1,700+ demand retraction of influential COVID-19 origins paper after emails reveal authors doubted their own conclusions
By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 26, 2023
More than 1,700 people have signed a petition calling for the retraction of the seminal scientific correspondence paper, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” that claimed COVID-19 was “not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”
The paper — sometimes referred to as the “Proximal Origins” paper or the “Nature Medicine paper” — was published March 17, 2020, in Nature Medicine journal.
It was used by former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, former National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, and other federal public health officials in 2020 and beyond to dismiss the possibility of a lab leak.
Biosafety Now — a nongovernmental organization that “advocates for reducing numbers of high-level biocontainment laboratories and for strengthening biosafety, biosecurity, and biorisk management for research on pathogens” — on July 19 launched the petition, stating, “It is imperative that this clearly fraudulent and clearly damaging paper be removed from the scientific literature.”
Biosafety’s leadership team includes 27 experts in biomedicine, mathematics, public health, public policy, public advocacy, law and social science.
Fraudulent paper ‘played an influential role’ in driving official narrative
Bryce Nickels, Ph.D., co-founder of Biosafety Now and professor of genetics at Rutgers University, said the petition seeks “to expose a clear case of scientific fraud and misconduct that has had a major impact on public opinion and policy.”
Nickels told The Defender :
“The removal of ‘Proximal Origins’ from the scientific literature is the first step in a long process needed to repair the damage this paper has caused to public trust in science.”
According to the petition, “This paper played an influential role — indeed, the central role — in communicating the false narrative that science established that SARS-CoV-2 entered humans through natural spillover, and not through research-related spillover.”
The petition continues:
“Email messages and direct messages via the messaging program Slack among authors of the paper obtained under FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] or by the U.S. Congress and publicly released in full in July 2023 … show, incontrovertibly, that the authors did not believe the conclusions of the paper at the time the paper was written, at the time the paper was submitted for publication, and at the time the paper was published.”
The recently-released internal communications show the paper “was, and is, the product of scientific fraud and scientific misconduct,” the petition said.
Commenting on the petition, investigative journalist Paul Thacker said:
“The thing that’s really the most troubling, which is why it should be retracted … [is] the ghostwriting and the undue influence [of federal public health officials on the drafting of the paper], which we know from the emails by Francis Collins, by Anthony Fauci, and from Jeremy Farrar.”
Thacker — who noted that within only a few days the petition had already garnered more than 1,300 signatures and set the hashtag #RetractProximalOrigins trending on Twitter — told The Defender :
“These guys basically ordered up a piece of science — or some sort of publication — that they could then point to, which they all did afterwards, as definitive proof that this thing could not have come from the lab.
“The whole thing was orchestrated for political purposes. It has nothing to do with science.”
Little more than a ‘political piece of propaganda’
Thacker is a former fellow at the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University whose investigative writing has appeared in The New York Times, The BMJ, the Journal of the American Medical Association and The Washington Post.
He explained that weeks prior to the paper’s publication, Kristian Andersen, Ph.D. — one of the co-authors of the “Proximal Origins” paper — emailed Fauci and Collins a draft of the manuscript, thanking them for their “advice and leadership” on the paper.
Andersen also invited Fauci and Collins to comment and offer suggestions about the paper — but neither are mentioned in the acknowledgments section of the final version published by Nature Medicine. According to Thacker:
“Both Collins and Fauci then promoted the Nature Medicine paper as evidence of ‘independent science’ pointing against a possible lab accident — Collins in a post for the NIH Director’s blog that alleged the study left ‘little room’ for argument in favor of a lab accident, and Anthony Fauci in a White House press briefing.
“In both cases, neither Collins nor Fauci disclosed their involvement in orchestrating Andersen’s study. This last March, Congress released further emails showing that Fauci helped to orchestrate the Nature Medicine paper.”
Thacker pointed out that the paper — which “has been called everything from ‘research paper’ to ‘analysis’ to ‘study’” — was “really just correspondence” that was later turned into a “political piece of propaganda that people could then reference, which they did.”
Describing the recent about-face regarding the paper’s importance, Thacker said:
“Now the editor-in-chief of Nature Medicine is saying, ‘Oh, well, it was just a viewpoint … like he’s trying to dismiss what it was when they [federal public officials] used it for completely different purposes. They used it as some definitive piece of scientific research that put to rest any idea this thing could have come from a lab.
“Then we find out internally that none of them who wrote it believed that in the first place. … Quite frankly, from the very beginning, none of the scientific evidence in any direction means anything about how this pandemic started. It’s always been the internal documents and the money that have mattered more.”
Thacker added, “This entire drama and discussion has nothing to do with science. It has everything to do with corruption and a coverup.”
On July 25 Thacker tweeted:
Writers Curtis Schube and Gary Lawkowski in a July 24 op-ed for The Hill pointed out that when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention responded to the FOIA request to release Fauci’s “explosive” email showing his involvement with the Nature Medicine paper, the agency completely redacted the email.
Moreover, Thacker alleged that Andersen submitted false testimony at the July 11 hearing of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, which is investigating the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Andersen’s allegation that Fauci and Collins were provided the paper only after it had been “accepted” and was in “proof” is false, Thacker said. “Emails impeach this portion of Andersen’s testimony,” he added.
