Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

What SAGE gets wrong: The evidence that almost everyone is exposed during a surge and most are immune

By Will Jones • Lockdown Sceptics • July 17, 2021

During a Covid surge, what proportion of the population is exposed to an infective dose of the virus, which they either fight off with no or minimal symptoms or are infected by? This is one of the most important questions scientists need to answer.

It’s closely related to the question of whether lockdowns work. If lockdowns work then, as per SAGE and Imperial orthodoxy, the restrictions successfully prevent the virus from reaching most people, who remain unexposed and susceptible – and hence in need of vaccination to protect them when the protective restrictions are lifted. If lockdowns don’t work, however, then they don’t prevent the virus spreading, and thus the majority of people will be exposed to it as it spreads around unimpeded by ineffectual restrictions.

Another related question is: What proportion of exposed people are infected? Using ONS data we can estimate that around 10-15% of the country tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 over the autumn and winter. How many were exposed to the virus to produce this number of infections? Was it, say, 10-20%, with half to all of them catching the virus? Or was it more like 80-90%, with around 10% being infected? It’s a question that makes all the difference in our understanding of the virus and how to respond to it.

If almost all are exposed during a surge, and relatively few of them are infected, then a number of things follow. First, most people have enough immunity to fight off the virus when exposed to it, and only a small minority become infected. Second, the surge ends when enough of that small minority who are particularly susceptible to this virus or variant acquire immunity through infection, i.e., when herd immunity is reached. Third, there won’t be another surge or wave until there is a new virus or variant which evades enough of the existing population immunity to require herd immunity to be topped up via a further spread of infections.

If, on the other hand, very few are exposed during a surge, and most of them are infected, none of these things is true. It means: Most people have little immunity and are highly susceptible. A surge which infects 10-20% of the population has exposed not much more than that. The surge does not end because of herd immunity but because of restrictions. And there will be another surge as soon as restrictions are eased or behaviour changes and the unexposed begin to be exposed again. SAGE orthodoxy, in other words.

The evidence, however, is strongly supportive of the first position – ubiquitous exposure – not the second, limited exposure.

Consider the secondary attack rate (SAR, the proportion of contacts an infected person infects). Data from Public Health England consistently shows this figure sits around 10-15%, meaning around 85-90% of the contacts of infected people do not become infected. It rises during a surge, which is typically due to the higher SAR of a novel variant, and then falls after the surge, as the new variant’s SAR also falls.

Such data is much more consistent with ubiquitous exposure than with limited exposure, as it shows that only a minority of those exposed to an infected person are themselves infected (10-15%), meaning ubiquitous exposure with a minority infected is the much more plausible scenario. This meshes with the data on high levels of prior immunity via T cells and other mechanisms.

Another key data point is the fact that surges consistently peak abruptly and begin to fall, independently of the imposition of restrictions. For instance, as Professor Simon Wood has shown, all three lockdowns in England were imposed after infections had peaked and begun to decline. Similarly, multiple peer-reviewed studies have shown no relationship between the imposition of restrictions and Covid infections or deaths across different countries and U.S. states.

The pattern of abrupt peaks and falls in incidence, independent of restrictions, is strongly indicative of hitting a herd immunity threshold (or overshooting it), as the virus or variant runs out of susceptible people to infect and exhausts itself.

Similarly, when restrictions are lifted there is typically no immediate surge, as there wasn’t in Europe last summer and in numerous U.S. states such as Texas and Mississippi in spring 2021. Surges only tend to occur when a new variant arrives, which again suggests it is not restrictions that are preventing spread to a still highly susceptible population but herd immunity that is preventing it, at least until a new virus or variant arrives to temporarily disturb it.

How, though, does the virus circumvent restrictions to achieve ubiquitous exposure of the population, and apparently without being noticeably even slowed down by the restrictions or voluntary distancing behaviour?

The answer, as I have suggested previously, likely lies in the airborne transmission of the virus. It is likely that the virus primarily spreads through building up to infective levels in the air, and that people are infected by breathing it in (a form of transmission which face masks do little or nothing to prevent). During a surge the virus becomes increasingly ubiquitous in the air at higher concentrations, accelerating exposure and infections until the herd immunity threshold is hit, at which point it abruptly enters decline. This explains why even though it is at its highest point of prevalence and was spreading at its fastest rate just a few days before, it suddenly stops and enters sustained decline. It is hard to see how any explanation other than herd immunity can explain this consistently abrupt change in the rate of virus transmission, particularly as there is no evidence of a similarly abrupt change in public behaviour in the mobility data.

Is there any concrete evidence that SARS-CoV-2 or other airborne viruses like influenza are ubiquitous in the air? Yes, there is. As HART notes in its bulletin this week:

For novel influenza viruses, between 7% and 8% are susceptible and develop antibodies in the first winter, much as we saw with SARS-CoV-2… If a certain proportion of the population are susceptible to infection in any one season, those individuals will end up infected sooner or later, regardless of which day they are exposed.

Studies have demonstrated that influenza is transmitted by aerosol particles and that such particles are prolific, indeed ubiquitous, in all indoor settings during the winter season. What stops people contracting the virus is their level of susceptibility, not their level of exposure.

HART refers to a study on influenza from 2014, which argues:

There are some amounts of the virus in the air constantly. These amounts are generally not enough to cause disease in people, due to infection prevention by healthy immune systems. However, at a higher concentration of the airborne virus, the risk of human infection increases dramatically. Early detection of the threshold virus concentration is essential for prevention of the spread of influenza infection.

The idea of a “threshold virus concentration” at which an outbreak is triggered (rather than just low level transmission) may be important for understanding how airborne viruses spread, and how they can become ubiquitous during a surge. Seasonal factors such as temperature, humidity, UV radiation, human behaviour (e.g. gathering indoors with little ventilation), and cycles in the human immune system may play a role in how easily this threshold concentration is reached.

A study in JAMA tested the air in hospitals for SARS-CoV-2 and found plenty, particularly in the public areas:

Overall, 14 of 42 samples (33.3%) in public areas were positive, with 9 of 16 (56.3%) in hallways, 2 of 18 (11.1%) in other indoor areas, and 3 of 8 (37.5%) in outdoor public areas (P = .01).

There isn’t yet much evidence from other settings, though a study, COVAIR by Imperial College, is underway and the results will be of great interest when they eventually appear.

To my mind, this is the explanation that (at least for now) explains all the known facts better than others – the low secondary attack rate, the ineffectiveness of lockdowns, the outbreaks that explode then suddenly end, the absence of resurgence when restrictions are lifted, the repeated hitting of herd immunity, and so on. At the heart of it is the idea of ubiquitous exposure – that almost everyone, not just a small percentage, are exposed each time the virus passes through, and the vast majority are already immune.

July 17, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Mental ‘virus’ or real, governments can’t just censor and imprison their way out of immunity debt

By Helen Buyniski | RT | July 16, 2021

Covid-fearing parents may think they’re doing their kids a favor by keeping them inside, masked and encased in a bubble of hand sanitizer. But as humans we need pathogens to function – literally and metaphorically.

Evolution, it turns out, isn’t stupid. There’s a reason our guts are swarming with bacteria, and while we’ve been taught to recoil at the very concept (especially after a year and a half of plague-talk in which bacteria are regularly brutally assaulted with jets of hand sanitizer for nothing more than existing), those microscopic creatures actually digest our food for us. If it weren’t for them, we’d starve.

The bacterial colonies that call us home also need to interact with one another, which means once in a while touching a doorknob (or even a subway pole) and not immediately dousing your microscopic hitchhikers in caustic death-juice; sneezing on public transit without having to worry you’ll be lynched; and letting your kid play in the mud with other kids. Their lives could depend on it, as several countries previously praised for their ability to control their citizens are being reminded.

Under Covid-19’s new abnormal, we think nothing of going weeks without seeing friends, months without seeing family, long periods without so much as touching another person, and are told that this is not only healthy – if you don’t do it, you could die! So we learn to run across the street when we spot an old friend coming in for a hug, and to almost preemptively say “no” when our kids ask if they can for once play with their friends in real life instead of through an endless series of screens.

