You will forgive me if from time to time I find myself silent and stymied in the doldrums. The past three years, in our Corona Epoch, weigh heavily on us all, but there is more: these past three years have revealed to those with eyes to see and ears to hear the rank depths of corruption within virtually every institute of government and within virtually every formerly honorable profession.
To have witnessed Medicine undermine itself in such a way as to make itself unrecognizable – in, for example, its sudden enthusiasm for masks, it sudden forgetfulness about early treatment and natural immunity, its sudden acceptance of a novel therapeutic agent that had been inadequately tested, its mania to subject children to this agent, its sudden scorn for informed consent and its equally sudden disregard of the founding principle of the Hippocratic Oath, at first not to harm – is to recognize outright self-destruction. That so many so-called medical practitioners abandoned their fundamental duties to their patients and themselves is a disgrace for which I can find no adequate word except prostitution – bearing in mind that in using this word I am doing sex workers a disservice because their form of prostitution represents an honest exchange.
There is more to the weight of these three years of deception because these three years have carried the culminating weight of ages of hypocrisy, oppression and falsehood from the Powers that have ruled over the common man and woman.
A friend recently opined to me that he has begun to question the veracity of State utterances or, as is fashionable now to say, its ‘narratives’, and I responded by saying that I believed one should adopt the attitude that everything we are told by governmental authorities is a lie until proved otherwise.
They lied about the murders of JFK, RFK, MLK and Malcolm X. They lied about the war in Vietnam. They lied about 911. They lied about the Middle East invasions, the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, the various coups instigated by ‘intelligence’ agencies around the world and, naturally, they lied about covid in a way that would make Satan proud for the comprehensiveness and cleverness of the ruse. They are lying about the Ukraine and Russia at the moment too. The effect of these relentless and blatant falsehoods is to corrode the very tissue of legality and fairness that keeps societies together under an aegis of justice, and consequently to fashion a world whose only law is Power.
I’ve written about Power and its role and the sober expectations we must possess regarding those who wield it, yet the scale of sadistic and murderous campaigns throughout history pales in comparison to the war within which we find ourselves now: global, savage, ingeniously devious and, to date, fairly successful.
The ways and means of killing have assumed a sophistication that makes Nazi concentration camps appear cumbersome and inefficient. Is it not ‘cleaner’ and far more effective to render populations infertile, to accelerate cancers, to foster strokes and cardiomyopathy and autoimmune conditions in age groups hitherto unaccustomed to suffer such phenomena, and to create, even in these early years post-jab, what is euphemistically called ‘excess mortality’ – a term that sanitizes and obscures the calculated enfeeblement and killing that is unique and unprecedented?
And is it not a macabre form of genius to have persuaded so many many people to accept it all, to refute the evidence of their senses, and to attack those of us who challenge their perceptions with frightful vehemence, vehemence that overrides the bonds of friendship?
In a recent exchange with a friend of nearly five decades, I was told that he scorned my ‘alternative’ sources and that he was through with me. For the past year we had maintained our friendship – a friendship that included wonderful times together and frankly beautiful shared experiences – on condition that I not dare to speak about anything that contradicted his MSM conception of all things covid or Ukraine.
It was like sitting across from someone while the proverbial elephant in the room had placed its bulk right between us. We could exchange pleasantries and reminisce about anything and everything except the large creature with its imposing trunk and tusks and head and limbs that stood in our way, the immense pachyderm that was the bloated embodiment of historically accumulated falsehood.
Can friendships survive with such strictures?
Can friendships survive the chasm between those who have swallowed the propaganda of mainstream news outlets hook, line and sinker, and those who seek for truth from ordinary citizens not beholden to advertising revenue or governmental coercion?
Should friendships survive a chasm that separates those who condone mandates, lethal universal inoculations, outright kinetic war when it suits their purposes, climate change fanaticism, the suppression of debate, and a centralized global governing ‘order’ – from those who cherish free speech, individual responsibility, and human choice?
Well, however difficult and painful it may be to accept, there is a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing …
Dr. Garcia is a Philadelphia-born psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand in 2006. He has authored articles ranging from explorations of psychoanalytic technique, the psychology of creativity in music (Mahler, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Delius), and politics. He is also a poet, novelist and theatrical director. He retired from psychiatric practice in 2021 after working in the public sector in New Zealand.
March 12, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Militarism | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine |
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In the aftermath of the release of the Lockdown Files, the public is slowly coming to terms with some fairly shocking facts: that the Government was willing to lie and mislead, and to scaremonger and manipulate the media, in order to achieve its Covid policy objectives (or even just to garner a few headlines). The news is still sinking in, but a day of reckoning for those involved looks likely.
For those of us bearing the scars of long engagement in the climate and energy wars, however, none of this was a surprise. It has long been clear that the inhabitants of the Westminster village were happy to hype up fears of climate purgatory and to fib about the road to redemption – renewables – and the cost of taking it. Once the public understand the depth and extent of the deception, and the damage done to the economy and the prospects for our children, the trickery over Covid is going to look decidedly peripheral.
The latest report from the Climate Change Committee (CCC) is a case in point. On the surface it’s a roadmap to a decarbonised electricity grid, but in reality it’s merely a sales document, full of tricks, evasions and outright falsehoods that would make even the most cynical used car salesman blush.
For example, in a number of places, it says that decarbonisation of the grid will be ‘cost-effective’, but you will find next to no information on what it will cost. The game that is being played becomes a bit clearer when you read the reference to ‘carbon prices’. In normal usage, the carbon price is the estimate of the damage done by a ton of carbon dioxide, but in the CCC’s parlance it is an estimate of what it will cost to decarbonise. So, while it gives you the impression it has done a cost-benefit analysis and is going to be saving you money, in reality it is only saying that the bill to be paid will be the same as previously advised. It’s a trick.
Another trick is to assume that wind power costs will be only a quarter of what they actually are. For years, the industry has been pushing claims that they have brought about a cost-reduction revolution. The problem is that windfarms’ own financial accounts show that it isn’t true. And with new windfarms now saying they will not come on stream without further subsidies, the deception has been exposed.
I’m picking on the CCC here, simply because it is in the news today. But it’s not just the CCC. None of the bodies whom the public expect to tell the truth about the Net Zero project will do so: the Royal Academy of Engineering is silent. The Royal Society likewise. National Grid pretends the task is a cinch. The National Infrastructure Commission just repeats the Government line verbatim. Parliament asks how soon the job can be done, not whether it can be done or how much it will cost. Everywhere the tricks go unchallenged and the lies are swept under the carpet.
Such deceptions mean that we are storing up catastrophic harms for our economy, and for our children and grandchildren. Energy that was said to be as cheap as gas is actually going to cost three or four times as much. The costs of ensuring supply when the wind doesn’t blow are an order of magnitude larger.
And whether it was delivered on the back of a lie or not, you are going to have to pay for it. A huge pipeline of wind projects is in place already, each eligible for an astonishing array of hidden subsidies – the list is too long to give here. Once built, they will suck wealth from our economy and hope from our society. They will be hard, if not impossible, to close down – they have been made exempt from windfall taxes and the Government cannot simply switch them off without destroying investor confidence in the economy as a whole. If we do not reverse course soon, our children will never know the wealth we have enjoyed until now, just poverty and rationing and hardship. And all because everyone is too scared to challenge the lies. Just like Covid.