Thacker also pointed out that The Intercept last week published newly revealed documents showing Andersen and his co-author — Tulane virologist Robert Garry, Ph.D. — both lied to Congress during the House hearing. The alleged lies covered the fact that both had pending federal grants controlled by Fauci — money that could have been used to influence their positions on the lab-leak theory.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s latest book, “The Wuhan Cover-up: How US Health Officials Conspired with the Chinese Military to Hide the Origins of COVID-19,” is due out in September. The book is available now for preorder. Kennedy is the founder and chairman on leave from Children’s Health Defense.
Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Never investigate what you don’t want to ‘confirm’
This maxim pretty much explains everything in our New Normal
BY BILL RICE, JR. | JULY 27, 2023
(Part 1 of 2)
I quickly formulated a maxim that pretty much explains why all the authorized Covid narratives took hold. This also explains why non-authorized narratives never had a chance.
This maxim is:Never investigate that which you don’t want to “confirm.”
As far as I can tell, this narrative-control tactic works every time.
If officials don’t want any revelations to debunk their preferred narrative, they just don’t investigate it. This way it’s almost impossible for anyone to “confirm” these trusted officials and truth-seeking scientists have been telling whoppers longer than Pinocchio.
FWIW, the intentional creation of bogus narratives satisfies the correct definitions of “disinformation” and “malinformation.”
As journalists are supposed to give examples to support our maxims, I’ve included several examples, a few which reveal my own futile efforts to learn or expose taboo truths.
Solution to protect said False Narrative: Make sure most people don’t know that the average age of a Covid victim is a couple of years over the average life expectancy.
For example, from my research for this article, I learned that in Europe the average age of a Covid victim was around 82.4 (where average life expectancy is about 79.4).
It’s hard to debunk/reject the all-important authorized narrative (“Covid is a threat to everyone”) if hardly any citizen reads that just about the only people dying from Covid were the elderly (almost all of whom had multiple co-morbid health conditions). Given the parameters established by this information template, the false narrative might as well be “confirmed.”
Narrative protection technique: Make sure no journalist ever writes a story that mentions that zero college or pro athletes ever died from Covid.
If officials and journalists did “confirm” the fact that no college or pro athlete has died from Covid, this information wouldn’t exactly promote the official bogus narrative.
Officials and journalists have never “confirmed” that zero athletes have died from Covid … because they never bothered to “investigate” this.
For reporters or researchers, confirming facts entails “investigative” effort. A bonus for journalists employing this narrative-control technique is they don’t have to do any investigative work. This actually makes their jobs much easier. One could even say this feature of their job rewards laziness.
Early in official Covid, I wrote a letter to the editor for al.com, showing that at the University of Alabama in the flu season of 2017-2018 – in just a few few weeks – at least 863 UA students students went to the college infirmary with flu symptoms.
From further research, I showed that at just one college in our state, five times as many college students had been “sick” from a flu outbreak that spanned approximately 40 days than had been “sick from COVID-19 in our entire state … in approximately 200 days.
I knew this because one journalist at al.com wrote a story on September 16, 2020 that provided several nuggets of eye-opening information.
For example, more than six weeks after students returned to Tuscaloosa in the summer of 2020, no UA student had been hospitalized due to Covid.
Per this article, Dr. Ricky Friend, the dean of UA’s College of Community Health Sciences, said: “I can also tell you very few students in quarantine and isolation are experiencing significant symptoms.”
Also from the same article (more about the real source of this info later): “Friend … said one in every four or five students tested on campus is showing symptoms. The rest are asymptomatic.This is very much in line with data and trends we are seeing across the country.”
Re-stated: 75 to 80 percent of college students who were classified as a Covid “case” at Alabama (and around the country) were “asymptomatic,” meaning they weren’t sick at all.
In late summer 2020 at the University of Alabama (after a month of non-stop student testing), exactly zero UA students had been hospitalized from Covid, none had died, “very few” students forced to live “in isolation” were “experiencing any significant symptoms” and, 75 to 80 percent of “positive” students experienced no Covid symptoms.
In other words, the flu of two years earlier had made far more UA students sick than Covid did.
And the 863 “sick” flu students identified in the news report of a Birmingham TV station were just those who went to the UA infirmary. Many sick students might have gone to another healthcare provider, or never gone to the doctor … or these students became sick while they were home on Christmas holidays.
Many thousands of UA students had no doubt become “sick” during this particular flu outbreak.
Which brings me to my main point: Life at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa did not stop in January 2018. No classes were cancelled; nobody was ordered to wear a mask; basketball season was not cancelled; Students didn’t have to take on-line courses from their dorm rooms or apartments. Nobody freaked out at all.
I pointed all of this out in a letter I submitted to al.com. In the letter, I reported that “far more UA students were sick a couple of years ago from the flu than have been sick since Alabama’s first “confirmed” case in March.
But, alas, al.com wouldn’t publish my essay.
I did get to argue my case with the the news organization’s op-ed editor (K. A. Turner). Ms. Turner was decent enough to call and talk to me about my piece. I’ll never forget what she told me:
“Bill, we can’t allow you to compare Covid to the flu.”
