The Money Trails of the Pandemic Planning Racket
By Jeffrey A. Tucker | Brownstone Institute | July 30, 2023
The Justice Department has dismissed all charges related to campaign finance leveled against Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the founder and CEO of the Bahamas-based crypto exchange FTX. The grounds were a bit unusual. Officials in the Bahamas said that such charges were not the basis of the extradition. “The Bahamas did not intend to extradite the defendant on the campaign contributions count,” said the Justice Department. “Accordingly, in keeping with its treaty obligations to the Bahamas, the Government does not intend to proceed to trial on the campaign contributions count.”
And just like that, charges are gone. What’s strange is that this claim jumps out in the financial trail of FTX. Indeed, it seems obvious. It was an impressive caper. FTX said it practiced “effective altruism” and so intended to give away $1 billion to charity. It raised venture funding from many sources that wanted to pay off politicians but were restricted from doing so by law. FTX classified this as investment and then altruistically gave money to many charities involved in “pandemic planning” but many were not real charities. They were 501c4s that fund political campaigns. With just a few hops in the money trail, this mechanism allowed vast funding of mostly Democratic political interests in advance of the 2020 election.
Once you have a look at the details and players (and we have done so in two articles here and here), it becomes clear that “effective altruism” was simply a cover for a politically driven money scheme. FTX was founded and then went into bankruptcy exactly in keeping with this purpose. It remains possible that SBF will face trouble over claims of wire fraud but that could be plea-bargained away. We shall see. What’s striking is that the most obvious issues have been swept away on a legal technicality.
Central to the charity of FTX was the issue of pandemic planning, or so they said. SBF’s brother ran a pandemic organization. Linda Fried, Sam’s aunt on his mother’s side, was Dean of the School of Public Health at Columbia University and on the board of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Aging. SBF’s girlfriend Caroline Ellison’s mother is a professor of economics at MIT with a research specialization in the pharmaceutical industry while her father has written at least four papers on epidemiological modeling.
The “Together Trial” was a trial of therapeutics that ended up inveighing against Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine and was generously funded by FTX together with the Koch Foundation. The head of Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, Moncef Slaoui, received $150,000 from FTX to write SBF’s autobiography. HelixNano, a vaccine company that claims to be developing mutation-resistant vaccines, received $10M in funding from FTX Future Fund. And Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security: This institution ran the Event 201 lockdown tabletop exercise in 2019, and received at least $175,000 for a single employee, from FTX coffers.
This barely scratches the surface and we would like to know more. It would be glorious if the New York Times or some other big media organ would assign 50 reporters to dig deeper, as they did with the supposed Trump-Russia connection that turned up nothing after years of high dudgeon. But nope: all we get is silence. In contrast, the national media mostly treats SBF as a confused genius who got in over his head because his wonderful company achieved too much too fast.
How the national media treats money trails entirely depends on the political drive behind the effort. In the second term of the Reagan administration, the executive branch became involved in an effort to fund the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and the Contras in Nicaragua in the name of fighting the spread of Soviet influence and winning the Cold War. Congress had specifically stopped these funding efforts so the Reaganites turned to the usual suite of shell companies, friendly governments, intelligence agencies, and secure money-movers to get the cash to those who wanted it.
The result was many years of intense investigation. Every center-left and left-wing outfit was all over the Iran-Contra money scandal, seeking receipts and subjecting the major players like Oliver North to sworn Congressional testimony. There was nothing wrong with this and everything right: in the American system, the executive branch cannot fund global projects without the approval of Congress. The search to ferret out the scandals seemed like part of the effort to clean up government.
Here we are nearly 40 years later and the Biden administration is embroiled in an astonishing version of something similar, with familial connections, shell companies, cash moving here and there, foreign governments like Ukraine, and intelligence agencies serving as essential tools of covering it all up. It was the Hunter Biden laptop that provided the clues and that led to more receipts of an amazing nature. This week I received a call from a man who was instrumental in discovering the laptop who explained many of the funding connections but after about 15 minutes of detail I could not keep up even though he went on for another 30 minutes. It was all mind-boggling. This one makes the Iran-Contra scandal seem like the age of innocence.
How deep does this rabbit hole go? Consider the attacks on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and the attempt to close the primary such that only Biden can win it? The effort is primarily funded by Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook which itself cooperated very closely with the federal government in suppressing contrary opinions on lockdowns and vaccines. Liam Sturgess explains:
The group behind the campaign is the Progressive Turnout Project, a political action committee (PAC) that has been described as “the largest voter contact organization in the country.” It has a series of sub-organizations operating under different names, two of which are also engaged in the BAN RFK petition: Stop Republicans and Progressive Takeover. … Using the most recent publicly-available data from OpenSecrets, we discovered that the single largest donation to the PTP came from Dustin Moskovitz.
Moskovitz also co-founded a project management application called Asana in 2008. Between these two massively profitable companies, Moskovitz generated so much wealth that he was identified by Forbes in 2011 as the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, even beating out Zuckerberg.
After earning his fortune in Big Tech, Moskovitz and his future wife, Cari Tuna, signed on to “The Giving Pledge,” committing to give away the vast majority of their money before the end of their lives. The Giving Pledge was the creation of mega-millionaires Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, with co-signatories including Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, George Lucas, David Rockefeller, and Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the recently-collapsed FTX cryptocurrency trading platform.
