Top White House Covid Advisor Admits: ‘No Study in the World Shows Masks Work’
Infowars | December 28, 2022
A viral video features top White House Covid adviser Dr. Ashish Jha admitting there are no studies that show face masks work.
“There’s no study in the world that shows that masks work that well,” Jha told The Philadelphia Inquirer earlier this month.
“So you’re never going to get the kind of benefit from mandatory year-round masking as you would from making substantial improvements in indoor air quality, plus it’s a lot easier to implement as well,” he continued. “So this is an area where we’re doing a lot and trying to really encourage people to use the resources they have to make those investments and start really improving ventilation filtration in buildings.”
Despite his admission, Dr. Jha and other top Covid advisers have previously advocated for masking.
Jha’s vacillation on whether masks work parallels with NIAID Director Anthony Fauci’s own back-and-forth remarks on masks, which he initially claimed do not work.
Jha has previously been criticized for giving Americans shady medical advice encouraging them to take both flu and Covid-19 jabs at the same time, saying, “That’s why God gave you two arms.”
Despite their questionable efficacy, many places around the country are once again considering implementing mandatory face mask policies.
Twitter lawyer Jim Baker wanted to know why Trump wasn’t censored for tweet saying “don’t fear Covid”
Twitter execs had to explain why optimism isn’t a violation of the rules
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | December 27, 2022
Lawyer James Baker, formerly of the FBI and working for Twitter until recently – and an excellent example of the “revolving door” policy happening between Big Tech and “Big Government” – shows up in several censorship controversies that have come to light thanks to the release of the “Twitter Files.”
In the fall of 2020, Baker was Twitter’s deputy general counsel with an eye on President Donald Trump’s account and apparently looking for just about any way to silence him, even when Trump’s tweets sought to lift people’s spirits at the peak of the pandemic and lockdowns.
On October 4, 2020, Trump was about to leave the hospital where he was treated for Covid for several days, and tweeted about this, telling 86 million followers that he was feeling well, and advising them not to be afraid of Covid, or allow it to dominate their lives.
“Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life. We have developed, under the Trump Administration, some really great drugs & knowledge. I feel better than I did 20 years ago!,” the president’s optimistic tweet read.
However, the content of the published internal communications suggest that Baker – whom one of the journalists now releasing Twitter Files says was “one of the most powerful people” in the US intelligence community – wanted you to be afraid.
Soon after Trump posted his message, Baker emailed Yoel Roth, who was at the time head of Twitter’s Trust & Safety, asking why the tweet was not considered a violation of the social site’s Covid policies.
“Why isn’t this POTUS tweet a violation of our COVID-19 policy (especially the ‘Don’t be afraid of COVID’ statement)?,” Baker quizzed the Twitter exec.
Roth’s response was that Trump had made “a broad, optimistic statement” which could not be interpreted as a violation since it didn’t encourage his followers to do anything harmful or even not to wear masks.
That tweet eventually stayed up, but Baker had better luck in convincing those at Twitter responsible for suppressing the New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, by misleading them to believe the laptop’s contents were “likely” inauthentic.
For this, Baker might be investigated by Republican congressmen, who suggested this earlier in December.
And the former FBI and DoJ man even tried to “review” the documents that are now being released as “Twitter Files” – before he was let go by Elon Musk.
Steve Kirsch interview with UK cardiologist Aseem Malhotra
stkirsch – December 21, 2022
My 80-minute interview with famous UK cardiologist Aseem Malhotra. He went from pro-vax to anti-vax. He noted that “No cardiologist that you know of is getting any more COVID jabs. That’s information that’s been shared with me since my publication.” Guess what? The mainstream UK press is NOT covering that.
In one year, the UK has gone from nearly all the UK cardiologists getting jabbed to all of them refusing to get any more. That’s a pretty dramatic shift in opinion in 1 year. The narrative cannot be maintained much longer. How many years will it be before the mainstream media reports this?
We covered a lot of ground in the 80 minute interview which I recorded using Squadcast.fm for crystal clarity of the video, then I imported into Davinci Resolve to assemble the two videos and normalize the sound levels.
Topics covered (but not in this order):
- WHO says that patients should be fully informed of side effects but for the vaccine the rule doesn’t apply
- Is there a scientific reason that vaccines should have liability protection? What happened when India refused to offer it? [Kudos to India for being smarter than the rest of the world health authorities ]
- When does the nonsense stop in the UK?
- Will anyone debate you? Why do they all refuse?
- Is the vaccine helpful for anyone?
- C, D, Zinc + nasal rinses: far better than vaccines for COVID?
- 8% needed to seek medical attention after the vax (per v-safe, rasmussen, and my surveys). Is that “safe”? Or ridiculously unsafe? What should it be?