For a few moments, I was speechless.
Did I hear this news editor right? The leading news organization in our state would “not allow” me to publish a true and important statement, one backed up by quantifiable published data?
What happened to American newspapers?
It didn’t take me long to figure out what’d happened. People like myself – using elementary critical thinking skills – were not going to be “allowed” to debunk any authorized narrative about Covid.
The point I was seeking to “confirm” with good, old-fashioned facts …. would not be allowed.
I still think the dean’s admission that up to 80 percent of “Covid cases” at UA were asymptomatic should have been national news.
At the time, students across the country were returning to campuses after several months of lockdowns. Every college in America was testing students; newspapers were filled with stories about “new cases” and “outbreaks” at colleges.
But one dean obviously messed up and said that no students were hospitalized, very few students had significant symptoms, nobody had died and, indeed, the overwhelming majority of “cases” were as “sick” as I am right now.
That is, the dean blew up an important, albeit false, fear-mongering narrative.
Of course no other news organizations picked up on this accidental revelation, which was a bummer … because I was the person who’d sent several emails to the reporter asking this journalist to ask a UA official this very question.
The journalist was Michael Cassagrande, who normally covers sports for al.com, but expanded his journalist duties during the first months of Covid (probably because there were no sporting events to cover).
I kept emailing Michael a reader suggestion: Ask some UA official how many of these positive cases are asymptomatic.
And damn if he didn’t do it. The info the dean revealed about no student hospitalizations and all the students in isolation being fine was unexpected bonus Covid info.
So we have a lesson here: If you keep bugging a few sports reporters, one of them might ask questions “news” reporters would never ask.
I’m also a journalist (although, at the time, I was a freelance journalist who could never get any of my taboo Covid stories published).
Still, several months later, I asked the director of the University of Alabama’s Media Affairs the same questions Michael asked. I knew UA never stopped testing students so I wanted to know if the “asymptomatic” rate was STILL 80 percent.
However, the director (who used to be a journalism professor) wouldn’t answer my questions.
Nor would she arrange an interview with the dean who’d previously answered Michael’s questions (actually my questions) several months earlier.
I also wanted to know what percentage of athletes at Alabama who were testing positive were asymptomatic. She wouldn’t answer that either.
So I asked the media affairs staffers at the SEC the same question. (Testing of all student-athletes was mandatory for many months, with most athletes having to get a swab pushed up their noses three or four times a week.)
The SEC’s media affairs director said he couldn’t answer that question. He told me maybe I could go straight to the university and get that information. I told him I had: no dice.
I didn’t stop with the SEC. I asked all the media affairs people at all the big Division I conferences (Big-10, Pac-12, ACC, etc.), the same questions:
How many student athletes who tested positive via a PCR test were asymptomatic?
How many athletes have been hospitalized with Covid?
My answers were “we can’t answer those questions” … or no “media affairs” helpers replied to the questions of this media reporter.
Do these conference officials simply not know these answers or did they know the answers and simply didn’t want the public to know?
I don’t know … Oh, who am I kidding? I didn’t fall off a turnip truck yesterday …. I know the answer.
They know the answers … they just don’t want to “confirm” them. Or they know that it’s best to NOT do any investigations that would “confirm” that Covid is and always has been a nothing burger to college students and college athletes.
They know an important part of their jobs is to protect all the authorized narratives, especially the ones that are false.
Revealed: Dark Money Funders Behind ‘Disinformation Dozen’ Report
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 27, 2023
A new report published Monday by GreenMedInfo revealed nine of the dark money sources funding the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), an influential nonprofit that allegedly colluded with social media platforms and the White House to censor Children’s Health Defense (CHD), Robert F. Kennedy Jr., CHD’s chairman on leave and others for spreading “disinformation.”
The report identified CCDH’s funders primarily as U.K.-based philanthropic organizations whose directors and trustees are affiliated with legacy media organizations, the U.K. government and major global philanthropic organizations such as the Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation.
Despite claims by Imran Ahmed, CCDH’s CEO and founder, that the organization has “never taken government money,” the report also found at least one of its funders has received U.K. government funding.
“It appears that CCDH may be an astroturf front operation for both NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] and the U.K. government to directly interfere with and target the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens, and this should be a concern for all Americans,” report author Sayer Ji told The Defender.
CCDH famously drafted a list of the so-called “Disinformation Dozen,” which included Kennedy, Dr. Joseph Mercola, the founders of The Truth About Vaccines and The Truth About Cancer websites Ty and Charlene Bollinger, and Ji, founder of the natural health website GreenMedInfo.
CCDH alleged in its report that just 12 accounts produced the majority of “anti-vaccine disinformation” on social media.
Facebook investigated and dismissed the report, releasing a statement saying that “There isn’t any evidence” to support its claims and that the small sample used in CCDH’s analysis was “in no way representative of the hundreds of millions of posts that people have shared about COVID-19 vaccines.”
“There is no justification for [CCDH’s] claim that their data constitute a ‘representative sample’ of the content shared across our apps,” Facebook stated.
Yet, the report was used by the White House and Twitter to censor those individuals and by legacy media outlets such as NPR, The Guardian and countless others to discredit the people on the list.
