Ashli Babbitt, the Coronavirus Coup, and the Silence of the Scams
More than seven months have passed since an unarmed protester named Ashli Babbitt was shot dead inside the US Capitol while attempting to climb through an opening in a glass door.
Six months after her death, her killer – a police officer who apparently shot her without warning, and certainly without having made any effort to stop her short of putting a fatal bullet through her chest – has never been publicly identified, let alone charged or disciplined.
During those same seven months – during which every self-respecting liberal demanded a criminal penalty for the policeman who killed George Floyd – Ashli Babbitt, the victim of an equally questionable police killing, has been the target of an orgy of media character assassination.
When Donald Trump recently mentioned her death as “a terrible thing” (hardly a radical assessment), New York Magazine’s response seethed with victim-blaming outrage, insisting that the unarmed Babbitt, with no criminal history of any kind:
was leading the mob [inside the Capitol] violently forward toward its goal of threatening or killing officials.”
There’s no evidence that Babbitt intended to kill anyone, let alone that she actually tried to. And there’s plenty of reason to believe that her fatal shooting was illegal. But facts about Ashli Babbitt have never counted for much in liberal media.
For the press, the top priority has been to ensure that in any story told about the 2020 election, Donald Trump and his supporters are the ones who tried to destroy American democracy, while Joe Biden’s Democratic Party heroically came to its rescue.
In this respect, New York’s slander is altogether typical. Refracted through the editors’ invective, in which (among other things) Republican politicians are, weirdly, accused as the real culprits in Babbitt’s death, the underlying message emerges as an ideological tautology: Ashli Babbitt had to die because she joined the wrong sort of protest.
No wonder New York concluded that the hapless 35-year-old was killed “for a very good reason.”
The January 6 demonstration in which she participated has been as relentlessly demonized in the press as Babbitt herself.
According to mainstream media, the men and women who marched to the Capitol to protest the machinations by which Biden ousted Trump from the White House were – take your pick – “fascists” (PBS), “white supremacists” (CNN), “terrorists” (MSNBC), or a violent “mob” bent on paralyzing the United States government (USA Today), while virtually every mainstream media outlet still insists – against all evidence – that, collectively, the demonstrators staged an armed “insurrection” that only just failed to turn the United States into a right-wing dictatorship.
And anyone who imagined that, after seven months of this, the slanders against Ashli Babbitt couldn’t get any more venomous reckoned without the inflammatory effect of mass media Trump-hatred.
When, on July 12, the former President suggested that Babbitt’s killer should at least be publicly identified, the New Republic swung into anti-Republican overdrive, claiming in a hysterical screed that the unarmed Babbitt was a monster who had hoped for “the mass execution of Democratic politicians and prominent liberals” when she went to Washington to be killed on January 6.
Merciful heavens, the woman was so freaking bloodthirsty that she actually used to watch – Tucker Carlson!
Even that wasn’t all. The same rant that accused Ashli Babbitt of harboring dreams of mass murder described the January 6 protest as “a mob of thousands who…rampaged through the halls of Congress,” when in fact only a small fraction of the protesters entered the Capitol at all, and only a handful of those have been accused of possessing “weapons” (most of which seem to have been flagpoles); with a single exception, not one of the charged “insurrectionists” even thought to bring a gun to the coup. (The lone protester facing criminal charges who did carry a pistol into the Capitol never drew it, according to police.)
But hey, fantasy breeds fantasy: for liberals like the TNR editors, where there are Trump supporters, there’s just got to be mayhem.
Lest I be accused of playing an after-the-fact role in the “insurrection” myself, let me emphasize that I do not share Ashli Babbitt’s politics, and that I do not approve of the actions of the protesters who broke into the Capitol on January 6. Nor do I regard the 2020 presidential election as having been “stolen,” at least not in the sense that many of the protesters evidently believed it was – of which more presently.
But whether Ashli Babbitt was right about Donald Trump or about the 2020 election is ultimately beside the point. The plain truth is that as far as anyone can tell she was the victim of an extrajudicial execution – an execution made even more heinous by the fact that Babbitt’s actual offenses inside the Capitol involved no violence and placed no one in jeopardy.
It is an outrage that in the United States of America a police officer can shoot a woman dead for trespassing. And it is doubly an outrage that so few ostensible civil libertarians have been willing to say so.
Scores of liberals, politicians, op-ed writers and public moralists demanded a full-scale investigation into the fatal police shooting of Breonna Taylor. Why couldn’t one of them utter a single word of protest about the lethally trampled civil rights of Ashli Babbitt?
The smear campaign against Babbitt is more than the product of a pernicious double standard. It also serves to distract the public from the very real issues that spurred the protest in the first place.
I repeat: I don’t credit stories about the ghost of Hugo Chavez rising from the grave to manipulate secretly-programmed voting machines on Election Day. (In fact, I suspect these “theories” have been amplified in popular media precisely because they’re relatively easy to refute.)
But the January 6 protesters did have excellent reasons to be angry about the electoral process that put an end to Trump’s term of office. And since the popular press refuses to discuss the protesters’ legitimate grievances, allow me to enumerate three of the most important ones.
1. The balloting procedures used in key jurisdictions were probably illegal.
In several closely contested states – Georgia, Illinois, Michigan and Pennsylvania among them – state executives made unilateral changes in the election laws in order to facilitate voting by mail rather than at polling booths, citing the “killer virus” as a pretext. Yet in every such case, the applicable state constitution assigns questions of public policy – including the extent to which people can vote by mail – to the state’s legislators rather than the executive branch; these matters cannot legally be determined by gubernatorial fiat except in strictly defined “emergencies.”
Nor can it be claimed that COVID19 posed such an emergency. Even Atlantic Magazine, one of the most sedulous organs of coronavirus hysteria, conceded barely a month before the presidential election that “voting with a mask on is no more dangerous than going to a grocery store with a mask on – something millions of Americans do every week.”
That means that the balloting procedures used in several important states were fundamentally flawed – not only violating the relevant state constitutions but probably transgressing the “due process of law” requirement of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution itself. And while there’s no way to know whether these wrongly altered procedures actually changed the outcome of the election, Trump voters had every right to condemn them.
2. The election was effectively decided by mass media misinformation.
It is ironic that so much recent propaganda accuses Trump and his supporters of circulating “misinformation.” In fact, one of the most consequential misinformation campaigns of modern times was largely responsible for Trump’s defeat.
Post-election observers are in general agreement that Joe Biden – that mumbling mummy – would have stood little chance of besting Trump had it not been for the popular press’ relentless stoking of coronavirus hysteria.
Of particular impact was the claim – repeated in various forms in more venues than I can count – that Trump was “personally responsible for tens of thousands of deaths,” as one typical hit piece insisted in the run-up to the election.
But was he? For all the huffing and puffing, no one has presented any real evidence to support the accusation. Yes, the man in the bad wig behaved as anyone familiar with his record might have expected: he made some foolish remarks, picked needless feuds with Democratic governors, hogged the spotlight, reversed himself without acknowledgment, and took credit for things that would have happened just as well without him.