March 12, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, UK |
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This is the latest instalment of a series in which Paula Jardine examines how the Covid vaccine programme was conceived by US defence planners nearly 20 years ago as a 21st century ‘Manhattan Project’ for biodefence. You can read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here and Part 4 here.
IN APRIL 2017, three months after the Davos launch of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), an opinion piece appeared in the Harvard Business Review arguing that the world needed a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) style programme to prevent pandemics.
It was co-written by Dante Disparte, later a member of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) National Council and of the World Economic Forum (WEF) Digital Currency Governance Consortium, and Governor Tom Ridge, a Vietnam veteran who was the first US Secretary of Homeland Security. Ridge co-chairs Dr Robert Kadlec’s Biodefense Commission, a private entity whose funders include the smallpox and anthrax vaccine manufacturers Bavarian Nordic and Emergent Biosolutions, and the Hudson Institute, co-founded in 1961 by Herman Kahn, the Rand Corporation pioneer of situational simulations (like the ones so loved by Kadlec) who was satirised by Stanley Kubrick as Dr Strangelove.
The co-authors wrote: ‘In public health, it is much easier to play offense than it is to play defense. Playing offense well, however, is going to require a lot more co-ordination – both internationally and within national borders. We believe an important first step in this effort is for the United States and governments around the world to develop an equivalent to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that focuses cross-sector efforts on advancing biological and pandemic risk readiness.’
Kadlec’s Covid-19 Manhattan Project, reported on here which was rolled out as Operation Warp Speed in the US and spearheaded internationally by CEPI, an organisation that is the international equivalent to DARPA for vaccines, did just that. The aim was operationalising DARPA’s Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3) programme through a network of public-private partnerships. DARPA says P3 aims ‘to support military readiness and global stability through pursuit of novel methods to dramatically accelerate discovery, integration, pre-clinical testing, and manufacturing of medical countermeasures against infectious diseases.’
Dr Michael Callahan, the man hired by Kadlec to investigate the Covid-19 outbreak on the quarantined Diamond Princess cruise ship, which purported to prove that SARS-CoV2 spread asymptomatically, is a physician scientist who managed DARPA’s biodefence ‘therapeutic’ programmes between 2005 and 2012. It was part of DARPA’s ‘super soldier’ project, the aim of which was to create ‘kill proof’ soldiers with an unfair advantage over enemy troops. Inner Armour was the name Callahan gave to the programme to develop advanced genetic vaccines against infectious diseases, now commercialised by Moderna and BioNTech. If conventionally developed vaccines are conceived of as the regular troops routinely deployed in the War on Microbes, the new genetic rapid response vaccines DARPA wanted were meant to be the guerilla fighters, ‘bushwhackers’ as the Americans call them, to be used as an interim firewall.
The objective behind the kill proofing programme was to make American soldiers deployable anywhere in the world on short notice. Callahan told Wired magazine in 2007: ‘As of today, our soldiers are vulnerable to diseases to which the enemy is immune. When a single soldier is infected, the mission is jeopardized and often terminated.’
During Callahan’s time in charge of the biodefence therapeutics programme, its annual budget ballooned from $61million to $260million. The portfolio involved eight programmes that generated nine investigational new drugs (INDs) and three new drug applications with products in the market. Callahan also launched the Department of Defense Icon programme Accelerated Manufacture of Pharmaceuticals (AMP) which generated emergency use pandemic swine flu (H1N1) vaccine, and ZMapp, an experimental monoclonal antibody developed by Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory and the US Army Medical Research Institute of Disease to treat Ebola. ZMapp is ‘pharmed’ in tobacco plants grown by a subsidiary of British American Tobacco and was tested on 200 people during the 2014 West African Ebola outbreak without having previously undergone any human clinical trials for safety or effectiveness.
The genetic vaccine programme called ADEPT: PROTECT is part of the Pandemic Platform Program (P3) launched in 2011. Its focus is on developing ‘rapid discovery, characterisation, production, testing, and delivery of efficacious DNA- and RNA-encoded medical countermeasures’.
Notably absent from this shopping list is the word ‘safe’. This programme is the genesis of the mRNA gene therapy vaccines catapulted on to the pharmaceutical market by Moderna and BioNTech via the Covid-19 pandemic.
Wired magazine first reported the US military’s desire for these genetic vaccines in 1996, but until the appearance of Covid-19 little substantive progress had been made in developing them to the point of commercialisation via normal regulatory approval pathways. Regardless, the ambition to see this ‘rapid response’ technology authorised for use remained undented.
In 2017, the P3 Manager Matt Hepburn, another one of Kadlec’s Red Dawn Wolverines, said: ‘DARPA’s goal is to create a technology platform that can place a protective treatment into health providers’ hands within 60 days of a pathogen being identified, and have that treatment induce protection in patients within three days of administration. We need to be able to move at this speed considering how quickly outbreaks can get out of control. The technology needs to work on any viral disease, whether it’s one humans have faced before or not.‘
Sars CoV2, the vehicle that finally delivered this vaccine technological revolution (through regulatory wormholes at warp speed into countless arms), appears itself to be a by-product of other US government programmes intended to achieve the Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine, articulated by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) in Rebuilding America’s Defenses. Biodefence was a single throw-away line in the PNAC document. ThoughKadlec, Tara O’Toole and their associates attempted to focus the attention of defence planners on bioweapons via the June 2001 Dark Winter tabletop simulation of a smallpox bioweapon attack, it was not until the anthrax attacks that followed 9/11 that this received the attention they desired. Again, despite the FBI coming to believe the so-called Amerithrax attacks were an inside job, the War on Microbes had arrived.
Full Spectrum Dominance in the War on Microbes entails predicting pathogen evolution, attempting to pre-empt it and, finally, defending against it. Since the early 1960s, the US military has been cataloguing pathogens around the world as part of its operational preparedness efforts in order to develop vaccines to defend its personnel. In 2009, USAID, a US government agency that is known to act as a front for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), launched an Emerging Pandemic Threats (EPT) programme to target the early detection of new disease threats in the developing world. This virus surveillance programme was called PREDICT. Its aim was to identify the animal sources of coronaviruses, influenza viruses and filoviruses such as Ebola and mitigate the epidemic risk ‘by minimising those practices and behaviours that trigger the spill-over and spread of new pathogens from animal reservoirs to humans’.
Five years into the EPT programme, a non-profit organisation called EcoHealth Alliance, whose president is Dr Peter Daszak, a British zoologist with an interest in disease ecology, joined an international consortium working on the PREDICT programme. Originally called the Wildlife Trust, EcoHealth Alliance was founded in 1971 by the British naturalist Gerald Durrell as a conservation organisation. It has evolved a long way from its original aims.
