Its audacity on full display, Pfizer — arguably the most criminal corporation in history — has asked the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to greenlight its new bivalent COVID-19 vaccine that targets the Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants for people 12 and older “to help the country prepare for potential fall and winter surges of the coronavirus,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said in a statement.
Bourla’s good intentions are sadly thwarted by FDA regulations that require an Investigational New Drug (IND) application be submitted and approved before a drug can be tested in humans.
Luckily, the FDA can circumvent the inconvenience of its own regulatory processes by allowing itself the ability “to authorize use of an experimental drug in an emergency situation that does not allow time for submission of an IND in accordance with 21CFR, Sec. 312.23 or Sec. 312.20.”
Section 312.20 of the Code of Federal Regulations specifies that a clinical investigation cannot commence until an IND application has been submitted and approved. Nevertheless, Pfizer on Monday submitted an IND for its new formulation.
Now that the FDA and Pfizer have crossed their Ts and dotted their Is to make sure all the rules are followed, how do we know these products are safe and will work?
This is where the rodents come in — the products seem to work on mice.
As NPR reported, “For the first time, the FDA is planning to base its decision about whether to authorize new boosters on studies involving mice instead of humans.”
Yes, it’s an unprecedented move by the FDA, but Dr. Ofer Levy, professor of pediatrics at Harvard and advisor to the FDA argues that the country has had enough experience with the vaccines at this point to be confident the shots are safe and that there’s not enough time to wait for data from human studies.
He has a point. There were still only 30,479 uninvestigated deaths reported in VAERS after administration of the shots as of Aug. 19.
In any case, why should the FDA be concerned with such things as human studies in the first place?
This maneuver by the FDA may finally unshackle the agency from its overly restrictive responsibility to fulfill its own mission and become more agile in bringing products to market.
Not to be left behind, Moderna also requested the FDA authorize its bivalent vaccine for human beings over the age of 17.
Similar to the Pfizer vaccine, Moderna’s vaccine also, for good measure, will encode for the spike protein for the original ancestral SARS-CoV-2 strain, which for all intents and purposes, does not exist on our planet any longer.
Meryl Nass, M.D., summarized it this way:
“No clinical trials. (You need to obtain an IND before you can start testing the vaccine in humans. Pfizer applied 4 days ago.)”
Taking no chances, the FDA will not convene the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (just like the first time the FDA authorized boosters) and has announced this today to see how much opposition the agency gets.
Can we dispense with the pretense any of this is about health?
No sane person vaccinates the entire country with an experimental vaccine without trials — particularly since the whole country already has some immunity, the virulence is low and the evidence supports higher all-cause mortality with an increasing number of vaccine doses.
What is in the vaccine that they are desperate to inject us with?
Madhava Setty, M.D. is senior science editor for The Defender.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
August 27, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, FDA, United States |
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I created a form to ask healthcare workers to speak anonymously about what they are seeing.
Here’s what they said in their own words.
Here is a quick summary of some of the things they said:
- They are afraid to come out publicly due to intimidation tactics such as loss of job and/or license to practice medicine.
- Unvaccinated healthcare workers are extremely upset with the medical community. They feel they have been treated unfairly.
- It is the vaccinated workers who are getting sick with COVID, but it is the unvaccinated who are punished with constant testing, restrictions, and threats of losing their jobs.
- The COVID shots are a disaster. Even for the elderly which is supposed to be the most compelling use case, death rates in elderly homes went up by a factor of 5 after the shots rolled out. Each time the shots are given, the deaths spike. Nobody is talking publicly about this. It’s not allowed.
- “I have a patient who owns an adult care home that gave vaccinations to their six adult clients. They all died within a week.”
- Doctors are seeing rates of injury and death increase dramatically in all ages of people. The injuries are only happening to the vaccinated. There is no doubt that this is happening but many doctors have so much cognitive dissonance that they don’t see it.
- One nurse with 23 years of experience says she’s never heard of anyone under 20 dying from cardiac issues until the vaccines rolled out. Now she knows of around 30 deaths.
- “I have been a nurse for 36 years. I have NEVER witnessed people in their 20s and 30s having strokes, atrial fibrillation, or cardiomyopathies until the Covid vaccines. I work in cardiology. When I mention that someone should look at the vaccines as a possible reason, I am immediately silenced and told, “It is NOT from the vaccine.””
- Doctors aren’t recording vaccination status in the medical records so that all the deaths are attributed to the unvaccinated.
- Doctors are deliberately ignoring the possibility that the vaccines could be the cause of all the elevated events. The events are simply all unexplained.
- Many doctors have either quit or will quit.
- Some doctors and nurses at top institutions such as Mass General Hospital have falsified vaccine cards. They publicly toe the line and encourage their patients to take the shot knowing full well it is deadly. They value their job more than the lives of their patients. The important thing is they are risking 10 years in jail for doing this. These highly respected medical workers are telling the world that these COVID shots are so dangerous that they are willing to risk 10 years in prison to avoid taking the shot. That’s the message America needs to hear. And if Biden were an honest President, he would call for full amnesty and protection from retaliation for all these cases if people admitted publicly they did this. He’d be amazed at the number of responses he’d get. But he won’t do that because it would be too embarrassing for his administration.
- Things don’t seem to be getting any better.
- The medical examiners all over the world are not doing the proper tests during an autopsy to detect a vaccine-related death. Without doing the necessary tests, it is very hard to make an association. There isn’t a single “guidance” document from any medical authority anywhere in the world to do these tests on people who die within 3 months of their last COVID vaccination. This is why no associations are found: they aren’t looking and it is deliberate. The mainstream press doesn’t call them out on this either.
- Doctors are being forced to take other vaccines so the hospital can meet their quota. This was admitted to them.
It is very difficult to read that document and come away thinking that everything is working fine.
If you read the document and think everything is just fine, it means one or more of the following is true:
- You work in the White House
- You work at the CDC, FDA, or NIH
- You are a member of Congress or are a staff member for a member of Congress (Ron Johnson and his staff are excluded)
- You work in the mainstream media
- You are a top executive at a mainstream social media company
- You work in the mainstream medical community (doctor or academic)
- You are a miserable excuse for a human being
- You are an exemplary blue-pilled individual; you are just the type of citizen that your government wants to have
If you read through the document and are troubled by what is going on and you want to hold these people accountable, there are two simple thing you can do to make a difference:
- Share this article on all your social media platforms
- Make a donation to help re-elect Senator Ron Johnson (click here for the donation link). He’s the most important person in Congress that will hold these people accountable. This is why he’s the #1 target of Democrats.