- How many red-pilled cardiologists are there in the UK? It went from 5% against to 100% against in just one year!
- What are the death and disability rates from the vax?
- Is there enough evidence now to stop the vaccines? So why aren’t they?
- Does the vax do anything good? or is it all net bad?
- Did the press cover your paper? WTF?!!? Why not? They covered all your other papers!
- You got the vax. Have you screened yourself for subclinical myocarditis?
- How confident are you that your dad died suddenly due to the vaccine?
- Nobody wanted to see the Israeli safety data. Ever heard of that before?
- What do you think of the embalmer clots?
- How are they trying to discredit you? Have people accused you of being a grifter? motivations?
- Has anyone published a rebuttal to your paper? With the entire world against you (at least publicly), it seems odd nobody is challenging your papers on COVID.
Aseem’s patreon account has various levels if you would like to support his work.
Twitter Files describe Covid censorship campaign
RT | December 26, 2022
The latest batch of Twitter documents released by CEO Elon Musk show how the platform censored posts about Covid-19 that didn’t align with the White House’s message. Qualified doctors and epidemiologists were suppressed and banned at the direct request of the Biden administration, the documents suggest.
Both the Trump and Biden administrations pushed Twitter to moderate coronavirus-related content, journalist David Zweig reported on Monday, citing the company’s internal communications. While Trump’s team wanted to tamp down rumors of grocery-store shortages to combat panic-buying, Biden switched focus to “misinformation” about vaccines once his team took over in January 2021.
According to files seen by Zweig, Biden’s staff directly pressured Twitter to ban “high-profile anti-vaxxer accounts,” including that of former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson, who has persistently claimed that the risks of vaccination outweigh the benefits. Twitter complied and suspended Berenson in July 2021, but Twitter employees said afterwards that “the Biden team” was still “not satisfied” with the platform’s censorship efforts, and angrily demanded that it “de-platform several accounts.”
Twitter placed a warning label on the account of a Harvard epidemiologist who argued that “those with prior natural infection” do not need to be vaccinated, and flagged as “misleading” tweets that cited the Biden administration’s own data on Covid death rates. It used a combination of AI “bots” and contracted moderators in foreign countries to make these decisions.
A physician was flagged for sharing the results of a peer-reviewed study linking vaccination with cardiac arrests in young people, while another doctor was permanently suspended for referring to a published study suggesting that vaccination temporarily impairs male patients’ sperm count.
“Dissident yet legitimate content was labeled as misinformation, and the accounts of doctors and others were suspended both for tweeting opinions and demonstrably true information,” Zweig tweeted.
When former President Donald Trump urged his followers not to “be afraid of Covid” following his own recovery from the illness, Twitter’s senior moderators debated taking action against the tweet, before concluding that Trump’s “optimistic” assessment did not count as misinformation.
Since purchasing Twitter for $44 billion in October, Musk has released batches of documents shedding light on the platform’s previously opaque censorship policies. Published by several independent journalists, these document dumps have shown how Twitter suppressed information damaging to Joe Biden’s election campaign, colluded with the FBI to remove content the agency wanted hidden, assisted the US military’s online influence campaigns, and censored “anti-Ukraine narratives” on behalf of multiple US intelligence agencies.
Twitter Files – The important question
The decline of the MSM
The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | December 26, 2022
When Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in October, he promised to scrutinise the previous administration. Whether this was because he genuinely wanted to emancipate the company or because he was annoyed at being forced to pay the price he paid (after being sued), who knows but it provides for some interesting reading.
Musk enlisted the help of several journalists, including Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberger and Lee Fang. Apparently, his one request was that any information found must first be revealed on Twitter.
On 2 December, the first instalment of the Twitter files was released with the most recent, ninth part, published on Christmas Eve.
So, what have we learnt so far?
Benjamin Carlson provides a good summary:
- History changed because of this:
- Hunter Biden’s alleged corruption censored;
- Covid 19 lockdown debate stifled;
- Trump silenced.
You may agree with each decision. But there is no denying that halting information flow and free debate had real consequences.
- Many things called conspiracy theories were true:
- FBI was working with Twitter and paid them million of dollars;
- Blacklists and shadow bans were real;
- US intel lobbied to censor accounts;
- Covid-19 conversation was heavily manipulated;
- Twitter rules changed and enforced by whim.
- Censorship is being cloaked in the language of safety:
- ‘Safety, harm, violence’ redefined to apply to ideas;
- Opinions and information deemed ‘unsafe’ subject to silencing;
- Jokes, memes, questions about the origin of Covid off limits.
- The government is policing opinion:
- FBI has 80 staff monitoring speech;
- Small accounts on left and right flagged;
- FBI held frequent meetings with Twitter;
- Facebook, Youtube and Instagram = similar?