Dr William Karesh, EcoHealth Alliance’s Executive Vice President for Health and Policy, is a member of Kadlec’s Biodefense Commission who participated in the 2014 workshops that produced the Biodefense Commission’s ‘National Blueprint for Biodefense’. He is also a consultant to the World Health Organisation and is credited with coining the term ‘One Health’ used to describe the interdisciplinary approach promoted by EcoHealth Alliance which says that the health and wellness of all living things on the planet is interconnected. The One Health ‘philosophy’ has been adopted by the WHO and the US government.
In 2016, interested parties gathered at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Conference Center in Italy ‘to develop a vision on the importance and feasibility of the Global Virome Project in building a world safe from the threat of emerging viral diseases.’ Karesh was there. So was Dr George Gao, then Director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control. Under the One Health rationale, once viruses have been identified and catalogued, all creatures, human, or animal are candidates for vaccination, for the good of their health. Last month Sir Jeremy Farrar, the WHO’s incoming Chief Scientist called for governments to invest in developing vaccines for all known animal influenzas just in case they caused a human outbreak. In the War on Microbes there are countless enemies and corresponding opportunities for pharma-profit churning.
The PREDICT consortium contracted out surveillance work on coronaviruses to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). In 2018, EcoHealth Alliance announced that the WIV had found viruses closely related to SARs in bat caves and that they were capable of infecting humans. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Dr Daszak was involved with Dr Baric, Sir Jeremy Farrar and Dr Anthony Farrar in the email chain concerning what’s become known as ‘the proximal origin discussion’ to quash any suggestion of a lab origin for SARS-CoV2.
Once an animal viral reservoir is identified, another DARPA programme called PREMPT, to ‘pre-empt pathogens’ emergence with preventive vaccine’, is meant to activate. This programme, which Michael Callahan also once oversaw, aims to preserve military readiness to deploy to remote locations by protecting against infectious disease threats by targeting the animal hosts of the viruses with self-spreading vaccines.
Not even wild animals fall outside the scope of America’s Full Spectrum Dominance ambitions. In March 2018, EcoHealth Alliance submitted a PREMPT funding proposal to DARPA called DEFUSE which proposed to reverse-engineer a bat coronavirus vaccine.
DARPA rejected it over concerns that it violated a moratorium imposed by the Obama administration in October 2014 on risky gain-of-function research that might make coronaviruses and influenza viruses more pathogenic or transmissible. This was not, tragically, enough to halt the research.
In my next article I will report on exactly how Anthony Fauci circumvented this ban by outsourcing the gains of function research to China.
March 11, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | CEPI, CIA, Covid-19, Darpa, EcoHealth Alliance, United States, WEF, WHO |
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More than $250 billion in Covid-19 relief funds were lost to “fraud” and “waste,” the directors of three US government agencies testified before the House Oversight and Accountability subcommittee on Thursday.
Compounding what Deputy Inspector General Sheldon Shoemaker of the Small Business Administration (SBA) called “the biggest fraud in a generation,” the officials stressed that the figures they gave represented an extremely conservative estimate of the total amount lost as they did not include the amount defrauded from the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program.
According to a statement submitted by Shoemaker ahead of the hearing, the SBA has already uncovered $190.7 billion in potential fraud across relief programs under its jurisdiction. Specifically, it expects to find upwards of $100 billion within the scandal-plagued Paycheck Protection Program. Acting Treasury Inspector General Richard Delmar admitted to just $2.6 billion in dubious charges confirmed at his agency, pleading that ongoing audits precluded making an estimate of the full cost.
Larry Turner, inspector general of the Department of Labor, blamed the massive losses on a lack of preparation, insufficient oversight, and even the government’s generosity, making a “highly conservative” estimate of $76 billion in fraudulent spending. With no functioning system in place to verify applicants’ qualifying details in a reasonable time frame, the “unprecedented infusion of federal funds” into the program made it irresistible to fraudsters, he told the subcommittee.
Rep. Keith Mfume (D-Maryland) expressed shock that no one had predicted that requiring only “self-certification” to access such a prodigious cash hoard would lead to “a lot of hanky-panky,” while Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Florida) pointed out that the agencies did not even use existing checks and balances to vet applicants, and Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Florida) highlighted that state unemployment systems were hopelessly outdated even before the pandemic placed them under unprecedented stress. Of $45.6 billion in potential fraud lent out in association with one Labor Department program, Turner acknowledged upon questioning that $267 million had gone to dead people.
Asked about the possibility of recovering the money, Turner said that hunting down the perpetrators was financially unrewarding, as “once money goes out the door, it is hard to get it back.” Even in cases where the government has been able to track down Covid-19 benefit fraudsters and claw back some of the funds, the inspectors general were unable to tell subcommittee members what had become of some of the money.
More than $5 trillion in pandemic relief funds have been distributed since 2020. By some estimates, as much as $400 billion was stolen from the unemployment relief program alone.
March 11, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Economics | Covid-19, United States |
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The Telegraph’s publishing of former UK Health Czar Matt Hancock’s private Whatsapp messages has been dubbed ‘The Lockdown Files.’ The messages detail multiple interactions demonstrating the U.K. Government’s willingness to abandon science and a reasoned approach to Pandemic measures, for coercion and control of the British people.
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | March 9, 2023
Former CDC Director, Dr. Robert Redfield, testified before The House Selection Committee on the Coronavirus Pandemic this week, letting loose on Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, Francis Collins, gain-of-function research and the lab origin debate detailing what he witnessed in early 2020. His testimonials are nothing short of historical.
March 11, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
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Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Hearings “Investigating the Origins of COVID-19” Hit Tip of Iceberg
On November 19, 2020 I testified as the lead witness in the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs led by Senator Ron Johnson. I used the term “academic fraud” in a series of sharp exchanges with now White House Coronavirus Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha. I was told by colleagues that the term fraud was too strident and I should tone down my comments for the media.
Over two years later the US House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic held hearings on “Investigating the Origins of COVID-19” and has hit the tip of an iceberg of academic fraud with a trail of peer-reviewed manuscripts as evidence for the creation of the SARS-CoV-2 chimeric virus in the Wuhan Institute of Virology Biosecurity Annex Level 4 laboratory (WIV). This lab had been conducting experiments designed by UNC researcher Dr. Ralph Baric for years and publishing their progress on creation of a coronavirus that could invade human respiratory cells via the ACE2 receptor. They were also developing countermeasures including monoclonal antibodies and killed virus vaccines.
Menachery VD, Yount BL Jr, Sims AC, Debbink K, Agnihothram SS, Gralinski LE, Graham RL, Scobey T, Plante JA, Royal SR, Swanstrom J, Sheahan TP, Pickles RJ, Corti D, Randell SH, Lanzavecchia A, Marasco WA, Baric RS. SARS-like WIV1-CoV poised for human emergence. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2016 Mar 15;113(11):3048-53. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1517719113. Epub 2016 Mar 14. PMID: 26976607; PMCID: PMC4801244. Menachery, V., Yount, B., Debbink, K. et al. A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence. Nat Med 21, 1508–1513 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nm.3985
The House Committee found through emails that multiple researchers including Dr. Kristian Andersen and Dr. Edward Holmes messaged Dr. Anthony Fauci in January with their conclusions that SARS-CoV-2 could not have arisen from nature. These and other doctors were summoned to a teleconference with Fauci, Dr. Francis Collins, and Welcome Trust Director (now WHO Scientific Director) Jeremy Farrar and four days later the messaging from all the individuals made a 180 degree turn consistently stating the virus did not come from the WIV.