But the fact remains that presidential action had little effect on the virus or its consequences; nearly all the important decisions – including the disastrous lockdowns and small business closures, not to mention the suspension of representative democracy and the attacks on education, public worship and the arts – were made at the state level.
In all of this, the White House was largely irrelevant. Trump’s most culpable act – in my opinion – was backing the Food and Drug Administration as it cut the corners of the testing procedures that should have been required for the COVID19 “vaccines” and granted the manufacturers blanket legal immunity for any adverse medical consequences.
But on that point, remember, Trump was supported by the “experts” and even by his political opponents. Legitimate criticism never figured in the media blitz against the former President. Instead, he was blindsided over claims so vague they couldn’t even be specified, with dire-sounding but meaningless words like “downplaying” or “mishandling” repeated so often that eventually they seemed to prove themselves. It was an impressive display of emotion-churning propaganda. It contained little or no truth.
Did the avalanche of misinformation violate any election laws? Alas, no. But that fact certainly did not deprive angry voters of their right to protest.
3. Biden’s election guaranteed the worsening of the coronavirus coup.
The protesters’ conviction that Trump actually won the election probably won’t stand the test of time. But in one important sense, they did know perfectly well what they were fighting for – and so did we.
Joe Biden has never made a secret of his fondness for attacks on freedom in the name of “health” regulation. Less than two months into his term, Biden was openly mulling an executive fiat that would require the muzzling and six-foot separation of all American workers, even those who have submitted to the “vaccines.”
He has also suggested that anyone who declines to be a guinea pig for Big Pharma is unpatriotic, and has announced a plan to have “local health leaders” hawk the scantily-tested drugs from door to door to add even more pressure to the vaccination campaign – even as the unprecedented “gene therapy” has already figured in more than 5,300 deaths nationwide.
And this is clearly just the beginning.
Each passing week sees the lockdown-lovers flaunting still more contempt for the Bill of Rights. Mandatory muzzling has been reintroduced in Los Angeles County. Geraldo Rivera, a media stalking horse for the administration, has endorsed Jim Crow restrictions for the “unvaccinated” that would bar them from grocery stores and nearly all public places.
The US Surgeon General is publicly calling for still more censorship on social media (where dozens of accounts have already been canceled for disseminating information the authorities don’t like).
The nastiest aspect of all these police-state tactics is the growing intensity of the hate speech aimed at dissenters. “Look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated,” Biden insisted (falsely) on July 16.
Rochelle Walensky, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, took the incitement a step farther, blaming even infections among vaccinated Americans on “outbreaks of cases in parts of the country that have low vaccination coverage.” In other words: if you get sick, you can thank those dastardly freethinkers who still imagine they’re entitled to civil rights.
It’s a dangerous and divisive strategy. And anyone unsure where it leads need only look to Italy, France and Greece, where officials are already forcing health care workers to submit to vaccinations on pain of losing their livelihoods.
French President Emmanuel Macron, not even bothering to seek parliamentary approval, is mandating “vaccine passports” for anyone who wants to eat at a restaurant or to travel by train.
And these strong-arm tactics are doubtless intended to prepare us for worse still to come. Anthony Fauci himself has declared that COVID19 vaccination should be compulsory in as many places as possible – even though federal law holds otherwise, since the drugs have only been granted “emergency use” authorization – because he thinks it “horrifying” that people should decide the fate of their own bodies. (The good doctor sings a different tune on the question of legalized abortion, but since when have our ruling mandarins been consistent?)
In short, to say that a lot was at stake in the 2020 presidential election would be putting it very mildly. Liberal pundits have expressed shock at the willingness of thousands of people to converge on Washington to denounce the election results that effectively intensified the coronavirus coup. I think it would have been shocking had they not done so.
It’s not just that our government – and its tame mouthpieces in the press – is using the pretext of “health regulation” to demonize those citizens who choose to exercise their right not to be injected with an untested drug. The entire vaccine-blackmail program is premised on a lie.
The campaign necessarily assumes that the COVID19 “vaccines” prevent transmission of the virus from one person to another. They do no such thing.
The manufacturers have acknowledged, and the FDA has explicitly confirmed, the absence of any evidence that the new “vaccines” prevent either infection or transmission of SARS-CoV-2. The argument that vaccination is necessary to “protect the public” against COVID19 is simply fraudulent.
Not only does the fear-mongering about “the unvaccinated” falsely assume that the “vaccines” prevent transmission, it completely ignores the presence of genuine immunity among those who have already been exposed. As with any respiratory virus, exposure to SARS-CoV-2 triggers the development of antibodies and T-cells that serve to prevent future infections and, therefore, to block the virus’ transmissibility.
In October 2020, the prominent Oxford University epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta estimated that “three months, maybe six is sufficient time for enough immunity to accumulate…that the vulnerable could resume normal lives” in the United States. More than nine months have now passed since Gupta’s assessment.
Even if her estimate turns out to have been overly optimistic, there can be no doubt that enough natural immunity exists in the general population to have a profound effect on the transmissibility of COVID19, with or without the experimental drugs the government wants us to use. Any “analysis” that omits that obvious fact is patently dishonest.
And suppose, for argument’s sake, that one overlooks all this and accepts the “case” numbers peddled by the CDC. Even so, the statistical basis for all the shrieking about “a pandemic of the unvaccinated” is riddled with too many inconsistencies to be taken seriously.
The southern states of Mississippi and Arkansas, for instance, are both at the low end of the vaccination-level range, at 33.6% and 35.2% respectively.
If the Biden-Walensky propaganda were correct, those states would be inundated in comparable outbreaks of new COVID19 infections.
In fact, after adjusting for the small difference in population size, Arkansas’ most recent 7-day average for “new cases” is nearly 2.5 times higher than Mississippi’s. Such a disparity in the official numbers clearly cannot be explained on the basis of COVID19 vaccination rates.
And things are no different at the high end of the vaccination spectrum. Maryland has “fully vaccinated” 57.6% of its population, while New York lags just slightly behind at 55.8%. Yet, after adjustment for the different population sizes of the two states, New York still has nearly 2.5 times the 7-day average number of new “cases” of COVID19 that Maryland has – as big a gap as that between Mississippi and Arkansas.
Or consider the wildly different “case” levels to be found in California, which has a “fully vaccinated” rate of 51.5%, and in Pennsylvania, where the rate is 51.1%. Again, after adjusting for population, California’s latest “new case” average is well over double that of Pennsylvania’s – even though the vaccination level in the two states is virtually identical. Anomalies like these make nonsense of any argument that the US is experiencing a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.”
And what about the “vaccinated”? Here, too, the propaganda doesn’t withstand even cursory scrutiny. Recently, six “fully vaccinated” people at a single wedding – held in a “large, open-air tent” – all came down with COVID19. Of those six, two were hospitalized and one died.
In a rather desperate brush-off typical of mainstream media, Insider’s Hilary Brueck described this as a “small outbreak that underscores how effective vaccines are against even variants of the virus.”
