By Dr. Joseph Mercola | September 20, 2022
Just when you thought the U.S. Food and Drug Administration couldn’t possibly get any worse, they prove you wrong. Here are two recent COVID booster campaign messages tweeted out by the FDA:
“It’s time to install that update! #UpdateYourAntibodies with a new #COVID19 booster.”1 “Don’t be shocked! You can now #RechargeYourImmunity with an updated #COVID19 booster.”2
FDA Now Pushes Transhumanist Pipe-Dream
That’s right. The FDA now wants you to believe that your immune system is something that needs to be “recharged,” as if it were a battery, or “updated” with mRNA injections like a piece of software.
This is transhumanist lingo that has no bearing on real-world biology or physiology, and proves beyond doubt that the FDA is fully onboard with the transhumanist ideas of technocracy pushed by the globalist cabal. The human body is basically viewed as nothing more than a biological platform equipped with genetic software that can be altered and updated at will.
The problem, of course, is that your body doesn’t work that way. You cannot turn your body into a “bioreactor”3 or an internal “vaccine-production facility”4 and expect it to work as intended. The massive increase in disability and sudden death among COVID jab recipients is a testament to the fact that allowing Big Pharma to play God is a bad idea.
Transhumanism as a whole is a pipe-dream, as it fails to take into account just about everything that actually makes us human, including the nonlocality of consciousness, which they irrationally believe can be uploaded to a cloud-based system and merged with AI, or downloaded into an artificial body construct, such as a synthetic body.
False Advertising
The Federal Trade Commission is responsible for addressing fraudulent advertising. According to law, an ad must be “truthful, not misleading, and, when appropriate, backed by scientific evidence.”5 The FDA itself also requires drug ads to be “truthful, balanced and accurately communicated.”6
“Balanced” refers to promotional materials that include efficacy and benefit claims, which must include a balance between benefit information and information about risks. In my view, the FDA’s most recent COVID booster ads are clear examples of false advertising, because:
Was No-Test Drug Approval the Plan All Along?
While I cannot prove it, I suspect Operation Warp Speed (OWS) — devised in the spring of 2020 by a dozen top officials from then-President Trump’s health and defense departments to expedite the development of a COVID-19 vaccine8 — may have been intended to normalize the approval of drugs without proper testing.
Even if the normalization of expedited drug approval wasn’t originally intended, it certainly has been used and abused to that aim since. In June 2022, the FDA quietly implemented a “Future Framework” scheme9 to speed up the delivery of COVID boosters. This is what allows for the authorization of reformulated COVID shots without human trials.10,11,12
The FDA basically rewrote the rules on the fly, deciding that mRNA gene therapies are equivalent to conventional influenza vaccines and can be updated and released without testing.
The idea here is that the safety of the mRNA COVID shots has already been proven by the original shots, which they claim have harmed or killed no one. Hence, safety is a given, and the effectiveness of reformulated boosters can be assessed simply by checking the antibody levels in a few mice, which is what Pfizer and Moderna did.
In reality, however, millions of people around the world have been harmed and killed by the original shots, the human trials for those shots were riddled with fraud, antibody levels tell us nothing about the jab’s ability to protect against infection, and the two technologies (conventional flu vaccines and mRNA gene therapy) have no common ground.
I have no doubt this “Future Framework” will also, over time, be widened to include other vaccines and drugs that drug makers may want to tinker with. It may even lower standards for drug trials in general, which historically have required at least 10 years of multiphase testing.13 The dangers of this trend really cannot be overstated.
Analysis of US Booster Policy
In a September 12, 2022, article, Kaiser Health News raised several questions about the FDA’s authorization of the new bivalent COVID boosters:14
“… in the real world, are the omicron-specific vaccines significantly more protective — and in what ways — than the original COVID vaccines so many have already taken? If so, who would benefit most from the new shots? Since the federal government is purchasing these new vaccines … is the $3.2 billion price tag worth the unclear benefit? …
The FDA could have requested more clinical vaccine effectiveness data from Pfizer and Moderna before authorizing their updated omicron BA.5 boosters. Yet the FDA cannot weigh in on important follow-up questions: How much more effective are the updated boosters than vaccines already on the market? In which populations?
And what increase in effectiveness is enough to merit an increase in price (a so-called cost-benefit analysis)? Other countries, such as the United Kingdom, perform such an analysis before allowing new medicines onto the market, to negotiate a fair national price …
As population immunity builds up through vaccination and infection, it’s unclear whether additional vaccine boosters, updated or not, would benefit all ages equally … The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices considered limiting the updated boosters to people 50 and up, but eventually decided that doing so would be too complicated.”
Shocking Jab Study Decimates Safety Claims
In related news, a shocking risk-benefit analysis15 looking at the impact of booster mandates for university students concluded that:
That means mandating a third COVID shot for university students will result in “a net expected harm.” The authors also stress that “Given the high prevalence of post-infection immunity, this risk-benefit profile is even less favorable.” The authors go on to state that “University booster mandates are unethical because:”16
“1) no formal risk-benefit assessment exists for this age group;
2) vaccine mandates may result in a net expected harm to individual young people;
3) mandates are not proportionate: expected harms are not outweighed by public health benefits given the modest and transient effectiveness of vaccines against transmission;
4) U.S. mandates violate the reciprocity principle because rare serious vaccine-related harms will not be reliably compensated due to gaps in current vaccine injury schemes; and
5) mandates create wider social harms. We consider counter-arguments such as a desire for socialization and safety and show that such arguments lack scientific and/or ethical support.”