- Private censors & police control what you say and to whom.
- Social media executives lie freely:
- Twitter execs repeatedly and publicly denied shadow bans;
- In reality, bans were in place as “visibility filtering”;
- Ultimately, no accountability to public.
- Free speech is controlled by a small group:
- Biggest decisions in Twitter Files made by 3-4 individuals;
- Despite misgivings and doubts, once made, decisions stuck;
- Now it’s Musk.
One difference: his embrace of public polls to set policy.
- The slippery slope is real:
- Staff rebellion led to Trump ban;
- Staff called for more covid-19 censorship;
- 2021-22 saw increase of bans and ‘one-offs’.
This is how you get Billy Baldwin in the crosshairs.
Once you silence a president, who has a right to speak?
This is all massive stuff but nothing most of us didn’t already know or suspect. And the Fauci files that Musk keeps saying he will release haven’t been published yet.
But the important question is, why have the Main Stream Media barely reported on it? If we had learnt that the secret services in another country had meddled with elections in their country, it would be everywhere. But happens in the West and nothing.
I keep getting adverts from the BBC popping up telling me to trust them.
So what have the BBC written about the Twitter files to earn my trust? It seems they have only written a brief article, two weeks ago, merely touching on the issues mentioned above. The article titled “Twitter Files spark debate about ‘blacklisting’” says we are missing the context as to whether other accounts have faced similar treatment. Furthermore, they question whether the restricted accounts were in breach of rules for example spreading false claims about Covid.
The BBC continues, “restricting accounts can be a useful tool if they are spreading harmful material.” and “there have been various reports suggesting marginalised groups including trans and plus size people were more likely to have their accounts restricted.”
So, unfortunately, I can’t trust you BBC, you haven’t written one sentence on the implications such meddling could have had on the US elections. If there had been an equivalent Russian Twitter Files, you would have been on the case every single day.
Marianna Spring, the BBC’s infamous disinformation correspondent analyses the situation at the end of the article. Unsurprisingly, but predictably, her main point is that how you interpret the “Twitter Files” depends on how you think misinformation should be dealt with. She also says that those caught up in the revelations have received backlash online.
Again, nothing about how the misinformation and censorship may have changed the outcome of the US election.
But that’s about it from the BBC.
Next on to the Guardian. They have one article called “I read Elon Musk’s ‘Twitter Files’ so you don’t have to” which pretty much sums up their position. The article describes the censorship as “individual examples of rightwing users being on the end of light-touch moderation” and Jay Bhattacharya as a “Covid sceptic”.
And again, other than this, the Guardian haven’t reported on the issue since.
The more right wing leaning newspapers have a few more stories. The Times and Telegraph reported on how Twitter aided the Pentagon, how Donald Trump was banned and a Republican claim that the Biden family is the most corrupt in history.
The Daily Mail is probably the only UK paper to have covered this story in detail.
So why, after all of the revelations from the “Twitter Files” is much of the Main Stream Media so happy to ignore what had been going on? It’s a rhetorical question. I know the answer and you know the answer but it’s one which erodes any remaining trust we might have in MSM reporting.
Most people, especially older people, trust the BBC, read the odd headline and watch the evening news. So, when the real scandals revealed in the “Twitter Files” are never reported on, the general population don’t have a clue. Even with well-read people, I have tried to discuss the topic but they haven’t even heard of the “Twitter Files”, let alone what has been revealed.
And this is before the Fauci files are released, if they ever are. But if they are, then don’t for one second think that the general public will hear about them or change their position on anything to do with Covid. It just won’t happen unfortunately. If the MSM do report on the Fauci files, it will be brief and they will conclude that lockdowns were necessary to prevent deaths and vaccines are a miracle from God.
“Anti-Science” a Weaponized Term Used by Those Who Refuse to Face Vaccine Safety Data
By Peter A. McCullough | Courageous Discourse | December 24, 2022
Last night I was invited on national TV and appeared with former US Representative Jason Chaffetz on FOX News Ingraham Angle and was asked to react to the term “anti-science” used by Anthony Fauci. During my preparation I learned the term “anti-science” had been used to describe the conflict between old paradigms during the scientific revolution and the introduction of the scientific method. In recent years the term has been used within modern clinical science in a different and dark way. Dr. Peter Hotez, vaccine promoter at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, has developed a lecture tour and set of writings for several years before the COVID-19 crisis using the term “anti-science” as a way of denigrating those who are evaluating and discussing safety data on vaccines.