Despite its baseless claims, the report was extremely effective, Ji said.
Ji told The Defender :
“CCDH’s factually baseless campaign was amplified and disseminated globally by hundreds of colluding media outlets, such that today you can find over 3,400 news articles online uncritically citing their defamatory construct ‘disinformation dozen.’
“This has wrought profound reputational damage, and has dramatically curtailed our ability to share our message, given that over 2 million of our followers have been removed, following the deplatforming efforts of those spreading these lies.”
In Kennedy’s testimony before a U.S. House of Representatives hearing organized by the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government last week, he cited his inclusion on CCDH’s list as part of a “new form of censorship, which is called ‘targeted propaganda,’ where people apply pejoratives like ‘anti-vax’ … to silence me.”
The latest “Twitter Files” released July 18 by investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker detailed how Twitter and the White House used CCHD’s “Disinformation Dozen” report as justification for censoring the people on the list.
Thacker also profiled Ahmed, who previously worked for Merrill Lynch and was a British Labour Party political operative, and is the co-author of “The New Serfdom: The Triumph of Conservative Ideas and How to Defeat Them… .” Ahmed emerged during the pandemic as a “vaccine and disinformation expert,” although lacking any experience that would qualify him as such, Thacker reported.
Thacker raised questions about who funds CCDH and reached out to the organization to investigate, but received no response.
Ji’s report published Monday provides a partial answer to that question, seeking to “contribute to the collective effort to shed a sterilizing light on the dark agenda spear-headed by astroturfing organizations like CCDH,” he wrote in the report.
CCDH’s funders primarily global but U.K.-based nonprofits
Although CCDH does not make its funders publicly available and failed to respond to Thacker’s inquiries, Ji was able to identify some of them by examining the public grant-reporting website 360 GrantNav, along with other publicly available sites, including CCDH’s 2020 website archived on the Wayback Machine.
The funders identified are primarily U.K.-based charities, some of which operate globally and generally contribute to a wide variety of causes that cluster around issues of environment and poverty, rather than health or science.
According to the report, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation in 2021 gave CCDH a £100,000 grant earmarked for “growing the digital presence and impact of the Center for Countering Digital Hate.” The foundation’s trustees include the former general-director of the BBC Tony Hall, Baron Hall of Birkenhead, and Sir Anthony Saltz, formerly on BBC’s board of governors.
The Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, a large U.K. charity with a £1.5 billion endowment, whose mission is “to improve the natural world, create a fairer future and strengthen community bonds in the UK,” gave CCDH £200,000 in October 2021 to support a salary at the organization and to “disrupt the spread of online hate and misinformation.” It awarded CCDH a second £13,333 grant in January of this year.
The Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, which, according to the report, is a U.K.-based limited company — not a charity and therefore able to fund political causes — gave CCDH £53,400 in 2020.
CCDH is also funded by the Oak Foundation, a global environmentalist grantmaking foundation that gave CCDH $100,000 to help it shine a “spotlight on digital misinformation platforms that are polluting the public discourse.”
CCDH reported on its website that it received an undisclosed amount of money from the Barrow Cadbury Trust, whose mission is to “tackle profound social ills, including juvenile crime and urban poverty.”
The Pears Foundation, a U.K. charity that Ji’s report says focuses on “Israel-related projects” gave CCDH £250,000 over three years. The foundation is funded by the William Pears group and the U.K. government, according to the report.
The Hopewell Fund is a U.S.-based 501(c)(3) organization managed by a Washington, D.C.-based philanthropy consulting firm and is dedicated to funding “innovative social change projects.” It gave CCDH a small $15,000 grant in 2021.
Unbound Philanthropy, the final donor identified by the report, is a New York-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization whose executive director Taryn Higashi also sits on the advisory board of Soros’ Open Society Foundations and who formerly worked at the Ford Foundation.
But this is just a partial list, and in his report, Ji appealed to the public to continue researching the “dark money” behind the organization.
Ji also invited readers to take action on the Stand for Health Freedom campaign website “to send the message that the targeting of U.S. citizens to illegally suppress protected speech is unacceptable.”
The Defender examined CCDH’s 990 — the tax form nonprofits must file annually with the IRS — from fiscal year 2021, where the organization reported receiving $1,471,247 in contributions and grants and listed $860,457 in total assets.
The list of contributors was marked as “restricted,” and further information was not provided. It did report spending $12,633 on “lobbying activities.”
While The Defender was only able to find the single 2021 federal form 990, we did locate CCDH’s U.K. financial reporting form for fiscal year 2022 (ending Oct. 31, 2022), showing the organization received $904,452 from donations in 2022 and $638,499 in 2021.
Financial filings also reveal CCDH board member affiliations
The U.S. 990, the U.K. financial statements and the U.K.’s company information service also revealed CCDH’s frequently changing board members and directors, many of whom have close ties to government and media organizations.
Notable figures include Simon Clark, board chair, who was a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. The Atlantic Council is a NATO, arms industry and Persian Gulf monarchies-funded think tank.
Prior to his work at the Atlantic Council, Clark was a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, where he led the work that informed the Biden White House’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism.