In April, 2020, an opinion paper led by Andersen and coordinated by Farrar appeared in Nature Medicine which completely ignored the work by Baric in the WIV and concluded the virus could not have come from the lab.
In September, 2021, Holmes continues the false narrative in the journal Cell this time citing Baric’s work (Menachery et al) but completely ignoring the chimeric creation in 2015 with homology to the ancestral WIV SARS-CoV-2.
These no doubt are just a few of the individuals and the manuscripts that will memorialize an academic crime that advanced a false worldwide narrative on the origins of SARS-CoV-2. Many have speculated that NIH funding was the motive to get in line with Fauci and Collins. The author list however, tells us this was a global act of fraud.
Why did so many scientists want their names on papers that intentionally misled readers away from WIV? What was the motivation for NIH NIAID UNC WIV to design SARS-CoV-2 as a lethal infection with potential to kill millions? Was this for the advancement of science or where there intentions darker? Did all of these doctors really think it could all be covered up? When I said “fraud” on the Senate record (National Archives) in 2020 I had no idea the extent would be this deep and nefarious. The work of investigative reporters has just begun.
Menachery VD, Yount BL Jr, Sims AC, Debbink K, Agnihothram SS, Gralinski LE, Graham RL, Scobey T, Plante JA, Royal SR, Swanstrom J, Sheahan TP, Pickles RJ, Corti D, Randell SH, Lanzavecchia A, Marasco WA, Baric RS. SARS-like WIV1-CoV poised for human emergence. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2016 Mar 15;113(11):3048-53. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1517719113. Epub 2016 Mar 14. PMID: 26976607; PMCID: PMC4801244.
Andersen KG, Rambaut A, Lipkin WI, Holmes EC, Garry RF. The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2. Nat Med. 2020 Apr;26(4):450-452. doi: 10.1038/s41591-020-0820-9. PMID: 32284615; PMCID: PMC7095063.
Holmes EC, Goldstein SA, Rasmussen AL, Robertson DL, Crits-Christoph A, Wertheim JO, Anthony SJ, Barclay WS, Boni MF, Doherty PC, Farrar J, Geoghegan JL, Jiang X, Leibowitz JL, Neil SJD, Skern T, Weiss SR, Worobey M, Andersen KG, Garry RF, Rambaut A. The origins of SARS-CoV-2: A critical review. Cell. 2021 Sep 16;184(19):4848-4856. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2021.08.017. Epub 2021 Aug 19. PMID: 34480864; PMCID: PMC8373617.
March 10, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19 |
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Again, another statistical illusion of efficacy was manufactured by simple miscategorisation
By late 2021 it was already clear in the UK that the covid vaccines did not stop infection or transmission. And there were also already plenty of concerning safety signals. So, even though the “vaccine pass” was then required in the UK to participate in daily life, ‘vaccine hesitancy’ was on the increase.
Switching narrative to counter vaccine ‘hesitancy’
Given this increasing resistance against the vaccine programme, the official messaging was changed from “vaccines stop you getting covid” to “vaccines stop you being hospitalised and dying from covid”.
To push this new narrative the Government started pumping out ‘data’ to support the claim that almost all of those ill in hospital with covid were unvaccinated. Here is an NHS text that was sent to everybody registered with a GP in the UK in November 2021:
At the time the text was sent out, “fully vaccinated” in the UK was defined as: “at least 14 days since 3rd jab” or “between at least 14 days and less than 6 months of 2nd jab”. So, the official figure of 8 out of 10 “not fully vaccinated” might have been right but was totally misleading since almost ALL of those who were vaccinated (i.e., had at least one jab) at that time were “not fully vaccinated”.
This creates a false semantic equivalence between ‘unvaccinated’ and ‘not fully vaccinated’.
Many media sources, including the BBC, pushed the 80% unvaccinated claim without even mentioning the ‘fully vaccinated’ criteria:
Similar claims were made about covid deaths among the vaccinated such as this one in the Independent :
and this one in the Guardian :
With respect to patients in ICU claims that high proportions of those with covid were unvaccinated were widely cited – and never challenged – in the mainstream media:
A particularly serious example was the ludicrous claim made in the BBC documentary “Unvaccinated” by Dr Mehool Patel (Consultant, University Hospital Lewisham). His statement – unchallenged in the programme – was:
“We looked at about 550 patients that were admitted in our trust between the 15th December and 15th January 2022, which in effect would mean that most if not all of them were through due to Omicron variant, and of that there were unfortunately 21 patients who had to be admitted to intensive care who were the most severe patients due to COVID. Of the 21 I’m afraid 20 of them were unvaccinated, that’s 95%.
Just one person was vaccinated. And of the 21 who were on the unit, I’m afraid unfortunately seven of them didn’t make it, all of them were unvaccinated, 100%. So that’s one figure to just illustrate the point.”
This was one of the many specific pieces of misinformation that I raised in my formal complaint to the BBC about the programme. I asked the BBC to provide the verified data to support this claim. When I eventually received a response from the BBC’s Complaints Director Jeremy Hayes he said:
“You maintain that this claim was “either false/exaggerated or an unbelievable outlier”.
I have approached the programme makers for information about the data which were quoted by Dr Patel. I have been advised that the figures were compiled by Dr Patel himself for the purposes of research.
“Lewisham and Greenwich Hospital Trust does not record the vaccination status of patients in ICU so Dr Patel’s figures cannot independently be verified.”
But the scam was based on something even more ludicrous than classifying “not fully vaccinated” as “unvaccinated”.
As a result of Freedom of Information Requests sent to some individual NHS trusts we now know that some hospitals were using the NIMS system to classify vaccine status of patients while others were using their own systems. This meant that, in many cases even if a patient had a vaccination record in NIMS, if the patient was not vaccinated in that particular hospital/Trust they were recorded as unvaccinated. Some hospitals were using a mixture of both systems (NIMS where a death was recorded and an internal system where a covid case was recorded). For those relying on NIMS, since it was not operational until June 2021, all deaths within the hospital would have had an unknown vaccination status between Jan-June 2021. The problem is that some hospitals were classifying “unknown” as “unvaccinated”.
So, deliberately murky record keeping was used to manipulate the data.
To see the implications of this, here are the data on hospital deaths (all deaths, not just covid) from the start of the vaccine programme until the end of 2021 from an undisclosed NHS trust who responded to an FOI request:
Note that every death up until 21 June 2021 was recorded as unvaccinated simply because hospitals in this Trust were using the NIMS system for classifying deaths which was not up and running until then. But, of course, an unknown number (probably most) of these 742 people were vaccinated.
There are plenty of other anomalies in the data. Note the improbable, sudden and dramatic trend changes:
- A steady decline in “unvaccinated” deaths from 21 June until 13 Sept. In week ending 13 Sept only 4 out of 46 (less than 9%) were unvaccinated.