Turns out this is a great way to guarantee future epidemics. New Zealand, a global media darling for its 26 (reported) Covid deaths, is experiencing a major spike in a normally non-threatening childhood illness, since – while kids remain all but unaffected by Covid-19 – the same doesn’t hold true for other common respiratory diseases. Nearly 1,000 cases of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) have been diagnosed in just five weeks in the country, more than half of the number usually reported in an entire 29-week winter, according to the Guardian, which quoted public health experts placing the blame squarely on the “immunity debt” incurred from the country’s prolonged, stringent Covid lockdowns. In other words, “two weeks to flatten the curve” was one thing, but 18 months later, the curve is flattening us.

This problem wasn’t exactly unknown to medical science, and NZ’s willingness to go down this path rather than, say, encourage residents to come out of their homes and behave like normal humans when the worst danger of Covid-19 had passed, speaks to a pattern of martyrdom and virtue signaling that President Jacinda Ardern has capitalized on expertly. Her government postponed elections, forced new arrivals into “quarantine camps” for a period of not less than two weeks even with negative test results (positive results, or worse a refusal to be tested, could have you locked up even longer), and has all but smothered the independent press. The economy imploded, posting its largest quarterly decline in history, and housing costs remained unmanageable for many.

Yet she and her party got a historic mandate to rule (in October’s delayed election, with unprecedented numbers of mail-in ballots, after Facebook shut down one of the opposing parties’ pages right before Election Day, and other asterisks that went unmentioned by the press as they dined on her fiance’s cooking during the vote count). Turns out democracy is a risk factor for Covid-19, too. Who knew?

The phenomenon of “immunity debt” translates well to information, and Wellington isn’t the only government long overdue for a reckoning regarding the censorship it’s been forcing down its citizens’ throats, supposedly in the name of protecting them from infectious bad ideas. Kiwis were already resigned to being shut out of the global conversation after the Christchurch mosque shooting made it OK – nay, expected! – for an emergency to require termination of non-approved communications – and 10-year prison sentences for anyone who wouldn’t comply and delete the wrongthink. For a “democratic” country to enact such censorship would have elicited screams if it had come from Trump’s America, but Ardern was doing it in the name of Safety. With literally no way to test the success of such measures other than an absurd “X number of days without another mass shooting,” the silencing campaign was preemptively declared a success and governments around the world signed on, elevating censorship to the chief crime (and protest)-fighting method. Object? What are you, a terrorist?

Applying analogous measures while the world panicked over Covid-19 was a no-brainer, and in many countries it has been effectively – if not literally – forbidden to question the official story of the virus’ arrival and spread, even though the World Health Organization and its national counterparts were changing that “official story” on a monthly, if not weekly basis. Context-free videos of people dropping to the ground and convulsing in China, even without an implication those people even had the virus, put the fear into the rest of the world and, by the time American news networks were getting caught rerunning footage of packed Italian hospitals as “Covid-hit New York City,” even dissenting voices had largely shied away from questioning the “facts” the government was putting out. Only in cases where the government was not pushing total fear was it acceptable to mock the orders one was given, because not wanting us to live in fear could only mean they didn’t really care about us.

With Trump safely out of the White House, though, the entire American power structure has presented a united front pushing the same stultifying and borderline-nonsensical message of fear on offer from Ardern. The Biden administration is no longer even covering up unconstitutional behaviors like “flagging misinformation” for Facebook to delete, and even the White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki seems to have been forced into arguing with herself as social media muffles all opposing voices. Pacified by deliveries of occasional helicopter money whose value is steadily declining – a fact they might understand if they hadn’t declared math racist – Americans have proudly stepped up to act as the guards in the narrative managers’ mental prison. Far from demanding more transparency from their government, Americans are demanding less, while dog piling on dissenters – aware at some basic level they’re being lied to but unwilling to admit who’s doing the lying.

New Zealand’s censorship may be more photogenic – certainly Ardern is easier on the eyes than the ever-stumbling gaffe-mummified Biden – but both countries are headed straight for a wall built up by years of unpaid epistemological “immunity debt.” One cannot simply stuff “offensive” ideas or “misinformation” down the pipes eternally unless one wants to experience a killer mental toilet backup. The more reality has diverged with whatever is believed by these increasingly-unhinged closed societies, the more of a mess that backup will leave. Neither country can afford such a meltdown, and both would be wise to start allowing reality to filter back into their media before it’s too late. That means ending knee-jerk social media censorship (which has been shown to make users more gullible when it comes to fake news, anyway), rolling back the ever-expanding definition of “hate speech,” and in general behaving like adults.

Instead, Wellington is trying to make “hate speech” itself a crime punishable by three years in prison, and continues to push absurd poll results in which “75% of New Zealanders feel like the country is heading in the right direction, and for the most part, Covid-19 is not impacting their future.” Washington is trying to take the Second Amendment away from its citizens even while still choking on the First. Meanwhile, over in the UK, the Johnson government is warning of an influenza “epidemic” even as citizens remain under lockdown from the last Covid wave. It’s hard to guess which of these three policies will fail first, but whichever one it is, I wouldn’t want to be in charge of the cleanup job.

Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Telegram

July 17, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

Chicken Licken Finds Safety and Freedom in the Land of Covidia

By Rob Slane | The BlogMire | July 16, 2021

Once upon a time there was a little chick called Chicken Licken. One day as she was scratching about in the farmyard, she heard a message coming from the television in the farmhouse saying that everyone must stay home or else we would all die.

‘Oh no,’ cried Chicken Licken. ‘I must go into my coop and stay there.’

So off she went to stay in her coop for three weeks, which was how long the nice man on the telly reckoned it would take. On the way, she met Henny Penny.

‘Oh Henny Penny,’ cried Chicken Licken, ‘There’s a deadly virus about and if we don’t stay cooped up we’re all going to die.’

‘But why would those who are perfectly healthy need to do that?’ asked Henny Penny confused. ‘If we’re healthy, that means we haven’t got it. And if we haven’t got it, we can’t spread it.’

‘Henny Penny!’ replied Chicken Licken aghast. ‘The man on the telly said that healthy people can spread it to one another even if they haven’t got it. Stay Safe.’

‘Sounds like nonsense to me,’ said Henny Penny, ‘but I suppose they must know what they’re talking about.’

So Chicken Licken and Henny Penny hurried off to their coops. On the way they met Cocky Locky.

‘Oh Cocky Locky,’ cried Chicken Licken. ‘There’s a deadly virus about, and we need to go into Lockdown to protect vets from being overwhelmed.’

‘But we’ve never quarantined millions of the healthy before Xi Jinping did it in China,’ said Cocky Locky, ‘and there’s not a jot of scientific evidence that it will do anything to prevent deaths, although it will undoubtedly wreck our society, economy, and lead to a never-ending medical tyranny.’

‘Cocky Locky, I’m ashamed of you,’ sneered Chicken Licken. ‘You sound more like Tucker Carlson by the day. I think you need to stop watching right-wing talk shows and alternative media and instead get your news from established sources like the BBC and CNN. Follow the Science.’

So Chicken Licken, Henny Penny and Cocky Locky hurried off to their coops. On the way they met Ducky Lucky.

‘Oh Ducky Lucky,’ cried Chicken Licken, ‘There’s a deadly virus about and we all need to put pieces of cloth across our faces.’

‘But they told us we shouldn’t do that,’ replied Ducky Lucky. ‘And besides, what good is a piece of cloth with holes of an order of magnitude bigger than virus particles?’

‘Ducky Lucky,’ said Chicken Licken disapprovingly. ‘I’m shocked to hear you question the science. Wear Your Mask!’

‘Okay then,’ said Ducky Lucky in resignation as she strapped to her face a piece of old rag she found on the floor. ‘I suppose if the man on the telly says it will do us good, we’d better do it then.’

