that serve to eliminate any wayward thinking keep those with a modicum of skepticism in line.

“Research” has been redefined to mean browsing Wikipedia citations.

Rather than being considered for their merit, dissenting opinions are more easily dismissed as misinformation by labeling their source as untrustworthy.

How do we know these sources are untrustworthy? They must be if they offer a dissenting opinion!

This form of circular reasoning is the central axiom of all dogmatic systems of thought. Breaking the spell of dogmatic thinking is not easy, but it is possible.

In this article I describe six examples of double standards medical authorities have used to create the illusion their COVID-19 narrative is logical and sensible.

This illusion has been used with devastating effect to raise vaccine compliance.

Rather than citing scientific publications or expert opinions that conflict with our medical authorities’ narrative — information that will be categorically dismissed because it appears on The Defender — I will instead demonstrate how, from the beginning, the official narrative has been inconsistent, hypocritical and/or contradictory.

1. COVID deaths are ‘presumed,’ but vaccine deaths must be ‘proven’

As of April 8, VAERS included 26,699 reports of deaths following COVID vaccines.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officially acknowledges only nine of these.

In order to establish causality, the CDC requires autopsies to rule out any possible etiology of death before the agency will place culpability on the vaccine.

But the CDC uses a very different standard when it comes to identifying people who died from COVID.

The 986,000 COVID deaths reported by the CDC here are, as footnote [1] indicates, “Deaths with confirmed or presumed [emphasis added] COVID-19.”

If a person dies with a positive PCR test or is presumed to have COVID, the CDC will count that as COVID-19 death.

Note that in the CDC’s definition, a COVID fatality does not mean the person died from the disease, only with the disease.

Why is an autopsy required to establish a COVID vaccine death but not to establish a COVID death?

Conversely, why is recent exposure to SARS-CoV-2 prior to a death sufficient to establish causality — but recent exposure to a vaccine considered coincidental?

2. CDC uses VAERS data to investigate myocarditis yet claims VAERS data on vaccine deaths is unreliable

On June 23, 2021, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices met to assess the risk of peri/myocarditis following COVID vaccination, especially in young males.

This was the key slide in this presentation:

The observed risk of myocarditis is 219 in about 4.3 million second doses of COVID vaccine in males 18 to 24 years old.

The CDC is fine with using VAERS data to assess risk of myocarditis following vaccination — yet the agency rejects all but nine of the 26,699 reports of deaths following the vaccines.

Why does the CDC trust the peri/myocarditis data in VAERS but not the data on deaths?

One reason may be because the onset of myocarditis symptoms is closely tied to the time of vaccination.

In other words, because this condition closely follows inoculation the two events are highly correlated and suggestive of causation.

For example, here is another slide from the same presentation:

The majority of cases of vaccine-induced peri/myocarditis suffered symptoms within the first few days after injection. As explained above, this is highly suggestive of a causative effect of the vaccine.

A recent study in The Lancet included a similar graph, taken directly from VAERS, on deaths following vaccination:

Once again, the event (death) closely follows vaccination in the majority of cases.

As we regard the two graphs above we should acknowledge that the temporal relationship between the injection and the adverse event is suggestive of causation but does not stand as proof of such.

However, it is also important to note that if the vaccination caused the deaths, that is exactly what the plot would look like.

It should be clear that the CDC has no justification for dismissing VAERS deaths if the agency is willing to accept reports of myo/pericarditis from the very same reporting system.

3. CDC pushes ‘relative risk’ for determining vaccine efficacy, but uses ‘absolute risk’ to downplay risk of adverse events

In Pfizer’s Phase 3 trial, nine times more placebo recipients developed severe COVID than those vaccinated during the short period of observation. This constitutes a relative risk reduction of 90%.

This seemed an encouraging finding and was used as a major talking point to compel the public to accept this experimental therapy despite the absence of any long-term data.

However, the risk of a trial participant contracting severe COVID (Table S5) was 1 in 21,314 (0.0047%) if they were vaccinated.

If they received the placebo, the risk was still only 9 in 21,259 (0.0423%).