To accomplish their goal, Moskovitz and Tuna embraced a philosophy of “effective altruism.” According to its proponents, effective altruists seek to direct funding towards the people and organizations most likely to accomplish a given intended outcome for the betterment of humanity and the planet —often focusing on topics such as artificial intelligence, natural disasters, and combating “misinformation/disinformation.”
With effective altruism as their anchor, Moskovitz and Tuna started the Good Ventures Foundation in 2011. The focus of their philanthropy was to include biomedical research, pandemics and bioterrorism, education, food security, foreign aid, geoengineering, global health and development, immigration, nanotechnology and treatment of animals. Good Ventures also partnered with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to co-fund research related to infectious diseases in Africa.
In August 2014, Good Ventures partnered with a similar organization called GiveWell to launch the Open Philanthropy Project, which would recommend grants for Good Ventures to fulfill (paid for by Moskovitz).
In the years leading up to COVID-19, Moskovitz used Open Philanthropy and Good Ventures to provide significant funding toward pandemic preparedness and biosecurity. Open Philanthropy is also listed as the primary sponsor of a series of tabletop pandemic “war games,” during which world leaders practice how they might respond to various scenarios involving outbreaks of novel viruses, whether man-made or of natural origin. Some examples include Clade X (May 2018); A Spreading Plague (February 2019); and of course, the infamous Event 201 (October 2019).
If you have followed this article carefully, you see that we have come full circle, from the effort to silence and stop Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., back to Sam Bankman-Fried, the phony crypto exchange FTX, and the money trails through pandemic planning straight to political control of people by a single political party that tolerates no competition. One might suppose these connections would launch a thousand investigations and calls for reform. They should.
Instead, the charges were dismissed, by the very regime that stands to lose all credibility in light of all these strange money trails. And now we see major banks canceling accounts by major medical dissidents, as a warning to others.
Let there be no mystery as to why the public has lost trust in government, public health, media, and virtually every other official institution. Even as Americans have been pillaged and had their foundational rights violated by governments, the people on the inside have done very well for themselves within this tangled web of graft and corruption. They have every intention to forever block curious journalists from knowing more.
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.
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Iran spent $1 million to wipe out $30 billion in data center plans, and take down Amazon in the ME
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From the Archives
A short history of British torture
ICC | December 2005
When the House of Commons was debating how much to increase the time limit for detention without trial the question of torture came up. Officially this was limited to the nice considerations of whether it was all right to send people to places where torture is used and whether Britain can use information collected by the use of torture in other countries. This discussion gave an impression of democratic Britain as the home of civilised behaviour where the very idea of torture is repugnant to our legislators – unlike, say, the US with its secret CIA jails… In reality, the British state has a long history of using and developing a whole range of torture techniques. … continue
Blog Roll
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- Zionist billionaire pressure to silence Macklemore sparks exodus from Ed Sheeran tour
- House Votes to End Iran War for Third Time
- North Korea Slams US Plan for ‘AUKUS 2.0’ with South Korea and Japan
- Prolonging US-Iran Conflict Not Meeting Interests of Int’l Community – China’s Wang Yi
- EU bans former Zelensky aide from parliament
- NATO-backed Kosovo separatist ‘responsible for war crimes’
- US destroying international space law
- SCO Calls for Binding Global Deal to Prevent Arms Race in Space
- If Americans Knew
- U.S. Makes, Israel Takes: The Real Story of U.S.-Israeli Military Cooperation
- Night raids rise in Palestine
- Tucker Carlson interviews Norman Finkelstein about Gaza
- Groups urge Americans to support Van Hollen legislation on Israel’s killing of Americans & Palestinians
- Trump administration plans to send 40,000 tons of bombs to Israel: report
- Sanctions Target Iran’s Government, But Kill Hospitalized 23-Year-Old Woman
- An alternative view on the book “Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power”
- Ed Sheeran’s band Beoga, other opening acts quit tour after Macklemore was dropped over his pro-Palestinian comments
- The assassination attempt on President Trump in Butler and the various Israeli connections to it
- “We Want That the Whole Land Be Jewish”
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
- Economic Masterminds: German Socialists Suggest Taxing Productivity Gains Stemming From Using AI
- The South China Sea Has Not Been Cooperating With The Climate Change Narrative
- Energy Crisis: Germany Enters Heating Season With Historically Low Gas Reserve Fill Levels
- New Study: The Antarctic Ice Sheet Gained Mass From 2020-2024 Due To Staggering Snow And Ice Accumulation
- Study: Ocean Heating Rates From Thousands Of Years Ago ‘Dwarf’ Modern Ocean Heating Rates
- Climate Extremists Target, Attack Large-Scale Power Grid Infrastructure In Germany!
- New Study: Antarctic Ice Melt Has Contributed Less Than 1 Centimeter To Sea Level Rise In The Last 30 Years
- Fear Of Debate: Alarmist German Climate Scientist Calls On Mainstream Media To Discredit Skeptic Voices
- End-Of-August Arctic Sea Ice Extent Hasn’t Fallen In 20 Years, Official Data Show!
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