So Chicken Licken, Henny Penny, Cocky Locky and Ducky Lucky hurried off to their coops. On the way they met Drakey Lakey.

‘Oh Drakey Lakey,’ cried Chicken Licken. ‘There’s a deadly virus about and you need to take a PCR test.’

‘But I’m feeling fine,’ replied Drakey Lakey. ‘Why would I need to take a test for an illness I don’t have? And besides, the PCR test is not a clinical diagnostic tool and cannot tell whether you are infected or infectious.’

‘Drakey Lakey!’ said Chicken Licken frowning contemptuously. ‘I never dreamt you were a conspiracy fowl. Everything you say has been debunked by various factchecking websites and the mainstream media. Are you saying they’re all wrong? Get Your Test!’

‘Well okay, I don’t want to be seen as a crank,’ replied Drakey Lakey anxiously, shoving the test up his beak.

‘Aagghh!’ cried Drakey Lakey. ‘Even though I feel perfectly fine and healthy, the test tells me I have the deadly virus.’

‘You see,’ said Chicken Licken smugly. ‘I told you it was a conspiracy theory to doubt those who are trying to keep us safe. Now stop listening to Mike Yeadon, Sucharit Bhakdi and Peter McCullough and go and self-isolate.’

So Chicken Licken, Henny Penny, Cocky Locky, Ducky Lucky and Drakey Lakey hurried off to their coops. On the way they met Goosey Loosey.

‘Oh Goosey Loosey,’ cried Chicken Licken. ‘There’s a deadly virus about which is like the plague and it could kill us all.’

‘Hmm?’ replied Goosey Loosey quizzically. ‘Actually, according to John Ioannidis, the world’s most cited epidemiologist, the Infection Fatality Rate of this virus is between 0.15% – 0.23% — about the same as a bad flu season. What is more, it’s only really dangerous to the elderly and sick.’

‘Goosey Loosey! Are you saying the lives of the elderly are worth nothing?’ said Chicken Licken, sounding like Cathy Newman.

‘Well no, that wasn’t what I meant,’ replied Goosey Loosey looking somewhat shamed. ‘But if we know which people it effects, surely targeted protection towards them would make more sense than this scattergun approach.’

‘If you’re referring to the so-called Great Barrington Declaration,’ said Chicken Licken dismissively, ‘not only did Matt Hancock dismiss it out of hand, but you won’t find it coming up in the Google rankings – that’s how thoroughly discredited it is.’

‘Oh,’ replied Goosey Loosey taken aback. ‘Well, I suppose if Google, Facebook and other Big Tech companies have decided it’s not something we should see, it can’t have any credibility, can it?’

‘Indeed,’ said Chicken Licken. ‘Now come along and Don’t Kill Granny.’

So Chicken Licken, Henny Penny, Cocky Locky, Ducky Lucky, Drakey Lakey and Goosey Loosey hurried off to their coops. On the way they met Turkey Lurkey.

‘Oh Turkey Lurkey,’ cried Chicken Licken. ‘There’s a deadly virus about for which there’s no known treatments.’

‘I don’t think that’s the case,’ replied Turkey Lurkey. ‘A number of highly qualified physicians and scientists have put in place treatment protocols, some of which prevent up to 85% of deaths.’

‘Turkey Lurkey,’ sneered Chicken Licken. ‘You sound like a card-carrying Covidiot. Do you really think if such treatments existed, the Government and the scientists on the telly would ignore them?’

‘But they’ve been suppressed and censor…’

‘Stop it!’ screeched Chicken Licken. ‘Stop spreading disinformation. Now come along with us and Help Save Lives.’

So Chicken Licken, Henny Penny, Cocky Locky, Ducky Lucky, Drakey Lakey, Goosey Loosey and Turkey Lurkey hurried off to their coops, keeping two wings apart as they went. On the way they met Foxy Loxy.

‘Oh Foxy Loxy,’ cried Chicken Licken. ‘There’s a deadly virus about, it’s mutating into new variants, and we’re all going to die.’

‘If you come with me,’ said Foxy Loxy with a glint in his eye. ‘I’ll keep you safe and give you your freedom back.’

With sighs of relief, Chicken Licken, Henny Penny, Cocky Locky, Ducky Lucky, Drakey Lakey, Goosey Loosey and Turkey Lurkey followed Foxy Loxy who took them to a yard surrounded by black and yellow walls covered in slogans, such as ‘Watch Out for Invisible Dangers,’ whilst over the gates were the words, ‘Safety and Freedom for All’.

‘This, my friends, is where you can lay aside all your fears,’ explained Foxy Loxy calmly. ‘Once you enter here, I not only give you my personal guarantee for your safety, since it is guarded day and night by my own family, but we will give you all the freedom you like, within these four walls. As if that weren’t enough, we’re actually giving away two shots of our brand new Virus Vanquisher as part of the entry package. We’ve been working on it flat out for days, so you really are very lucky birds indeed. What are you waiting for?’

As they received their shots and filed into the yard, the gates clanged shut behind them. Looking up at the top of the walls, they were reassured to see the kindly eyes of the smiling Loxy family keeping watch over them, and glad to hear the ping of the app they’d been given telling them what to do and when to do it. But most of all they were comforted by the words on the inside of the gates:

‘All who attempt to leave do so at their own risk.
Stay Safe. Be Free. Never Leave.’

July 17, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

White House: If you’re banned for “misinformation” on one platform, you should be banned from ALL platforms

More calls for censorship from the Federal Government

By Tom Parker | Reclaim the Net | July 16, 2021

After making the shocking admission that the Federal Government is flagging content for Facebook to censor in yesterday’s White House Press Briefing, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki doubled down on the censorship rhetoric in today’s Press Briefing by calling for users to be banned from all platforms if they post “misinformation” and dismissing concerns that the Biden administration is acting as “Big Brother.”

During the Press Briefing, Psaki was asked to elaborate on the Biden administration’s flagging of misinformation to Facebook and to respond to a CNN report about the Biden administration’s “frustration with what they view as Facebook’s failures to uphold its own policies on vaccine misinformation.”

Psaki responded by framing the flagging issue as simply staying in “regular touch with social media platforms” to make them “aware of the latest narratives dangerous to public health” and engaging with them to “better understand the enforcement of social platform policy.”

She insisted that the social media platforms make the decisions when it comes to content moderation.

Of course, Psaki failed to mention that while Facebook is technically free to make its own content moderation decisions, this outreach about so-called dangerous public health narratives is coming from the same Federal Government that is placing huge amounts of pressure on Facebook’s business through an antitrust lawsuit.

When pressed on whether Facebook’s censorship has been as proactive as the White House would like, Psaki said there are “more steps everyone can take” and suggested that one step that “could be constructive for public health” is for social media platforms to coordinate and implement cross-platform censorship when users post alleged misinformation.

“You shouldn’t be banned from one platform and not others…for providing misinformation,” Psaki added.

After she was told that Facebook had already removed 18 million pieces of “COVID misinformation” and connected more than two billion people to “reliable information,” Psaki was asked whether the White House finds this “sufficient.”

“Clearly not,” Psaki responded.

She added: “They’re a private sector company, they’re gonna make decisions about additional steps they can take, it’s clear there are more that can be taken.”

Psaki also dismissed Fox News reporter Pete Doocy’s question about a lot of people on Facebook being concerned about “Big Brother watching you” now that they know the White House flags posts to Facebook to be censored.

“They’re more concerned about that than people dying across the country because of a pandemic where misinformation is traveling on social media platforms?” Psaki said. “That seems unlikely to me. If you have the data to back that up, I’m happy to discuss it.”

When Doocy raised the double standard with which The White House flags and censors so-called misinformation, Psaki again dismissed the concerns.

“There are videos of Dr. Fauci from 2020 before anybody had a vaccine and he’s out there saying there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” Doocy said. “So, is the administration going to contact Facebook and take that down?”

Psaki responded by arguing that Fauci said: “Science evolves, information evolves.”