Hotez is now joined by Tedros at the WHO and Fauci (retired NIH) in promulgating the term anti-science as a pejorative and insulting way of positioning clinical scientists who are studying the epidemiology, pathophysiology, and clinical consequences of COVID-19 vaccine injuries, disabilities, and deaths. Yes, the study of what COVID-19 vaccines do to the human body is “science” and it is insulting to hear the term “anti-science” thrown out as a blocking tool in order to discount any side effects of vaccination.
Tedros went so far as to say those studying vaccine injuries and who wisely chose to defer on vaccination themselves are “killing machines.” This unhinged hyperbole is symptomatic of a psychotic break in those who who have been the vanguard of the imploding worldwide narrative supporting mass vaccination.
I summarized these comments and pivoted on television to the opportunities that Drs Fauci, Walensky, Jha, Murthy, and several others had on Jan 24 and Dec 7, 2022, to attend US Senate Hearings and listen to COVID-19 experts and have an interchange on the “science” of what we have learned. Instead none of them showed up and now are painting themselves with the term “anti-science”. This regression can only lead to greater loss of credibility and dissolution of the crumbling false narrative “safe and effective.”
Canadian Government Tells Kids They’ll Be On Santa’s ‘Naughty List’ Without COVID Vaccine, Masks
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | December 23, 2022
It’s the end of 2022 and the world is still witnessing new heights of Covid absurdity and fear-mongering authoritarianism coming from government figures.
Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam has issued a new public health announcement for the Christmas holidays, which comes in the form of a 2-minute interview with “Mrs. Clause” from the “North Pole”. In it, children are warned that they could be on Santa’s “naughty list” if they don’t get the Covid-19 vaccine and mask up. Adults too are told that they won’t make the “nice list” if they don’t have their boosters.
Dr. Tam begins the video with the “good news” that the vast majority of Canadians have made the nice list this year after having been vaccinated.
And “Mrs. Claus” responds: “It just warms my heart to see everyone in Canada, especially kids, working so hard to keep the holidays safe…” The suggestion is that the minority of citizens who remain unvaccinated or without their boosters are “naughty”.
Mrs. Claus then informs the children that she and Santa are “both up do date with our vaccinations, including Covid boosters and flu shots.” This is the holiday image Canada wants to convey to impressionable young children – that coronavirus now threatens the mythical North Pole, apparently.
From there the Christmas message goes into the kind of guilt-tripping rhetoric we’ve all come to expect from the Canadian government, and its top health official who is the equivalent of Dr. Fauci.
“I always tell Santa to make a list and check it twice,” Mrs. Claus says, and goes through the “list” by telling children to “stay up to date on your vaccinations” as well as “wear a mask… and make sure it’s nice and snug.”
Dr. Tam follows by telling families that if they gather for the holidays, “open a door, or a window” to let fresh air in.
All of this might actually be a step up for Canada when compared to the first couple years of the pandemic, given that across major cities there were strict curfews severely hindering freedom of movement, and not even relatives could visit family members after dark on fear of being ticketed by police.
Merry Christmas
eugyppius: a plague chronicle | December 24, 2022
In 2020 it was the lockdowners who destroyed Christmas, and in 2021 it was the vaccinators. All of it was for nothing. Sweden, which never locked down, has lower cumulative excess mortality than Germany, which locked down longer and harder than almost any other country in Europe. Nor did anyone even try to pretend that excluding the unvaccinated from public life would reduce the incidence of infection or death. The vaccinators claim that their elixirs reduce the rate of severe outcome from SARS-2 infection, but mass vaccination has coincided with increases in all-cause mortality and higher rates of transmission everywhere that it has been tried.
In the end, the lockdowners and the vaccinators lost. Alas, it wasn’t our alleged rights or democratic principles that saved us, but only Omicron, which crashed the pandemicists’ mythology faster than the Federal Republic of Germany could get their coercive proposals before the Bundestag. Today, the German Corona regime is all but dead, and even China has sworn off Zero Covid.
While I like to think that we may have played a small part in defeating the hysterical clowns and their virus circus, their greatest opponent was always reality. They stirred up enough panic and utopian hope to impede ordinary social life for the better part of two years, but they were too wrong about too many things to survive as any kind of durable political movement.
While they’ve done incalculable damage and changed many aspects of our lives and our societies forever, it feels really, really great to have Christmas back again.
Merry Christmas to all of my readers.
End the National Emergency and Public Health Emergency Declarations
Stop the Abuses of Power, Corruption, and Fiscal Irresponsibility
By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH | Courageous Discourse | December 23, 2022
The National COVID-19 Emergency, first declared by President Trump in March 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, was formally extended a second time by President Biden on February 18, 2022 and will come up for a third consideration by Biden in February, 2023. In January 2020, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) declared a public health emergency (PHE) in response to the outbreak of COVID-19. Public health emergency declarations ease certain laws and regulations to make it easier to address the emergency and allow some federal grant money to flow toward addressing the emergency. A PHE is a lesser event than a national emergency, which triggers a rapid outlay of federal money to address the emergency. National emergencies also give great unliteral power to the president, allowing the president to do things such direct flows of money from the national treasury, deploy the national guard, etc.