The vaccine reduced the absolute risk of contracting severe disease by 0.038%.

Mainstream media and the CDC never mentioned the minuscule reduction in absolute risk of contracting severe COVID by getting inoculated.

Moreover, with 0.6% of vaccine recipients in the trial suffering a serious vaccine injury (one that results in death, medical or surgical intervention, hospitalization or an impending threat to life), approximately 16 serious adverse events will result for every serious case of COVID prevented by vaccination.

However, when it comes to risk of myo/pericarditis, the CDC states, “Myocarditis and pericarditis have rarely been reported, especially in adolescents and young adult males within several days after COVID-19 vaccination.”

The CDC further states, “While absolute risk remains small, the risk for myocarditis is higher for males ages 12 to 39 years…”

In other words, the risk of adverse events is being considered in absolute terms, not relative.

The CDC presentation slide above (Table 1) indicates the relative risk of contracting myo/pericarditis in males 18 to 24 is 27 to more than 200 times higher than expected in (unvaccinated) young men that age.

When assuaging the public’s fear around vaccine-induced myocarditis, the CDC finds it useful to cite absolute risk — yet when promoting the efficacy of the vaccine, the CDC emphasizes relative risks.

This double standard has been quietly and masterfully employed to reduce vaccine hesitancy and encourage compliance.

4. FDA requires randomized control studies for early treatment medications — but not for boosters

The CDC reports that as of April 8, 98.3 million Americans had received a COVID booster.

On March 29, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized a second booster for the immunocompromised and adults over age 50.

These authorizations were made not because of solid evidence the boosters are effective but rather to remedy the fact that the primary vaccine series has been widely shown to have waning efficacy within a few months.

As reported by The Defender, Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s vaccine division, Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, admitted the fourth booster dose approved last week was a “stopgap measure” — in other words, a temporary measure to be implemented until a proper solution may be found in the future.

Despite the lack of solid evidence, the FDA continues to recommend and authorize boosters.

Yet when it comes to early treatment options, the agency holds medicines — including those the agency has already licensed and approved for other uses — to a different standard.

In this CNN interview from August 2021, Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warns people not to take ivermectin for COVID because “there is no clinical evidence that this works.”

With regard to hydroxychloroquine, Fauci said, “We know that every single good study — and by good study, I mean randomized control study in which the data are firm and believable — has s shown that hydroxychloroquine is not effective in the treatment of Covid-19”, as reported by the BBC on July 29, 2020.

Where, then, are the randomized control studies in which the data are firm and believable that show boosters are effective at preventing COVID?

There aren’t any. None have been done.

As of today, the FDA still refuses to authorize the use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID despite hundreds of studies that demonstrate significant benefits (ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine) in prevention as well as early and late treatment.

The double standard here is blatant. There are no randomized control studies that show boosters are effective in preventing COVID.

Nevertheless, these experimental therapies have the FDA’s blessing while inexpensive, highly effective safe and proven medicines are ignored despite the enormous evidence that supports their use.

5. FDA uses immunobridging to justify Pfizer shots for young kids, but rejects antibodies as indicative of immune protection from COVID

Immunobridging is a method of inferring a vaccine’s effectiveness in preventing disease by assessing its ability to elicit an immune response through the measurement of biochemical markers, typically antibody levels.

The FDA asserts the presence of SARS-COV-2 antibodies is not necessarily indicative of immune protection from COVID.

Moreover, the FDA’s Vaccine and Related Biologics Product Advisory Committee reached a consensus last week that antibody levels cannot be used as a correlate for vaccine effectiveness.

Their decision is consistent with the CDC’s executive summary of a science brief released on October 29, 2021:

“Data are presently insufficient to determine an antibody titer threshold that indicates when an individual is protected from infection.”

Nevertheless, the FDA used immunobridging as a means to justify authorization of the Pfizer vaccine to children ages 5 to 11, as explained in The Defender here and here.

Because there were no deaths or serious cases of COVID in the pediatric trial, the FDA chose to reject its own position (and that of its advisory committee) regarding antibody titers as a correlate for vaccine efficacy.