If you are a member of the press and want to speak to any of these people, you can use the Contact me form to make your request. In the Notes part of the form, specify the database line number of the person(s) you want to contact.
The mainstream press will not share this information. This isn’t misinformation; these are all true stories, many of which are impossible to explain if the vaccines are truly safe and effective. Taken together, they are a stunning indictment of a medical system that has been corrupted through government incentives.
It is important for people throughout the world to hear from the healthcare workers whose voices have been silenced by the medical community. Please do it now.
August 27, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine |
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Who needs conspiracy theorists when you’ve got school books teaching children that Covid vaccines are “95% effective”?
This autumn, a new school book was introduced for the ninth grade in Norway. Fabel 10 was revised in 2021/22, but has only now been introduced in schools across Norway. Not only does the book overstate the effectiveness of the novel mRNA vaccines, it decries anyone questioning that as conspiracy theorists.
One excerpt reads:
Since the Covid pandemic broke loose, Covid deniers and vaccine sceptics have spread disinformation about coronavirus through social media. They claimed among other things that COVID-19 was no more deadly than the flu, that the vaccine was dangerous, and that restrictions were unnecessary. On Saturday March 20th 2021, 200 Covid deniers gathered in front of the Parliament. They burnt face masks to show that they thought they were unnecessary.
This short paragraph is easily debunked. Readers of the Daily Sceptic know that Covid now has an infection fatality rate about the same as influenza. We also know that side effects from the Covid vaccines – both the mRNA and the viral vector vaccines such as AstraZeneca’s – are more common than for other tried and tested vaccines. Remember when the Pandemrix vaccine rollout was halted because of a link to rare instances of narcolepsy? Multiple studies show Pfizer and Moderna’s Covid vaccines increase the risk of myocarditis and pericarditis in especially younger males – the demographic who make up precisely half the readership of Fabel 10. The German Government even admits that as many as one in 300 doses of the mRNA jabs produce serious injury. Compared to the danger that Covid poses to most people, does that make vaccines worth having?
And as for restrictions, a new consensus is gaining momentum. Whereas back in 2021, when the book was written, it was mainly agreed that lockdowns and other Covid restrictions were necessary to halt the spread, and countries with low Covid fatalities would credit these non-pharmaceutical interventions for their comparatively low excess mortality, studies later proved them incorrect. Lockdowns and excess mortality were not correlated. Whereas back in the early days of the pandemic, only a few, brave voices spoke up about their concerns, now even Rishi Sunak, who helped implement Britain’s lockdowns, admit they were detrimental to overall health and the economy and did little to stop infection. Yet in Norway, pupils are stuck in the reality curated more than a year ago, a reality that has now been revealed to most as bonkers.
And those 200 “Covid deniers” who burnt face masks deserve praise for being a tiny minority speaking up for science at a time where “the science” became an allegory for anything the authorities wanted us to do without having to prove why.
The book also states that vaccines are “95% effective against COVID-19 infections”. This is clearly nonsense, and doesn’t need further debunking. We all know of multiple-jabbed people getting infected several times over, and that infection rates in highly vaccinated countries went through the roof after the vaccine rollout.
Perhaps the book will serve as a test to pupils old enough to gather information from multiple sources. Some might agree with what they’re presented with, while others will see through this Government-approved misinformation. But that’s not really the sort of education you want in a free, democratic country. The book doesn’t invite 14-15 year-olds to question or discuss – it presents them with all the (wrong) answers. That’s bad enough in itself, but what’s worse is it tells them to ridicule those who don’t agree. The chapter on Covid and conspiracy theories could have been a great opportunity to teach children about academic freedom, online censorship, tolerance, debate, dissent and freedom of speech. Instead, it serves straight-up, Orwellian newspeak to young minds in a way the CCP would be proud of.
August 27, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, Norway |
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In his 1974 book and accompanying article with the shared title of “Medical Nemesis,” philosopher and theologian Ivan Illich boldly asserted that medical professional practice and related health policies, which he characterized as “both industry and religion,” had become “a major threat to health.”
Leading medical figures such as Richard Smith, a long-time medical journal editor and critic of fraudulent health research, later credited Illich with “remarkable” prescience about iatrogenesis — the cover term for ailments “where doctors, drugs, diagnostics, hospitals, and other medical institutions act as … ‘sickening agents.’”
Already by 1999, the Institute of Medicine had flagged medical error as being in “the top ranks of urgent, widespread public problems.”
Then in 2000, Johns Hopkins public health expert Dr. Barbara Starfield got more specific, fingering iatrogenesis as America’s third leading cause of death.
The United States leads the world in per capita pharmaceutical spending, which may explain why the worldwide ranking of iatrogenesis as a cause of death, while still alarming, is slightly lower — fifth, rather than third.
In her landmark paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Starfield estimated around 225,000 American deaths annually — or possibly as many as 284,000 — from causes such as unnecessary surgery, contraindicated care, medication errors and drug adverse effects.
Writer Jon Rappoport — who interviewed Starfield in 2009, and regularly reminds readers about her “stunning” findings on medically caused death in America — observed in 2015, that while there was “every reason for [Starfield’s paper] to cause a firestorm in the press, and in the halls of government … that’s not what happened.”
Instead, “intentional amnesia set in” — until 2016.
That year, two more Johns-Hopkins-based authors, Dr. Martin Makary and Michael Daniel, briefly revived the topic in The BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal ), again citing “lethal events” resulting from medical error as “the third biggest cause of death in the US,” and appraising their figure of roughly 251,000 annual deaths — nearly 1 in 10 overall deaths — as a conservative underestimate.
A less noticed 2013 article in the Journal of Patient Safety judged the practice of medicine to be causing on the order of 440,000 American deaths each year, with those authors calling for an end to the “Wall of Silence” surrounding such unfortunate occurrences.