Government Study Reveals COVID Jab Problems
A small observational study17,18 led by neurology researchers at the National Institutes of Health also brings bad news, as they found “a variety of neuropathic symptoms” occurring within three to four weeks of COVID injection:
“We studied 23 patients (92% female; median age 40 years) reporting new neuropathic symptoms beginning within 1 month after SARS-CoV-2 vaccination. 100% reported sensory symptoms comprising severe face and/or limb paresthesias, and 61% had orthostasis, heat intolerance and palpitations …
Biopsies from randomly selected five patients that were evaluated for immune complexes showed deposition of complement C4d in endothelial cells. Electrodiagnostic test results were normal in 94% (16/17). Together, 52% (12/23) of patients had objective evidence of small-fiber peripheral neuropathy …
This observational study suggests that a variety of neuropathic symptoms may manifest after SARS-CoV-2 vaccinations and in some patients might be an immune-mediated process.”
FDA Refuses to Release Key COVID Jab Safety Analyses
In July 2022, The Epoch Times asked the FDA to release “all analyses performed by the agency for the COVID-19 vaccines using … Empirical Bayesian data mining, which involves comparing the adverse events recorded after a specific COVID-19 vaccine with those recorded after vaccination with non-COVID-19 vaccines.”19
The FDA has so far refused, claiming the data is tied to “internal discussions protected by law.” September 10, 2022, The Epoch Times reported:20
“According to operating procedures laid out by the agency and its partner in January 202121 and February 2022,22 the FDA would perform data mining ‘at least biweekly’ to identify adverse events ‘reported more frequently than expected following vaccination with COVID-19 vaccines.’ The agency would perform the mining on data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
In a recent response, the FDA records office told The Epoch Times that it would not provide any of the analyses, even in redacted form. The agency cited an exemption to the Freedom of Information Act that lets the government withhold inter-agency and intra-agency memorandums and letters ‘that would not be available by law to a party other than an agency in litigation with the agency.’
The agency also pointed to the Code of Federal Regulations, which says that ‘all communications within the Executive Branch of the Federal government which are in written form or which are subsequently reduced to writing may be withheld from public disclosure except that factual information which is reasonably segregable in accordance with the rule established in § 20.22 is available for public disclosure.’
It’s not clear why the FDA could not produce copies of the analyses with non-factual information redacted. The Epoch Times has appealed the determination by the records office.”
CDC Also Refuses to Release Its Safety Analyses
According to the VAERS standard operating procedures cited above, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is also required to perform data mining analyses, using Proportional Reporting Ratio (PRR) data mining. PRR23 measures how common an adverse event is for a specific drug compared to all the other drugs in the database.
When The Epoch Times asked the CDC to release its results, it too refused. According to The Epoch Times, the CDC “has also twice provided false information when responding to questions”:24
“The agency initially said that no PRR analyses were done and that data mining is ‘outside of th[e] agency’s purview.’ The agency then said that it did perform PRRs, starting in February 2021. Later, the agency acknowledged that wasn’t true.
The agency did not begin performing PRRs until March 2022, a spokesperson told The Epoch Times. Roger Andoh, a records officer, gave the initial response, citing the CDC’s Immunization and Safety Office. Dr. John Su, a CDC official, gave the second response.
It remains unclear with whom the information originated. The Epoch Times has submitted Freedom of Information Act requests for internal emails that may provide answers.”
So far, the FDA has insisted the data show no evidence of serious adverse effects from the COVID jab. The only possible signal they’d found through April 16, 2021, was for raised body temperature. In the article, The Epoch Times cites several papers in which the FDA and/or CDC claim their data mining efforts have come up empty handed.
But if that’s true, why the reluctance to release the data? Don’t they want us to be reassured that these shots are as safe as they claim them to be? Why sit on exculpatory evidence? Unless, of course, the data proves the FDA and CDC have been lying all along.
Senators Calling for Special Grand Jury
In other related news, naturopath Henry Ealy and two Oregon state senators, Kim Thatcher and Dennis Linthicum, have been trying since March 2022 to compel the impaneling of a special grand jury to investigate decisions by federal officials that “significantly compromise[d] the accuracy and integrity of COVID-related data.”25
According to the March 7, 2022, petition,26,27 filed in Portland, Oregon, the 30 defendants manipulated statistics to create “a significant hyperinflation of COVID-19 case, hospitalization and death counts,” which in turn resulted in $3.5 trillion in fraudulent taxpayer expenditures.
Defendants specifically named28 are former CDC director Robert Redfield and current CDC director Rochelle Walensky, former Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary Alex Azar, HHS director Xavier Becerra, and National Center for Health Statistics director Brian Moyer.