From a clinical point of view from a physician who has treated COVID-19 from the very beginning, a PHE would be evident if hospital capacity was exceeded by COVID-19 patients and care could not be provided to other patients with urgent problems. As a general rule this would be >15% occupancy by COVID-19 patients. From that perspective, the COVID-19 PHE ended in January, 2021 once hospital capacity ramped up to meet demand. I checked the CDC website and the weekly cases of COVID-19 has maintained its unimpressive pattern of oscillations while hospitalized cases are about 5000 well below that 15% threshold of about 130,0000.
CDC December 16, 2022. As of December 14, 2022, the current 7-day average of weekly new cases (65,067) decreased 2.9% compared with the previous 7-day average (67,034). A total of 99,705,095 COVID-19 cases have been reported in the United States as of December 14, 2022. The current 7-day daily average for December 7–13, 2022, was 5,010. This is a 2.3% increase from the prior 7-day average (4,899) from November 30–December 6, 2022.
Emergency declarations have allowed for prepurchase of vaccines, government coverage of COVID-19 health care costs, Medicaid expansion, and Emergency Use Authorization of diagnostics, drugs, and vaccines without full FDA approval.
Throughout US history there has been a reluctance by the executive branch to end national emergencies and relinquish power. After investigations of abuses of power in prior years, the House agreed to a Senate amended bill, and President Gerald Ford signed the National Emergencies Act into law on September 14, 1976. This act was designed to restore the checks and balances of power and end emergencies. On two occasions, March 3, and November 15, 2022, the Senate voted 48-47 and 62-36, respectively, to end the national emergency declaration nearly three years after it was invoked. The House did not pick up the bills and the Biden administration said it would veto any attempts to end the emergency declaration. Would former President Trump have ended it? Why hasn’t any reporter asked him that question now?
As for the PHE controlled by HHS, twenty-five Republican governors have signed a letter asking President Joe Biden to direct HHS to end it, saying “it is time we move on from the pandemic and get back to life as normal.” A main reason for this move is to end the expansion of Medicaid provisions and get state budgets back into alignment.
In summary, both national emergencies and PHE are power grabs that facilitate unchecked decisions and flows of money fostering corruption and continued desire to extend the declarations. The House and the Senate figured this out back in the 1970’s and found a legislative way of ending them. Until these declarations are dropped, we will continue to careen out of control on health policy, pandemic response, corruption, and fiscal irresponsibility. The most important question you can can ask a lawmaker, governor, or president or candidate: “Are you in favor of dropping the emergency declaration and PHE? If not why?
November 22, 2022 Senate Approves Resolution to End COVID-19 National Emergency Declaration
Prosecution stays COVID-related charges against Canadian Christian pastor Artur Pawlowski
By Anthony Murdoch | Life Site News | December 22, 2022
CALGARY, Alberta — Alberta-based Christian pastor Artur Pawlowski has been vindicated in court yet again after the COVID-related charges levied against him in 2020 for feeding the homeless and attending a pro-freedom rally were stayed by Crown prosecutors.
The Democracy Fund (TDF) said in a press release Tuesday that it “is pleased” with the decision by the Crown to drop Pawlowski’s charges, noting that if convicted he could have faced a fine of up to $100,000.
“Pastor Artur Pawlowski was charged for attending gatherings (feeding the homeless with his church and attending a Walk for Freedom protest), allegedly in breach of the COVID-19 pandemic-related gathering restrictions for ‘private social gatherings’ in December 2020,” said the TDF.
“The charges have been outstanding for the past 23 months, and Pastor Pawlowski has endured a total of five trial days.”
Pawlowski’s lawyer, Sarah Miller, noted that the Crown deciding to stay the charges is an “incredibly late resolution in Mr. Pawlowski’s favor.”
“The entire prosecution was flawed, from a weak case to extremely late disclosure, to inconsistent witnesses, to unreasonable delays,” said Miller.
“It will be a relief for Mr. Pawlowski once the stay expires and this prosecution is no longer hanging over him.”
The TDF noted that on December 16, right before Pawlowski’s trial was about to recommence, “the Crown decided to stay the prosecution.”
“This represents another victory for Pastor Pawlowski in his fight to defend religious freedom and civil liberties in Canada,” TDF celebrated.
The Crown’s decision to stay its charges against Pawlowski comes shortly after Alberta’s new premier, Danielle Smith, promised she would look at pardoning Christian pastors who were jailed for violating so-called COVID policies while Jason Kenney was premier.