Makary, who is not shy about pronouncing 20% of all medical procedures unnecessary, told The Washington Post in 2016, “It boils down to people dying from the care that they receive rather than the disease for which they are seeking care.”
Both Starfield and Makary also strenuously objected to victim-blaming, explaining, “It’s the system more than the individuals that is to blame.”
Although the BMJ article forced WaPo and other mainstream media outlets to briefly pronounce death by medicine a “hot topic,” the problem was quickly “disappeared” from view again, with Makary, a couple of years later, lamenting the lack of any meaningful health system correctives.
Tip of the iceberg? Bad outcomes often go underreported
Everyone who has tried to estimate the harms caused by modern medicine has called attention to the difficulty of truly getting a handle on the phenomenon due to underreporting and limitations of existing datasets, which likely reveal only the “tip of [the] iceberg.”
The first limitation is that most data used to calculate medicine as a leading cause of death come from hospitalized patients.
However, according to another 2000 study cited by Starfield, drug-related adverse effects are also high in outpatient settings, affecting somewhere between 4% and 18% of such patients.
In fact, researchers of that era estimated outpatient snafus resulted in nearly 200,000 additional deaths annually.
A second and related data shortcoming is that the focus on mortality tends to obscure non-fatal outcomes such as disability and, using Starfield’s word, “discomfort.”
In the late 1990s, researchers reported that medicine gone awry was leading to millions of additional physician visits, prescriptions, emergency department visits, hospitalizations and long-term admissions as well as billions in extra costs.
By 2018, a medical expert estimated the number of “severe patient injuries resulting from medical error” to be “40 times the death rate.”
A third problem is that when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) compiles its annual list of the most common causes of death, it does so using death certificate data and the International Classification of Disease (ICD) codes listed on the death certificates.
But as Starfield concluded, “How cause of death and outpatient diagnoses are coded does not facilitate an understanding of the extent to which iatrogenic causes of ill health are operative.”
Makary noted that the CDC does not require reporting of fatal medical errors, meaning that “causes of death not associated with an ICD code, such as human and system factors, are not captured.”
Those factors, Makary said, encompass “inadequately skilled staff, error in judgment or care, a system defect or a preventable adverse effect,” and problems such as “computer breakdowns, mix-ups with the doses or types of medications … and surgical complications that go undiagnosed.”
As one example, a family whose young child died after being given an overdose of sodium chloride solution learned that many states have “absolutely no requirements, or proof of competency” for the pharmacy technicians who compound hospital IV medications.
A fourth challenge involves difficulties of definition and classification. For example, are medical mistakes errors of omission, execution or planning?
What about adverse drug reactions that are dose-dependent? Are reactions predictable (that is, based on known facts about toxicity, side effects and drug interactions) or unpredictable (e.g., arising from factors such as allergy, intolerance or “idiosyncrasy”)?
In addition to drug mess-ups (such as incorrect administration, poisoning or therapeutic failure), iatrogenic effects can ensue through other avenues — from diagnostic procedures (both mechanical and radiological), surgery and other invasive procedures, hospitalization, unsafe injection practices, unsafe blood transfusions or the “treating doctor himself/herself.”
For example, studies highlight significant risks from screening colonoscopy — including perforation, infection and hemorrhage — with perhaps as many as 4% of recipients experiencing complications serious enough to send them to the hospital within a month of the procedure.
Cause-of-death rankings in COVID era
Makary noted the taboo nature of iatrogenesis, stating “We all know how common [medical error] is” and “We also know how infrequently it’s openly discussed.”
The CDC, meanwhile, is frank about the fact that ranking causes of death “is, to some extent, an arbitrary procedure” that flows from its in-house decisions about which causes are “eligible to be ranked.”
It also admits its rankings “do not necessarily denote the causes of death of greatest public health importance.”
With the advent of COVID-19-related medical measures and health policies, there is an urgent need to shatter the taboo and shine more of a spotlight on the public-health-important medical killing machine.
For example, did the dramatic two-year decline in life expectancy reported for 2020, and the three-year decline in the last-place state of New York — vaguely blamed on the “pandemic” and drug overdoses — have something to do with the imposition of perverse, government-incentivized COVID-19 treatment protocols emphasizing frequently fatal drugs like remdesivir?
Does the skyrocketing all-cause mortality observed since 2021 have anything to do with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s enabling of deadly COVID-19 vaccines, in all likelihood fraudulently authorized?
With what is known and what we continue to learn about COVID-19 vaccine dangers, the CDC’s current disease rankings — which list heart disease, cancer, COVID-19, accidents and stroke as the five leading causes of death — demand close scrutiny.
Although multiple risk factors are certainly at play for the five causes of death, the COVID-19 jabs are indubitably adding to the death and disability rolls in those areas, with:
- Widespread reports of fatal and disabling heart problems following vaccination.
- Pathologist accounts of increased incidence of unusually large and aggressive “turbo” cancers, especially in younger patients.
- Data from around the world showing the vaccinated to be at higher risk of dying from COVID-19.
- Motor vehicle accidents surging in tandem with the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines — with news accounts linking the crashes to known adverse events such as seizures and mysterious “medical episodes.”
- Published studies describing various types of stroke in the aftermath of COVID-19 vaccination.
Research has linked kidney disorders, also on the CDC’s list of “top 10” causes of death, to both remdesivir and the COVID-19 shots.
In two Zogby polls commissioned by Children’s Health Defense, 15%-22% of respondents who had received a COVID-19 vaccine reported being diagnosed with a new medical condition “within a matter of weeks to several months.”
In the first poll, the top five conditions listed by respondents were blood clots, heart attack, liver damage, leg or lung clots and stroke.
In the second poll, the top conditions included the same, plus autoimmune conditions, disrupted menstrual cycles, Guillain-Barré syndrome and Bell’s palsy.
From 26%-30% reported knowing someone else who also had received a medical diagnosis after taking a COVID-19 vaccine.
Not an error
At this juncture, with damage from the killing protocols and fraudulent jabs on growing display, it is no longer possible to hide iatrogenesis behind the innocent-sounding term “medical error,” for it is increasingly clear that we are also talking about intentional harm and even genocide.
For Illich, the remedy for this “sinister” and “health-denying” medical civilization involved returning to simpler interventions designed for self-use — interventions demonstrated to “do more good than harm” — and reducing professional intervention “to the minimum.”