- The next week (20 Sept) the unvaccinated are suddenly the majority again with 21 out of 31 deaths (68%), and this increases so quickly that just 3 weeks later (11 Oct) all 44 deaths (100%) are ‘unvaccinated’.
- But then we get a sudden and rapid decline in the unvaccinated deaths. Just 2 weeks later (25 Oct) the unvaccinated are 13 out of 47 deaths (28%) and by 20 Dec none of 53 deaths (0%) were unvaccinated.
Such changes can only be the result of changes in definition of who should be classified as unvaccinated.
It is easy to see how the Government could cherry pick this kind of data to present the narrative they wanted. When the text messages were being sent out in November 2021 it is reasonable to assume that they were using the cumulative data up to, say, mid-October. Then using the data in the table up to and including 18 Oct 2021 we count:
- 1051 “unvaccinated” (including 17 with just a single jab)
- 370 “vaccinated” (with 2 jabs).
That gives 74% of all hospital deaths classified as “unvaccinated”.
But this is all an illusion. In fact, counting just the final three weeks of the data (6-20 Dec), just 18 out of the 144 deaths (12.5%) were unvaccinated.
It is also worth noting that the same NHS Trust provided the following information on “new COVID positives” in its hospitals between 19th Jan 2021 and 19th Jan 2022.
Given what we know about national vaccination take-up rates, and this Trust’s own death data, it is likely that the majority of those classified as ‘unvaccinated’ here would have been vaccinated (with the exception of those in the 0-20 age categories the vast majority of whom would not have been eligible for vaccination).
So, instead of the ‘50% of new covid cases’ being among the unvaccinated – the ‘official’ narrative pushed from this data – the true narrative should have been that the vast majority of new covid cases were vaccinated.
It matters a lot because, despite being completely bogus, these kinds of ludicrous figures were so consistently repeated that the message “vaccines stop you being hospitalised and dying from covid (even if they don’t stop infection and transmission)” was almost universally accepted. Even the strongest critics of the Government’s covid response consistently repeated this mantra:
The figures were also used as the basis for the bogus studies claiming millions of lives were saved by the vaccine.
So, yet again, we can see that statistical data was used to create an illusion of vaccine hospitalisation and mortality efficacy by the simplest of means: deliberately murky record keeping ensuring that the vaccinated get recategorized as unvaccinated when they die or are hospitalised.
Update 9 March 2023: Here is a video I made covering this article:
Postscript: A commenter below reports that the USA “was far worse”:
Patients who were vaccinated at pharmacies didn’t show up on the state records. The CDC admitted on a web page that ‘unvaccinated’ just meant they couldn’t find a vax on record. There was no requirement for hospitals to update records and why would they? This bias was described by hospital PA Deborah Conrad in the Highwire episode 233 https://thehighwire.com/videos/episode-233-the-vaers-scandal/ Alex Berenson reports evidence that the rate of overcounting of ‘unvaccinated’ patients was as high as 20x. “More evidence that American data may badly overstate the protection mRNA shots offer against hospitalization from Covid” – Jan 13
March 9, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, UK, United States |
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Can you create cutting edge “deep fake” videos, spy on people using household appliances, and make massive data dragnets? If so, the Pentagon wants to hear from you so it can amp up its manipulation efforts.
US Special Operations Command (US SOCOM) has issued proposal requests for a whole host of dodgy services, according to new documents obtained by The Intercept.
Specifically, the Pentagon is looking for “next generation capability to ‘takeover’ Internet of Things (IoT) devices in order to collect data and information from local populaces to enable a breakdown of what messaging might be popular and accepted through sifting of data once received.”
For what purpose? “This would enable MISO [Military Information Support Operations] to craft and promote messages that may be more readily received by the local populace in relevant peer/near peer environments,” according to the document.
Despite publicly obsessing over others’ foreign interference and propaganda, Washington is now openly admitting that it is actively seeking these new technologies for its own “influence operations, digital deception, communication disruption, and disinformation campaigns at the tactical edge and operational levels.” You know, exactly the same kind of thing, over which it drums up fear as a threat to freedom and democracy among the general public.
Earlier this year, a Washington-based advisory firm OODA published a report warning that Chinese-made household items could not only be spying on you, but basically fronting for the Chinese government. The report’s author called for the British government to act on claims that Chinese-made Internet of Things appliances, and even car components, can collect and transmit data through cellular 5G networks to Chinese companies, which could then be ordered to pass it on to the government. The story was hysterically splashed across British media.
OODA describes itself as a “global strategic advisory firm with deep DNA in global security, technology and intelligence issues.” The genetics run deep, indeed: straight to the Pentagon and Western intelligence communities where its executives, experts and advisers have past or current working relationships.
So now it looks like calls to ban Chinese household appliances for their spying potential have turned into Washington wanting to get in on the action by obtaining the best possible front row seat as you stand in front of your refrigerator at midnight, chugging chocolate milk straight from the carton.
The Pentagon also wants to be able to create “deep fake” videos that can realistically portray fake events as real, in an attempt to manipulate the target viewer(s). Or, as the Pentagon puts it, to “generate messages and influence operations via non-traditional channels in relevant peer/near peer environments.” It’s hard to imagine a more glaring example of actual fake news, yet the Pentagon wants to produce it in the way that Netflix makes movies and TV shows.
Finally, the Pentagon says that they want to get their hands on “a next generation capability to collect disparate data through public and open source information streams such as social media, local media, etc. to enable MISO to craft and direct influence operations and messages in relevant peer/near peer environments.”
Some might be tempted to just shrug this off as conventional practice because, when the military is tracking down bad guys, they’re obviously going to want to use every possible tool available at their disposal – and constantly seek to expand that tool box. But recent evidence suggests that military-grade collection and subversion tools targeting online and conventional information platforms have largely been turned on the average citizen for the purpose of protecting the establishment and its various narratives from dissent rather than for reasons of national security.
Last December, for example, Twitter CEO Elon Musk worked with a journalist to reveal the collusion between US government authorities and the social media platform to manipulate and censor public debate over the Covid-19 pandemic. According to internal Twitter documents, one of the first meetings that the Biden Administration requested with Twitter executives was on the topic of Covid vaccines and specific high-profile accounts that deviated from the official narrative. According to the journalist, David Zweig, “Twitter did suppress views – many from doctors and scientific experts – that conflicted with the official positions of the White House. As a result, legitimate findings and questions that would have expanded the public debate went missing.” He added that, “With Covid, this bias bent heavily toward establishment dogmas,” and cited examples of various experts, including prominent epidemiologists, whose views were censored as a result of being qualified by the Twitter staff as Covid “misinformation.”
Earlier this year, a British whistleblower also revealed that critics of Covid-19-related lockdowns and vaccine mandates – including prominent journalists and politicians – were monitored by the UK army’s information warfare brigade. The 77th Brigade, created in 2015 and described by the media at the time as composed of “warriors who don’t just carry weapons, but who are also skilled in using social media such as Twitter and Facebook, and the dark arts of ‘psyops’”.