Ji found it “unsurprising” that “CCDH’s rhetorical points made it into several U.S. Department of Homeland Security terrorism bulletins equating free speech and open debate about mRNA vaccine safety and efficacy, or Covid origins, as possible new forms of domestic terrorism.”
Another CCDH director, Kirsty McNeill has also worked as Save the Children’s executive director for Policy, Advocacy and Campaigns since 2016, a period during which the Bill & Melinda Foundation donated more than $40 million to the organization.
Save the Children has also partnered with Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. Gavi maintains a core partnership with the World Health Organization and the World Bank.
McNeill previously worked as a special adviser and speechwriter for former Prime Minister Gordon Brown. She is a member of the think tank European Council on Foreign Relations, funded by such entities as the Open Society Foundations, the United Nations and the Gates Foundation.
Aleen Keshishian and Zack Morgenroth are both CCDH board members and work at Lighthouse Management & Media, a Hollywood management agency representing top stars including Jennifer Aniston, who famously cut ties with her unvaccinated friends.
Damian Noel Thomas Collins, who joined CCDH in 2022, is a British Conservative Party politician who formerly served as a junior Minister for Tech and the Digital Economy in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport.
CCDH sought to silence the voices that were ‘most effective’ at warning the public
In addition to its government, social media and legacy media connections, CCDH has partnered with “fact-checking” firm NewsGuard — specifically, its HealthGuard product, described as “a vaccine against medical misinformation” and against critiques targeting the healthcare industry and global public health authorities.
According to an article by Off-Guardian, CCDH claimed the COVID-19 pandemic “will only be overcome by the most ambitious vaccination programme in human history” and those who question this program have “fringe and extremist views,” which “should not be permitted and should indeed be banned.”
They have also advocated for the imprisonment of “anti-vaxxers.”
Ji told The Defender that CCDH’s targeted campaign spoke to the validity of the ideas of those it sought to deplatform.
He said:
“George R. R. Martin once said, ‘When you tear out a man’s tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you’re only telling the world that you fear what he might say.’
“I believe CCDH’s campaign was intended to silence those of us who they believed were most effective at warning the public about the true dangers of the mRNA vaccine rollout and how this mass experiment violated the medical ethics principle of informed consent.”
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Trial Date Set in Landmark Lawsuit Concerning Wrongful Death During Pandemic Hospitalization
Hospital’s Motion to Dismiss Denied — Finally A Jury Will Hear Case
By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH | Courageous Discourse | July 26, 2023
One of the most important rights stripped from Americans during the pandemic was the 7th amendment right to a jury trial. Devastated families lost loved ones due to therapeutic nihilism in the hospital and in some cases negligent care or even personal injury. Many are disheartened by corrupt courts and judges who dismiss cases out of hand. Finally a case is moving forward thanks to the diligence of Scott Schara, father of the late Grace Schara. Grace had Down’s syndrome and died of respiratory depression after she was given three sedatives in the setting of acute COVID-19 pneumonia.
This is a dramatic case and you can hear all the details from the father on the McCullough Report Grace Under Pressure – A Father’s Courage to Face the Biopharmaceutical Complex by Dr. Peter McCullough | Apr 10, 2023 | Health, Politics.
Here is the first page of the press release about the case:
You can read the full disclosure below. This case could open the door for a floodgate of litigation where families believe one or more breaches in the standard of inpatient care occurred:
- Failure to continue outpatient multidrug protocols like the McCullough Protocol (no medication reconciliation)
- Lack of informed consent
- Denied access to family members
- Denied adequate food and water
- Failure sufficiently treat with viricidal nasal sprays and gargles, full dose oral antivirals, full dose steroids, aspirin, anticoagulants and adjunctive drugs
- Use of remdesivir after the WHO recommends against the use of remdesivir in COVID-19 patients 20 November 2020
- Unnecessary intubation for low oxygen saturation without failure of respiratory drive, mechanics, or other indication
Supported in part by the McCullough Foundation
Were lockdowners and vaccinators really just trying to save lives? And is this what made them so dangerous in the end?
eugyppius: a plague chronicle | July 26, 2023
Daniel Hadas, whose sensitive and measured commentary on the pandemic I’ve long valued, recently offered these remarks on lockdowns and mass vaccination on Twitter:
It needs to be understood that the true motivation of the lockdown / forced vaccination Covid response really 𝑤𝑎𝑠 Saving Lives.
Saving Lives wasn’t a smokescreen for some other hidden plan.
Of course, there was opportunism: there were those who used the state of emergency to claw power, money, fame to themselves. There were both supporters and opponents of the Covid measures who did that.
Where [there] is opportunity, there will be opportunists.
But mere opportunism is not enough to drive forward the leaders and followers in a revolution on the scale of the Covid response.
That requires faith, and the faith that drove this revolution was the faith in Saving Lives.
To deny the authenticity of the project to Save Lives is to remain perilously ready to sign up to all current and future projects to remake society and morality in the name of Life-Saving.
And it is to remain blind to the fact that Saving Lives has come to mean hacking away at the limits of what can be done to men, women and children in the name of saving their lives and those of others.