The alternative, in his view, was to continue to acquiesce — with potentially fatal or disabling results — to a “planned and engineered Hell.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
August 26, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine |
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Two U.S. senators on Tuesday — the day after Dr. Anthony Fauci announced plans to leave his government posts in December — formally requested the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) preserve all documents and communications related to Fauci.
Fauci on Monday said he will retire as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and as chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden in December to pursue “the next chapter” of his career.
In a letter to HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) demanded Becerra “immediately confirm” that HHS is preserving all records related to Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins, who was director of the NIH from August 2009 to December 2021.
“This request applies to all documents, records, memoranda, research, correspondence, or other communication or any portion thereof relevant to any involvement of Dr. Fauci or Dr. Collins,” the letter stated.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), in a letter to Lawrence Tabak, D.D.S., Ph.D., acting director of the NIH, asked Tabak to “ensure the preservation of all documents and communications within Dr. Fauci’s possession related to his tenure at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).”
Marshall stressed that it is “imperative” that all HHS workers are made aware of their “legal responsibilities to collect, retain, and preserve all documents, communications, and other records in accordance with federal law.”
He also reminded Tabak of his obligation, as the head of HHS, to ensure the preservation of all records and that any employee “who conceals, destroys, or attempts to conceal or destroy a federal record may be subject to fine and imprisonment for up to three years.”
Marshall pointed out that HHS previously refused to provide information to Congress:
“HHS and component agencies, including NIH in particular, continue to obstruct numerous congressional investigations through refusal to provide responsive information.
“In addition to withholding information from Congress, private parties note that NIH refuses to comply with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests until forced to do so by court order.”
Marshall went on to list “recent egregious examples” of NIH’s failure to meet record-keeping requirements and said that “even one” such example “should instigate immediate oversight action by HHS.”
Marshall’s letter outlined four “notable recent concerns” with NIH’s record-keeping, including past accusations that NIH destroyed records, potential conflicts of interest within the HHS Office of Inspector General, NIH’s practice of “self-policing” and NIH’s failure to ensure required reporting of clinical trial results.
‘Fauci’s resignation will not prevent full-throated investigation into origins of pandemic’ — Rand Paul
Paul, in his letter to Tabak, also emphasized the need to preserve NIH documents for investigation purposes.
Paul wrote:
“This information is critical to ensure that Congress has access to information necessary to conduct proper oversight regarding events that took place during Dr. Fauci’s tenure with the agency.
“Specifically, I request you preserve all records, e-mail, electronic documents, and data created by or shared with Dr. Fauci during his tenure at NIH that relate to COVID-19 including, but not limited to, NIAID-funded coronavirus research.”
In an email today, Paul told The Defender :
“Dr. Fauci misled the American people on public health guidance throughout the pandemic, lied to Congress under oath, and funneled tax dollars to fund dangerous research in communist China.
“The American people deserve transparency and accountability from the NIH regarding the COVID-19 pandemic regardless of Dr. Fauci’s future employment plans.”
On Monday, Paul tweeted, “Fauci’s resignation will not prevent a full-throated investigation into the origins of the pandemic. He will be asked to testify under oath regarding any discussions he participated in concerning the lab leak.”
For more than a year, Paul has advocated for a thorough investigation into the origins of COVID-19 and pushed for a criminal investigation of Fauci, whose NIAID research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China Paul suggested may have been involved in creating the virus.
Following up on a threat he made in mid-July of 2021, Rand sent an official criminal referral on Fauci to the U.S. Department of Justice on July 26, 2021.
Paul asked Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Fauci for allegedly lying to Congress when he said the NIH “has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
The week before he sent the official criminal referral, Paul asked Fauci if he wanted to retract the statement he made to Congress during a May 11 hearing. Paul said, “Dr. Fauci, knowing that it is a crime to lie to Congress, do you wish to retract your statement of May 11, where you claimed the NIH never funded gain-of-function research and move on?”
Fauci replied he would not retract the statement and was adamant he never lied before Congress.
However, Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson said on June 2, 2021, that evidence showed Fauci was “implicated in the very pandemic he had been charged with fighting.”
Emails obtained by BuzzFeed via the Freedom of Information Act show “Fauci supported the grotesque and dangerous experiments that appeared to have made COVID possible,” Carlson said.
The emails, which date back to the early winter of 2020, show Fauci was worried the public would think COVID-19 originated at the Wuhan lab. Why?
“Possibly because Tony Fauci knew perfectly well he had funded gain-of-function experiments at that very same laboratory,” Carlson said.
The emails showed Fauci and other top virologists shared an article from ZeroHedge suggesting COVID-19 was a man-made bioweapon. Despite it being a “plausible explanation,” said Carlson, ZeroHedge was banned from social media.
Carlson said:
“Until recently, you were not allowed to suggest that COVID might be man-made. Why couldn’t you suggest that? The fact checkers wouldn’t allow it. Why wouldn’t they? Because Tony Fauci assured the tech monopolies that the coronavirus could not have been manmade. And so the tech monopolies shut down the topic.”
NIAID has, for years, provided grants to the EcoHealth Alliance and others to conduct gain-of-function research on coronaviruses, as The Defender previously reported.
In March 2021, the Wuhan lab deleted mentions of its collaboration with the NIAID/NIH and other American research partners from its website. It also deleted descriptions of gain-of-function experiments on the SARS virus, according to Dr. Joseph Mercola.
“The NIH/NIAID has funded GOF [gain-of-function] research to the tune of at least $41.7 million,” Mercola said. “Up until 2014, this research was conducted by Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina.”
After 2014, when federal funding of gain-of-function research was banned, the research was funneled to the Wuhan lab via the EcoHealth Alliance.
Mercola added:
“In August 2020, the NIAID announced a five-year, $82-million investment in a new global network of Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases that will conduct GOF experiments to ‘determine what genetic or other changes make [animal] pathogens capable of infecting humans.’”
Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is an independent journalist and researcher based in Fairfield, Iowa.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Download for Free: Robert F. Kennedy’s New Book — ‘A Letter to Liberals’
August 25, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Aletho News | Covid-19, HHS, NIAID, NIH, United States |
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CDC Director Rochelle Walensky admitted organizational shortcomings on Fox News while deflecting blame toward predecessors for their lockdown recommendation.