The Canadian military was also caught using propaganda techniques honed on the battlefield in Afghanistan to shape the Covid debate by boosting the government’s narrative and attempting to head off any civil unrest over the harsh mandates.
The Pentagon’s latest wish list raises concerns that these tools will also be deployed on average Americans or Westerners for purposes of control and manipulation. Last September, the Pentagon vowed to review its secret psyops, but only after public outrage when a group of researchers suggested collusion between US government entities and American online platforms like Twitter and Facebook to control online narratives with fake accounts. Was the lesson learned to stop deploying psyops on average citizens? Or was it just to do a better job of keeping it secret?
Not that there’s any shortage of Western establishment cheerleaders demanding even more psychological manipulation efforts by the US government, if only to counter “disinformation” from foreign adversaries.
It seems that we’ve now come to the point where sticking it to Russia and China means actively cheerleading the increasingly militarized efforts by our self-styled defenders of freedom and democracy to brainwash their own people.
March 9, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States |
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The Telegraph columnist Alison Pearson has called for former health secretary Matt Hancock to be arrested for wilful misconduct in public office.
Writing in today’s paper Pearson summarises the revelations contained in Hancock’s WhatsApp messages, which were leaked to The Telegraph by Isabel Oakeshott.
Hancock handed more than 100,000 messages to Oakeshott when she wrote his lockdown memoir.
They revealed how Hancock gleefully plotted to “frighten the pants off everyone” to ensure lockdown compliance.
Hancock mooted using Covid variants to scare people into changing their behaviour. He supported blackmailing lockdown sceptic MP’s into keeping quiet.
One MP (James Daly, Bury) was told that if he didn’t shut up, his constituency wouldn’t receive funding for a disability hub.
Hancock repeatedly lied about the pressure Covid was exerting on the NHS. He briefed daily that hospitals were collapsing under the weight of Covid cases. The leaked messages reveal that in fact he knew from day one that there was no likelihood of hospital capacity running out.
He even offered beds to French and Italian Covid patients.
The leaks clearly demonstrate that Hancock was lying through his teeth day in, day out.
Has he broken the law? Alison Pearson thinks he just might have.
She concludes her excellent piece in today’s Telegraph, saying:
Are there grounds for a prosecution of the former minister for misconduct in a public office? Did Matt Hancock “wilfully misconduct himself to such a degree as to amount to an abuse of the public’s trust in the office holder without reasonable excuse or justification”?
Some families of care-home residents are preparing a private prosecution against Hancock, I know. The Crown Prosecution Service must then decide if it is in the public interest to proceed. The Lockdown Files should provide critical evidence.
With the third anniversary of lockdown looming, the Rights for Residents campaign asked their members to post a picture of their loved one in happier times, along with the three words that best describe them. Before, that is, those elderly ladies and gentlemen were locked away with no interaction with a close relative or friend.
They were consigned to a living death that was designed by our mad Covid masters to “save lives”. What could ever have justified such a crime against humanity?
Now, that’s what I call an Urgent Question.
March 8, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, War Crimes | Covid-19, Human rights, UK |
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This is the fourth part of a series in which Paula Jardine examines how the Covid vaccine programme was conceived by US defence planners nearly 20 years ago as a 21st century ‘Manhattan Project’ for biodefence. You can read Part 1 here, Part 2 here and Part 3 here.
Bill Frist was the 2003-2007 US Senate majority leader who championed the USA’s biodefence projects and promoted the concept of a ‘Manhattan Project’ against a pandemic, described in Parts 1, 2 and 3 of this series. He was also the politician who sponsored the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP) Act of December 2005 as soon as the World Health Organisation’s International Health Regulations had been amended to include a provision enabling WHO to declare Public Health Emergencies of International Concern (PHEIC). Critically it was this Act that established indemnity for the manufacturers of therapeutics, vaccines or diagnostics released during the course of a public health emergency against any and all harm caused.
Also working to influence US national biosecurity policy was Dr Robert Kadlec, described in Part 3. Working with him, and principally under the auspices of the Johns Hopkins Centre for Health Security (founded by Dr Tara O’Toole in 1998) were other participants in Operation Dark Winter, the code name for a senior-level situational simulation conducted on June 22-23, 2001, designed to wargame a covert and widespread smallpox bio-terrorist attack on the United States. These biosecurity hawks included O’Toole and Tom Inglesby of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies (CCBS).
When O’Toole was nominated some years later to serve in the Department of Homeland Security in 2009, critics warned of her paranoia. Microbiologist Dr Richard Ebright, one of the scientists who, in May 2021, called for a full and unrestricted international forensic investigation into the origins of Covid-19, said it was a disastrous nomination:
‘O’Toole supported every flawed decision and counterproductive policy on biodefense, biosafety, and biosecurity during the Bush Administration. [She] is as out of touch with reality, and as paranoiac, as former Vice President Cheney . . . It would be hard to think of a person less well suited for the position . . . She was the single most extreme person, either in or out of government, advocating for a massive biodefense expansion and relaxation of provisions for safety and security’. Dr Ebright concluded: ‘She makes Dr Strangelove look sane.’
It was Kadlec who formed the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense in 2014 and began the planning his Manhattan Project in earnest. Those involved with him in this commission included Tom Ridge, the first Homeland Security Secretary, Donna Shalala, a former Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary, Dr Margaret Hamburg, a former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner, Scooter Libby, formerly of Project for a New American Century (PNAC), William Karesh, the vice president of EcoHealth Alliance and an adviser to the WHO on reforms to the International Health Regulations (IHR), and Kenneth Wainstein, now the Under Secretary of Homeland Security for Intelligence and Analysis.
The Commission’s National Blueprint for Biodefense published in2015 called for major ‘reform’. Consider it the blueprint for Kadlec’s Manhattan Project, for the CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations) strategy and for the subsequent changes to the WHO IHR required to make the plan work.
The list of the BioDefense Commissions ‘we must’ demands follows:
· revolutionise the development of Medical Countermeasures (MCM, which are vaccines and therapeutics) for emerging infectious diseases;
· fully fund and incentivise the MCM enterprise;
· remove bureaucratic hurdles to MCM innovation;
· develop a system for environmental detection that leverages the ingenuity of industry and meets the growing threat;
· overhaul the Select Agent Program (which oversees the possession, use and transfer of risky biological agents and toxins) to enable a secure system that simultaneously encourages participation by the scientific community;
· help lead the international community toward the establishment of a fully functional and agile global public health response apparatus.
Three years later in May 2018 when Johns Hopkins ran Clade X, a table top simulation around a novel parainfluenza virus, O’Toole was involved once again. Johns Hopkins CHS also co-hosted with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation the better-known coronavirus simulation Event 201 in October 2019.
It was during a Clade X discussion on manufacturing capacity sufficient to end the fictitious pandemic through vaccination that O’Toole said: ‘Industry are more than willing to help but vaccines are very specific creatures that are difficult to turn to new purposes. We’re going to have to go to innovative manufacturing methods that will require a lot of leniency from the FDA and the understanding of the American people that we’re doing things on an emergency basis so every box in terms of safety and risk assessment may not be checked. But the vaccine is the only way forward.’ [My emphasis]
This was clear advocacy for vaccines as the exit strategy for the Clade X novel parainfluenza virus pandemic, and later once the Covid pandemic was underway, was to be the only exit offered to lockdown.
Today, O’Toole is an executive vice-president of the CIA spin-off venture capital firm In-Q-Tel in charge of a strategic initiative called BiologyNext. In April 2020 in a presentation to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) she said:
‘The bio-revolution is really founded on several core technologies that I’m going to simplify greatly. But it is all about being able to read, write, and edit the code of life. One of the most important recognitions of the past century in science, at least, is that life is written in code. And as Jason Kelly of Ginkgo Bioworks has put it: Biology is essentially programmable . . .
‘Ron Weiss, who is a synthetic biologist, predicted in 2014 that an RNA-based delivery method that allowed you to use RNA as a kind of platform to deliver new bits and pieces inside the cell would be a game-changing inflection point in synthetic biology. And the Covid-19 pandemic is giving us a chance to test that out. You may know that one of the vaccines that is coming on very quickly is made by Moderna. And it is a messenger RNA-based vaccine. So if that works, Ron Weiss’s prediction may come true.’ [My emphasis]
In August 2019 Kadlec’s department ran yet another table-top simulation, the Crimson Contagion. It simulated the impact of and response to the arrival in the US of an avian flu from China. It was a scoping exercise to identify legal authorities, US federal government funding resources and manufacturing capabilities for vaccines. It concluded that $10billion would be required to respond to a novel pandemic influenza strain.
A month later on September 19, 2019, President Trump signed the Executive Order on Modernizing Influenza Vaccines which launched the Manhattan Project by directing various US government departments and the US Department of Defense to propose a plan and a budget within 120 days – by January 17, 2020, to be precise.
Anthony Fauci’s diary, released following a freedom of information request, notes a teleconference concerning the ‘Global pandemic’ taking place on January 15, 2020, a date at which a global pandemic existed only in some people’s imaginations.
On January 23, 2020, after the Moderna vaccine announcement in Davos, Fauci had a conference call with Dr Richard Hatchett, CEPI’s CEO, and the following day, a Saturday, he had a senior leadership update with Dr Kadlec in advance of a meeting with Stephane Bancel of Moderna on Monday January 27. Perhaps Kadlec, Hatchett and Bancel were amongst the unnamed people on Fauci’s January 15 conference call.
On January 30, 2020, when the WHO declared a SARS CoV2 Public Health Emergency of International Concern, just 7,818 patients were said to be sick with Covid, of whom only 82 were outside China. As far as Kadlec was concerned, this was now a shooting war.
Following CEPI’s announcement in Davos on January 23, US-based manufacturers Innovio Pharmaceuticals were miraculously ready to begin developing a Covid vaccine, and Moderna already had its funding to begin manufacturing the first batch of the vaccine co-owned and co-developed with Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for use in a human clinical trial.
The legislation that he and Frist had shepherded through Congress between 2003 and 2005 had concentrated power in the hands of the US Health and Human Services Secretary (and the US Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response) during public health emergencies.
The basic goals of the architects had been achieved. These, the American investigative paralegal Katherine Watt has argued, were to set up legal conditions in which all governing power in the United States would be automatically transferred from the citizens and the three constitutional branches into the hands of one person, the Health and Human Services Secretary, ‘effective at the moment the HHS Secretary himself declared a public health emergency, legally transforming free citizens into enslaved subjects’.
The HHS Secretary Alex Azar, to whom ASPR’s Kadlec reported, was the senior legal counsel at HHS when the PREP Act was passed in 2005. Azar co-operatively declared a public health emergency on January 30, 2020, backdating it to January 27.
He then made a PREP Act declaration on February 4, enhancing liability protection for any person or firm involved in developing countermeasures, including Innovio and Moderna.
The announcement said: ‘The world is facing an unprecedented pandemic. To effectively respond, there must be a more consistent pathway for Covered Persons to manufacture, distribute, administer or use Covered Countermeasures across the nation and the world.’
HHS Secretary determinations are unreviewable by the US courts.
Further research by Katherine Watt into another PREP Act declaration for medical countermeasures by Azar in March 2020 shows it effectively sidestepped the Nuremberg Code by stipulating that the ‘use’ of any counter measures ‘shall not be considered to constitute a clinical investigation’ while also removing the right to informed consent. As there is, by decree, no clinical trial, there are no stopping conditions for the use of said countermeasures.
It is startling how Dr Kadlec and his few associates have, over a period of more than 20 years, managed to orchestrate an undemocratic and unethical bio-security coup with global reach.
The Manhattan Project was renamed Operation WarpSpeed when it was launched in May 2020. The involvement of the US Federal Government which through the NIAID owns the patent for the spike protein used in the vaccines, and its Department of Defense that ran and financed Operation WarpSpeed, arguably elevates this War on Microbes Manhattan Project to an unprecedented bioweapon attack on humanity using an under-tested novel injectable pharmaceutical.
Paula Jardine is a writer/researcher who has just completed the graduate diploma in law at ULaw. She has a history degree from the University of Toronto and a journalism degree from the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
March 7, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | CEPI, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, HHS, NIAID, Operation Dark Winter, PREP Act, United States, WHO |
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Virologists who worked to squelch consideration of a lab origin of COVID-19 in early 2020 worked in tandem with leaders in scientific research funding, according to their private emails.
Leaders of the National Institutes of Health in the United States and the Wellcome Trust in the United Kingdom played an undisclosed role in persuading virologists to write an influential article asserting a natural origin of SARS-CoV-2, according to a memo released Sunday by investigators with the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
By mid-February 2020, social media sites in the West and in China buzzed with speculation about a possible connection between the emerging novel coronavirus pandemic and labs specializing in coronaviruses at its epicenter.
The “lab leak theory” cast suspicion not only on the Wuhan Institute of Virology and its neighboring labs, but also on their esteemed funders and collaborators in the West.
A March 2020 paper in Nature Medicine titled “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” assured the public that the virus’ genome demonstrated an origin in wildlife. Hundreds of news organizations cited the article to assert that the lab leak theory was a “conspiracy theory.”
But the new congressional memo shows that the lead author of the article told the scientific journal that the writing had been “prompted” by then-Wellcome Trust Director Jeremy Farrar, leader of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci, and NIH Director Francis Collins.
The virologists met with Farrar, Fauci and Collins in a private teleconference on February 1, 2020, emails released under the Freedom of Information Act have shown — a meeting some scientists have criticized as improper.
“There has been a lot of speculation, fear mongering, and conspiracies put forward in this space,” acknowledged lead author Kristian Andersen in a February 12 email, according to the new memo.
“Prompted by Jeremy Farrah [sic], Tony Fauci, and Francis Collins, Eddie Holmes, Andrew Rambaut, Bob Garry, Ian Lipkin, and myself have been working through much of the (primarily) genetic data to provide agnostic and scientifically informed hypothesis around the origin of the virus,” continued Andersen, a virologist with Scripps Research.
The involvement of heavyweights in scientific funding in the article was not disclosed to the public.