This thesis angered many people, at least some of whom misconstrue what Hadas is arguing. The point is not that a genuine commitment to “Saving Lives” might excuse the response or make it better. Rather, a commitment to Life-Saving public health interventions is in Hadas’s view the ominous root of the problem, because Life Saving is in fact a shallow goal that sounds good enough to rationalise all manner of harmful, destructive policies. Almost anything can be justified – any amount of collateral damage accepted – if it is for Saving Lives, and this is why all of us should cultivate a distrust of self-appointed Life Savers everywhere we encounter them.
In this sense, then, Hadas’s thesis seems undeniable: The millions who signed on to lockdowns and demanded their governments force-vaccinate their peers were not just wrong in a direct, empirical sense – that is, for believing that lockdowns and vaccines would improve health in any way. They were also much more profoundly wrong in a moral sense. Even if lockdowns and vaccines had the potential to stop the virus, nobody deserves house arrest or forced medical treatment for the crime of being a potential vector of infection. Placing Life Saving ahead of all other outcomes is very dangerous and also very stupid, for the simple reason that we are all going to die. As a justification, it functions as a mere pretence to ignore the very real trade-offs that lurk in any alleged solution to anything. Explaining how it could be a good idea to delay the deaths of some elderly and sick people at the cost of the well-being, physical health and autonomy of billions is very hard. Pleading that “we need to save lives” is easy.
That said, I find the thesis less than complete. The public health establishment and their media collaborators carefully manufactured public support for their response by sowing far and wide the belief that it was necessary to Save Lives. Had we acted otherwise – say, by staying open and not doing very much – this, too, would’ve been marketed as the Best Way to Save Lives, and many millions would’ve believed it just as sincerely as they believed in lockdowns. To this comes the fact that Life-Saving in one form or another is profered as justification for a wide range of modern political pathologies, from mass migration schemes to climate change. Especially in ageing European countries like Germany, where an ever-growing number of pensioners and their health anxiety dominate national discourse, there are few better ways to sell noxious political programmes to the masses. Without our naive Life-Saving ethos, it’s not clear to me we wouldn’t have had lockdowns, though they would’ve required a much different kind of argument.
The extent to which states can be said to act upon clear motives at all is a further problem. A longstanding plague chronicle argument, is that modern managerial government doesn’t have goals, motivations or purposes in any human sense. Our countries every day do all kinds of truly insane things behind paper-thin justifications that bear no scrutiny. A lot of what is maligned as “conspiratorial” discourse, on both the left and the right, represents an effort to reimpose logic on state actions, generally by positing that the stated goals are a pretence for some deeper, hidden purpose. Most of the time, these analyses just aren’t convincing, and they function to obscure the blunt reality that we find ourselves beset by an incomprehensible post-liberal political order, in which state actions have been farmed out to a vastly complex network of stakeholders, NGOs, academics, bureaucrats and special advisory committees. For every area of policy the constellation of forces will be different, and nobody has any clear understanding of how the system works – not even the most powerful individuals in the midst of it all. Everything the state does is the sum of these thousands of different forces. What complicates this picture even further, is the fact that those responsible for policy formulation don’t act directly to shape outcomes in the outside world. Their motivations are almost always institutionally mediated, and for this reason much more confined and limited in perspective. They want to secure promotion and grant funding, they want to be thought well of by their peers, they want to satisfy their superiors, and many other petty careerist personal things of this nature.
To say that “climate change policy” is motivated by a desire to reduce carbon emissions, then, is merely to outline a descriptive thesis from outside. Such a thesis will sink or swim insofar as it explains actions of the system as a whole, but no such motivation is present in the system itself. The apparatus of modern governance is a vast inhuman machine consisting of human components; it doesn’t have thoughts any more than a storm system does. And in this sense, I think Saving Lives as the motivation behind lockdowns and mass vaccination is not quite right. Popular supporters of mass containment certainly saw these policies as Life Saving, and this helped enable them. The state itself, however, was playing a rather different game, one which fell (depending on the country) somewhere on a scale from “virus suppression” to “virus eradication” – lives be damned. The pandemicists’ abandonment of prior mitigationist plans entailed precisely deprioritising Life Saving in favour of a new, pathogen-centred approach.
“That may very well be, eugyppius, but what of the people at the start of it all, before lockdowns were taken up by the system? Surely they had human motivations, even if the regime cannot.”
This is true. The Neil Fergusons, Tomas Pueyos and Christian Drostens who sold lockdowns to their countries and the world surely did so for specific, personal reasons. The problem is that these reasons are very elusive. In fact, the more I read their early statements and their leaked correspondence, the more elusive they seem to me. Their words and actions, however, have a very clear and persistent sinister undertone, which is not a mere artefact of retrospect. Their mysterious coordination with each other, their willingness to engage in highly manipulative messaging and risk magnification, their reliance on foreign agents to launder research and strategies from China, and their constant efforts to justify with pseudoscientific findings apparently preconceived conclusions, are all very unsettling. The ambient Life-Saving ethos of modern society surely helped them win the argument in the moment and get away with it in the longer term, but whatever they thought they were up to, was something much different.