As explained by Ealy in the video update above, the defendants were given 60 days to reply to the March 7 petition. As it happened, the U.S. Attorney for Oregon, Scott Asphaug, was assigned by the Department of Justice (DOJ) to be the defending attorney — an interesting choice, considering Ealy, Thatcher and Linthicum had in 2021 asked Asphaug to investigate the listed defendants, which he refused to do.
Asphaug immediately filed for an extension, which gave them another 60 days. The defendants now had until August 26, 2022, to respond. Suddenly, July 13, the DOJ reassigned Asphaug to Nairobi, Kenya. Asphaug resigned from his post as U.S. attorney, effective July 17, at which point U.S. Attorneys Natalie Wight and Dianne Schweiner took over the CDC’s defense.
When the defendants missed the August 26 deadline, Ealy, Thatcher and Linthicum filed for default judgment.29 Two days later, August 29, Wight and Schweiner opposed default judgment.30
Schweiner’s excuse for missing the deadline was that she’d been busy caring for her acutely sick dog. As noted by Linthicum in his newsletter,31 “no self-respecting sci-fi editor would allow something this outlandish past his desk when trying to make a story about integrity and transparency sound believable.”
Ealy is now convinced the CDC is feeling the heat, and urges Americans to sign Stand for Health Freedom’s petition to convene a special grand jury to investigate the CDC’s conduct during COVID-19.
The more signatures there are on this petition, the stronger the argument that the court must order a grand jury investigation, as it demonstrates that this investigation is important to the American public, and isn’t just some pet grievance by Ealy, Thatcher and Linthicum.
As noted by Ealy, the CDC has committed criminal data fraud. There are laws prohibiting data manipulation by federal agencies, and laws meant to prevent it from happening in the first place.
The CDC violated those laws, not just once, but repeatedly, and those in charge must be held accountable. We cannot have a public health agency flouting data laws in order to justify harming the public. So, please, add your name to the grand jury petition.
Sources and References
“Suri had a bad stomach ache that turned out to be myocarditis”
By Steve Watson | Summit News | September 16, 2022
The New York-Presbyterian Hospital is running a commercial in an effort to raise awareness of myocarditis in children, seemingly suggesting that inflammation of the heart in children is a common condition.
The video, titled “Pediatric Patient Story – Suri” tells the story of a child who “had a bad stomach ache that turned out to be myocarditis, a serious inflammation of the heart.”
The video caption states that “Our multidisciplinary pediatric critical care team worked to regulate her heartbeat – and got her back to feeling like herself.”
Watch:
Myocarditis cases in children are rare, with studies indicating that in children there are 1 to 2 per 100,000, usually stemming from cold viruses. The majority of those cases resolve on their own or with treatment.
So why the sudden need to raise awareness?
Likely because data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) shows how reports of myocarditis and pericarditis related to vaccines exploded in 2021 and 2022.
By Dr. Joseph Mercola | September 15, 2022
In a September 1, 2022, article,1 the Post Millennial reveals how federal officials in the Biden administration have held secret censorship meetings with social media companies to suppress Americans’ First Amendment rights to free speech, and to ban or deplatform those who share unauthorized views about COVID and vaccines.
The evidence for this comes out of a lawsuit2 brought by the New Civil Liberties Alliance and the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana (Eric Schmitt and Jeff Landry) against President Biden, filed in May 2022.
During the discovery process, the plaintiffs sought to identify “all meetings with any social media platform relating to content modulation and/or misinformation,” which is how we now know that such illegal meetings did, in fact, take place.
Illegal Collusion to Suppress Free Speech
Monthly, a Unified Strategies Group (USG) meeting took place — and may still be taking place — between a wide variety of government agencies and Big Tech companies, during which topics to be censored and suppressed were/are discussed.
Censored topics included stories involving COVID jab refusal, especially those involving military refusals and consequences thereof, criticism against COVID restrictions and their effects on mental health, posts talking about testing positive for COVID after getting the jab, personal stories of COVID jab side effects, including menstrual irregularities, and worries about vaccine passports becoming mandatory.3 According to the New Civil Liberties Alliance:4
“… scores of federal officials … have secretly communicated with social-media platforms to censor and suppress private speech federal officials disfavor. This unlawful enterprise has been wildly successful.
Under the First Amendment, the federal government may not police private speech nor pick winners and losers in the marketplace of ideas. But that is precisely what the government has done — and is still doing — on a massive scale not previously divulged.
Multiple agencies’ communications demonstrate that the federal government has exerted tremendous pressure on social-media companies — pressure to which companies have repeatedly bowed …
Communications show these federal officials are fully aware that the pressure they exert is an effective and necessary way to induce social-media platforms to increase censorship. The head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency even griped about the need to overcome social-media companies’ ‘hesitation’ to work with the government …
This unlawful government interference violates the fundamental right of free speech for all Americans, whether or not they are on social media. More discovery is needed to uncover the full extent of this regime — i.e., the identities of other White House and agency officials involved and the nature and content of their communications with social-media companies.”