Ah, how nimbly propagandists put about in a changing wind! A year ago, six symptomatic cases of COVID19 would have marked the ceremony where they originated as a dreaded “superspreader event” – it would have been touted as proof that anyone selfish enough to invite guests to a wedding ought to be treated as a public menace.
And if, on top of that, fully a third of those infected had been hospitalized, and over 16% of them had dropped dead – well, I will leave it to the reader to imagine the hysterical headlines that would have erupted about that. Are we really supposed to chant hosannas now that the identical evils are showing up in the wake of COVID19 “vaccinations”?
But let us return to January 6 and the conspiracy of silence surrounding the killing of Ashli Babbitt.
Apart from her violent death – the only one that occurred in the Capitol on January 6 – the incidents of that day were strikingly incommensurate with the media’s horrified depictions of the “storming” of Congress.
Yes, there were scuffles with police, but such things were hardly unprecedented in Washington. And the media’s obsessive use of the phrase “deadly riot” misrepresents the unfortunate but nonviolent deaths (other than Babbitt’s) that occurred during or immediately after the protest.
Brian Sicknick, the Capitol Police officer who died the following day, and whose death – as we were assured by the New York Times on the basis of “anonymous” reports – resulted from being clubbed over the head with a fire extinguisher by one of the “insurrectionists,” actually died of natural causes (as did two of the older protesters).
The only other supposedly “violent” death, that of protester Rosanne Boyland, was determined by the D.C. medical examiner’s office last April to be the consequence of “acute amphetamine intoxication,” though that didn’t prevent the Times from offering its readers back in January a gorily detailed – and false – account of how Boyland was “trampled” and “crushed” to death by “the mob.”
(By the way, I am not aware that the ostensibly meticulous fact-checkers at the Times have ever printed a direct retraction of either of these two bogus articles. Innocent errors do sometimes merit a correction at the Paper of Record; malicious errors almost never do.)
The threat allegedly posed by the demonstrators to members of Congress seems also to have been greatly exaggerated. Despite the media’s early insistence that the “insurrection” was led by sinister “right-wing extremists,” only a handful of those who breached the Capitol had any ties to the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters or Aryan Nations.
“More than four-fifths” of those charged for their actions on January 6 “come from various backgrounds, from business owners to white-collar professionals,” the BBC reported in February. The claim that the “rioters” brought zip-tie handcuffs to use on Democratic politicians turned out to be another falsification: the one protester photographed holding the “restraints” actually found them on a table inside the Capitol. The police had brought them there.
And frankly, I find it a little hard to believe the stories of lawmakers who say they feared for their lives during the “siege” when one of them, a Democrat from the Virgin Islands, could generate straight-faced media reports by claiming that she preferred a “possible confrontation with the insurrectionist mob” to sharing a “secure location” with some Republicans who were – gasp – not wearing masks!
True, her insistence that masks on the Republicans would have protected her, while her own would not, is part of the magical thinking we’ve all been asked to swallow throughout the propaganda campaign.
But would anyone who genuinely thought she was running from a lynch mob refuse a safe haven just because “I wouldn’t be able to see the virus as it was coming toward me” from a few un-muzzled legislators across the room? What was evidently meant to sound like a horror story reads, to me, much more like farce.
So it turns out that anyone genuinely concerned about “deadly violence” during the January 6 protest can have only one real subject to investigate: Ashli Babbitt. And the more one investigates her death, and the circumstances surrounding it, the less justifiable the whole scenario appears.
Just how, for instance, did protesters manage to enter the Capitol in the first place?
No one in power has offered any convincing answer to that question.
Federal government buildings in Washington are normally among the most zealously guarded in the world. And everyone knew that a large political protest was planned for January 6, the day Joe Biden’s election as President was to be officially certified.
Why couldn’t Capitol police use tear gas to stop the unarmed demonstrators as soon as they breached the entrances, especially since “tear gas munitions were used by other federal police agencies against protesters in front of Lafayette Park” just a few months earlier? And assuming the local police force was somehow unable to handle the crowd, where was the vaunted National Guard?
Some of the protesters believe that they were deliberately entrapped. As one of them later told the FBI, “law enforcement purposefully did not have enough resources there so that supporters of the former president could overrun the Capitol and be subsequently labeled as ‘intruders.’” I cannot prove this theory correct – but I also cannot dismiss it as implausible.
As early as February 4, Time Magazine’s Molly Ball reported that a “conspiracy” involving “an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans” had orchestrated a “vast, cross-partisan campaign” to ensure Biden’s smooth entry into office.
This “conspiracy” was so effective that it “got states to change voting systems” and, on the day of the January 6 protest itself, saw to it that the protesters who converged on the Capitol “were met by virtually no counterdemonstrators” who might otherwise “be blamed for any mayhem.”
Surely a cabal capable of that much could also arrange for the protest to get just far enough out of hand to guarantee media images that would discredit Donald Trump with the nation’s political elites – which, of course, is exactly what happened. Or was it all just coincidence?
Along similar lines, the strange absence of the National Guard on January 6 has been widely reported – but only as an inexplicable blunder.
Yet couldn’t this, like the parallel absence of counter-demonstrations, have been deliberate?
We know that the deployment of National Guard or military personnel to the Capitol would have required the consent of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And we know that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was General Mark Milley, a man who (according to a soon-to-be-published book) told his aides that Trump reminded him of Hitler, and whose determination to ensure that Biden was installed as President – “come hell or high water” – went so far that he “informally planned for different ways to stop Trump” after the election, including private telephone conversations with (Democratic) House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
In fact, credible reports maintain (though he denies it) that General Walter Piatt, director of Army staff, specifically refused to send National Guard troops to the Capitol on January 6 because “it wouldn’t look good.”
An honest press – if we had one – would be taking a hard look into the possibility that the “deadly riot” was really political theater, organized not by the protesters but by the very democracy-haters the protesters came to challenge. That would make Babbitt’s killing an even uglier miscarriage of justice.
Meanwhile, the refusal of the media, the pundits, the civil rights organizations, the politicians – just about everyone in power – to give Ashli Babbitt’s death the attention it deserves is more than a wrong in itself. It is part of a larger pattern of political gaslighting by which the victors in the 2020 election, while accusing Trump & Co. of an attempted “coup,” continue to advance a coup of their own.
Today the coup marches under the name “Delta variant.” But this is only a temporary phase. Specific terrors will vary from month to month, but there will always be some reason for whittling down our remaining freedoms. This latest scare is entirely typical.
Notwithstanding the ballyhoo, there’s no real evidence that the “Delta variant” is particularly dangerous – not even the CDC has attempted to make that case – and as a general rule, subsequent variants of a respiratory virus are less severe than those they follow.
(As a matter of fact, there’s only sketchy evidence that the new “variant” is even more transmissible than the original version, despite popular media’s insistence on this as a matter of fact: the CDC cites only one study about the alleged contagiousness of the “Delta variant,” which is based entirely on manifestly unreliable public “test” data. It’s also rife with anomalies, such as the finding that the variant spreads more rapidly among Asians than among white people, while among blacks it actually appears to be less transmissible. Go figure.)