NIH funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan that strengthened SARS-related viruses, an NIH letter confirmed in 2021. Emails exchanged by Collins and Fauci and a private meeting between Fauci and a gain-of-function virologist in February 2020 suggests they were concerned about this connection in the days prior to the article being drafted.
While Wellcome is among the world’s largest philanthropies, a link between Wellcome and the lab complex in Wuhan has not been established. A spokesperson for Wellcome did not respond to a request for comment.
Farrar — who was recently appointed as chief scientist of the World Health Organization — shepherded the paper and made small edits to the article, the new congressional memo shows.
Farrar asked Andersen to change the sentence “it is unlikely that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of an existing SARS-related coronavirus.” He suggested changing “unlikely” to “improbable.” Andersen agreed.
Farrar said he would push Nature to publish the article. Its sister publication Nature Medicine would eventually publish the manuscript a few weeks later. Parent company Springer Nature did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The involvement of Collins, Fauci and Farrar in the article was not disclosed until it was made apparent in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in June 2021, 15 months after the article had first made its enormous impact.
The virologists have given shifting explanations of the purpose of the article, the new memo also shows.
When hoping to demonstrate their integrity to the journal, Andersen said discussion of the evidence had been “agnostic.”
However when speaking to gain-of-function virologists who did not want to give credence to the possibility of a lab origin at all, the authors assured them that their purpose was to demonstrate the lab leak theory was outlandish from the jump.
“Our main work over the past couple of weeks has been to disprove any type of lab theory,” Andersen wrote in an email on February 8, 2020.
NIH’s office of the director, NIAID and the Wellcome Trust did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
“The SARS-CoV-2 sequence was released in mid-January 2020 and by February scientists were trying to tell us where it came from. Actually, where it didn’t come from. That was premature by any call,” said virologist Simon Wain Hobson, an emeritus professor at the Institut Pasteur, who was not involved in the article. “Arguments of authority don’t wash. Data counts. Science needs time.”
The virologists’ article was cited by Fauci and the mainstream media to push back on claims that SARS-CoV-2 was a bioweapon among hawkish politicians in the U.S. But the new congressional memo also shows that the virologists were motivated at least in part by concerns about discussion of the possibility among regular Chinese citizens.
‘Pre-adapted’
The virologists behind the “proximal origin” article have strongly denounced accusations they were improperly swayed by the participation of influential funders of scientific research. They have asserted that they seriously considered the lab leak theory but that evidence accumulated in favor of a natural origin, assuaging their earlier concerns about the Wuhan lab.
However the congressional memo raises new questions about the idea that the virologists ever seriously considered the lab leak theory.
Columbia University virologist Ian Lipkin wrote on February 11, 2020, that an early draft of the article “does not eliminate the possibility of inadvertent release following adaptation through selection in culture at the institute in Wuhan,” citing a “nightmare of circumstantial evidence” at the Wuhan lab.
The new congressional memo shows for the first time that Holmes wrote on February 11, 2020, that he agreed with Lipkin’s assessment, even after he had drafted the first version of the article that would dispel the lab leak theory.
Holmes also said he had concerns about how quickly the virus had emerged in humans, apparently without detection in a likely zoonotic reservoir, in contrast to the SARS epidemic.
“It is indeed striking that this virus is so closely related to SARS yet is behaving so differently. Seems to have been pre-adapted for human spread since the get go,” Holmes said.
The “proximal origin” article nodded to the fact that SARS-CoV-2 appeared pre-adapted to humans.
But scientists who have stated that SARS-CoV-2 appeared pre-adapted to humans in more straightforward terms, and who left open the possibility that the adaptation had occurred in the lab, have received fierce backlash.
The pangolin data
Questions about the integrity of the impactful “proximal origin” article first swirled nearly two years ago.
A series of emails released under FOIA in 2021 and 2022 demonstrated that the authors had expressed private concerns about a lab origin before doing a public about-face.
“Andersen wrote on January 31, 2020, that he, Holmes and Tulane University virologist Robert Garry found that “the genome looks inconsistent with natural evolution.”
Garry wrote on February 2, 2020, that he could not understand how SARS-CoV-2 could have emerged naturally after comparing its genome to a highly similar virus at the Wuhan Institute of Virology: “I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature. Do the alignment of the spikes at the amino acid level … stunning.”
Yet the “proximal origin” article asserted that any lab origin theory was implausible.
Congressional Republicans have sought answers about whether the private teleconference with powerful funders of scientific research on February 1, 2020, had an improper influence.
The virologists have rebutted that claim in part by pointing to the emergence of data in China describing coronavirus data suggesting a highly similar receptor binding domain in pangolins around the same time they were drafting the article.
Pangolins are highly trafficked in China, though rarely sold live in wet markets.
But the new congressional memo suggests that Andersen, the article’s lead author, did not find that the pangolin data alone provided sufficient evidence in favor of a natural origin.
“The newly available pangolin sequences do not elucidate the origin of SARS-CoV-2 or refute a lab origin,” Andersen said in an email on February 21, 2020. “[T]here is no evidence on present data that the pangolin CoVs are directly related to the COVID-19 epidemic.”
Congressional investigators state in the memo that given the pangolin data was apparently not the compelling evidence in favor of a natural origin theory, the factor that likely pushed the scientists toward the natural origin theory was undue influence by Collins, Fauci and Farrar.
“The pangolin data was not the compelling factor,” the memo reads. “To this day, the only known intervening event was the February 1 conference call with Dr. Fauci.”
Meanwhile, Stanley Perlman, a University of Iowa virologist who edited one of the papers describing the pangolin coronavirus data, said that the new congressional memo has not changed his stance in favor of a natural origin. However the publication did issue a correction stating that pangolins were an unlikely intermediate host in 2021.
The committee also asserts that Andersen’s private statements contradict assertions made by a lawyer for Scripps Research in an August 2021 letter.
Asked about the apparent discrepancies, a Republican aide responded that “the select subcommittee is continuing to evaluate all available evidence, including whether or not Dr. Andersen was truthful to the committee.”
Asked whether the scientists scrutinized in the memo, including Fauci, would be called to testify, the aide said that “the select subcommittee previously requested their testimony and those plans have not changed.”
Despite the scrutiny that has fallen on Fauci — President Joe Biden’s former chief medical adviser — Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chair Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, said in a Face the Nation interview Sunday that the investigation would seek to work in bipartisan fashion.
“I just want to get to facts,” Wenstrup said. “There’s going to be some moments, I’m sure, of some emotions flaring. The last three years have been tough on everybody.”
March 7, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, NIH, Wellcome Trust |
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Yet another narrative reversal sees parts of the U.S. Government now saying COVID came from a Chinese lab. The HighWire reveals who kept this information from the American public from the beginning and why the same players are back at it with bird flu.
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | March 2, 2023
The great lies of COVID-19 pushed on the world by global health agencies and mainstream media are unraveling before our eyes. Del walks through the ‘10 Myths Told By Covid Experts’ published by Johns Hopkins Surgeon, Marty Makary, MD, pinpointing when and where The HighWire was brave enough to report on debunking each one, going all the way back to January of 2020.
March 4, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | China, Covid-19, United States |
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