“Many of those lockdowns pre-dated me at the CDC,” she said.
Walensky, who once used ‘Trust the science’ to persuade the public, carried a humbler tone while reflecting on her organization’s decisions.
“There were important decisions that we had to make in imperfect times, with imperfect data, and we always updated those decisions as those data were evolving…”
“So, I don’t really want to re-visit the questions of lockdowns that pre-dated me, but what I will say is, we’ve updated our guidance in the context of new information, and sometimes we have to make a decision before we have all the information that we want…”
Indeed, the CDC updated guidance by removing special quarantine recommendations for unvaccinated persons, effectively admitting that vaccination status is no longer relevant when it comes to infection or spread of the Covid virus.
In fact, on July 23, the CDC deleted a ‘fact’ from their “Facts about mRNA Covid-19 Vaccines”, and they did so without explanation. Last time I checked, facts don’t change — but apparently, they do for the CDC.
Walensky further stated that “[their] science” indicated hybrid immunity was superior to natural immunity. However, we’ve reported on a scientific study that accounted for more than 5.7 million people, which showed that natural immunity is just as effective as hybrid immunity.
To this point, Walensky’s usage of science in the possessive sense — by calling it “our science” — denotes a departure from “the science,” of which they’re either arbitrarily picking from or are completely unaware.
Between Fauci stepping down and Walenski pointing fingers, it appears the blame game has officially started.
August 25, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | CDC, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, Rochelle Walensky |
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Earlier in the year YouTube’s COIVD-19 medical misinformation policy wouldn’t allow you to post content which contradicted the WHO’s or local health authorities’ guidance on various issues including:
- Social distancing;
- Claims that wearing a mask is dangerous or causes negative physical health effects;
- Claims that masks do not play a role in preventing the contraction or transmission of COVID-19
Now, it’s perfectly fine, signalling that those claims are no longer misinformation. Too bad if you previously had your account cancelled for questioning those policies. You should know by now when it is ok to question The Science™ and when it is verboten. Do keep up.
August 25, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, YouTube |
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A talented filmmaker called Keith Craig has made a film about Bob Moran, the brilliant, acerbic, passionate cartoonist who lost his job at the Telegraph for being too outspoken and uncompromising in his opposition to the lockdown policy. Most of this site’s long-term readers will be familiar with Bob’s work, which we have used many times and continue to use in our Archive section. They’ll also be familiar with the cast of talking heads in this film – James Delingpole, Bev Turner, Dr. Tess Lawrie, Bernie Spofforth, Tonia Buxton and more.
This hugely enjoyable, lovingly-made film is very much worth watching in full. Deserves to become a cult classic.
August 25, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, UK |
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The Wall Street Journal last week published an opinion piece, “Fauci and Walensky Double Down on Failed Covid Response,” with this subhead: “Lockdowns were oppressive and deadly. But U.S. and WHO officials plan worse for the next pandemic.”
The article begins:
“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] belatedly admitted failure this week. ‘For 75 years, CDC and public health have been preparing for Covid-19, and in our big moment, our performance did not reliably meet expectations,’ Director Rochelle Walensky said. She vowed to establish an ‘action-oriented culture.’”
Yes, you read that correctly. Dr. Anthony Fauci and Walensky admitted they failed. They learned their lesson.
As John Tierney, author of the op-ed, wrote:
“Lockdowns and mask mandates were the most radical experiment in the history of public health, but Dr. Walensky isn’t alone in thinking they failed because they didn’t go far enough. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to the president, recently said there should have been ‘much, much more stringent restrictions’ early in the pandemic.”
They believe that they didn’t go far enough? There should have been “much, much more stringent restrictions?”
That’s what they learned from the destruction their public health policies wreaked upon this nation and the others that followed their lead?
To his credit, Tierney pointed out the absurdity of Walensky’s and Fauci’s stance on their own incompetence.
Tierney also dropped a series of “truth bombs,” including:
- “Their oppressive measures were taken against the longstanding advice of public-health experts, who warned that they would lead to catastrophe and were proved right.”
- “For all the talk from officials like Dr. Fauci about following ‘the science,’ these leaders ignored decades of research — as well as fresh data from the pandemic — when they set strict Covid regulations.”
- “The burden of proof was on them to justify their dangerous experiment, yet they failed to conduct rigorous analyses, preferring to tout badly flawed studies while refusing to confront obvious evidence of the policies’ failure.”
- “U.S. states with more-restrictive policies fared no better, on average, than states with less-restrictive policies.”
- “When case rates throughout the pandemic are plotted on a graph, the trajectory in states with mask mandates is virtually identical to the trajectory in states without mandates. (The states without mandates actually had slightly fewer COVID deaths per capita.)”
- A Johns Hopkins University meta-analysis of studies around the world concluded that lockdown and mask restrictions have had “little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality.”
- Florida’s and Sweden’s open policies have been vindicated based upon their lower levels of excess mortality compared to other regions.
- “It was bad enough that Fauci, the CDC and the World Health Organization ignored the best scientific advice at the start of this pandemic. It’s sociopathic for them to promote a worse catastrophe for future outbreaks.”
I take no issue with Tierney’s list. The problem here is with the Wall Street Journal.
Every single point this opinion piece offered could — and should — have been made months or years ago.
There was longstanding advice from public health experts that predicted Fauci and Walensky’s failures? Why didn’t you say so in 2020?
Fauci and Walensky ignored decades of research? They touted flawed studies while ignoring the obvious failures unfolding in front of them, month after month?
The successes of Sweden and Florida were apparent in 2020.
Where were the articles in your publication that could have brought light to these issues over the last two years?
The Johns Hopkins University analysis on mask restrictions was published nearly nine months ago. Why didn’t you cover it?
Why did it take so long to run this kind of piece when the evidence was around for so long?
Do you really expect us to look the other way because you now have the temerity to call Anthony Fauci sociopathic?
You had ample opportunity to give voice to the dissenters who were pleading for a voice, a conversation and a debate based on the very same evidence you are mentioning now.
You failed your readership. You failed the public.
The CDC’s policies were so devastating because you did not challenge them. Not once.