Jenin Younes, litigation counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance added:5
“If there was ever any doubt the federal government was behind censorship of Americans who dared to dissent from official COVID messaging, that doubt has been erased. The shocking extent of the government’s involvement in silencing Americans, through coercing social-media companies, has now been revealed …”
Federal Agencies Involved in Free Speech Suppression
Documents obtained so far have identified more than 50 federal employees across 15 federal agencies, who participated in these censorship meetings or otherwise engaged in illegal censorship activities.6 This includes officials from:
Emails from a strategic communications and marketing firm called Reingold7 also reveals that outside consultants were hired to manage the government’s collusion with social media to censor Americans. For example, Reingold set up a “partner support portal” for the CDC so that CDC officials could link emails to the portal for easier flagging of content it wanted censored by social media companies linked to the portal.
Big Tech Companies Involved in Government Censorship
On the private industry side, notable tech participants in the censorship meetings include:
While some social media companies may have “hesitated” to censor on the government’s behalf at times, Facebook was certainly an eager beaver from the get-go. As early as February 2020, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was in contact with the State Department, offering its services to help “control information and misinformation related to coronavirus.”8
Biden Administration’s ‘Executive Privilege’ Denied
As you might expect, the White House has not cooperated with discovery and have fought to keep communications secret — especially with regard to Dr. Anthony Fauci’s correspondence — claiming all White House communications as “privileged.”
However, executive privilege does NOT apply to external communications, so the plaintiffs called on the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana to “overrule the government defendants’ objections and order them to supply this highly relevant, responsive and probative information immediately.”
September 7, 2022, Judge Terry Doughty did just that. The Biden administration’s claim of executive privilege was rejected and Doughty ordered the White House to hand over any and all relevant records.9 That includes correspondence to and from Fauci, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and many others. According to the judge’s order, they have three weeks to comply.
Examples of Illegal Government Censorship
On Twitter,10 Missouri AG Schmitt has shared a long list of examples of government censorship, including one document in which Clarke Humphrey, COVID-19 response digital director at the White House, asked Facebook to take down the Instagram account “anthonyfauciofficial,” a parody account dedicated to making fun of Fauci.11 Facebook complied.
Schmitt also shared emails12,13 between a senior Facebook official and the surgeon general, stating, “I know our teams met today to better understand the scope of what the White House expects from us on misinformation going forward.” This email came on the heels of the surgeon general’s July 2021 “misinformation health advisory.”
The CDC also coordinated with Facebook, providing them with talking points to debunk various claims, including the claim that spike protein in the COVID shots is dangerous and cytotoxic. In a July 28, 2021, email, a CDC official provided Facebook with the following counter-narrative, taken straight from the “How mRNA Vaccines Work” section on the CDC website:14
“Messenger mRNA [sic] vaccines work by teaching our cells to create a harmless spike protein …” (Emphasis in the original.)
Fast-forward to mid-June 2022, and the CDC was suddenly less sure about the harmlessness of the spike protein.
Up until then, the words “harmless spike protein” had always been bolded, but in this June revision, they removed the bolding, along with an entire section in which they’d previously claimed that mRNA was rapidly broken down and spike protein did not last more than a few weeks in the body.15 Clearly, the truth was catching up to them and certain lies were getting too risky to hold on to.
CISA also reached out to Google, Meta (Facebook’s parent company), Microsoft and Twitter for help, shortly after the DHS’s Disinformation Governance Board was announced.16 Fortunately, public outcry put an end to this Orwellian Ministry of Truth before it got started.
When Censorship Becomes Election Interference
According to The Washington Times :17
“Details about the Biden administration’s conduct raised the hackles of Republican lawmakers. ‘Confirming that this is the most dangerously anti-free speech administration in American history AND that Facebook … is nothing but an appendage of the deep state,’ Sen. Josh Hawley, Missouri Republican, said on Twitter as he shared news of the court filing.”
Other lawmakers are also getting involved. In an August 29, 2022, letter18,19 to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, Republican Sens. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin requested records of the government’s contacts with social media companies to ascertain whether the FBI and/or DOJ did, in fact, instruct them to censor information about the Hunter Biden laptop scandal by falsely referring to it as “Russian disinformation.”20
Zuckerberg has also been asked21 to provide any correspondence involving the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story, especially as it pertains to the FBI’s instructions to censor this political hot potato — something he openly admitted in a recent Joe Rogan interview (see video above).22
Lawmakers Pursue Legislation to Penalize Gov’t Censorship
Three Republican House Representatives on the House Oversight and Reform, Judiciary, and Commerce committees — Reps. James Comer of Kentucky, Jim Jordan of Ohio, and Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington — have also introduced the Protecting Speech from Government Interference Act23 (HR.8752), aimed at preventing federal employees from using their positions to influence censorship decisions by tech platforms.
The bill would create restrictions to prevent federal employees from asking or encouraging private entities to censor private speech or otherwise discourage free speech, and impose penalties, including civil fines and disciplinary actions for government employees who facilitate social media censorship.
While the U.S. Constitution clearly forbids government censoring and restricting free speech, HR. 8752 could be a helpful enforcement tool, as people might tend to think twice when they know there’s a real and personal price to pay.