Since becoming premier, Smith has been clear that she did not agree with how far COVID rules went under Kenney, noting specifically her displeasure with vaccine passports and mandates, as well as restrictions placed on places of worship.
Under Kenney’s leadership, Christian pastors Pawlowski, Tim Stephens, and James Coates were all jailed for flouting COVID health dictates.
This is not the first legal victory Pawlowski has had in relation to his fight against COVID mandates.
In July, Pawlowski had contempt charges against him and his brother Dawid nullified by an appeals court.
The Pawlowskis made international headlines after they were arrested in a highway takedown in May 2021 for holding worship services contrary to Alberta’s COVID rules, and ultimately spent three nights in jail before being released on bail.
In total, since the start of the COVID “crisis,” Artur Pawlowski has been jailed no less than five times. After his last arrest, he was initially denied bail when a provincial judge ruled he was a threat to “public safety.” This happened despite his alleged “crimes” being completely non-violent in nature.
Due to the severe backlash against Kenney for allowing what many felt was Christian persecution under the guise of public health policy, Smith has indicated that her government will never introduce draconian COVID mandates on Albertans again, including those targeting churches.
What Is Crimson Contagion?
By Jeffrey A. Tucker | Brownstone Institute | December 22, 2022
The lockdowns of March 2020 shocked the American people and most public health agencies, not to mention infectious disease doctors. The idea of school shutdowns, business closures, plus mandatory remote work and other restrictions have previously seemed inconceivable. It was especially remarkable to have such an “all-of-government” response to a virus that we already knew posed a threat mainly to the elderly and infirm.
Issues like public-health precedent, American legal tradition, and medical knowledge about dealing with respiratory viruses, not to mention natural immunity and collateral damage of lockdowns, were all thrown out the window.
Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s book The Real Anthony Fauci mentions a tabletop exercise called Crimson Contagion that ran from January through August, 2019. I had not previously heard of it and I found the mention remarkable, simply because it proves that not everyone was shocked by lockdowns. They were not part of official planning documents of either the CDC or WHO but they were clearly in the plans of someone.
I’ve only followed up on this report in light of growing focus on the person who coordinated Crimson Contagion: Robert Kadlec, who served in the Trump administration as Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services, Preparedness and Response. It was he who also ran the Covid response between HHS and the Department of Homeland Security.
Kadec’s lifetime government service (and, yes, he is said to be CIA) extends all the way back to the G.W. Bush administration when in 2007 he took the position of Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Biodefense Policy on the Homeland Security Council from 2007 to 2009. The very notion of lockdowns originated in that administration.
The 2019 tabletop exercise involved a huge number of public-sector agencies across all states plus many private-sector associations. It postulated a disease scenario in which a respiratory virus begins in China and spreads around the world by air travelers. It is first detected in Chicago. The World Health Organization declares a pandemic 47 days later. But then it was too late: 110 million Americans became sick, with 7.7 million hospitalized and 586,000 dead.
The conclusion of the exercise was that government was not well prepared for a pandemic and urged more planning and fast acting to implement what we now call lockdowns as we await a vaccine. Presumably, the vaccine then fixes everything.
The public knew nothing of this exercise until March 19, 2020, when the New York Times reported on it for the first time. This was one day following the detailed release of stay-at-home orders by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The next day, National Public Radio also ran a report on Crimson Contagion.
The Times reported:
The Crimson Contagion planning exercise run last year by the Department of Health and Human Services involved officials from 12 states and at least a dozen federal agencies. They included the Pentagon, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the National Security Council. Groups like the American Red Cross and American Nurses Association were invited to join, as were health insurance companies and major hospitals like the Mayo Clinic.
The war game-like exercise was overseen by Robert P. Kadlec, a former Air Force physician who has spent decades focused on biodefense issues. After stints on the Bush administration’s Homeland Security Council and the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he was appointed assistant secretary of Health and Human Services for Preparedness and Response.
Also participating were former Trump administration officials Rex Tillerson (Secretary of State, 2017-2018) and John F. Kelly, who was White House chief of staff from 2017 to 2019. The NYT even ran a picture of the two of them at the event.
Here are some direct quotes from the October 2019 report of Crimson Contagion:
The exercise revealed several workforce protection challenges under conditions where medical countermeasures, such as the pandemic vaccine, antiviral medications, and personal protective equipment, are limited. To protect the public prior to vaccine distribution, public health officials issued guidance on the implementation of nonpharmaceutical interventions intended to slow the spread of the virus.
In keeping with non-pharmaceutical intervention recommendations, employers – including government entities – sought to practice social distancing by having a significant portion of their employees work remotely. Employers encountered cascading impacts associated with making, communicating, and implementing such work-distancing decisions.