As a media platform, you were no less negligent than the public health officials you see fit to denigrate now — after untold damage has occurred, at their hands and yours.
Perhaps you’ve caused your loyal readers to finally scratch their heads and reconsider their perspective after 28 months of mercilessly attacking those of us who were asking you and other mainstream platforms to do your job.
Why are you holding Fauci and Walensky accountable now? Is it because they are finally admitting they blew it?
They are not the only galactically incompetent parties in this global tragedy. You are, too. And we all know it.
Interestingly, your scathing attack on our public health agencies still hasn’t gone nearly far enough.
One of their biggest “blunders” was not around lockdown measures. It was the dismissal of powerful, early treatment regimens, including ivermectin, that could have saved thousands of lives or more.
Instead, the public was forced to wait for a largely ineffective and harmful vaccine that has since exacted an incalculable level of damage on humanity.
Nevertheless, more than a year after Dr. Pierre Kory gave impassioned congressional testimony demanding that an official expert panel be convened to examine the mountains of evidence coming from all corners of the globe demonstrating the significant benefits of ivermectin in treating and preventing COVID-19, you had the audacity to print this hit piece on the safe and effective medicine that would have obviated the need to inject poorly tested mRNA technology into the bodies of several billion human beings.
Beyond being irresponsible, the article was silly, citing a single, small and yet-to-be-published study (at the time) that purportedly showed no benefit as proof that ivermectin cannot prevent COVID-19 hospitalizations.
The study underdosed the participants and was too small to detect statistically significant benefits, despite reduced incidence of hospitalization in most cohorts that got the medicine. (Read a full critique of the study here).
The study didn’t prove anything — other than that it was designed to fail from its inception.
Talk about touting a “badly flawed” study.
More importantly, your article on the study missed the real story: the scuttling of ivermectin by an unseen hand that was, it seems, in the pockets of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation through Unitaid, a quasi-governmental advocacy organization the foundation funds (full story here).
Have your editors lost their sense of smell from repeated bouts of COVID-19? Or were you never able to sniff out where the real stories are?
It’s fairly obvious that despite this attempt to reclaim your journalistic integrity you are still muzzled. Any story that even intimates that the highly profitable COVID-19 vaccine was not only unnecessary but also a stark failure, is still off-limits.
Your silence on this continues to deafen us.
Madhava Setty, M.D. is senior science editor for The Defender.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
August 24, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine |
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Dr. Peter Hotez, dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, has repeatedly dismissed the idea of a lab accident or deliberate spread, calling it “an outlandish conspiracy theory.” He’s also a fierce critic of the ongoing Congressional probe into gain-of-function research, decrying it as a “threat to American biomedical science.”1
Well, Hotez, the lab leak denialist and Congressional probe critic, has now been outed as a funder and project leader of risky gain-of-function research on coronaviruses at the now-infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
Hotez Developed SARS Vaccine in Case of Lab Release
Hotez’s dismissal of the lab escape theory is particularly ironic considering he received a $6.1 million grant2 from the National Institutes of Health in 2012 for the development of a SARS vaccine in case of an “accidental release from a laboratory,” “deliberate spreading of the virus by a terrorist attack,” or a zoonotic spillover event. According to the grant abstract:3
“We have identified a highly promising lead candidate vaccine antigen, the receptor binding domain (RBD) of the SARS-CoV spike (S) protein that can induce potent neutralizing antibody response and protection against SARS-CoV infection.
Our objective is to develop a highly effective and safe recombinant RBD-based SARS vaccine that can be used in humans for prevention of future SARS outbreak and for biodefense preparedness.”
The research under that grant took place from 2012 until 2017. After spending five years preparing for the possibility of an accidental or deliberate release of SARS, why would Hotez think a lab leak of SARS-CoV-2 was out of the question?
Hotez Funded Creation of Chimeric Coronavirus
Clearly, Hotez is no stranger to the possibility of lab leaks. Could it be that his dismissal of the lab leak theory, and the Congressional inquiry into gain-of-function research, is based in fear that he may be implicated in SARS-CoV-2’s creation? As reported by U.S. Right to Know (USRTK):4
“While casting concerns about Wuhan’s labs as ‘fringe,’ Hotez has not mentioned his own connection to a project involving a laboratory-generated chimeric SARS-related coronavirus that has come under Congress’ microscope. The project was helmed by Zhengli Shi, a senior scientist and ‘virus hunter’ at the Wuhan Institute of Virology nicknamed the ‘Bat Lady.’
As part of his NIH grant, Hotez subcontracted funding for research on combined or ‘chimeric’ coronaviruses, a scientific paper5 shows. Hotez’s grant6 underwrote two of Shi’s collaborators on the project.
In the 2017 paper7 co-funded by Hotez, Shi and her colleagues generated a recombinant virus from two SARS-related coronaviruses: ‘rWIV1-SHC014S.’ It’s not clear whether the paper co-funded by Hotez should have been stopped under a temporary ‘pause’ on gain-of-function work before 2017.
However, some independent biosecurity experts have said research on this chimeric virus in some ways epitomizes lapses in NIH oversight of risky research in the years before the COVID-19 pandemic.
A prior study8 of one of the coronaviruses that comprised the chimera, WIV1, found it to be ‘poised for human emergence.’ Another prior paper9 on the other coronavirus, SHC014, stated that its future study in lab-generated viruses may be ‘too risky to pursue.’
‘The work here should have been at the very least, heavily scrutinized,’ said David Relman, a Stanford microbiologist and biosecurity expert. ‘This work should have been heavily reviewed for [gain-of-function], and probably should have been subject to the pause prior to December 2017.’”
The Ties That Bind Hotez, EcoHealth Alliance and the WIV
As explained in USRTK’s report10 and revealed in the 2017 paper11 titled, “Cross-Neutralization of SARS Coronavirus-Specific Antibodies Against Bat SARS-Like Coronaviruses,” another funding source of this joint project was the EcoHealth Alliance. The NIH grant12 behind EcoHealth’s part of the study has already come under scrutiny, as it involved the creation of chimeric coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab. As reported by USRTK:13
“Specifically, an EcoHealth Alliance grant report14 obtained by congressional investigators demonstrated that a WIV1-SHC014 chimera generated thousands of times the viral load and enhanced lethality in mice with human airway cells. This prompted concerns among some biosecurity experts, scientists and members of Congress.