In other words, like nearly everything the “experts” have claimed about COVID19 for the last seventeen months, the “deadly Delta” story is much less about facts than it is about maintaining public hysteria.
And the motive for the fear porn is perfectly clear. The Biden administration never intended to give the public anything more than a brief honeymoon from coronavirus terror.
True, there had to be some kind of reward for voting Donald Trump out of office. But now it’s time to get back to business – “business” being the deepening confinement of the American public.
“The carefree Covid season is over,” barked CNN on July 17. And the network was quick to identify the next targets of the crackdown: conservative media, for encouraging “vaccine hesitancy,” and “Republican-led states” that “have tried to outdo each other in limiting the power of cities and counties to impose Covid restrictions in case of a new outbreak.”
It’s a short step from condemning defenders of basic liberties to uprooting the liberties themselves. So if you thought this was all about roasting a TV commentator like Tucker Carlson or a politician like Ron DeSantis, think again: you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Can we still pry our country loose from the grip of the fear campaign? I hope so, believing as I do in the aspirations to which our political system is dedicated, and still more in the value of the human lives that have grown up under the influence of those ideals.
But if we want each life to matter, we have to prove that Ashli Babbitt’s life mattered too. We need to demand more from the federal Justice Department than the cynical conclusion that there was:
no evidence to establish that, at the time the officer fired a single shot at Ms. Babbitt, the officer did not reasonably believe that it was necessary to do so in self-defence or in defense of the Members of Congress and others evacuating the House Chamber.”
We need to seek an explanation for the fact that “the officer,” unlike Derek Chauvin – currently behind bars for killing George Floyd – has never faced charges of any kind for gunning down an unarmed woman under circumstances that placed no one in serious danger.
We must ask why there are no crowds in the streets to support the Babbitt family’s lawsuit against the Capitol police, as there would be if she had been killed by a cop during a Black Lives Matter rally.
It must be clear by now that the coronavirus coup isn’t going away of its own accord. If we don’t demand an end to it, there will be no end.
There will only be more fear porn, more manipulated elections, more wrecked livelihoods, more attacks on freedom – and more tragedies like the killing of Ashli Babbitt, who believed that by taking her protest to the seat of government she could make a difference.
Whether she was right about that is no longer up to her. It’s up to us.
Michael Lesher is an author, poet and lawyer whose legal work is mostly dedicated to issues connected with domestic abuse and child sexual abuse. His latest nonfiction book is Sexual Abuse, Shonda and Concealment in Orthodox Jewish Communities (McFarland & Co., 2014)
August 15, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, False Flag Terrorism, Progressive Hypocrite | Covid-19, Human rights, United States |
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In April and June of 2020 I wrote about something I referred to as LOKIN 20. In a series of articles I was among those in the so called “alternative media” who tried to highlight that lockdowns and other response measures, created by the Coronavirus Act, increased the risks to the most vulnerable.
This was entirely contrary to the rationale we were given for these new laws and subsequent policies. The response was promoted to the public as a “plan” to protect the most vulnerable. It was certainly a plan but increasing, rather than decreasing, the risks appears to have been the objective.
I reported the removal the safeguards put in place following the Shipman Inquiry and Francis Report (Mid Staffs). I pointed to statistical evidence from the Office of National Statistics and the concerns raised, by people like Professor Carl Heneghan and David Spiegelhalter, that a dangerous withdrawal of healthcare was contributing toward unnecessary increased mortality among the most vulnerable.
I am not claiming any great insight or deductive powers. I was just one, among many others, in the inappropriately named alternative media who were reporting the obvious dangers inherent to government policy.
It is important to stress that the increased mortality risk from the policies, rather than COVID 19, was abundantly clear at the time. Many people tried to warn the public but they were widely dismissed and labelled as “COVID deniers.”
A year later a number of mainstream media (MSM) articles have emerged confirming, what appears to have been, a policy that would inevitably maximise the risks to the most vulnerable. As usual, the possibility of deliberate policy intent is never broached in any of these MSM pieces. Their reports uncritically cite statements by politicians and consistently assume that these policies were mistakes and promote the notion that lessons need to be learned.
Speaking in June 2020 about the high risk discharge of 25,000 vulnerable patients into care setting, where they received neither medical care nor adequate social care, the former Health Secretary and chairman of the Health Select Committee, Jeremy Hunt, was unquestioningly reported as saying:
“It seems extraordinary that no one appeared to consider the clinical risk to care homes despite widespread knowledge that the virus could be carried asymptomatically”
Leaving aside the clear scientific proof that there is no such thing as asymptomatic transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the evidence suggests that these were neither mistakes nor failures. Yet all we see from the mainstream media is a free pass for the politicians and a blanket refusal to ever question their deceitful statements.
We face a huge sociopolitical problem. Despite the mountain of historical and contemporaneous evidence that governments can and do intentionally harm us, it seems we are collectively incapable of grasping the reality of democide. We wrongly assume that every policy is intentionally benign.
We must overcome this flawed and naive belief. Until we recognise that there are those within government, and its wider partnership networks, that wish us ill we will remain unable to address the threat they pose to all of us.
The UK government not only created the legislation to enable healthcare providers to increase the risks to the most vulnerable, they fully understood those risks. They had previously identified them in training exercises and had extensively modelled those risks.
Contrary to Hunt’s statement, there were many in the UK government who did “consider the clinical risk to care homes.” When the claimed pandemic arrived, rather than respond to limit and reduce the known dangers, the government, of which Hunt is a leading member, appeared to intentionally exacerbate them.
Section 14 of the Coronavirus Act removed the crucial NHS obligations under the NHS (standards) Framework. The NHS did not have to comply with clause 21(2)(a) and 21(12) of the 2012 Regulations.
The NHS no longer had a duty to assess a patient’s “eligibility for NHS Continuing Healthcare” before discharging them. In addition, no relevant body needed to have any “regard to the National Framework.” It is important to recognise what this meant within the context of a supposed global pandemic.
On 19th March 2020 the HCID group of Public Health England and the Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens (ACDP) unanimously agreed to downgrade COVID 19, from a High Consequence Infectious Disease, due to low mortality. The UK government issued instructions to the NHS that they must discharge as many patients as possible on the same day.
With no duty to assess a patient’s continuing healthcare needs, the government set very unsafe assessment criteria and compelled hospitals to discharge them. Unless they were in intensive care, receiving oxygen, on intravenous fluids or imminently close to death, the government decreed:
“Every patient on every general ward should be reviewed on a twice daily board round to determine the following. If the answer to each question is ‘no’, active consideration for discharge to a less acute setting must be made.”
This is worth reiterating. During an allegedly unprecedented health crisis the UK government removed the NHS duty to assess a patient’s health status (and conditions) before discharging them from hospital. They then issued instructions compelling the NHS to discharge as many patients as possible.
The government and the NHS accepted that this would mean discharging patients with an active COVID 19 infection into the community. COVID patients, and people with a range of potentially life threatening conditions, were shipped into care settings where other vulnerable adults, who may not not have had any infection, were supposedly “shielding.”
There is no doubt that untested and COVID 19 positive patients entered the care system via this route. Both during the first and second “waves.” It is entirely reasonable to suspect that this policy, combined with others we are about to discuss, caused the said “waves.”
An August 2020 study by the Queen’s Nursing Institute found the following practices commonly operating in Care Homes during the spring 2020 outbreak. We should note the element of compulsion:
“Having to accept patients from hospitals with unknown Covid-19 status, being told about plans not to resuscitate residents without consulting families, residents or care home staff… 21% of respondents said that their home accepted people discharged from hospital who had tested positive for Covid-19… a substantial number found it difficult to access District Nursing and GP services… 25% in total reporting it somewhat difficult or very difficult during March-May 2020.”
On January 11th 2021, during the alleged second wave, The Care Quality Commission stated:
“These settings are admitting people who are discharged from hospital with a COVID-positive test who will be moving or going back into a care home setting.”
Even a few isolated voices in the mainstream media pointed out what they referred to as culpable neglect. Some of the UK’s leading charities for vulnerable people including the Alzheimer’s Society, Marie Curie, Age UK, Care England and Independent Age contributed toward an open letter to the UK government. Written on 14th April 2020 they highlighted a litany of policy “failures:”
“Instead of being allowed hospital care, to see their loved ones and to have the reassurance that testing allows; and for the staff who care for them to have even the most basic of PPE, they are told they cannot go to hospital, routinely asked to sign Do Not Resuscitate orders.”
The policies operated both by the NHS and the care homes, as a consequence of Coronavirus Act’s “legislative easement,” did not protect the most vulnerable. Rather they maximised their clinical risk. Not just of COVID 19, but of every condition that rendered them vulnerable in the first place.
From the 17th March 2020 the NHS were discharging vulnerable patients into care homes without assessing their “eligibility for healthcare.” On 2nd April 2020 the NHS combined this with instructions that care home residents should not be conveyed to hospital. On the 6th April they issued guidance to GP’s which stated:
“All patients should be triaged remotely… Remote consultations should be used when possible. Consider the use of video consultations when appropriate.”
So called “first wave” mortality peaked on the 11th of April and the UK government published its COVID 19 Action Plan on the 15th April. This seemingly insane policy agenda was deemed “necessary” by the UK state to create “capacity” in the NHS:
“The UK Government with the NHS set out its plans on the 17th March 2020 to free up NHS capacity via rapid discharge into the community and reducing planned care… We can now confirm we will move to institute a policy of testing all residents prior to admission to care homes.”
There was no commitment to improve the situation from the UK government, just a plan to move toward one. We know from the observations of the CQC that they continued these high risk policies during the subsequent virus “waves.” There is no evidence that any of these policies were designed to reduce the risks of the most vulnerable. They all, consistently tended to increase them.
It is not tenable for politicians to now claim that they didn’t know what was happening. They constructed and enabled all of the policies that made this dangerous negligence possible. Nor is it credible to simply blame the medical profession. The widespread use of Hospital Trust gagging orders (non disclosure agreements) was also in place. Doctors who did speak out were disciplined or sacked. This was systemic policy initiative which physicians were expected to abide by.
Once the vulnerable were trapped in abandoned care homes, which were knowingly understaffed, the remaining, unprotected staff were then left to deal with both their own safety fears and the mounting mortality. The government decided this was an opportune moment to suspend all safety inspections in both hospital and care settings. This was supposed to “limit infections,” although every other decision they made appeared to increase them. Yet again, ending inspections raised the mortality risk for the most vulnerable.
At the same time, Do Not Resuscitate (DNAR) notices were being attached to vulnerable people’s care plans, often without their consent or even their knowledge. This coincided with a massive increase in orders for the potentially life ending medication midazolam.
In March 2020 the NHS purchased the equivalent of two years worth of supply. French suppliers were then given regulatory approval by the MHRA to sell additional stock to the NHS. This was then distributed for out of hospital use in the community.
This benzodiazepine (midazolam) is a sedative/anaesthetic that suppresses respiration and the central nervous system (CNS). The British National Formulary (BNF) recommends its use for sedation of anxious or agitated terminally ill patients using a mechanised syringe pump in doses of 30–200 micrograms/kg/hour. It is not recommended for conscious sedation in higher doses due to the following risks:
“CNS (central nervous system) depression; compromised airway; severe respiratory depression.”
Therefore a frail, eight stone (50 kg) adult could receive an initial dose of up to 2.5mg followed by a total incremental dose of another 2.5mg over a 24hr period. The purpose of this would be to ease their anxiety and agitation if they were experiencing the frightening sensation of intense respiratory difficulty.
Midazolam becomes a conscious anaesthetic for use in intensive and palliative care when given in higher doses. The British Association for Palliative Medicine recommend:
“Start with 2.5-5 milligrams – if necessary, increase progressively to 10 milligrams – maintain with 10-60 milligrams / 24h in a syringe pump”
Ten milligrams is twice the BNF recommended dose to ease anxiety (for an 8 stone vulnerable adult.) Therefore it is extremely concerning that NHS Clinical Guideline for Symptom Control for patients with COVID-19 recommended 10mg of Midazolam for patients with “distressing breathlessness at rest.” This risks a rapid deterioration of the symptoms causing them that distress.
Police are still investigating an estimated 15,000 deaths that occurred at Gosport War Memorial Hospital between 1987 and 2001. An inquiry has already found that at least 456 people’s lives were “shortened” through the unwarranted use of unnecessary medication. Many suspect that the true figure is in the thousands. The independent panel into the malpractice at Gosport War Memorial Hospital found:
“There was a disregard for human life and a culture of shortening the lives of a large number of patients by prescribing and administering “dangerous doses” of a hazardous combination of medication not clinically indicated or justified… they were, in effect, put on a terminal care pathway… The risk of using them in combination has been consistently documented in the BNF. In particular, it has long been known that when given together, opioids and midazolam cause enhanced sedation, respiratory depression and lowered blood pressure.”
This report was published in September 2018. In 2020 the NHS treatment guidelines for COVID 19 patients, who were deemed to be “agitated,” was:
“Start with Morphine 20mg and Midazolam 20mg”
This is precisely the mechanical syringe combination used at Gosport War Memorial to “shorten” thousands of peoples lives. There are numerous reasons to suspect that the huge increase in midazolam ordered by the NHS, with the full knowledge of the government, was intended for this purpose.
In April 2020 the Health and Social Care Committee, chaired by Jeremy Hunt, heard submissions from medical professionals as they considered the government response to the global pandemic. In Q377 Dr Luke Evans (MP fror Hinckley and Bosworth) asked then Health Secretary about NHS provisions for “a good death.” This is medical shorthand for assisted dying or euthanasia. Dr Evans (MP) asked:
“The syringe drivers are used to deliver medications such as midazolam and morphine. Do you have any precautions in place to ensure that we have enough of those medications?”
To which Matt Hancock replied:
“Yes. We have a big project to make sure that the global supply chains for those sorts of medications… are clear. In fact, those medicines are made in a relatively small number of factories around the world, so it is a delicate supply chain and we are in contact with the whole supply chain.”
Hancock was clearly referring to the huge midazolam order and MHRA approval of the French supply chain. The UK government had already passed the Coronavirus Act, removing the NHS Framework duties, and had ordered them to discharge patients en masse. The NHS had instructed care homes not to send sick patients to hospital and GP support from the care homes had effectively been withdrawn.
Jeremy Hunt was chairing this discussion. For him to claim two months later that no one had “appeared to consider the clinical risk to care homes” smacks of vile obfuscation. The best we can say about this statement is that he was wrong. We now have the documentation which shows that the clinical risk in care homes was very carefully considered and the withdrawal of care was planned.
In 2016 the UK government ran Exercise Cygnus. The training scenario was prepared by Professor Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College London (ICL). It simulated a flu outbreak and was a Command Post Exercise (CPX) designed to test the UK’s pandemic preparedness. Nearly a thousand key officials took part from central and local government departments, the NHS, public health bodies from across UK, as well as local emergency response planners.
Some of the Cygnus Report recommendations were implemented in response to COVID 19 and others not. For example, it recommended legislative easements. The Coronavirus Act certainly eased the legislation surrounding the death registration process and the NHS duty of care. The legal requirements for inquests, post-mortems and cremations were also relaxed.
Exercise Cygnus also highlighted a number of deficiencies. It identified inadequate numbers of critical, general and acute care beds, which the government then proceeded to reduce further; it warned that whole sections of the NHS may have to be shut, which is exactly what the government did during the “pandemic;” it highlighted that the most vulnerable could be denied care, just as they were, and that the health service would have to be set on a war footing just to be able to cope.
These were warnings not policy suggestions. The UK government’s adoption of some of the Cygnus recommendations and determination not to address Gygnus alarms appears to have been their policy response to COVID 19.
COVID 19 healthcare strategies were seemingly set in 2016. The Cygnus scenario, modelled by Ferguson and ICL differed from their COVID 19 “models” only by virtue of being based upon influenza rather than a coronavirus.
Perhaps this explains why Exercise Cygnus was kept secret, reportedly for reasons of “national security.” When the report was released, after being exposed, it was heavily redacted and all the names of the senior officials involved were hidden.
The official explanation for this is that it was just too terrifying for the public to withstand. We might ask, terrifying for whom? Using the media to terrorise the public during the alleged pandemic was recommended by Spi-B (SAGE.)
It is reasonable to assume that many of those redacted names would have been people working for Ferguson’s ICL team and current members of SAGE. If so, this indicates that those involved in planning the response to COVID 19 not only understood what the risks were, they then provided the claimed “scientific” justification for policies which they knew would increase them.
One of the senior officials involved in Cygnus reportedly said:
“These exercises are supposed to prepare government for something like this – but it appears they were aware of the problem but didn’t do much about it.”
Again, we see the assumption that everything must be explained away as error or unfortunate oversight. This stretches credibility beyond breaking point when we understand that Gygnus ultimately produced a plan to deny healthcare during a pandemic. This policy of increasing the risks of the most vulnerable was evidently operating during the first alleged pandemic wave. It also seems likely that it continued beyond that point.
Based upon the Cygnus conclusions, in September 2017, the NHS Surge and Triage briefing paper was made available to senior health and government officials. It discussed something called population triage:
“The purpose of this paper is to provide an update to Chief Medical Officer (CMO) and the Chief Scientific Advisor (CSA) on continuing refinement of the knowledge and understanding behind the potential decision that may be required in a future extreme pandemic influenza scenario to move to a state of population triage across the country..”
Population triage means the potential denial of healthcare:
“The majority of the detail in this paper will not be replicated in any publically available documentation… Difficult decisions will be needed about maintaining patient access to care.. There is significant discussion in the paper about ceasing or changing care to patients in the HRG (Healthcare Resource Croups)… Patients would be assessed on probability of survival rather than clinical need and higher level services would no longer be provided… Total excess death rate would be in excess of 7,806 per week of the peak of the pandemic if all these services were stopped… So in the peak six weeks of a pandemic… 46,836 excess deaths could be expected”
Between 7th March and 8th May 2020, there were 47,243 excess deaths in England and Wales. According to the Cygnus predictions this was slightly higher than the numbers envisaged to result directly from the withdrawal of healthcare. However, nearly all of these deaths were attributed to COVID 19. We should ask where, in the claimed COVID 19 mortality figures, the anticipated deaths from the denial of healthcare are.
In November 2017 a number of English stakeholders also met to discuss the a pandemic briefing paper for Adult Social and Community Care. This too was a product of Exercise Gygnus. Once again the intention was to keep the report secret.
“The majority of the detail in this paper will not be replicated in any publically available documentation… Whilst demand will increase, capacity, which is already under pressure because of recruitment challenges, will also reduce because of staff absences… Adult social care will have an increased role in supporting rapid discharge from hospital.. In a severe pandemic, only those services that are life-critical will be maintained… More patients could be supported by a greater focus on telecare/tele-monitoring.”
It is known, from the reports of the CQC and national charities and other NHS documents cited in this article, that primary healthcare was withdrawn from care settings and the community. The staff shortages identified in 2016 became chronic and then severe during the pandemic. This was entirely predictable and was a known outcome of the track and trace and self isolation polices of the UK government.
The briefing paper spoke about which services could be “reduced or deferred.” Crucially these included assessment of care needs, mobility support, personal care support, maintaining family connections and access to medical treatment.
During the “first wave” approximately 25,000 vulnerable people were discharged into care homes to face the extremely high risk environment created for them by the UK government. At the same time potentially life ending drugs were being liberally prescribed.
This was the COVID 19 policy response and we were told the intention was to “protect the most vulnerable”. All of it was predicted on the assumption that hospital were struggling to cope with the “surge” in COVID 19 patients. According to the UK government, patients needed to be discharged to free up capacity in the NHS.
At the height of the so called first wave, on the 13th of April 2020, the Health Service Journal reported that hospital bed occupancy was at a record low, with 4 times more beds available that usual for the time of year. There were 37,500 available beds.
The HSJ stated that the reason for this spare capacity was the discharge policy operated by NHS at the behest of the government. What they didn’t mention is that these figures show the high risk discharge of the most vulnerable people in our society was entirely unnecessary.
You may not like it but is not “unthinkable” that this was deliberate, coordinated policy designed to increase the mortality statistics. Many have questioned the claimed severity of the alleged pandemic. If you wish to give the impression of a high mortality disease then you need the deaths to back up your claim.
It is feasible that all of these risk heightening factors happened to perfectly coalesce to increase mortality, but is it plausible? A refusal to contemplate the possibility of a intentional act does not rule it out. Only a thorough, truly independent investigation can.