Sources and References
Bill Gates took over Covid just like he took over Operating Systems
By Igor Chudov | September 15, 2022
An amazing article from the least expected, mainstream source: Politico.
The title of the article was apparently edited in a hurry post-publication because Google News still lists it as “How Bill Gates and his partners took over the global Covid response”. Here’s the archive link to the original article with “Bill Gates” in the title — proving it was later edited in a hurry.
Even the article URL lists Bill Gates:
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/09/14/global-covid-pandemic-response-bill-gates-partners-00053969The article would be fascinating to read for people who were not previously aware of what most of us knew already — that the so-called “pandemic response” and global health are taken over by unaccountable private interest groups serving Bill Gates.
I highly recommend that you take a look!
The story given by the article is incomplete but very interesting.
It mentions that the pandemic response was taken over by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, GAVI, CEPI, and the Wellcome Trust. All four organizations pretend to be independent, but all were financed by Bill Gates.
They participated in Event 201, planning out the pandemic, in October 2019.
“What makes Bill Gates qualified to be giving advice and advising the U.S. government on where they should be putting the tremendous resources?” asked Kate Elder, senior vaccines policy adviser for the Doctors Without Borders’ Access Campaign.
Several important items are glaringly missing from the article:
Nevertheless, the mere publication of this article has huge importance. The things that most of us know and talk about, are appearing in the so-called “mainstream press” — after the damage was all done, of course.
The virus was released; millions died; over a billion young people were force-vaccinated under false pretenses. When it is too late to change anything, Politico is finally stating the obvious. Still, it is better than nothing.
Almost everything in the Politico article was known a year ago. Where was Politico then? Busy taking government covid vaccine advertising money.
The pandemic was a crime, not an accident.
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 13, 2022
The Rockefeller Foundation, the National Science Foundation (an “independent” agency of the U.S. government) and other nonprofits are pouring millions of dollars into a research initiative “to increase uptake of COVID-19 vaccines and other recommended public health measures by countering mis- and disinformation.”
In conjunction with the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the Rockefeller Foundation last month announced $7.2 million in funding for the Mercury Project, initially launched in November 2021, under the slogan, “Together, we can build a healthier information environment.”
The funds will support 12 teams of researchers in 17 countries who will conduct studies on “ambitious, applied social and behavioral science to combat the growing global threat posed by low COVID-19 vaccination rates and public health mis- and disinformation,” the Rockefeller Foundation said.
The Rockefeller Foundation and the SSRC claim the aim of the Mercury Project, whose name is derived from the ancient Roman god of messages and communication, is to bolster public health and safety.
However, some critics described the project as one based on “propaganda” aimed at “nudging” the unvaccinated to get vaccinated.
Creating ‘behavioral change’ by targeting schoolchildren and specific socio-economic groups
Behavioral change lies at the heart of the Mercury Project, which will issue three-year research grants to estimate “the causal impacts of mis- and disinformation on online and offline outcomes in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic,” including “differential impacts across socio-demographic groups.”
The research will include “interventions that target the producers or the consumers of mis- and disinformation, or that increase confidence in reliable information.”
Some of the “interventions” proffered by the Rockefeller Foundation include “literacy training for secondary school students” to “help students identify COVID-19 vaccine misinformation,” “equipping trusted messengers with communication strategies to increase COVID-19 vaccination demand” and “using social networks to share tailored, community-developed messaging to increase COVID-19 vaccination demand.”
This information will, according to the Rockefeller Foundation, “provide evidence about what works — and doesn’t — in specific places and for specific groups to increase COVID-19 vaccination take-up.”
But according to ZeroHedge, the research groups funded by the Mercury Project “are operating with the intent to tailor vaccination narratives to fit different ethnic and political backgrounds, looking for the key to the gates of each cultural kingdom and convincing them to take the jab.”
The project uses “ambiguous language and mission statements” to at least partially conceal the project’s main purpose of “using behavioral psychology and mass psychology elements to understand the global resistance to the recent COVID compliance efforts,” ZeroHedge reported.
‘Fabricating effective COVID propaganda’ a ‘money train’ for behavioral researchers and psychologists
In November 2021, the Mercury Project received an initial $7.5 million in seed funding from entities including the Rockefeller Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to apply “the principles of large-scale, team-based science to the problem of vaccination demand” over a three-year period.
As of August 2022, these entities have funded the Mercury Project to the tune of $10.25 million.
In June, the project received $20 million from the National Science Foundation to study “interventions to increase COVID-19 vaccination demand and other positive health behaviors.”
The SSRC’s latest call for proposals, under the aegis of the Mercury Project, received nearly 200 submissions.
The accepted proposals come from researchers in countries including the U.S., Canada, Côte d’Ivoire, England, France, Ghana, Haiti, Kenya, India, Malawi, Mexico, Sierra Leone, Spain, Rwanda and Tanzania.
U.S.-based researchers represent institutions including Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, Duke, Harvard, MIT, New York University, Rutgers, St. Augustine University, Stanford, UC Berkeley, University of Southern California, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, Vanderbilt and Yale.
The titles of some of the projects most recently funded by the Mercury Project include:
Arguing in favor of the importance of the project’s research, Anna Harvey, president of the SSRC, stated:
“With COVID-19 prevalent and rapidly evolving everywhere, there is a pressing need to identify interventions with the potential to increase vaccination take-up.
“Vaccines are only effective if they become vaccinations; vaccines are a scientific marvel but their potential is unfulfilled if they are left on the shelf.”
Describing the Mercury Project’s grantees, Dr. Bruce Gellin, the Rockefeller Foundation’s chief of global public health strategy, said:
“This initial cohort’s ideas exemplify the creativity and vision behind the Mercury Project. They go far beyond quick fixes, with the goal of identifying robust, cost-effective, and meaningful solutions that can be widely adopted and scaled.
“We hope that more, better, and science-based knowledge about what we need to do will lead to increased uptake of reliable information — and serve as a powerful counter to the effects of misinformation and disinformation on vaccine demand.”
Heather Lanthorn, the Mercury Project’s program director, highlighted the importance of leveraging communication toward achieving public health objectives:
“The viral, vaccine, and information environments are all rapidly evolving–but that doesn’t mean it is impossible to make progress towards more effective and equitable responses.
“By funding projects on the ground around the world, this work will help us understand what works where, and why, and identify new ways to harness the power of connection and communication to advance public health goals.”
ZeroHedge, however, countered that behind all the rhetoric, the focus of the Mercury Project, is “propaganda, propaganda and propaganda,” and “the very basis of the existence of the Mercury Project presupposes that individuals cannot be trusted to make up their own minds about the information they are exposed to.”
The expectation is that individuals “must be molded to accept the mainstream narrative,” ZeroHedge said, while presupposing that “mainstream or establishment information is always trustworthy and unbiased.”
“Fabricating effective COVID propaganda is becoming a money train for the small groups of behavioral researchers and psychologists that jump onboard,” ZeroHedge added.
GAVI: 200 global ‘nudge units’ specialize in applying behavioral science to everyday life
The field of behavioral science — and a concept known as “nudging” — figured prominently during the years of the COVID-19 pandemic and were heavily utilized by governments and public health officials throughout the world to justify often stringent restrictions and countermeasures.
Nudging was defined in a bestselling 2008 book by economist Richard H. Thaler and legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein — “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness” — as something that “alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives.”
Thaler and Sunstein presented nudging as a technocratic solution for tricky policy issues involving a perceived need to encourage, in a “voluntary manner,” policies or measures that would otherwise be unpopular.
Their work drew from a 1974 paper by two Israeli psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, which, as explained by an article published by GAVI-The Vaccine Alliance, “pioneered the study of mental shortcuts that humans rely on to make decisions, known as heuristics.”
As previously reported by The Defender, the Rockefeller Foundation is also a partner and board member and donor to GAVI, alongside the WEF, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, which hosted Event 201, which simulated the spread of a coronavirus just prior to the actual COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2010, the U.K. government established the Behavioural Insights Team, initially within the government’s Cabinet Office, before it was spun off as a private company in 2014. A year later, U.S. President Barack Obama issued an executive order to promote the utilization of behavioral science in federal policymaking.
According to GAVI, “globally, there are now more than 200 teams, or nudge units, that specialize in applying behavioral science to everyday life.”
COVID-19, and the response to it, was no exception. HRW Healthcare’s Tony Jiang described nudges as “a set of policy tools which utilize psychological insights to attempt to motivate people to adopt certain desired actions/behaviours, without having to enforce strict laws, bans, or punishments,” and as a means to “motivate people into making responsible decisions, while preserving individual liberty.”
According to Jiang, “at the beginning of the pandemic, to encourage COVID-safe behaviours, behavioural nudges were the preferred policy by governments in the UK, USA, and Australia.”
According to Jay Van Bavel, associate professor of psychology at New York University, “as COVID-19 infections grew exponentially in 2020, behavioral scientists wanted to help. Nudges presented a possible route to controlling the virus, particularly in the absence of vaccines and evidence-based treatments.”
Van Bavel, along with Sunstein and 40 other researchers, in 2020 published a paper in Nature presenting ways in which behavioral science and nudging could contribute to efforts to combat COVID-19, including through fostering increased trust in government and fighting “conspiracy theories.”
As explained by GAVI, “as scientists learned more about how the coronavirus spread … governments knew what they wanted their citizens to do, but they still had to think carefully about how to encourage people to change their behavior. That’s where nudges could help.”
This was evidenced, for instance, in a March 14, 2020, U.K. government document published approximately two weeks before the U.K. government imposed a nationwide lockdown.
The document presented the role that would be played by the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies in advising the U.K. government’s response.
The document referenced the 2009-10 swine flu pandemic and the advice the advisory group received at the time from a subgroup known as the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour and Communications. This group was reconvened on Feb. 13, 2020, with an exclusive focus on behavioral psychology.
According to the document, the group was “asked to provide advice aimed at anticipating and helping people adhere to interventions that are recommended by medical or epidemiological experts,” concluding that the U.K. government should “provide clear and transparent reasons for the different strategies that might be taken.”
The group advised the U.K. government that “in order to increase confidence in, and adherence to, the interventions should provide clear and transparent reasons for the strategies that have and have not been selected … and conduct rapid research into how best to help people adhere to the recommendations” whilst suggesting “behaviours that reduce risk.”
Other studies in the 2020-2021 period also highlighted the potential role nudging and behavioral psychology could play in relation to COVID-19.
For instance, a 2021 study showed that sending text messages to patients before scheduled primary care visits increased flu vaccinations by 5%, while another 2021 study found that the same strategy boosted COVID-19 vaccination appointments by 6% and actual vaccinations by 3.6%.
Still another 2021 study, also published in Nature, found that “behavioural nudges increase COVID-19 vaccinations,” arguing that “overcoming vaccine hesitancy … requires effective communication strategies” and finding that “inducing feelings of ownership over vaccines” can help bring about an increase in vaccine uptake.
The National Science Foundation offered grants of $200,000 for research in this field, while the SSRC also issued a call for proposals, receiving 1,300 applications even though it had sufficient funding for only 62.
However, as the pandemic progressed and as vaccination figures eventually plateaued, the strategy of nudging began to be called into question.
Dena Gromet, executive director of the Behavior Change for Good Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania, said nudging is effective only if individuals are already inclined to perform the action that they are being reminded or encouraged to perform.
Nudging, as a result, was supplanted by vaccine mandates.
Indeed, such “sterner measures” were advocated by Richard Thaler, one of the creators of the concept of nudging. In an August 2021 New York Times op-ed, Thaler called for stricter measures for the unvaccinated, including vaccine passports and isolation — measures which he described as “pushes and shoves” instead of nudges.
Two studies performed by researchers at King’s College London also cast doubt on the effectiveness of nudging to change behaviors and attitudes in relation to COVID-19.
Notably, the dedicated COVID-19 page on the website of the Behavioral Insights Team, which had played such a key role in advising the U.K. government on its COVID-19-related countermeasures early in the pandemic, has not featured a new posting since April 28, 2021.
However, some believe there still remains a role for nudging as the world enters a “new phase” of the COVID-19 pandemic. Tony Jiang argued that “as mandates relax, a greater reliance on individual compliance is required if we are to prevent mass-outbreaks in the future.”
“This makes the role of nudges and behavioural science ever more crucial,” he said, suggesting that going forward, nudges can be utilized to encourage mask-wearing, vaccinations and boosters.
Jiang proffered suggestions such as personalized masks that “can be more fashionable,” and for vaccinations, the potential role of “defaults,” where “people are automatically enrolled to receive a booster and must deliberately cancel the scheduled appointment if they do not wish to receive it.”
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., is an independent journalist and researcher based in Athens, Greece.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
By John Roberts | TCW Defending Freedom | September 13, 2022
There have been calls for those who championed lockdown to apologise or at least admit they were wrong – to accept the overwhelming evidence that the imprisonment of pretty much the entire population did far more harm than good. With few exceptions that hasn’t happened.
Well, I have a confession to make. I was a committed Europhile. My name is John and I loved the EU. I voted Remain in the referendum and was upset and dismayed when the result came through. Actually I was beside myself. I really could not understand how so many people could be antagonistic to something that I thought was such a force for good.
Surely, I reasoned, a closer union of European peoples would help change our centuries-long habit of killing each other. I have always enjoyed travelling around Europe, experiencing the various cultures and at the same time been proud of our common European heritage. To be able to explore in this way with relatively little bureaucracy, and perhaps eventually without currency exchanges, was to my mind wonderful. I also thought that Britain’s membership would be a bulwark to French and German domination, which some of the smaller EU countries hoped would be the case. Then there was the frequent banner-waving for freedom, democracy and human rights. What’s that you say? How could I have been so naive? Perhaps you might say something less polite. Anyway, I’m not going to argue; maybe I was too idealistic. I knew there was corruption and stupidity but there is in most governments and although I didn’t think the EU was benign I didn’t think it was evil either. Now I delight when I hear of the EU in difficulty, not because I wish ill on the people but because of the discomfort it would cause the globalist bureaucrats. I would be happy for the Union to break up.
What changed me? The last two and half years. Through the so-called pandemic nearly all countries have become increasingly authoritarian, ours included. Most countries in the EU took the biscuit with longer and stricter lockdowns and draconian vaccine mandates. Piers Morgan may have called for the unvaccinated to be made to suffer but it never really happened here except perhaps through the actions of our ‘friends’ and family members and, of course, care workers in England who were sacked for not taking the jab, too low on the social scale to worry about.
In countries such as Italy, France, Germany and others the vaccine mandates were forced through with fascistic brutality, applauded and encouraged by the EU. Travel and restaurant bans were commonplace; an apartheid reminiscent of Germany in the late 1930s. Many states in Europe suffered greatly from one kind of dictatorship or another in the last century so you would have thought that their leaders might have found imposing vaccine mandates on their populations difficult – but not so. Despite some ministers and officials here, drunk on dictatorial power, wanting to go full-on China, they never quite managed it. What happened here was bad enough but never as bad as much of Europe.
I would like to say that the marches, the resistance that rose through the internet and the thousands of nurses and other health professionals who refused to be intimidated, albeit too late to stop the care workers from being sacked, were the reasons for this, but I think there is more to it. There were plenty of examples of resistance and indeed solidarity between the vaxxed and unvaxxed in EU countries but the jackboots marched onward. There has now been a move away from the health apartheid but that’s because in the real world the vaccines have been shown to be useless at preventing spread; the majority of the vaccinated know this because they and their friends and families have caught the virus, sometimes more than once. In such circumstances even avid watchers of mainstream propaganda will spot the insanity of compulsory vaccination.
The last couple of years have shown that the EU is a piece of the globalist jigsaw puzzle and a large one at that, and it hasn’t just been hijacked as some countries have – its founders were going in that direction right from the start. It is obvious to me that the orchestrated pandemic with its lockdowns and vaccine mandates was part of that age-old weapon of tyrants: fear. Fear so that we will ask the globalist elites to protect us from disease and climate change. In return we have only to give up our culture, our national sovereignty and eventually our families. This is how I see the EU now; I was late coming to the party.
My estrangement from the EU led to a growing warmth towards my country. For all its faults and frustrations I believe the ideals of liberty are more deeply ingrained here than in many places. I wonder if those of our politicians who are closet tyrants realised they couldn’t impose an EU-style authoritarianism on us. I find it ironic that the French national motto is: ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’. We don’t have a national motto; we have the monarch’s ‘Dieu et Mon Droit’: My God and my Right. Nothing about liberty there or equality either, decidedly autocratic, yet I would suggest that the British have been much less inclined to accept dictatorial government than the French. We are known to be a polite and placid people and we have not had the violent revolutions that our continental neighbours have suffered. We like order but not perhaps in the way the Germans do, not forced on to us from above but that which grew over the centuries from the ordinary people.
By Rachel Emmanuel | The Counter Signal | September 14, 2022
Denmark has ended the COVID-19 vaccine for most people under 50, the Danish Health Authority said yesterday.
Denmark had already discontinued COVID-19 shots for nearly everyone under 18.
According to health officials, the purpose of vaccines is to prevent severe illness, hospitalization and death.
“Therefore, people at the highest risk of of becoming severely ill will be offered booster vaccination,” the Danish Health Authority says.
“The purpose of vaccination is not to prevent infection with covid-19, and people under 50 are therefore currently not being offered booster vaccination.”
The statement goes on to say that people under 50 are generally not at high risk of becoming severely ill from COVID.
“In addition, younger people aged under 50 are well protected against becoming severely ill from covid-19, as a very large number of them have already been vaccinated and have previously been infected with covid-19, and there is consequently good immunity among this
Under the new regulations, Danes under 50 will only be inoculated if they at high risk of becoming severely ill from COVID-19. This includes those with an impaired immune system, people working in healthcare and those working with seniors.
The ban comes even while Denmark expects “a large wave of [Covid] infection” in the next few months, according to independent journalist Alex Berenson.
Berenson reports that Denmark did not explicitly say the risks of mRNA jabs now outweigh their benefits for healthy people under 50, but that view “is implicit in the announcement.”
“In other words, the health authority is not stopping shots because Covid has ended. It now believes most people are better off getting the coronavirus than taking more mRNA,” he wrote.
The announcement comes as other countries make similar steps to limit COVID-19 vaccine access.
The UK has banned doctors from giving the COVID-19 vaccine to children under 12, saying kids don’t need it and they likely already have natural immunity.
The UK government also released a report stating that pregnant and breastfeeding women should under no circumstance get the Pfizer COVID vaccine due to a lack of trial data on the vaccine’s effect on reproductive health.
In Canada, health authorities continue to encourage parents to vaccinate their babies and kids, even while the former Chair of National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI) admitted last month that COVID is less deadly to kids than the flu.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently said he might impose more COVID restrictions this winter unless 80-90% of the population gets “up-to-date” vaccinations.
To be fully vaccinated in Canada previously meant having two doses of a Health Canada-approved vaccine. The Canadian federal government is now applying pressure for citizens to get regular COVID-19 boosters.
In September, NACI announced that Canadians might consider getting a vaccine every 90 days.
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
Involuntary servitude is good for business
By Kurt Nimmo | Another Day in the Empire | April 20, 2026
In 2025, Alex Karp, the CEO of government and military tech contractor Palantir, published The New York Times best-seller, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. The Wall Street Journal praised the book as a cri de coeur, a passionate appeal “that takes aim at the tech industry for abandoning its history of helping America and its allies,” while Wired praised the book as a “readable polemic that skewers Silicon Valley for insufficient patriotism.”
On April 18, 2026, Palantir posted twenty-two points to social media summarizing the book. In addition to taking Silicon Valley to task for insufficient patriotism, advocating a role for AI in forever war, and denouncing the “psychologization of modern politics,” the Palantir post on X declares: “National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.”
National conscription, a form of involuntary servitude, and the wars it portends, is good for business, especially for corporations within the orbit of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the national security state. Palantir fits comfortably within this amalgamation. … continue
Aletho News If Americans Knew No Tricks Zone
Aletho News 