In response to questions from congressional Republicans, NIH acknowledged15 that the research was out of compliance with its own regulations on gain-of-function research.’
In this limited experiment, laboratory mice infected with SHC014 WIV1 bat coronavirus became sicker than those infected with WIV1 bat coronavirus,’ the letter read. ‘As sometimes occurs in science, this was an unexpected result rather than something the scientists set out to do.’”
So far, Hotez has not been forthcoming about his apparent conflict of interest. On the contrary, he’s denied that his NIH grant supported Shi’s controversial research project at the WIV.
In an August 9, 2022, Twitter post,16 Ebright pointed out that such denials are provably false, as funding from NIH grant AI09877517 (Hotez’s grant) is acknowledged as a funding source in Shi’s paper,18 “Cross-Neutralization of SARS Coronavirus-Specific Antibodies Against Bat SARS-Like Coronaviruses.”
Hotez Is Part of The Lancet COVID-19 Commission
Hotez’s conflicts of interest are all the more pertinent when you consider he’s on The Lancet COVID-19 Commission, where he co-chairs the COVID-19 Vaccines and Therapeutics task force.19 Richard Ebright, a professor of chemistry at Rutgers University, told USRTK:20
“The construction and threat-characterization of rWIV1-SHC014 was — unequivocally — gain-of-function research. It is a conflict of interest that, to my knowledge, has not previously been disclosed to The Lancet Commission … and that surely will be of interest to The Lancet Commission.”
As coincidence would have it, EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak was also on the Lancet Commission back when its COVID Origins task force was initially set up.21 Daszak was eventually “recused”22 from the Origins task force after his conflicts of interest were brought to light, garnering widespread criticism and lack of trust. The task force has now closed down permanently.23
Daszak was also selected by the Chinese to be part of the World Health Organization’s initial task force to investigate the origin of SARS-CoV-2. That task force has also been dismantled due to conflicts of interest and less than credible results, and has been replaced with a new working group.
Like Hotez, Daszak also went on record, early on, dismissing the lab-origin theory as “pure baloney,”24 and he was the mastermind behind the publication of a “scientific consensus statement” signed by 27 scientists, condemning the lab leak theory as “conspiracy theory.”25,26
Overall, it looks like Hotez and Daszak are reading from the same scripts. They’re also clearly funding the same controversial and highly risky research that likely played a major role in the COVID pandemic.
Hotez, One of the Most Shockingly Hateful People in Medicine
Hotez has made headlines a number of times through the years, typically delivering some kind of hateful rhetoric. Hotez has publicly stated he wants to “snuff out” vaccine skeptics,27 for example, and in May 2021 called for cyberwarfare measures to be deployed against people who share vaccine safety information, and he did this in the highly reputable science journal Nature, no less.28
Over the years, Hotez has repeatedly spewed vitriol at parents of vaccine-injured children and called for physical harm and imprisonment of people who don’t agree with the one-size-fits-all vaccine agenda, so it was rather funny when he whined and complained about getting bombarded with “anti-vaxx hate speech” in response to his cyberwarfare call.29
Hotez is not above casting an evil eye on other scientists either. As reported by independent journalist Paul Thacker in an August 9, 2022, Substack article titled, “Peter Hotez Sees Aggression Everywhere But in the Mirror”:30
“Patrolling scientific discourse, Hotez has a knack for discovering ‘antiscience’ in anyone who disagrees with him. Jeffrey Sachs, economics professor at Columbia University and chair of an international commission on COVID-19, charged in a wide-ranging interview31 last week that the National Institutes of Health and allied scientists were impeding an investigation into how the COVID-19 pandemic started.
Since the pandemic’s beginning, virologists have been attacking anyone who asks hard questions about what might have started this outbreak. Predictably … Hotez went on the assault, tweeting that Sachs, as leader of the Lancet Commission, did not represent the views of science.
Much like a Pentagon general wrapping himself in freedom and the flag to demand more federal monies for another foreign war … Hotez has been shrouding himself in the mantle of science to denigrate anyone who questions taxpayer funding for dangerous virus research by the National Institutes of Health.”
Lancet’s COVID Origin Task Force Disbanded Over Dishonesty
Sachs was in fact the one who shut down the Lancet Commission’s COVID Origins task force, a decision he says began with concerns about conflicts of interest between Daszak and the WIV, but in addition to that, Sachs claims he also came to realize that Daszak was “not always telling the truth.” The final straw came when Sachs sacked Daszak and members of the task force suddenly attacked him for being “antiscience.”
Shortly thereafter, a Freedom of Information Act request brought previously hidden NIH documents to light, and Sachs realized that those who were attacking him also had undisclosed ties that made their ability to get to the truth doubtful at best. At that point, he decided to disband the whole task force.
“My own experience was to witness close up how they’re … trying to keep our eyes on something else … away from even asking the questions that we’re talking about,” Sachs said in his Current Affairs interview.32
“Although Sachs did not name specific task force members who assailed him, it’s not hard to imagine who they were,” Thacker writes. Pulling up the archived webpage for the now-defunct task force, we find no fewer than seven members with direct professional and/or financial ties to Daszak: Peter Hume, Gerald Keusch, Supaporn Wacharapluesadee, Danielle Anderson, Linda Saif, Stanley Perlman and Sai Kit Lam. (In his article, Thacker details those ties.)
Hotez in Daszak’s Corner
Curiously, rather than supporting Sachs — or at bare minimum feigning concern about Daszak’s dishonesty and this extraordinary level of conflicts of interest — Hotez has defended Daszak, shooting down any and all critique with a single word: “Antiscience.” As noted by Thacker:33
“Anyone interested in joining the Hotez crusade against antiscience, should be forewarned: his scripture can be difficult to follow. The registry of the sinful often changes, with names of heretics rotating in and out of sermons, depending on political expediency.
In late 2020 when members of QAnon seemed to be hiding under every American bed, Hotez preached that members of the online conspiracy were mixing with anti-vaxxers and neo-Nazis to create a ‘globalizing anti-science confederacy or empire.’