Dancing COVID Nurses That Supported Draconian Mandates Switch To Climate Change
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | July 26, 2023
Perhaps one of the most unsettling narrative relationships during the covid pandemic lockdowns was the assertion by various governments, think-tanks and media pundits that the mandates weren’t just good for “stopping the spread,” they were also good for “saving the environment” from what they claim will be inevitable Apocalyptic climate change. While the covid agenda has all but disappeared thanks to millions of people and half the states in the US rejecting the restrictions, climate hysteria is still alive and well.
One of the most obnoxious trends in covid propaganda was the constant TikTok dance videos. Dancing politicians, dancing talk show hosts and dancing nurses all telling us to comply while frolicking around like maniacs. Well, it’s not over, because the dancing covid nurses are back, and now they’re here to tell us that accepting carbon controls is just as important as the mandates.
Beyond the numerous question on how nurses managed to have time to make so many group TikToks if the hospitals were “overrun” with patients dying of covid as the media asserted for the first year of the pandemic, we must also ask: If they lied about the effectiveness of the mandates, why should we listen to them about climate change?
Not one draconian policy enforced by governments made any difference whatsoever in the transmission of the covid virus. The lockdowns were pointless. The masks were pointless. Social distancing was pointless. And the official median Infection Fatality Rate of covid is a mere 0.23%, which means that 99.8% of people were never under any threat from the disease anyway. These facts were well known by medical professionals by early 2021, yet many of them continued to push the mandates.
Invariably, as the summer heats up so does the hype surrounding climate controls which would do little or nothing to shift the existing state of the Earth’s temps. “Record temps” are often touted, but these records are limited to a short time from of around 140 years of official data (since the 1880s). But what about before then? When we look at the real history of the Earth’s climate, the temps today are incredibly mild. Not only that, but the global warming events of the past all occurred without human involvement.
One has to wonder, if this is the case, why are no carbon control proponents or climate scientists talking about it? Is the situation much like covid, where they tell you to “believe the science” except for the science that contradicts their claims? And let’s not forget, these same people have been telling us the Earth is on the verge of burning for a very long time.
People stopped idolizing nurses after the pandemic scare. Dancing for the climate feels more like a desperate act to regain relevancy, rather than legitimate activism.
Indisputable – Covid ‘cures’ caused the excess deaths
By Serena Wylde | TCW Defending Freedom | July 21, 2023
‘Virologists have been exploiting us and screaming fire where there was none’: Dr Denis Rancourt giving his testimony to the National Citizens’ Inquiry in Ottawa, Canada.
This citizen-led, citizen-funded inquiry into Canada’s Covid-19 response, by definition cannot be commissioned or conducted impartially by the government whose responses and actions are the subject of the investigation. It has already held hearings in Vancouver, Ottawa and Quebec City at which scientific, medical, and legal experts have testified under oath, along with journalists and Canadian citizens who have pertinent testimony to offer. On May 17 Dr Rancourt, a scientist with a PhD in physics who has held key research positions in France and the Netherlands prior to becoming a physics professor and lead scientist at the University of Ottawa 23 years ago, gave his evidence.
For the last three years, with a team of statisticians and scientific researchers, he has been conducting a vast number of studies on all-cause mortality. These have focused on North America but have included other Western nations, resulting in more than 30 scientific reports. His findings appear conclusive, and establish that there was no particularly virulent pathogen on the planet in 2020; that excess deaths that year were entirely caused by the measures imposed against a fictitious threat, and then from 2021 onwards, by the vaccines.
He further concludes that none of the various ‘pandemics’ announced by the US and Canada since the Second World War was reflected in excess all-cause mortality. In other words, they too were fiction.
Importantly, at the inquiry hearings Dr Rancourt explained his focus on all-cause mortality data. It is because it contains no bias. It is a simple counting of deaths per age group, by sex, state, city and as a function of time. It enables one to spot and correlate events such as heatwaves, earthquakes, wars, economic depressions; anything that perturbs the population sufficiently to cause mortality. Its ‘power’ is that it provides a clear, unmanipulated picture of a given population.
During a 97-minute testimony he provided detailed evidence to show how he arrived at three core conclusions:
1. ‘If governments had done nothing out of the ordinary, if they had not announced a pandemic, not responded to a presumed new pathogen, done nothing more than what is usually done when there is high seasonal mortality in the winter, there would have been no excess mortality. There was the usual ecology of pathogens which we live with and are always present. People get ill, they recover, some die, but there was no pandemic that caused excess mortality beyond the historic trend, and that would have remained the case if we had just left things alone.’
2. The measures that governments applied were many different forms of assault, all of which contributed to excess mortality.
3. The Covid-19 vaccination campaign has caused huge excess mortality in clearly visible peaks which are seen directly associated with the roll-out of various vaccine doses to different age groups and in different jurisdictions, and likewise with the administration of boosters. The excess mortality occurs immediately following vaccination and lasts a few days, then the curve of mortality declines exponentially over a period of about two months. Dr Rancourt emphasises that it is not possible to have such an unusual pattern without it being causally connected to the injections.
Explaining why there was no pandemic of a viral respiratory disease, Rancourt shows that when one integrates the all-cause mortality in the ‘Covid’ period there were huge variations from area to area, which defies the hypothesis of viral spread.