But when she discussed other claims that she doesn’t approve of during the Press Briefing, such as claims that the vaccines cause infertility, Psaki framed it as “information that is irresponsibly traveling” and pushed social media platforms to let the White House know that they’re “taking steps to address it.”

The White House Press Secretary’s comments are yet another example of the increasing collaboration between public officials and private companies that are raising First Amendment violation flags.

Prior to Psaki’s recent statements, numerous reports have pointed to similar public-private sector censorship collaborations. These include a recent lawsuit showing that Democrats have worked with Twitter to flag tweets and get them taken down and a recent letter from Republicans accusing Fauci of advising Facebook to censor lab leak theories.

July 17, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Social media misinformation ‘killing people,’ Biden says, as White House doubles down on private censorship

RT | July 16, 2021

US President Joe Biden claimed social media platforms are “killing people” with misinformation about Covid-19, as his press secretary Jen Psaki made a case for deplatforming ‘offenders’ across the ostensibly private networks.

“They’re killing people,” Biden told reporters who asked him to send a message to platforms like Facebook. “The only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. And they’re killing people,” he shouted, over the noise of a helicopter outside the White House on Friday.

On Thursday, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory against health “misinformation,” calling it “an imminent and insidious threat to our nation’s health.” He defined it as information that is “false, inaccurate, or misleading according to the best available evidence” and claimed 67% of unvaccinated Americans had heard at least one “myth” about Covid-19 vaccines.

At the same press conference, Psaki admitted the government was “flagging problematic posts for Facebook,” causing a stir among some civil libertarians.

Insisting that it was these ostensibly private companies doing the censorship and not the federal government – thereby trying to dodge the thorny issue of the First Amendment – Psaki then doubled down on Friday, saying that platforms should coordinate their rules and terms of service so that a person “shouldn’t be banned from one platform and not others… for providing misinformation out there.”

Her announcement raised more than a few eyebrows across the political spectrum. Journalist Glenn Greenwald, responsible for publishing NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013, called the entire line of White House thinking “pernicious.”

Psaki was “issuing decrees on who should and shouldn’t be allowed to use social media, then smugly scoffing at the notion that this should concern anyone on the ground that we’re going to die if we don’t submit to the White House’s orders,” Greenwald added, summarizing her exchange with Fox News’ Peter Doocy.

In a video making rounds on social media, Psaki tells Doocy that everyone, including journalists, ought to be more concerned about “the number of people who are dying around the country” due to misinformation rather than any Big Brother-like behavior by the government. When he argued the opposite, she replied, “That feels unlikely to me.”

“We don’t take anything down… Facebook makes decisions,” she insisted.

Asked politely by Philip Wegmann of RealClearPolitics to explain how often and how long the White House has been flagging “misinformation,” and if she could define it, Psaki responded with generalizations and claims that all this information is “publicly available” on social networks.

Psaki’s remarks amounted to an admission that the government is coordinating with private corporations to ban people from social media, podcast host Jack Murphy pointed out, calling it “literal fascism before our eyes.”

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was conspicuously silent about this threat to freedom of expression, Greenwald noted, and was instead tweeting about transgender issues.

Meanwhile, a UK-based nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) claimed the White House relied on their research in identifying the people producing alleged “misinformation,” and promoted their CEO Imran Ahmed’s TV appearance in which he spoke about online “superspreaders.”

CCDH first drew attention in June 2020, when NBC – one of the big three broadcast TV networks in the US – cited their research in a story trying to pressure Google into demonetizing the blog ZeroHedge and the conservative-leaning online magazine Federalist.

July 17, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

UK ‘Freedom’ Means Continued Masking, Govt Tracking & Vax Passports

By Mark Harper | Principia Scientific | July 16, 2021

After weeks of denying that vaccine passports would be introduced into everyday domestic life in the UK, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced Monday that the government will ask nightclubs, pubs, and anywhere where people gather to adopt the measure ‘as a matter of social responsibility’.

The announcement was again completely vague, with little details on exactly what venues will be made to use the NHS COVID app system as “a means of entry,” or how it will be managed and enforced.

The only details that were given by ministers are that it will be ‘encouraged’ anywhere where people are “likely to be in close proximity to others outside their household.”

So everywhere then.

Far from being a “terminus date” for restrictions in England, “Freedom Day” will see the Government urge large indoor venues to tell customers to show Covid passes before being granted entry, it has been confirmed. https://t.co/lsQDulALek — Toby Young (@toadmeister) July 12, 2021

Government guidelines, published Monday also state that if sufficient measures are not taken to limit infection, the Government will “consider mandating certification in certain venues at a later date.”

The announcement also comes on the heels of the government suggesting that while face masks and distancing measures will become optional, businesses and transport companies will be encouraged to make their own policies.

Literally every shop, restaurant, pub, education facility, government facility, bank, form of transport and event could do the same if not expressly forbidden by law – and many will, perhaps the majority. So in other words – not a “lifting” of restrictions at all. https://t.co/2A1qo2Lckd — Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) July 9, 2021

In addition, the NHS ‘Test, Trace & Isolate’ system will also remain in place, meaning that people will still be subject to spontaneous house arrest orders.

The government documents state that “Test, Trace and Isolate has an important ongoing role in managing the virus and reduces the risk of potentially dangerous variants spreading.”

“The Government expects the Test, Trace and Isolate system will remain necessary through the autumn and winter,” it adds.

The guidance also states that “Anyone who tests positive will still need to self-isolate regardless of their vaccination status. Further details will be published in due course and the changes are likely to come into effect later in the summer.”

The Prime Minster also stated Monday that the Government will keep Covid data under review “probably, I’m afraid, into next year” adding that he “will not hesitate” to re-impose restrictions if needed.

The series of ‘freedom’ announcements has left journalists, business owners, MPs, and the general population asking what exactly they are being freed from.

“There is a model for what will be coming our way if we do not resist vaccination passports and electronic ID cards: China’s social credit system, which blacklists people for numerous antisocial offences” | Writes @RossjournoClark https://t.co/f1OzQeJSAe — The Telegraph (@Telegraph) July 13, 2021

Anyone who thinks I’m being too pessimistic should take a look at the small print in Government documents, which offer more than a hint that the Government is intending to reintroduce restrictions this winter… Read more in my article for @ConHome here👇https://t.co/AUwboHRmau — Mark Harper (@Mark_J_Harper) July 12, 2021

July 16, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , | Leave a comment

Governments are using credit card purchase data as “contact tracing’ COVID surveillance

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim the Net | July 16, 2021

The ongoing “war on cash” that far preceded the pandemic, whose goal is to steer people towards using traceable forms of payment, is coming in very handy in the COVID era precisely for the reason the policy is criticized in the first place – it makes it easy for authorities to keep tabs on individuals who use card transactions.

Reports now mention instances of Australian residents receiving a mandate to quarantine after using their credit card to pay at an establishment, where somebody known to be infected with the virus had stayed.

Credit card receipts led back to the person that was then forced to self-isolate (although they did not have coronavirus) – and apparently led the person to consider what, if anything, is left of their privacy in a world where more and more people leave long “data trails” behind them.

Stop-gap measures like switching to alternative browsers etc (while probably running it on Windows) aside – the takeaway is that the only way to regain some privacy in the world of mass surveillance and tracking is to turn to alternatives – but do it consistently, and be prepared to pay for the privilege of removing oneself from the closed ecosystems like those ruled with an iron fist by Google, Apple, or Microsoft.

As for using card transactions to do COVID contact tracing, Australia is far from being the only country that is doing it. In fact, those lauded as most successful in even getting their contact tracing efforts off the ground, like South Korea, pioneered the practice. Data surveillance, reports said, was used by authorities there to make sure that people who were either unable or unwilling to share their every move are eventually forced into doing it.

Australia has “distinguished” itself for being willing to jeopardize people’s privacy with a series of COVID surveillance and control measures over the past 18 months, and last November, the National Contact Tracing Review, whose chair is Australia’s Chief Scientist Alan Finkel, recommended using consumer credit card data for track and trace purposes.