A year later, QAnon fell out of the news, prompting Hotez to refocus … The threat of anti-science aggression now arose from three sources: far right members of Congress and conservative news outlets; an online ‘disinformation dozen’; and Russian propaganda …
Four months later — surprise!!! — Hotez discovered antiscience was more complex and multifaceted. Forgetting to cite Russia, Hotez identified a ‘troubling new expansion of antiscience aggression’ and railed in PLOS Biology against the three new horsemen of the antiscience apocalypse:34
1.Far-right members of the US Congress;
2.The conservative news outlets and;
3.A group of thought leaders who provide intellectual underpinnings to fuel the first two elements.
Cobbling together a set of disconnected thoughts, Hotez centered the threat to science on various accusations made against the NIH’s Anthony Fauci, as well as media reports on Peter Daszak. The essay touched on Nazis — of course!!! — and ended with a plea for swift and positive action that included ‘federal hate-crime protections’ for scientists who were being criticized.”
Who or What Is Hotez Really Fighting For?
In his article, Thacker goes on to review several other bizarre incidences involving Hotez. Most recently, he called scientific experts invited to testify before Congress “fringe elements” testifying and promoting “outlandish conspiracies.” So much for Ph.D.’s and med school. He also accused Sen. Rand Paul of promoting conspiracies.
“With a final flourish, Hotez proposed a new threat to science a couple days back: gain of function ‘conspiracy guys’ allaying themselves with antivaccine activists. But it’s not hard to imagine that Russians and Nazis will make another appearance in a Hotez tweet or essay soon to come,” Thacker concludes.35
Here’s the take-home: The reason Hotez protects Daszak and rails against “antiscience” is because it protects Fauci, and Fauci is the one Hotez is really beholden to. He’s received millions of dollars in grants from the NIH — and so has Daszak and a lot of other people who conduct completely unnecessary and dangerous research.
If Daszak goes down for illegal research, so does Fauci, and with him, the biggest research purse strings in America, if not the world. Ending gain-of-function research would have the same withering effect on funding — and hence careers — which is why anyone who questions the sanity of gain-of-function research is “antiscience” and should be cyberattacked on sight. So, all that hateful rhetoric? It all comes down to protecting self-serving interests. Who would have guessed?
Sources and References
August 23, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, NIH, United States |
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The Trudeau government has announced $4.2 million in additional funding to keep a Windsor-Essex ‘voluntary’ isolation site afloat until March 2023.
In a new release, the Government of Canada said that isolation remains one of the best ways to slow the spread of COVID despite it being over two years since COVID began and there being little to no evidence to support such a position.
The government continues, saying that the isolation site will be used to accommodate foreign agri-workers who can’t find a place to isolate when they enter Canada. “These workers tend to live in close accommodations and work in congregate settings, which makes it difficult to isolate, if required,” reads the news release.
“As Essex continues to welcome thousands of incoming agricultural workers in the coming weeks and months, this critical federal funding will provide spaces for those who are unable to isolate safely in the community,” said Windsor-Tecumseh MP Irek Kusmierczyk.
“Thank you to Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos and the federal government for recognizing the unique challenges our community faces and always standing up for Windsor-Essex.”
According to the news release, the $4.2 million given to the County of Essex will allow the site to operate 50 rooms for foreign agri-workers until March 31, 2023. ($84,000/room)
The site, formerly operated by the City of Windsor, was previously allotted $4.8 million for the same purpose, with funding lasting until June 30, 2022.
While unvaccinated foreign nationals are still prohibited from entering Canada thanks to the country’s vaccine mandate, an exemption exists for agricultural and food processing workers, marine crew workers, those making medical deliveries, and those that work with medical equipment.
However, despite the exemption, agri-workers still have to follow testing and quarantine requirements upon arrival, including a mandatory (not voluntary) quarantine requirement.
Thus, with flu season on the horizon, it looks like foreign-born agri-workers will be the first to feel the squeeze of the government’s renewed effort to bring back COVID measures.
What it would take to convince the government to end such measures permanently, rather than merely suspend them in certain areas, is anyone’s guess, and the government has made no indication they will ever admit the pandemic is over despite criticism internally and abroad.
August 22, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science | Canada, Covid-19 |
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The US judicial system has dismissed yet another lawsuit filed by censored users of Big Tech’s social media platforms, who allege First Amendment free speech violations.
This time it was the US District Court for the Northern District of California that granted a motion to dismiss filed by the defendant, Facebook (Meta). The plaintiff in this case, Richard Rogalinski, sued on First Amendment grounds after a number of his posts about Covid got censored on Facebook.
We obtained a copy of the decision for you here.
One of the posts expressed Rogalinski’s skepticism about the efficacy of masks, saying that he has not seen scientific evidence of their usefulness, but instead, “just talking heads who want to spread fear and control you.”
To this, Facebook’s “fact-checkers” reacted by adding a warning label claiming the post was “missing context.” The same warning was slapped on a post that saw the plaintiff criticize the Covid vaccine rollout.
Finally, a screenshot of a tweet posted by a doctor who promoted the use of hydroxychloroquine got labeled as “false information” by Facebook and removed.
Originally, the Florida resident filed a class action lawsuit in that state, but Facebook moved to either dismiss or transfer it, after which the judge transferred it to California.
In an attempt to fight against the usual defense that massive tech corporations have when censoring content and users – that they are private operations that have the right to do that, while the First Amendment applies only to state actors – Rogalinski mentioned statements made by former White House press secretary Jen Psaki.
In July 2021 – and the California judge noted in the ruling that this happened “after Meta took action against Rogalinski’s posts” – Psaki told a press conference that the Biden administration is “in regular touch” with major social media platforms, and actively flagging content posted on Facebook that the government thinks are “problematic” on misinformation grounds.
Rogalinski argued that the state “chose the targets and content of the statements that it deemed worthy of the defendant’s censorship” which then resulted in censorship by Facebook.
The plaintiff further accused the government and Meta of communicating directly and specifically about the censorship actions and engaging in the act together by sharing responsibility for the two-step process of censorship.
However, the court disagreed, citing several similar cases, including O’Handley v. Padilla, where the ruling reads that the government “can work with a private entity without converting that entity’s later decisions into state action.”
August 21, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Facebook, United States |
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