The US excess mortality in this period was five times higher than that of neighbouring Canada proportionately to its population, which is epidemiologically impossible. These differences were also visible between US states, which means one has to look at social factors to explain the phenomenon. The excess deaths occurred mainly in the Southern states, which have a high incidence of seasonal bacterial pneumonia, and these infections went inadequately treated because during the ‘Covid’ period all Western nations cut antibiotic prescriptions by at least 50 per cent. Another strong population correlation factor was the number of people with disabilities. The US has a large number of registered disabled, and people who rely on outside support for everyday needs cannot function in a society in lockdown. It also has high numbers of poor people, and with the closure of churches, schools and community facilities, these populations were utterly stripped of their usual mechanisms of survival.
Excess mortality in 2020 in Europe was equally inconsistent with the notion of viral spread. Immediately after the pandemic was announced Lombardy in Italy became a hotspot, where hospitals put two people at a time on mechanical ventilators. But Italy’s crisis did not flow into Switzerland, nor did Spain’s high death toll cross the border into Portugal, and Alsace’s peak in Eastern France did not affect neighbouring Germany. This constitutes counter-evidence of a viral respiratory disease. Furthermore, although the lethality of ‘Covid’ was said to be exponential with age, mortality data shows no correlation with age.
Dr Mike Yeadon, who understands the biological effects of fear, told James Delingpole in their recent discussion: ‘Two mg of diazepam, a cup of tea and a biscuit, arm around the shoulder and give them an oxygen mask. I think most people would have gone home, but instead they admitted and murdered them.’
As the fraud began with the seeding of an idea of a pandemic, solid, irrefutable data is key in dismantling the illusion. This Dr Rancourt provided.
He completed his testimony with a plea to scientists and physicians to go back and look at the data of who is dying, and where and when, and what it correlates to. He believes there has to be a reset of thinking to recognise that virologists have been exploiting us and shouting fire where there was really nothing present. Clinicians and emergency staff have donned ‘Covid glasses’, he believes, making them see things as dangerous which at any other time would appear perfectly normal.
He postulates that the way to reset thinking is to use hard data that cannot be disputed, and that is all-cause mortality data. Unless this central data issue is addressed, he fears pandemics will be declared without basis, and populations will be assaulted at will.
Risk of Stroke Skyrockets with COVID-19 Infection after Vaccination
Breakthrough within 21 Days of Shot Confers 8-Fold Risk of Ischemic Stroke
By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH | Courageous Discourse | July 23, 2023
Because the COVID-19 vaccines load the body with the genetic code for the thrombogenic and lethal Wuhan Spike protein, those who take a vaccine are vulnerable to a catastrophe if they get infected with SARS-CoV-2 after recently taking one of the shots.
Nahab and coworkers from Emory analyzed a statewide database of COVID-19 vaccine recipients. Approximately 5 million adult Georgians received at least one COVID-19 vaccine between December 2020 and March 2022: 54% received BNT162b2, 41% received mRNA-1273, and 5% received Ad26.COV2.S. Those with concurrent COVID-19 infection within 21 days post-vaccination had an increased risk of ischemic (OR = 8.00, 95% CI: 4.18, 15.31) and hemorrhagic stroke (OR =5.23, 95% CI: 1.11, 24.64).
This analysis shows one of many great dangers present in rapid vaccine development and rollout without sufficient data safety and monitoring. Stroke is a devastating outcome and it appears that a large number of debilitating cases could have been avoided if the COVID-19 vaccines were taken off the market in January, 2021 for excess mortality. The patients in this study would have been spared stroke and disability.
Nahab F, Bayakly R, Sexton ME, Lemuel-Clarke M, Henriquez L, Rangaraju S, Ido M. Factors associated with stroke after COVID-19 vaccination: a statewide analysis. Front Neurol. 2023 Jun 28;14:1199745. doi: 10.3389/fneur.2023.1199745. PMID: 37448752; PMCID: PMC10337778.
These data highlight the need for Spike protein detoxification, in other words, methods to reduce the burden of Spike protein within the body. We have a widely anticipated manuscript in press featuring an ambulatory triple combination regimen of nattokinase, bromelain, and curcumin which works proteolytically clear Spike while providing a low level of thrombolysis and control over inflammation.
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From the Archives
The New Baghdad Pact
By Dr Bouthaina Shaaban | February 23, 2017
A recently declassified CIA document prepared in 1983, and released on 20 January 2017, shows that the United States had at the time encouraged Saddam Hussein to attack Syria, which would have led to a vicious conflict between the two countries, thus draining their resources.
The report, which was then prepared by CIA officer Graham Fuller, indicates that the US tried adamantly to convince Saddam to attack Syria under any pretense available, in order to get the two most powerful countries in the Arab East to destroy each other, turning their attention away from the Arab-Israeli conflict. … continue
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- Mearsheimer: Israel Owns Trump
- Mark Levin and Jonathan Pollard Push for Nuking Iran
- TCN: America Enables Israel’s Crimes
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- No Tricks Zone
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- New Study Reports A 60% Slowdown In Greenland’s Ice Loss Rate In The Last Decade
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- German Science Blog Accuses PIK Climate Institute Of Hallucinating Climate Tipping Points
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