But what about privacy? Privacy rules will apply – until they don’t, seems to be the gist of it.

“Privacy rules will apply,” the Review said, but then added, “and in some jurisdictions legislative change may be required.”

July 16, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | Leave a comment

Covid – start at the beginning and question everything

By Abir Ballan | The Conservative Woman | July 15, 2021

ASKING questions is at the heart of science. Science is not an institution and not an authority. Science is never settled. It is forever evolving through conjecture and criticism. Questions form the basis of all scientific inquiry and scientific progress. Without challenging existing concepts – usually held by a majority – there is no knowledge creation. Censoring dissenting voices eliminates the mechanism of error correction and pushes humanity back into the dark ages.

From the beginning, lockdowns were a questionable public health tool, even described as ‘pro-contagion’ by Professor Ioannidis of Stanford University. As early as June 2020, papers showed that lockdowns and other non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) had no effect on reducing deaths. We were all aware that lockdowns would have a terrible economic impact and a devastating human toll, especially in the developing world. We went along with this ‘cure’ because we were told it would save lives – it was necessary for two to three weeks to flatten the curve of infections and prevent healthcare system strain. Yet the goalposts kept shifting endlessly, moving towards a ZERO COVID world: a completely unrealistic and unachievable goal.

Is now the time to question absolutely everything?

The US Centers for Disease Control, the World Health Organisation and ‘experts’ have flip-flopped multiple times. In February 2020, Anthony Fauci said: ‘In all the history of respiratory-born viruses of any type, asymptomatic transmission has never been the driver of outbreaks. The driver of outbreaks is always a symptomatic person.’ However, all the pandemic measures were based on the assumption that people who are healthy might be sick without knowing it. On June 8, 2020, Maria Van Kerkhove of the WHO stated  that asymptomatic spread of SARS-CoV-2 is very rare. The next day she walked back her comment saying that studies, based on computer modelling not real-life data, show that asymptomatic spread is cause for concern. A systematic review and meta-analysis paper, published in 2020, falsified this assumption. Asymptomatic spread is simply not the main driver of disease.  What should be of even less concern is transmission in the open air, likely to be below 0.1 per cent of all transmissions. Unfortunately, the CDC overestimated outdoor spread, claiming that it represented 10 per cent of transmissions. This exaggeration was used to justify futile outdoor mask mandates. They later admitted their error, too little, too late. Why are we still testing healthy people and locking populations indoors?

The CDC and the WHO confused the public with their contradictory social media recommendations about masks: ‘Masks don’t work in the community. Everyone should wear masks in the community. Everyone should wear two masks. Even if you are vaccinated you should still wear a mask. If you are vaccinated you can do without a mask.’ Behind the scenes, the CDC published a policy review in May 2020 stating, ‘We did not find evidence that surgical-type face masks are effective in reducing laboratory-confirmed influenza transmission’. The WHO published an Interim guidance in June 2020 stating ‘At present, there is no direct evidence on the effectiveness of universal masking of healthy people in the community’. Fauci’s leaked emails showed that he didn’t believe in the power of masks either. He said in February 2020 in his email to Sylvia Burwell, ‘The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through the material.’ Why were masks mandated even when the data showed that they made no difference?

The WHO flip-flopped on the definition of herd immunity, which is the point at which an infectious disease stops being a cause for concern because most of the population is immune to it. They removed natural immunity from the definition and limited herd immunity to that reached via vaccination only. After this meddling caused an uproar, they went back again and included both forms of immunity as contributing to herd immunity. Furthermore, they changed their recommendations about the PCR test, first allowing very high cycle thresholds of 45 (which is the number of times the genetic material of the virus is multiplied until it is detected) and recommending that cases are diagnosed based on a positive PCR test, regardless of symptoms – previously unheard of in medicine. Patients are usually diagnosed with a disease if they are sick. Later the WHO rectified their stance, clarifying that the diagnosis of cases requires clinical symptoms and that high cycle thresholds lead to false positives. Why did the WHO make recommendations contrary to established medical practice for infectious diseases? The PCR test was not designed to diagnose infectiousness. It merely detects viral genetic material, dead or alive. Studies indicate that 25 cycles are enough to detect an infectious virus. How much have the false positive results affected the number of cases and in turn the number of deaths? How many deaths were wrongly attributed to COVID instead of other diseases?

Science doesn’t flip-flop like that. Politics does. Science has become politicised. We need to decouple science from politics. It is being manipulated to serve corporate and political agendas. Anyone criticising ‘The Science’ is silenced harshly. People are smart and if given accurate information they can make the right decisions for themselves and their communities. Unfortunately, people are being misinformed and terrified with non-stop death reports, apparently vanishing immunity and the threat of new variants. Fear is not good for us. It’s not good for our immunity, our health or our ability to think rationally. To calm the fear, we need to know that ‘cases’ are meaningless, deaths are overestimated and immunity – whether natural or vaccine-induced – Is long-lasting and can protect us from future variants. Variants are not unique to Covid. All respiratory viruses mutate. The variants are so minutely different from each other that our immune system will recognise them and protect us. It’s like your friend wearing a cap. Can you still recognise him? In the same way, your immune system also recognises the variants. How much longer should we let those variants haunt us?

Now is the time for error correction. Start at the beginning and question everything: lockdowns, asymptomatic transmission, mask mandates, claims about short-lived immunity and dreadful variants. Now is the time for a better solution.

Mark your calendar for The Question Everything: Lockdowns Summit, on July 17, 2021, where pre-eminent experts from science, social sciences, law and industry will evaluate the response to Covid-19.

July 16, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Former Pfizer VP answers Reuters ‘fact checker’: ‘A pack of lies’

By Mordechai Sones | AMERICA’S FRONTLINE DOCTORS | June 28, 2021

Former Pfizer Vice President and Chief Science Officer Michael Yeadon today told America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS) that a Reuters “fact checker” article calling his statements “misinformation” is “a mixture of straw men and sheer invention,” saying the Reuters article was “well worth rebutting”.

This is not the first time Reuters has tried to discredit Yeadon by “fact checker” obfuscation, although past attempts have been less half-hearted. This time, Reuters called Yeadon an “anti-vax proponent” who “has made unfounded claims”. Relying on an entity that calls itself “Meedan’s Health Desk, a group of public health scientists working to tackle medical misinformation online,” the Reuters “fact check” addresses Yeadon statements on asymptomatic spread, variants, the COVID-19 vaccine, and its use in pregnancy. The article’s concluding “verdict” tries to claim that “infected but symptom-free people can spread the coronavirus; vaccinated people are better protected but not 100% immune; research shows COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective for adults and pregnant women.”

Relating to the article, Yeadon said: “The narrative statements that have repeatedly been claimed by the authorities which are a pack of lies are:

“1. Asymptomatic transmission. It’s definitely a lie. Have you seen that video where Fauci states that ‘it’s always a symptomatic person who drives an epidemic and never people without symptoms’?

“A WHO doctor said exactly the same thing.

“There’s also a terrific peer-reviewed journal article showing that domestic transmission in asymptomatic cases was effectively zero.

“All marries up with the statements I’ve made, and with biological logic.

“2. Variants. They’re just being idiotic. I can show several good quality papers demonstrating that T-cells from a convalescent person or an immunized person each recognize all the then-available variants, again, as anticipated by fundamentals of immunology. The weak twaddle in their piece about antibodies is risible.

“3. Vaccines. The bastards are actually claiming they’re safe. Got them. We have VAERS, Yellow Card, and EMA monitoring. We have mechanism of toxicity. We have multiple open letters to EMA (warning of blood clots) which were immediately followed by vaccine withdrawals (for blood clots).

“4. Pregnancy/fertility. No one in their right mind thinks giving experimental treatments to pregnant women is other than reckless. Especially when reproductive toxicity testing is incomplete.”