While this system was in operation, the UK government encouraged widespread adoption of the Clap for Carers, often referred to as “clap for the NHS.” During lockdowns, as the whole nation was told to self isolate indoors and avoid all unnecessary congregation, between the 26th March and the 28th May, we were “allowed” to simultaneously congregate on the streets and show our appreciation by clapping, banging pots and pans and ringing bells.
Meanwhile vulnerable people were being discharged into unsafe care homes where access to medical care was withdrawn and essential social care removed. Clapping for this was obscene. The government clearly used this ploy both as a distraction and as propaganda. This does not suggest that doctors, nurses and carers do not deserve our support. Any medical professional or carer who blows the whistle is almost certainly making a career ending decision.
Given the evidence we have discussed, if we consider ourselves to be responsible citizens who live in a democracy, it is unconscionable for us to simply ignore what appears to have been a deliberate and illegal government policy of large scale euthanasia in the UK. We must seek answers from policy makers and malfeasance in office must be prosecuted wherever it is identified.
August 12, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Exercise Cygnus, UK |
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Brits being ‘coerced and controlled by fear’
The organisation claims its numbers are growing as current and retired journalists join. Their ethos is that only one side of the Covid-19 story is reported and the government isn’t being questioned enough by the mainstream media.
A counterinsurgency is underway in the British media. Holding The Line is a group who bill themselves as ‘Journalists Against Covid Censorship’. They are not anti-vaxxers or Covid-deniers but do feel the mainstream media is only allowing certain themes and tropes to be reported. Most importantly, they are adamant that UK citizens have been manipulated and gaslighted by the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE).
One of HTL’s spokespeople, Sonia Elijah, said to RT.com: “Unfortunately, I feel the UK public have been part of a mass behavioural science experiment because these behavioural scientists know full well the power of fear. You can really control someone’s behaviour through fear.”
I feel fearmongering has really gone on in the media like the government’s Project Fear advertising campaign about if you leave your house people can die, and they did a Look Me In The Eyes campaign. If you look at the early meetings that SAGE did last year in the minutes, they did look to use the media to increase the sense of personal threat, so the media were used as a tool for fearmongering, that’s a fact.”
This fear and control is what Holding The Line wants to rally against.
Elijah said: “We feel there’s only been one official Covid narrative that has been pushed onto the public through the mainstream media. As journalists, our role is to present all the facts, not just select a few.”
Some members of the group are anonymous, for fear of losing their jobs but they are from a cross-section of the industry. The plan is to expand and begin to release their own content online to beat the censors. Elijah, an independent investigative reporter, witnessed the censorship first hand when YouTube removed a video of her interviewing Dr Robert Malone.
She explained: “I think I’m the only UK journalist to have done so as yet, he is a vaccine expert and the inventor of mRNA technology. He’s undergone systematic attacks; his whole profile is being erased online. I posted the interview on YouTube and within three hours it got taken down for violating their policy, there was nothing on it that was to do with any kind of conspiracy theory.
It was very fact driven, he was measured in his responses but because he mentioned people having adverse events from taking the vaccines, that was probably one of the reasons it got taken down. People working in the mainstream media have found a lot of their stories being blocked or censored, or just not getting published, it’s a problem.”
Holding The Line is particularly concerned with mixed messaging. Some attribute this to the changing demands of a global pandemic, but they feel there is also a more sinister reason.
Taking aim at England’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, Elijah added: “When the pandemic first broke, he was saying over his 15 years, there has been no evidence of masks presenting any transmission of a virus and then they did a U-turn weeks later and mandated masks, so you’re getting this sort of flip-flopping happening. Journalists need to ask, why is this happening?
I covered the anti-lockdown protests that were hardly covered in the mainstream media in the early days and if they were covered by the BBC, they were covered as anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists and they were a small group of a few thousand. When, in fact, I attended one of these protests and there were hundreds of thousands of people there from all different backgrounds.”
Virtually everyone concedes Britain has reacted ineptly to the pandemic, with over 130,000 dead but, according to Elijah, issues around testing go beyond naivety.
She took a look herself at the lateral flow tests that are being used by millions of Britons and made a startling discovery.
“These tests are produced in China by Xiamen Biotime Biotechnology, their original manufacturer,” she explained, “but they have been rebranded by Innova which is a US start-up company that has no background in any medical field and they were started up just around the time the pandemic started. They are wholly owned by Pasaca Capital which is a venture capital group funded by a US/Chinese billionaire.
The UK government has spent£3.2 billion in procurement and buying these tests. The Innova lateral test was then rebranded by the NHS, school children were given these kits and they were branded as NHS but this is the history behind it. They were proven to be highly inaccurate and very unreliable, they actually have false positive and false negative results.”
Due to issues around the tests, in June the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) urged Americans to stop using them. They advised the population to place “them in the trash” or return them to Innova. Elijah added: “Our equivalent in the UK, the MHRA (Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) ignored what had happened in the US and have continued to extend their emergency authorisation use for these tests. They are saying they have done their assessment and are satisfied, but they’re not publishing their findings, so they’re not being forthcoming. There are so many scandals and the people who have benefitted from these contracts have made billions.”
Pertinently that’s what Elijah thinks is behind a lot of the perceived Covid censorship: money. With many media companies struggling financially, they are clinging even harder to the backers. For example, Rupert Murdoch’s successful tabloid The Sun (once the biggest selling British newspaper) was recently given a value of zero, after Covid-19 contributed to a £200 million loss.
Elijah explained: “You have to look at who funds the mainstream media, the amount of advertising revenue they make, their sponsors, and a lot of them don’t want to bite the hand that feeds them. The independent platforms have the freedom to tell the whole story, they are not being restrained whereas in the mainstream media, you have to follow the money.
There is sort of a war on information going on right now, it’s a shame for journalists to be gagged in a way. We need to level the playing field. We are promoting best journalistic practice as a group and we feel there needs to be more room for a balanced debate, that’s what has been sorely missing in this whole Covid world.”
Other themes that Holding The Line say have been omitted from mainstream platforms are the Great Barrington Declaration and the drug Ivermectin as a way to fight Covid-19, which the FDA strongly advises against. It is true many issues haven’t received widespread coverage, but some journalists attribute this to research or facts that don’t merit the spotlight. Different platforms will choose what to run, it’s not feasible to report every possible story but professional balance is essential.
Elijah added: “It’s the way people are being coerced that I think is a bit troubling and there hasn’t been enough questioning behind that. Even the lab leak theory which has been discussed in the mainstream media, six months ago that would never have been discussed. The public are hungry to know what’s really going on.”
Chris Sweeney is an author and columnist who has written for newspapers such as The Times, Daily Express, The Sun and Daily Record, along with several international-selling magazines.
August 11, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, UK |
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As a number of politicians push for ‘vaccine passports’ amid fears that a new brand of medical apartheid is coming, a re-surfaced CDC publication advocating internment camps for the ‘high-risk’ has some people fearing the worst.
Last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a paper that floated the totally not suspicious idea of relocating “high-risk” individuals into green zone “camps.” While the proposal didn’t attract much attention at the time, as draconian anti-Covid measures are beginning to ramp up, and basic human rights and liberties are coming under attack, the document has attracted newfound attention. And not without reason, it seems.
The very first line of the document discusses the implementation of a “shielding approach in humanitarian settings… focused on camps, displaced populations and low-resource settings.” Essentially, and this will be important later on, ‘humanitarian settings’ is just another way of saying ‘camps’. Many people are quick to associate the idea of camps with the containment of refugees, for example, or illegal aliens who have breached the border. Yet the only time the word ‘refugee’ is mentioned in the paper is in reference to a camp in Kenya. At the same time, ‘camp’ and ‘camps’ are referred to about 20 times.
There is another ambiguous thing about this document, and that involves its description of “high-risk” individuals and the “general population.”
The paper reads: “In most humanitarian settings [i.e. camps], older population groups make up a small percentage of the total population. For this reason, the shielding approach suggests physically separating high-risk individuals from the general population to prioritize the use of the limited available resources and avoid implementing long-term containment measures among the general population.”
In other words, the CDC is saying that older people being held in camps (humanitarian settings), because they are in the ‘high-risk’ category, should be separated from the ‘general population’ in these facilities so as to reduce the ‘containment measures’. OK, fine. But the document never explains who makes up the general population inside the camps, and why these ‘low-risk’ individuals are being held in these humanitarian ‘green zones’ in the first place.
Either due to a careless lack of clarity or deliberate deceptiveness on the part of the CDC, it is not difficult to see how some people could interpret the inclusion of high-risk groups into these ‘humanitarian settings’ to mean the unvaccinated. But even if there is no evil intent to intern the anti-vax crowd in camps, the conditions set down for these humanitarian settings leave much to be desired. Indeed, to be avoided at all costs.
In one passage, it is stated that “monitoring includes both adherence to protocols and potential adverse effects or outcomes due to isolation and stigma. It may be necessary to assign someone within the green zone, if feasible, to minimize movement in/out of green zones.”
Would that ‘someone’ by any chance be the local police or even the US military? The document offers no clues. However, several lines later, the CDC advises that “isolation/separation from family members, loss of freedom and personal interactions may require additional psychosocial support structures/systems.”
Admitting that confinement in these settings would entail “the loss of freedom and personal interactions” strongly suggests that these individuals are being held in these facilities against their will. In fact, reading through the document, one might get the impression the CDC is talking about a maximum-security prison for the criminally insane.
Anyone who thinks being detained in one of these facilities for the ‘high-risk’ would be all fun and games may wish to take particular heed from this line, which warns: “this shielding approach may have an important psychological impact and may lead to significant emotional distress, exacerbate existing mental illness or contribute to anxiety, depression, helplessness, grief, substance abuse, or thoughts of suicide among those who are separated or have been left behind.”
Left behind? Left behind from what, exactly? The Rapture?
Finally, the authors of this document seem fully aware that their warm and cuddly humanitarian setting, which seems to more resemble a gulag than a health retreat, will not be welcomed by all members of the general population. Gee, I wonder why.
“While the shielding approach is not meant to be coercive, it may appear forced or be misunderstood in humanitarian settings,” advises the CDC, which appears overly concerned about public perceptions. “As with many community interventions meant to decrease COVID-19 morbidity and mortality, compliance and behavior change… are difficult in developed, stable settings; thus, they may be particularly challenging in humanitarian settings which bring their own set of multi-faceted challenges that need to be taken into account.”
The CDC paper references heavily from a March 2020 study authored by one Caroline Favas, entitled ‘Guidance for the Prevention of COVID-19 Infections among High-Risk Individuals in Camps and Camp-like Settings.’ Once again, any hope for clarity is dashed, as this paper, which mentions the words ‘camp’ and ‘camps’ 73 times, is written for “the displaced community itself, humanitarian actors and camp coordination/management authorities.” Few details are given as to who the ‘displaced community’ may be.
(Note: The Favas study provides a broad definition of ‘camp’ or ‘camp-like settings’ as “forcibly displaced population, including refugees and internally displaced living in high density formal or unformal settlements, under collective or individual shelters”).
What follows in the Favas study, which was published by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, occasionally comes off as one of those jargon-riddled medical tracts that are almost as painful to read as a doctor’s handwritten medical prescription. Yet, just as with the CDC paper, the Favas study is crystal clear when it acknowledges that these camps will be viewed negatively by many members of the population.
“Conversely, it is likely that the approach will not be successful if it is perceived as coercive, misunderstood or used by authorities as a pretext for forms of oppression.”
So, who will get to determine who is at high risk of Covid infection and who is not? On this tricky point, Favas, as well as the CDC, wash their hands of the process, leaving it up to ‘community members’ to decide who should be detained in these ‘humanitarian settings’.
“Identification of high-risk community members should be a community-led process, which supports and promotes community ownership of the approach,” Favas avers. “The purpose of the shielding approach and the inclusion criteria should be clearly communicated and explained to the community, so that each household can identify who among them is at risk and should be shielded, on a voluntary basis.”
Favas provides some options for how the detainees could be isolated from their families and communities, none of them terribly comforting. The first involves providing a green zone at the household level. While it may not seem so bad keeping grandma confined to a back room, the author describes the “household shelter” as either a “single shelter” or a “multi-shelter compound.”
The next type of facility is a group of shelters (with maximum 5-10 households), within a small camp area.
Finally, there are the full blown “sector” camps that would accommodate 15,000 or more people. It would be difficult to imagine a camp of such scale that would not require a high police presence, as well as virtually all of the rules and regulations of a prison.
Many people would probably scoff at the thought of Covid camps, dismissing them as the fevered dream of a ‘conspiracy theorist’. And perhaps they would be right. After all, just last month, the Associated Press debunked the claim floated in a satirical publication that Joe Biden was planning to send the unvaccinated to quarantine camps until they agreed to take the shot. Yet the increasingly befuddled US leader has made false claims in the past, like promising that Americans would be free from their mask bondage if they agreed to be vaccinated. That promise evaporated last month as the CDC backtracked, mandating mask wearing in places experiencing spikes in Covid levels, even among the vaccinated.
While some may find it irrelevant to discuss a paper that was released by the CDC last year, they may want to ask why the CDC and Caroline Favas were already discussing the possibility of ‘humanitarian settings’, i.e. camps for high-risk individuals, in early 2020, when the outbreak was still in its early stages. Some might say that was jumping the gun.
In any case, now that the CDC document has made a splash one year after its release, it would be a good time for an explanation regarding some of its more ambiguous and even outrageous suggestions. At a time when a feeling of general distrust and even paranoia of Covid measures is sweeping the globe, people need assurances that their real enemy is not the very people they elected to protect them.
Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist. He is the author of ‘Midnight in the American Empire,’ How Corporations and Their Political Servants are Destroying the American Dream.
August 11, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular | CDC, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States |
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