6. Causation must be proven for vaccine injuries, but correlation suffices for proving vaccine efficacy

When it comes to vaccine injuries the public is often reminded that correlation does not equal causation.

In other words, just because an injury was preceded by inoculation doesn’t mean the vaccine caused the injury.

But what constitutes causation in medicine? A mechanism of action needs to be identified and pathological studies must confirm this mechanism while eliminating other potential causative factors. Causation can be proven only on a case-by-case basis.

Proving causation requires an enormous burden of proof in medicine.

For example, does smoking cause lung cancer? The answer is yes, it can. That doesn’t mean that it will.

However, when it comes to the benefit of medical intervention, such as a vaccine, causation does not have to be established. Correlation suffices.

In the COVID vaccine trials, fewer vaccinated people contracted COVID than unvaccinated ones. Yet there were those who received the vaccine who contracted the disease anyway.

To be fair, this is how all new medical interventions are evaluated. The benefit doesn’t have to be caused by the vaccine in the strictest sense, there just has to be a correlation between vaccination and a relative protective effect.

The more often this happens, the more confident we can be that the outcome wasn’t simply a coincidence.

Likewise, when it comes to assessing the harm of medical intervention, the most sensible outcome to consider is mortality. After all, what would be the point of introducing a vaccine that prevented some deaths while causing more?

Nevertheless, this is, in fact, what we have done with the Pfizer product. The interim results from the Phase 3 trial demonstrated that all-cause mortality in the vaccinated cohort was higher than in the placebo.

This glaring problem gets brushed aside because there were two deaths from COVID in the placebo arm versus just one in the vaccinated cohort, allowing the vaccine manufacturer to claim a 50% efficacy in preventing this outcome.

However, if we attribute a protective benefit to the vaccine in preventing this one fatality, we must also conclude that the vaccine was responsible for the extra death when considering mortality from all causes.

Doing otherwise would be applying yet another double standard.

How the pandemic could have played out differently

To summarize how devastating the use of these double standards in crafting the “safe and effective” narrative was, let’s look at how different the situation would be if we had adopted the opposite standard:

There would have been an extremely low number of deaths from COVID. Very few, if any, autopsies have definitively confirmed that a fatality was caused by SARS-CoV-2. If confirmation by autopsy is the standard, there have been essentially zero deaths from COVID during the pandemic.
On the other hand, if we presume the deaths registered in VAERS are in fact vaccine-induced fatalities — similar to how the CDC presumed many deaths from COVID — we can affirm there have been more than 26,000 vaccine deaths.
Using absolute risk reduction as a measure of efficacy, vaccines would have been widely rejected as ineffective, providing only a 0.038% risk reduction for contracting severe COVID.
Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine would have been readily available for people who got COVID. And for those who got the vaccine but got COVID anyway, these medicines would have been a great alternative to boosters, which wouldn’t have been approved due to the lack of a single randomized control study proving they work.
No children between the ages of 5 and 11 would have received this risky, experimental vaccine as it wouldn’t have been authorized for this age group — because Pfizer’s pediatric trials did not demonstrate any meaningful outcomes in children ages 5 to 11.
The Pfizer vaccine would no longer be in use because interim data demonstrated that all-cause mortality is higher in the vaccinated.

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

April 14, 2022 Posted by aletho | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | CDC, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, FDA | 2 Comments

Report on the FDA’s 4/6/22 Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) meeting on the selection of future boosters

While the committee got nowhere on the choice of next boosters, there were a few very important reveals

By Meryl Nass, MD | April 10, 2022

Authorizing vaccine for the 6 months to 5 year old group was never mentioned. Can it be that FDA is finally grappling with the awful data, the longterm risks of vaccination, and will turn away from unleashing these vaccines on our youngest kids? Or is there simply too much money at stake, too many promised school mandates, too many done deals behind closed doors?

Important takeaways

1. Many members and presenters agreed that antibody levels (aka titers) are not a valid measure of immunity (they are not a correlate of protection, and there is currently NOTHING measurable in the blood that is considered a valid reflection of immunity). This admission is HUGE, as it reveals that neutralizing antibody titers can no longer be used to authorize or approve COVID vaccines.