At multiple levels of government, officials wrestled with identifying employees who are essential and those who are nonessential in the context of an incident forecasted to span many months. In addition, officials faced challenges in determining which employees could perform their duties remotely and hierarchical organizations, such as state and federal departments and agencies, were uncertain as to the process for determining and implementing remote-workforce decisions.
Also:
During the exercise, CDC recommended that states delay school openings for six weeks, a follow-up to the initial (pre-exercise) recommendation that states delay the opening of schools for two weeks if the disease is present in the area. Many local jurisdictions and school districts have the authority to decide to close schools (or keep schools open). This distributed approach to school closure decisions caused confusion centered on discrepancies between schools that remained open and those that closed. In addition, while school delays and dismissals may be necessary over the course of the pandemic response, state participants identified any continued school delays and dismissals as having serious cascading impacts that require a concerted public messaging campaign and government coordination. Multiple states realized that dismissing schools is much more complex than they previously appreciated.
The participating private sector organizations and businesses:
- Aetna
- Allegheny Health Network
- Amador Health Center
- American Hospital Association
- American Red Cross
- Association of Public Health Laboratories
- Association of State and Territorial Health Officials Carestream Health
- Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists
- Ephraim McDowell/James B. Haggin Hospital
- Giant Eagle Pharmacy
- Grand Strand Health/HCA
- Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center Healthcare and Public Health Sector Coordinating Council Healthcare Ready
- International Safety Equipment Association
- Juvare
- Kidney Community Emergency Response Program
- Mayo Clinic
- Moldex-Metric Inc.
- National Alliance of State Pharmacy Associations National Association of County and City Health Officials
- National Community Pharmacists Association
- National Indian Health Board
- North Shore University Health System Patients’ Hospital
- RBC Limited
- San Mateo County Health – EMS Agency Seqirus Inc., USA
- Spectrum Health
- TriStar Skyline Medical Center
- University of Minnesota
This exercise took place entirely out of the public eye but had strangely prescient foretelling of events only 5 months later. Kadlec, who had organized the entire tabletop exercise, was also later the author of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health Education, Labor and Pensions report: An Analysis of the Origins of the COVID-19 Pandemic, which came out earlier this year.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., reports: “second only to his longtime crony and comrade in arms Anthony Fauci, Robert Kadlec played a historic leadership role in fomenting the contagious logic that infectious disease posed a national security threat requiring a militarized response.”
He is the signer of the report to HHS, in a letter dated December 9, 2019:
By the time of this letter, US intelligence already knew of the Wuhan virus. Four months later, US lockdowns began, starting with the March 8th cancellation of South-by-Southwest by the Austin, Texas mayor, and extending to the March 12th imposition of travel restrictions, the March 13 takeover by FEMA, and the March 16th press conference by Trump, Fauci, and Deborah Birx, which announced nationwide lockdowns.
The same day, Politico ran an article about another pandemic exercise from 2017 in which some incoming Trump officials participated, including Kelly and Tillerson. The article claims that such exercises are required by law. By the time of Covid lockdowns, they had both been pushed out, only to reemerge as key participants in Crimson Contagion along with most national-security and health-related agencies of the federal government.
The lockdowns – to which Trump agreed only reluctantly and were extended far past the point in which he believed they would control the virus – were the most ruinous of the administration. Trump’s pollsters for 2020 all agreed that these lockdowns created the conditions that drove him from office.
What does it all mean? Perhaps it is all just a series of coincidental data points, that what is called the worst pandemic in 100 years came only a few months after an elaborate multi-agency trial run of the same in which former high officials of the Trump administration participated. And perhaps the best person to run the Covid response also happened to be the very person who organized and managed the trial run in the previous season.
Many people will surely say there is nothing to see here. There is so much not to see these days.
The Fake ‘Tripledemic’ That Was 90% RSV and Almost Zero COVID-19
BY DR ANDREW BOSTOM | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | DECEMBER 21, 2022
Already by the last week of October 2022, continuing through November and early December, local Rhode Island media were amplifying clinician and public health official warnings about a paediatric respiratory illness ‘tripledemic’. The ‘tripledemic’ that prompted this tocsin of looming calamity in children was an alleged convergence of COVID-19, influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).
Serious paediatric illness is best gauged by the actual number of children hospitalised, as opposed to ‘respiratory virus test positivity’. The latter is especially misleading because of the unique, ongoing phenomenon of continued mass COVID-19 testing for minimal symptoms. Curiously, almost two months later, I could find no local media follow-up coverage elucidating the feared paediatric ‘tripledemic’ by this most germane metric: a direct comparison of children hospitalised for COVID-19, influenza or RSV.