Yeadon continued: “But on top of this stupidity, are two recent public disclosures: (I) the distribution of vaccine to tissues in mice shows a very disturbing concentration into ovaries. No one has followed it up, so the assumption has to be this is happening in humans too, and (II) our concern expressed in the December 2020 petition to EMA about immune cross-reactivity between spike protein and human syncytin-1 has been confirmed. A paper was very recently published showing young women making antibodies to syncytin-1 within days of vaccination.”

Summarizing, Yeadon concluded: “Of course this is wholly fraud. Imagine that the number of people in U.K. who’d actually been killed by the virus, instead of dying with it, was just a couple of thousand; you’d been on the streets with torches and pitchforks.

“You should be. Governments everywhere have lied and lied and lied about every one of the central narrative points about this virus.

“The effect of compliance with their ludicrous policy responses has been to hollow out and arguably to have destroyed economically several G20 counties, and actually increased the number of avoidable deaths, not least by deprivation of healthcare.

“These people all need locking up in that new high-security facility being built at speed at Wellingborough, Northants. The prima facie case against a dozen or so people in U.K. warrants their arrest pending criminal prosecutions.

“If these figures are of the same order of magnitude for other countries as well, and there is no reason to assume otherwise, then the plague is a deception of unprecedented proportions, and crimes committed against humanity on a huge scale have been committed here.”

July 16, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Cuba and Color Revolution: A Cautionary Tale of the Next Phase of Forever-War

By Joaquin Flores | Strategic Culture Foundation | July 14, 2021

If one believes that the protests in Cuba can be explained within the rubric of 20th century economic systems, and then believes they can go on to extract some great truths about socialism vs. capitalism, then they are misinformed. No, this is about technocracy, color revolution, and forever-war.

The events in Cuba were caused by the staged economic collapse directed by the IMF under the advisement of the World Economic Forum, under the pretext of supply-line stoppages and economic closures to combat Covid-19. The socio-economic strife that such an imposed crisis is known to provoke, is then weaponised to destabilize ‘regimes’ so as to further the hegemonic agenda of the (admittedly divided) oligarchy ruling the global west. We saw this before in 2008 with the crash and crisis, and how this was weaponised to create a destabilization process known as the Arab Spring.

The planners involved are long-term planners, having transcended the quarter-driven constraints of the old market system. The new technocracy emerging is simply able to use Friedmanesque manipulations to keep the system afloat until the law of value is entirely transcended through automation. That was the crypto-Marxian understanding of economics promoted by Maynard Keynes.

Just as Cuba positioned itself away from socialism and towards further integration into global markets, the IMF moved openly to wind down the global market system and move towards a new type of totalitarian order which some critics have likened to communism.

Cubans are protesting against the mask-mandates and the lockdowns which have harmed people’s way of life. They are protesting the way that the government has effectively privileged those with dollar accounts who can buy from state-sanctioned dollar stores. Hence, those without families abroad sending dollars are negatively affected the most. This strikes against the whole narrative of Cuba and its gusano diaspora. Cuba produces its own vaccine, one that is not an experimental mRNA vaccine. The US would like very much to force a concession onto Cuba that it accept the mRNA vaccine. Perhaps the Cuban population of 11 million is just too high.

The fake news talking points that Cubans are protesting a lack of vaccines is a lie. We knew that trans-Atlantic talking points were a part of the Color scheme last year in Belarus when we were told that protestors rose up to oppose Lukashenko’s lackadaisical approach to the plandemic. Lukashenko in turn revealed that he refused an IMF offer of $980 million to play the lockdown deathmatch.

This is a Color Revolution

Anyone like Tom Fowdy for RT who writes that it is premature to say that the clear signs of a Color Revolution aren’t there, probably only says so because they don’t really know what those signs are.

They probably approach that question in terms of on-location forensics: identifying that a particular protest leader is actually an employee of the state department or Soros NGO in some fashion.

Yet for those who understand what the signs are, the signs of a Color Revolution are certainly there. But to understand this requires a long and broad view of the interplay between staged economic crises and the predictable turmoil they create in certain countries.

Because turmoil and protests are all but predictable even to OXFAM, once the FAO food index price surpasses about 210 (by 2012 ratios). Then, it becomes a question of which countries global lending institutions deem worthy of borrowing to subsidize against the newly inflated food price, or which countries the food production companies view in a lenient fashion.

As OXFAM wrote in 2012: “While concerns about high food prices are foremost about the spread of hunger and poverty, high food prices are also strongly correlated with political instability and have historically been a catalyst for mass protest in countries where legitimacy is already faltering. Research performed by the New England Institute for Science and Society has identified “a global food price threshold for unrest;”

Since 2007, food riots have broken out in more than 60 countries and have occurred with heightened frequency during periods of record-breaking food prices such as in 2008, when food riots erupted from Europe to the South Pacific. The FAO food price index crossed the 210 threshold, for the first time, in February 2008.”

Do we need to mention again that global economic crises are staged? Surely, there are structural problems broadly speaking, in the entire Neo-Keynesean system built in some large part from the ideas of Milton Friedman. So it should be clarified that while the timing of these economic crises are planned, they are also bound to happen. But when precisely they happen, and the point of them, would probably shock and confuse, then demoralize anyone who had a naïve understanding of global politics. You see, the point of planned economic crises is the upwards redistribution of wealth. Every firm except a handful of ‘zaibatsu’ style state-picked winners must absorb their own losses. This is corporatism 101.

Milton Friedman (July 31, 1912 – November 16, 2006) American economist and statistician who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences

Each market crisis is structurally predetermined as these bubbles which define them, grow to a certain point. But it is a decision that is made to ‘pop the bubble’ at a particularly more fortuitous time as opposed to some other time – granted that it would need to be popped sooner or later. So these are both features of the structure, but also planned.

Understanding Color Revolutions requires an understanding of this phenomenon. In 2008, the massive bail-outs to banks using currency debasement, led to a geopolitical strategy on the part of the US deep state to buy up and corner the markets on perishable goods, especially those markets and firms which directed their energies towards Turkey, the Arab world, and Iran. This led to strife across the Maghreb region, Egypt, Syria, an increase of problems in occupied Iraq, and a boon to the Green movement in Iran.

The Crisis in Cuba

Further destabilization in Cuba will be a huge part in a coming global destabilization, and so it must be opposed. This is the case, even contemplating the reasonable grievances of the actual protesters, which in turn are not the same as the Sorosian demands placed in the mouths of anonymous protestors by the globalist media.

An inflation crisis has hit Cuba because of the staged political response to Covid, meant precisely to cause inflationary crises globally. The tourism industry has taken the biggest hit. Food and similar perishables are unaffordable for many without access to dollar accounts. There are state-picked favourites in the private sector (as is the case everywhere) as well as Communist Party bureaucrats who seem unaffected by the very same conditions that the protesters accuse them of bringing about. This much seems reasonable: in looking at who to blame for a problem, look to those who are making out.

The themes affecting Cuba are isolation and sovereignty, versus integration and dependence. Ever since the collapse of the USSR, which Cuba relied on for massive subsidies, Cuba has had both up and down periods as it struggles to balance between these two questions. Cuba is an island nation with just 11 million people, and so there can be no real sovereignty without the heavy price of isolation, nor can there be any integration into the globalist system without becoming a dependent state.

It’s a very tough predicament, because the Ideological State Apparatus of Cuba is its own variant of Marxism-Leninism, and this means that no matter how actually integrated and dependent Cuba is or is becoming, it must use the pages of Granma to pencil polemics declaring that Cuba is more sovereign and stable than ever before. Conversely, each undeniable period of crisis must be blamed on the very same socio-economic systems of global governance which Cuba relies upon in part for its own legitimacy.