2. Therefore the only way to determine vaccine effectiveness is a clinical trial.

3. No one at the meeting (nearly 30 people) ventured a guess as to what strain might cause the next COVID wave. All seemed to agree there would be another wave, but this was just a guess. However, without a variant you can’t make a vaccine and you can’t conduct a clinical trial to see if the vaccine works. And you can’t possibly do this by June, to make vaccine available for the fall, when FDA and the VRBPAC expect it will be needed.

4. Dr. Peter Marks, the director of the FDA’s vaccine division, CBER, admitted that the 4th booster dose authorized last week was a “stopgap measure”– in other words, he claims it was to kick the waning vaccine efficacy can down the road.

5. Claims were repeatedly made that vaccine still protects against severe outcomes and death, but FDA’s lead scientist for this presentation, Doran Fink, admitted that efficacy is also waning for severe outcomes. I’ll say it is.

6. NO data was presented at all regarding strain choice/prediction of what to use as the antigen(s) for a newer vaccine. It was as if everyone just got the idea to begin thinking about this yesterday.

7. It appeared that neither CDC, FDA nor the VRBPAC advisors wanted to take any initiative or responsibility in figuring out what kind of a vaccine comes next (with the exception of Dr. Kim, who did show initiative about prescribing a way forward). I am not sure any of them wanted to find a way forward.

8. Was everyone dancing around the strain/variant choice because in fact no one really wants a newer vaccine, or because no one wanted to be responsible for picking a loser? I could not tell whether this was a deliberate slow-roll as a means of squeezing out of the COVID vaccine disaster, or whether we were watching an agency and advisors who are highly risk-averse but have no problems with the vaccines.

9. The Public Comments from about 1:30 pm to 2:30 pm (about 5 hours into the meeting) were evidence of outstanding work by independent scientists and heart-rending testimonies by the vaccine injured. There were only 2 people who favored vaccines in the group, one a top Moderna scientist (Dr. Rita Das) who did not actually belong there… had FDA begged Moderna to find someone to speak in favor of boosters?

10. The word transparency was used a lot. Which was peculiar since FDA’s COVID vaccine data, deliberations and decisions have been anything but transparent. Even the reason for today’s meeting is murky.

The link below is to my live blog of the all day meeting.

https://live.childrenshealthdefense.org/admin/fda-advisory-committee/fullscreen-chat

———————-

Of course, what the FDA needs to say, no doubt in some slowly unrolling, self-serving fashion, is that:

The mRNA platform was the best we could do under the circumstances, but it didn’t actually work out that well.
Coronaviruses are mutating or lab-tating too quickly to be able to vaccinate effectively against them.
While we still have contracts for 5 or 10 doses per person, we are going to cancel them and try early treatments.

What they won’t way is that these vaccines sickened many thousands, or millions, and the US will now establish clinics to evaluate and treat the injured Americans who did what their government asked of them, cover their medical expenses and pay them disability.

PS. When the Japanese found that the HPV vaccines caused similar severe injuries, about 8 or 10 years ago, clinics were established to take care of the injured.

April 10, 2022 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science | CDC, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, FDA | Leave a comment

Putting Big Pharma on Trial in the COVID-19 Era, Part 3

Backing the Big Four: Big Pharma and the FDA, WHO, NIH, CDC

By Rebecca Strong | February 16, 2022

Part 1, Part 2

I know what you’re thinking. Big pharma is amoral and the FDA’s devastating slips are a dime a dozen — old news. But what about agencies and organizations like the National Institutes of Health (NIH), World Health Organization (WHO), and Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC)? Don’t they have an obligation to provide unbiased guidance to protect citizens? Don’t worry, I’m getting there.

The WHO’s guidance is undeniably influential across the globe. For most of this organization’s history, dating back to 1948, it could not receive donations from pharmaceutical companies — only member states. But that changed in 2005 when the WHO updated its financial policy to permit private money into its system. Since then, the WHO has accepted many financial contributions from big pharma. In fact, it’s only 20% financed by member states today, with a whopping 80% of financing coming from private donors. For instance, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) is now one of its main contributors, providing up to 13% of its funds — about $250–300 million a year. Nowadays, the BMGF provides more donations to the WHO than the entire United States.

Dr. Arata Kochi, former head of WHO’s malaria program, expressed concerns to director-general Dr. Margaret Chan in 2007 that taking the BMGF’s money could have “far-reaching, largely unintended consequences” including “stifling a diversity of views among scientists.”

“The big concerns are that the Gates Foundation isn’t fully transparent and accountable,” Lawrence Gostin, director of WHO’s Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law, told Devex in an interview. “By wielding such influence, it could steer WHO priorities … It would enable a single rich philanthropist to set the global health agenda.”

Bill Gates, Francis Collins, Anthony Fauci. Photo credit: National Institutes of Health

Take a peek at the WHO’s list of donors and you’ll find a few other familiar names like AstraZeneca, Bayer, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Merck.

The NIH has the same problem, it seems. Science journalist Paul Thacker, who previously examined financial links between physicians and pharma companies as a lead investigator of the United States Senate Committee, wrote in The Washington Post that this agency “often ignored” very “obvious” conflicts of interest. He also claimed that “its industry ties go back decades.” In 2018, it was discovered that a $100 million alcohol consumption study run by NIH scientists was funded mostly by beer and liquor companies. Emails proved that NIH researchers were in frequent contact with those companies while designing the study — which, here’s a shocker — were aimed at highlighting the benefits and not the risks of moderate drinking. So, the NIH ultimately had to squash the trial.

And then there’s the CDC. It used to be that this agency couldn’t take contributions from pharmaceutical companies, but in 1992 they found a loophole: new legislation passed by Congress allowed them to accept private funding through a nonprofit called the CDC Foundation. From 2014 through 2018 alone, the CDC Foundation received $79.6 million from corporations like Pfizer, Biogen, and Merck.

Of course, if a pharmaceutical company wants to get a drug, vaccine, or other product approved, they really need to cozy up to the FDA. That explains why in 2017, pharma companies paid for a whopping 75% of the FDA’s scientific review budgets, up from 27% in 1993. It wasn’t always like this. But in 1992, an act of Congress changed the FDA’s funding stream, enlisting pharma companies to pay “user fees,” which help the FDA speed up the approval process for their drugs.

A 2018 Science investigation found that 40 out of 107 physician advisors on the FDA’s committees received more than $10,000 from big pharma companies trying to get their drugs approved, with some banking up to $1 million or more. The FDA claims it has a well-functioning system to identify and prevent these possible conflicts of interest. Unfortunately, their system only works for spotting payments before advisory panels meet, and the Science investigation showed many FDA panel members get their payments after the fact. It’s a little like “you scratch my back now, and I’ll scratch your back once I get what I want” — drug companies promise FDA employees a future bonus contingent on whether things go their way.

Here’s why this dynamic proves problematic: a 2000 investigation revealed that when the FDA approved the rotavirus vaccine in 1998, it didn’t exactly do its due diligence. That probably had something to do with the fact that committee members had financial ties to the manufacturer, Merck — many owned tens of thousands of dollars of stock in the company, or even held patents on the vaccine itself. Later, the Adverse Event Reporting System revealed that the vaccine was causing serious bowel obstructions in some children, and it was finally pulled from the U.S. market in October 1999.

Then, in June of 2021, the FDA overruled concerns raised by its very own scientific advisory committee to approve Biogen’s Alzheimer’s drug Aduhelm — a move widely criticized by physicians. The drug not only showed very little efficacy but also potentially serious side effects like brain bleeding and swelling, in clinical trials. Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, a Harvard Medical School professor who was on the FDA’s scientific advisory committee, called it the “worst drug approval” in recent history, and noted that meetings between the FDA and Biogen had a “strange dynamic” suggesting an unusually close relationship. Dr. Michael Carome, director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, told CNN that he believes the FDA started working in “inappropriately close collaboration with Biogen” back in 2019. “They were not objective, unbiased regulators,” he added in the CNN interview. “It seems as if the decision was preordained.”

That brings me to perhaps the biggest conflict of interest yet: Dr. Anthony Fauci’s NIAID is just one of many institutes that comprises the NIH — and the NIH owns half the patent for the Moderna vaccine — as well as thousands more pharma patents to boot. The NIAID is poised to earn millions of dollars from Moderna’s vaccine revenue, with individual officials also receiving up to $150,000 annually.

Operation Warp Speed

In December of 2020, Pfizer became the first company to receive an emergency use authorization (EUA) from the FDA for a COVID-19 vaccine. EUAs — which allow the distribution of an unapproved drug or other product during a declared public health emergency — are actually a pretty new thing: the first one was issued in 2005 so military personnel could get an anthrax vaccine. To get a full FDA approval, there needs to be substantial evidence that the product is safe and effective. But for an EUA, the FDA just needs to determine that it may be effective. Since EUAs are granted so quickly, the FDA doesn’t have enough time to gather all the information they’d usually need to approve a drug or vaccine.

Pfizer CEO and chairman Albert Bourla has said his company was “operating at the speed of science” to bring a vaccine to market. However, a 2021 report in The BMJ revealed that this speed might have come at the expense of “data integrity and patient safety.” Brook Jackson, regional director for the Ventavia Research Group, which carried out these trials, told The BMJ that her former company “falsified data, unblinded patients, and employed inadequately trained vaccinators” in Pfizer’s pivotal phase 3 trial. Just some of the other concerning events witnessed included: adverse events not being reported correctly or at all, lack of reporting on protocol deviations, informed consent errors, and mislabeling of lab specimens. An audio recording of Ventavia employees from September 2020 revealed that they were so overwhelmed by issues arising during the study that they became unable to “quantify the types and number of errors” when assessing quality control. One Ventavia employee told The BMJ she’d never once seen a research environment as disorderly as Ventavia’s Pfizer vaccine trial, while another called it a “crazy mess.”

Over the course of her two-decades-long career, Jackson has worked on hundreds of clinical trials, and two of her areas of expertise happen to be immunology and infectious diseases. She told me that from her first day on the Pfizer trial in September of 2020, she discovered “such egregious misconduct” that she recommended they stop enrolling participants into the study to do an internal audit.

“To my complete shock and horror, Ventavia agreed to pause enrollment but then devised a plan to conceal what I found and to keep ICON and Pfizer in the dark,” Jackson said during our interview. “The site was in full clean-up mode. When missing data points were discovered the information was fabricated, including forged signatures on the informed consent forms.”

A screenshot Jackson shared with me shows she was invited to a meeting titled “COVID 1001 Clean up Call” on Sept. 21, 2020. She refused to participate in the call.

Jackson repeatedly warned her superiors about patient safety concerns and data integrity issues.

“I knew that the entire world was counting on clinical researchers to develop a safe and effective vaccine and I did not want to be a part of that failure by not reporting what I saw,” she told me.

When her employer failed to act, Jackson filed a complaint with the FDA on Sept. 25, and Ventavia fired her hours later that same day under the pretense that she was “not a good fit.” After reviewing her concerns over the phone, she claims the FDA never followed up or inspected the Ventavia site. Ten weeks later, the FDA authorized the EUA for the vaccine. Meanwhile, Pfizer hired Ventavia to handle the research for four more vaccine clinical trials, including one involving children and young adults, one for pregnant women, and another for the booster. Not only that, but Ventavia handled the clinical trials for Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and Novavax. Jackson is currently pursuing a False Claims Act lawsuitagainst Pfizer and Ventavia Research Group.

Last year, Pfizer banked nearly $37 billion from its COVID vaccine, making it one of the most lucrative products in global history. Its overall revenues doubled in 2021 to reach $81.3 billion, and it’s slated to reach a record-breaking $98-$102 billion this year.

“Corporations like Pfizer should never have been put in charge of a global vaccination rollout, because it was inevitable they would make life-and-death decisions based on what’s in the short-term interest of their shareholders,” writes Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice Now.

As previously mentioned, it’s super common for pharmaceutical companies to fund the research on their own products. Here’s why that’s scary. One 1999 meta-analysis showed that industry-funded research is eight times less likely to achieve unfavorable results compared to independent trials. In other words, if a pharmaceutical company wants to prove that a medication, supplement, vaccine, or device is safe and effective, they’ll find a way.

With that in mind, I recently examined the 2020 study on Pfizer’s COVID vaccine to see if there were any conflicts of interest. Lo and behold, the lengthy attached disclosure form shows that of the 29 authors, 18 are employees of Pfizer and hold stock in the company, one received a research grant from Pfizer during the study, and two reported being paid “personal fees” by Pfizer. In another 2021 study on the Pfizer vaccine, seven of the 15 authors are employees of and hold stock in Pfizer. The other eight authors received financial support from Pfizer during the study.

As of the day I’m writing this, about 64% of Americans are fully vaccinated, and 76% have gotten at least one dose. The FDA has repeatedly promised “full transparency” when it comes to these vaccines. Yet in December of 2021, the FDA asked for permission to wait 75 years before releasing information pertaining to Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, including safety data, effectiveness data, and adverse reaction reports. That means no one would see this information until the year 2096 — conveniently, after many of us have departed this crazy world. To recap: the FDA only needed 10 weeks to review the 329,000 pages worth of data before approving the EUA for the vaccine — but apparently, they need three-quarters of a century to publicize it.

In response to the FDA’s ludicrous request, PHMPT — a group of over 200 medical and public health experts from Harvard, Yale, Brown, UCLA, and other institutions — filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act demanding that the FDA produce this data sooner. And their efforts paid off: U.S. District Judge Mark T. Pittman issued an order for the FDA to produce 12,000 pages by Jan. 31, and then at least 55,000 pages per month thereafter. In his statement to the FDA, Pittman quoted the late John F. Kennedy: “A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”

As for why the FDA wanted to keep this data hidden, the first batch of documentation revealed that there were more than 1,200 vaccine-related deaths in just the first 90 days after the Pfizer vaccine was introduced. Of 32 pregnancies with a known outcome, 28 resulted in fetal death. The CDC also recently unveiled data showing a total of 1,088,560 reports of adverse events from COVID vaccines were submitted between Dec. 14, 2020, and Jan. 28, 2022. That data included 23,149 reports of deaths and 183,311 reports of serious injuries. There were 4,993 reported adverse events in pregnant women after getting vaccinated, including 1,597 reports of miscarriage or premature birth. A 2022 study published in JAMA, meanwhile, revealed that there have been more than 1,900 reported cases of myocarditis — or inflammation of the heart muscle — mostly in people 30 and under, within 7 days of getting the vaccine. In those cases, 96% of people were hospitalized.

“It is understandable that the FDA does not want independent scientists to review the documents it relied upon to license Pfizer’s vaccine given that it is not as effective as the FDA originally claimed, does not prevent transmission, does not prevent against certain emerging variants, can cause serious heart inflammation in younger individuals, and has numerous other undisputed safety issues,” writes Aaron Siri, the attorney representing PHMPT in its lawsuit against the FDA.

Siri told me in an email that his office phone has been ringing off the hook in recent months.

“We are overwhelmed by inquiries from individuals calling about an injury from a COVID-19 vaccine,” he said.

By the way — it’s worth noting that adverse effects caused by COVID-19 vaccinations are still not covered by the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. Companies like Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson are protected under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act, which grants them total immunity from liability with their vaccines. And no matter what happens to you, you can’t sue the FDA for authorizing the EUA, or your employer for requiring you to get it, either. Billions of taxpayer dollars went to fund the research and development of these vaccines, and in Moderna’s case, licensing its vaccine was made possible entirely by public funds. But apparently, that still warrants citizens no insurance. Should something go wrong, you’re basically on your own.