With the cooperation of Rhode Island Department of Health (RIDOH) spokesman Joseph Wendelken, and an academic paediatrician at Hasbro Children’s Hospital, I can now present those hospitalisation data, per the table below. Given time lags in compilation and transmission, the hospitalisation record only covers all of October, and November 2022.
Despite the anguished media declarations, there was no Rhode Island paediatric ‘tripledemic’, at least through October and November. RSV, alone, accounted for around 90% (194 ÷ 222 = 87.4%) of so-called ‘tripledemic’ hospitalisations among Rhode Island children, and the rate of RSV hospitalisations (97 per month), was around seven-fold the rate of COVID-19 and influenza hospitalisations combined (14 per month). Moreover, the surrogate for RSV hospitalisations, a single International Classification of Diseases (ICD) RSV code (bronchiolitis, an inflammation of the smaller lung airways) omits RSV pneumonia and bronchitis coded hospitalisations. Certainly, omitting these ICD codes underestimates true paediatric RSV admissions.
The rate of primary (or ‘suspected‘ primary) COVID-19 pediatric hospitalisations mirrored what I discovered about the receding ‘Omicron wave’ from February to early June 2022. After weeks of wrangling, requiring an Access to Public Records Act submission to the Rhode Island Department of Health (RIDOH), supported by two state legislators, my query on paediatric COVID-19 hospitalisations in the first half of 2022 was answered on August 5th 2022. These data revealed that during the 16-week period from February 13th 2022 through June 4th 2022 there were a total of only 15 primary COVID-19 paediatric hospitalisations (for ages 0 to 17 years-old), as determined by RIDOH criteria. Notwithstanding this clinically insignificant, low ebb trickle of COVID-19 paediatric hospitalisations, RIDOH issued two memos recommending Rhode Island public schools re-institute compulsory masking (see RIDOH memos dated May 19th 2022 and May 20th 2022) for all school children in so-called “high COVID-19 transmission” districts.
Present ‘tripledemic’ nonoccurrence aside, the overwhelmingly RSV-driven rate of increased paediatric respiratory illness hospitalisations in Rhode Island during October and November should decline significantly in December and January as RSV infection rates peaked in early November and declined precipitously through early December (see data from RIDOH, plotted below).
Additional reassuring national data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicate the early influenza spike this year may be peaking in the U.S. overall as well, albeit not yet in New England. The third leg of the non-‘tripledemic’, COVID-19 paediatric infections, are not spiking in Rhode Island above rates observed since the summer and early autumn, while primary COVID-19 hospitalisation rates in children (see earlier table) remain exceedingly low.
Predictably, those Rhode Island medical thought leaders ginning up unwarranted concerns about the ‘tripledemic’ are once again, ad nauseum, pushing non-evidence-based masking and vaccination in children.
They ignore uniformly negative randomised controlled trials (RCTs) on community masking for the prevention of either influenza (12 RCTs; 10 here; also here and here) or COVID-19 (two RCTs; here, here), complemented by a small RCT in healthcare workers which demonstrated masks also failed to prevent RSV. While acknowledging the absence of a viable vaccine for RSV (but failing to mention the catastrophic failure of historical RSV ‘immunisation’), such thought leaders also ignore the absence of RCT data demonstrating either influenza or COVID-19 vaccines prevent hospitalisation from these respiratory illnesses in children.
The high rate of paediatric RSV hospitalisations alone in October-November should not be shrilly exploited by the media or so-called medical authorities to make counterfactual claims of an RSV, COVID-19 and influenza ‘tripledemic’. Instead, RSV, and now influenza, far more than COVID-19, should be accepted for what they are, i.e., part of the natural cycle of paediatric respiratory infections, and treated calmly, and with caring.
Dr. Andrew Bostom is a physician currently affiliated with the Brown University Center for Primary Care and Prevention, and was an Associate Professor of Medicine and Family Medicine at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University from 1997 until June 2021. As a clinical trialist and epidemiologist he designed and completed the largest randomised controlled trial conducted in chronic kidney transplant recipients.
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How Ukraine Tortured and Slaughtered Donbass
By Kit Klarenberg | Al Mayadeen | July 11, 2024
Almost immediately after the proxy war erupted, ISIS-tier footage of the torture and murder of Russians in Ukrainian custody emerged.
On July 6th, the New York Times published an astonishing investigation: In Ukraine, Killings of Surrendering Russians Divide an American-Led Unit. The article documents in grim detail how Chosen Company, an international volunteer battalion for Kiev, routinely executes Russian prisoners of war. It is the very first mainstream admission that this practice – a brazen breach of the Geneva Conventions, and a grave war crime – is widespread among Ukraine’s fighters, both foreign and homegrown. … continue
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