The July 13th Edition of Granma, Official Organ of the CC of the CP of Cuba

The problem then is when people really believe this state propaganda, or when people are forced to openly proclaim a public truth they know personally to be a lie. Because instead of the public understanding that Cuba has lost much of its sovereignty in its process of dollarizing so much of its economy, (and that the machinations of foreign actors, the IMF, the planned and staged collapse of the global speculative economy that Cuba is integrated in, is a large part of Cuba’s present woes) blame is laid by the public directly at the feet of a nominally sovereign state’s ruling government.

Quite the predicament. Because the government cannot really tell the truth, it must take the blame. Or do as it has done (and done so with no shame for provoking incredulity), and claim that the entire protest is a foreign provocation.

The Cuban government and its sinecure functionaries must always declare that any grassroots grievances expressed en masse are always at its core the work of foreign ‘imperialist’ intelligence operations bent on a destabilization strategy.

Yet such accusations of foreign plots are more likely to be true than not.

Another problem, and this is something where the Cuban government needs to make a fix, is the issue of dollar accounts.

Those with dollar accounts are tremendously less affected by the perishable goods inflation crisis in Cuba. But those deposits are only possible by having loved ones who have left Cuba for the US. So those who have ‘betrayed’ the revolution are the ones able to help those in Cuba. Those in Cuba living better off are not those who have been loyal to the socialism project of Cuba excepting a small layer of bureaucrats and professional snitches, but instead are the relatives of those gusanos in Florida and the rest of the US who have moved on to greener pastures.

What sort of message does that send? This greatly weakens the legitimacy of the government, because those common-folk who defend the Cuban system are left feeling like fools. When this layer joins a protest movement, the government’s days are numbered.

Cuba – Between a Rock and a Hard-Spot

Color Revolution schemes cannot work unless there are real-existing grievances shared among large segments of the population.

And yet going further, those real-existing grievances today, (while they compound longer standing ones which the Cuban government must account for), are directly caused by the IMF’s decision to bring global capitalism to a grinding halt for some period of time.

It is very difficult for a nominally sovereign government to tell a Thatcherite story of ‘TINA’ – there is no alternative. Cuba lacks alternatives except going either the path of the Khmer Rouge, or the path of laissez-faire. It has chosen some middle-path.

This really touches on a very big problem Cuba faces: its civilizational decision to place its legitimacy at the hands of international organizations related to global governance. Cuba strives to show its own citizens, and perhaps secondarily the US, that the rest of the world and especially the UN’s alphabet soup of agencies and organizations, recognize any number of successes that Cuba promotes having accomplished. To wit, at least within the rubric of those accounting systems, Cuba makes a decent case.

So a problem arises when this very same system of global governance, under the pretext of fighting Covid-19, instructs various countries to commit ritual seppuku at the altar of world health in order to preserve this status and these relationships to global trade and global governance.

And how? The western hemisphere is controlled almost entirely by the IMF and global banking systems. Cuba exists in some netherworld of ‘helpful harm’, if not through the US due to sanctions, then through the same banks in their Trans-Atlantic incarnations by way of Europe.

Since we understand that the WHO is effectively controlled by allies of the World Economic Forum like Bill Gates, which in turn is the think-tank of the IMF; and since the IMF includes in its bylaws and requirements that countries in a time of a declared global pandemic by the WHO must take the proscribed measures to combat this, then we understand what we have seen as a global phenomenon.

It’s been only a handful of leaders, several in Africa, in Haiti, and Belarus, that have openly bucked these provisions. And of these, all have been since eliminated except for Lukashenko in Belarus who no doubt enjoys some security provisions from the Russian Federation.

The Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC) explains that in 2019, “The top exports of Cuba are Rolled Tobacco ($287M), Raw Sugar ($211M), Nickel Mattes ($134M), Hard Liquor ($97.3M), and Zinc Ore ($78.4M), exporting mostly to China ($461M), Spain ($127M), Netherlands ($65.5M), Germany ($64.7M), and Cyprus ($48.9M).

The top imports of Cuba are Poultry Meat ($286M), Wheat ($181M), Soybean Meal ($167M), Corn ($146M), and Concentrated Milk ($136M), importing mostly from Spain ($1.01B), China ($790M), Italy ($327M), Canada ($285M), and Russia ($285M).”

Hence Cuba was placed in a pincer move. It lost massively from the global plandemic and the restriction of supply lines, the tightened access to imports, the loss of tourism. The compliance of other countries to the IMF’s mandated economic implosion reduced demand for Cuba’s exports and damaged tourism as well.

But in order to maintain its own relationship with the IMF and also following the global narrative of the Socialist International (2nd International), (an EU driven social-democratic association of governments and political parties), it went along with the ‘solidarity’ driven component of woke politics seen in the ‘do-your-part’ masking and lockdowns.

But those harmed by the lockdowns were ordinary Cubans, not government officials or those with dollar accounts. And so the reaction we see today is a predictable one.

Conclusion

There can be no doubt: Cuba’s present crisis is not the direct result of its own economic mismanagement, but rather the staged demolition of finance, global trade, and supply lines using the Covid pandemic as a pretext. However, a number of social and political decisions by Cuban leaders have no doubt compounded the impact of the crisis and emboldened protesters.

What citizens in first world countries have seen as a ‘stock market rebound’ predicated by ‘too-big-too-fail’ type bailouts (socialism for the rich), are only possible so long as those moneys are held on the books but not really spent – hence the lockdowns. At least not spent in such a way as would this liquidity naturally circulate in the economy. For such velocity of moneys based on such extreme debasement of the currency, would lead to the largest inflationary crisis in the history of man on earth.

In raw-materials producing countries like Cuba, that has meant a tripled hardship. The aim of the centers of finance capital has been to do something like the Arab Spring, only more so.

At the same time, the Cuban government’s defensive and accusatory posture is poor optics and bad politics. It needs to better engage the protestors and validate some part of their grievances. Pointing the finger at Uncle Sam is tone deaf and only serves to satisfy a single demographic in Cuba.

Today, we are seeing only the start of a fresh wave of global destabilization efforts, never-ending wars. But now governments have prepared the civilian populations for these wars under the pretext of never-ending lockdowns due to a mystery illness. The right to protest, strikes, and the basic social contact needed to organize these can be revoked by instantaneous mandate as some new variant of Covid will always invariably be discovered. This is the biggest threat humanity faces since the Second World War, but in addition to destabilization campaigns, is the backdrop of a class-war gambit of the oligarchy against everyday people. Cuba needs to be understood in this light, and while it needs a better approach to managing the Covid narrative and hearing its people, foreign meddling in its affairs needs to be opposed.

July 16, 2021 Posted by | Economics | , , | Leave a comment

The ‘racketeering and corruption’ that led to man-made Covid virus being unleashed

By Neville Hodgkinson | The Conservative Woman | July 14, 2021

Yesterday we reported evidence given to the German-led international Corona Investigative Committee on Friday July 9 by Dr David Martin, who runs a US company monitoring innovations relevant to financial interests.  He said a review of more than 4,000 patents issued around the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) coronavirus had led to the dramatic conclusion: ‘We made SARS’. Today we continue an account of his evidence, of which the live-streamed video is here. 

THE United States has a federal law known as the RICO Act.  It sounds friendly, but is aimed at something deadly: Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations. It was introduced due to the complexity of bringing successful charges against organised crime gangs.

Dr David Martin told the Corona Investigative Committee that in April 2003, a US drug company applied for a patent on anti-viral agents, treatment, and control of infections by coronavirus, just three days after the Centres for Disease Control sought to patent the SARS coronavirus itself – in a supposedly secret application. The first SARS outbreak had occurred in February that year in China.

His description led the inquiry committee chairman, German lawyer Reiner Fuellmich, who specialises in exposing corporate swindles, to comment: ‘This could well blow up into a RICO case ultimately.’

Martin replied: ‘Not could blow up – it is a RICO case. And the RICO pattern which was established in April 2003 for the first coronavirus was played out to exactly the same schedule when we see SARS-COV-2 show up.’