To be continued…

April 10, 2022 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | CDC, FDA, Gates Foundation, NIH, United States, WHO | 1 Comment

« Previous Entries Next Entries »

The Attack on Pearl Harbor Was No Surprise (Part V)

Aletho News Videos

or go to

Aletho News Archives – Video-Images

From the Archives

The Old Testament and the Genocide in Gaza

“You will chase your enemies, and they shall fall by the sword before you. Five of you shall chase a hundred, and a hundred of you shall put ten thousand to flight; your enemies shall fall by the sword before you.” – Leviticus, Chapter 26, verses 7-9

“When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations… then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them and show them no mercy.” – Deuteronomy 7:1-2,

“…do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them… as the Lord your God has commanded you…” – Deuteronomy 20:16

Gilad Atzmon | January 8, 2009

There is not much doubt amongst Biblical scholars that the Hebrew Bible contains some highly charged non-ethical suggestions, some of which are no less than a call for a genocide. Biblical scholar Raymund Schwager has found in the Old Testament 600 passages of explicit violence, 1000 descriptive verses of God’s own violent actions of punishment, 100 passages where God expressly commands others to kill people. Apparently, violence is the most often mentioned activity in the Hebrew Bible.

As devastating as it may be, the Hebrew Bible saturation with violence and extermination of others may throw some light over the horrifying genocide conducted momentarily in Gaza by the Jewish state. … continue

Blog Roll

Subscribe to Aletho News

Enter your email address to receive new posts by email.

Email Address:

Join 2,406 other subscribers
Visits Since December 2009
- 7,306,863 hits
Looking for something?

Search for:
Archives
Archives
Calendar

January 2026

M T W T F S S

1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31

« Dec
Categories

Aletho News Civil Liberties Corruption Deception Economics Environmentalism Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism Fake News False Flag Terrorism Full Spectrum Dominance Illegal Occupation Mainstream Media, Warmongering Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity Militarism Progressive Hypocrite Russophobia Science and Pseudo-Science Solidarity and Activism Subjugation - Torture Supremacism, Social Darwinism Timeless or most popular Video War Crimes Wars for Israel
Tags
9/11 Afghanistan Africa al-Qaeda Australia BBC Benjamin Netanyahu Brazil Canada CDC Central Intelligence Agency China CIA CNN Covid-19 COVID-19 Vaccine Donald Trump Egypt European Union Facebook FBI FDA France Gaza Germany Google Hamas Hebron Hezbollah Hillary Clinton Human rights Hungary India Iran Iraq ISIS Israel Israeli settlement Japan Jerusalem Joe Biden Korea Latin America Lebanon Libya Middle East National Security Agency NATO New York Times North Korea NSA Obama Pakistan Palestine Poland Qatar Russia Sanctions against Iran Saudi Arabia Syria The Guardian Turkey Twitter UAE UK Ukraine United Nations United States USA Venezuela Washington Post West Bank WHO Yemen Zionism

January 2026
M	T	W	T	F	S	S
	1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16	17	18
19	20	21	22	23	24	25
26	27	28	29	30	31

Aletho News
If Americans Knew
No Tricks Zone
Contact:

atheonews (at) gmail.com
Disclaimer

This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.

This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.

Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.

Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.

The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.

The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.

Fair Use

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

DMCA Contact

This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.

If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.

We will respond and take necessary action immediately.

If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.

All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.

	papasha408 on Trump’s war posturing against…
	Coronistan on This is How We Should Have Res…
	Coronistan on NO MANDATES, NO PROFITS: MODER…
	Lutz Barz on Russia Vows to Protect Its Oil…
	loongtip on Russia Vows to Protect Its Oil…
	loongtip on Hamas never agreed to lay down…
	eddieb on Conspiracy Denial
	eddieb on WEF Calls for ‘Cultural Revolu…
	loongtip on Trump wanted to play peacemake…
	Coronistan on EU member to sue bloc over ‘su…
	loongtip on Vicious
	loongtip on EU turns to India for defense…

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Bill Gates, Francis Collins, Anthony Fauci. Photo credit: National Institutes of Health

Featured Video

From the Archives

Gilad Atzmon | January 8, 2009

Blog Roll

Subscribe to Aletho News

Visits Since December 2009

Looking for something?

Archives

Calendar

Categories

Tags

Recent Comments

Contact:

Disclaimer

Site info