He claimed that Moderna (originally ModeRNA) were given the genetic sequence for the spike protein that forms the basis of their Covid vaccine by phone from the vaccine research centre at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases even before the novel subclade of the virus had been defined. ‘How do you treat a thing before you actually have the thing?’ he asked.

Moderna (originally ModeRNA Therapeutics) is a Massachusetts-based company founded in 2010 by a team of investors to develop RNA (ribonucleic acid) technology, thought to hold huge promise in harnessing the power of RNA code to make new medicines inside our bodies.

Another important date, Martin said, is June 5, 2008. This was around the time when the Defence Advanced Research Programme (DARPA) in the US took an interest in coronavirus as a biological weapon.  It was also the date when a drug company, now part of the Paris-based pharma giant Sanofi, filed a series of patents targeting genes that 12 years later are said to be the novel features of SARS-COV-2 that make it a health hazard for humans.

From 2008 onwards, patent filings from numerous organisations identified ‘every attribute’ of the virus, as it eventually came to be described. The reference paper routinely used to identify it, published in March 2020, claimed to show that the novel features had come about in nature, and that the virus ‘originated from multiple naturally-occurring recombinant events among those viruses present in bats and other wildlife species’.

Martin said: ‘Unfortunately, if you actually take what they report to be novel, you find 73 patents, issued between 2008 and 2019, which have the elements which are allegedly novel in SARS-COV-2. So – there was no outbreak of SARS, because we had engineered all of the elements of that.’

The supposedly new virus had been said since 2016 to be poised for human emergence. But ‘it was not only poised for human emergence, it was patented for commercial exploitation – 73 times,’ Martin said. ‘Any assertion that this pathogen is somehow unique or novel falls apart on the actual gene sequences, which are published in the patent record.’

Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (who collaborated with the laboratory in Wuhan, China, in the coronavirus ‘gain of function’ work) along with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Moderna, began the sequencing of a spike protein vaccine in November 2019, a month before the Wuhan outbreak happened.

Martin also challenged the idea that injecting people with the RNA sequence for the spike protein is a true vaccine. The theory behind it is that by teaching the immune system to recognise the protein, which in itself has toxic effects, the body will be better equipped to deal with the toxin when exposed to the virus.

‘The illusion that we continue unfortunately to see very well-meaning people get trapped in, is conversations about whether we are having a vaccine for a virus. The fact is, we’re not. We are injecting a spike protein RNA sequence, which is a computer simulation of a sequence which has been known and patented for years. It’s not derived from nature.

‘The ludicrous nature of the story that this is somehow prophylactic or preventative flies in the face of 100 per cent of the evidence, because the evidence makes it abundantly clear that there has been no effort by any pharmaceutical company to combat the virus. This is about getting people injected with the known-to-be harmful spike protein.’

The reason for doing that, he argues, is to get people ‘addicted’ to a pan-coronavirus vaccine. There had been a decade-long, pan-influenza vaccine mandate, ‘desperately, desperately, desperately promoted by governments around the world. They failed. And they decided if influenza doesn’t deliver, on the public promise of getting everybody to get an injection, let’s change the pathogen.

‘You need to create the illusion of a demand, and there is nothing right now that does a better job of creating the illusion of demand than the urgency of an event you have manufactured.

‘Here’s the sad and sober irony: I raised these issues in 2002, after the anthrax scare, and the tragedy is we are now sitting in a world where we have hundreds of millions of people who are being injected with a pathogen-stimulating computer sequence which is being sold under what the Patent Office, the medical profession, and the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) in its own clinical standards would not suggest is a vaccine. But by using the term, we are now subjecting hundreds of millions of people to what was known by 2005 to be a biological weapon.’

The video of Martin’s live-streamed evidence is already receiving tens of thousands of views. At the very least, the data he presents surely should put to rest the idea of the virus as a product of nature that just happened to develop the capacity to jump from animals to humans.

This in itself has enormous implications. For one thing, why should we believe the claims by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness (CEPI), launched in 2017 with a huge cash infusion from the Gates Foundation, that a proposed 3.5billion-dollar quest for a universal coronavirus vaccine to ‘contain SARS-COV-2 and its variants’ is either a desirable or an achievable goal?

Urging support for the plan, co-founder Bill Gates said ‘CEPI has helped the global science community do something incredible: develop Covid-19 vaccines in less than a year.’  That claim sounds more than hollow in the light of the 20-year patent trail revealed by Martin.

What’s more, Martin spelled out a case that even the alleged SARS ‘variants’ of the coronavirus are artificial, representing the identification of different gene fragments rather than genuine variations.

‘It’s just an alteration in when you start and stop what you call the reading frame,’ he said. ‘If what we are looking for is something we have decided is worth looking for, then we’ll find it … where I choose to start or stop, I can say I found it. Or I didn’t find it! I didn’t find the match that I projected on to the data, because I chose to look at the data in a way that I could not find the match.’

With government advisers seemingly pulling ‘new variants’ out of the bag whenever they feel the grip of terror is lessening, this is another area calling for a sober reassessment of what is really going on.

July 15, 2021 Posted by | Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

White House admits ‘flagging problematic posts’ for Facebook, says it’s needed to fight medical ‘misinformation’

RT | July 15, 2021

As the Biden administration called “medical misinformation” a public health threat, the White House said it was working with social media to flag “problematic” posts. Critics called it an end-run around the First Amendment.

“We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters on Thursday. In addition to directing the company to censor people, the government is also working to “get trusted content out there” by putting medical professionals in touch with social media influencers.

Psaki’s admission came after Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory declaring misinformation “an imminent and insidious threat to our nation’s health.”

“Misinformation takes away our freedom to make informed decisions about our health and the health of our loved ones,” Murthy said at the White House. During just the Covid-19 pandemic, it has led to Americans refusing to wear masks, “turn down proven treatments” and choosing not to get vaccinated, which, he said, cost lives.

Murthy is a “tyrant” who wants “Big Tech to crack down on what amounts to open inquiry and free exchange of ideas,” commented journalist Jordan Schachtel, one of the notable skeptics when it comes to official pandemic narratives.

Looking at the surgeon general’s recommendations, Grabien’s Tom Elliott pointed out that the government is literally instructing private companies to “abridge the freedom of speech, and of the press, and the rights of people to peaceably assemble and petition the gov’t for redresses of grievances” – in other words, violate the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald, who helped publish NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations about surveillance abuse in 2013, called this union of corporate and state power “one of the classic hallmarks of fascism.”

“If you don’t find it deeply disturbing that the White House is ‘flagging’ internet content that they deem ‘problematic’ to their Facebook allies for removal, then you are definitionally an authoritarian,” said Greenwald.

“This is ‘Ministry of Truth’ level malfeasance. They’re literally admitting to colluding with [the] media to control the narrative. This is censorship,” tweeted Congressman Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky), adding that such tactics befit dictatorships and that throttling speech with which the government disagrees crosses a line.

Conservative columnist Stacey Lennox argued that censorship would actually make Americans question the White House’s narrative even more.

“If your ideas are the best, they can stand on their own. Censorship will make people question it more. Every. Single. Time,” she tweeted.

Democrats have clamored for social media to censor “misinformation” ever since the 2016 election, which resulted in the surprise victory of Republican Donald Trump over mainstream media favorite Hillary Clinton. The Trump campaign had bypassed corporate gatekeepers by reaching out to Americans directly via Twitter, Facebook, and other social media.

Four years later, under the pretext of fighting misinformation and “Russian interference,” thousands of users had been purged from the platforms, while Twitter and Facebook suppressed a newspaper for publishing a story about Joe Biden’s son Hunter and the information found on his laptop. They also cracked down on any questions about new electoral practices, such as mass mail-in voting, labeling them “misinformation.”

The Biden campaign actually demanded Facebook censor Trump himself for “misinformation,” which the platform initially refused to do.

Eventually, however, Trump was banned from all social media platforms – while he was still the sitting president – as much for allegedly “inciting violence” over the January 6 riot at the US Capitol, as for continuing to argue the 2020 election wasn’t honest.

July 15, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »