WHO’S DRIVING THE PANDEMIC EXPRESS?
By Dr David Bell and Emma McArthur | PANDA | September 4, 2022
Sceptics of the growing ‘pandemic prevention, preparedness and response’ (PPR) agenda celebrated recently, heralding a perceived ‘defeat’ of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) controversial amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR). Although the proposed amendments would have undoubtedly expanded the WHO’s powers, this focus on the WHO reflects a narrow view of global health and the pandemic industry. The WHO is almost a bit-player in a much larger game of public-private partnerships and financial incentives that are driving the pandemic gravy train forward.
While the WHO works in the spotlight, the pandemic industry has been growing for over a decade and its expansion accelerates unabated. Other major players such as the World Bank, coalitions of wealthy nations at the G7 and G20 and their corporate partners work in a world less subject to transparency; a world where the rules are more relaxed, and a conflict of interest receives less scrutiny.
If the global health community is to preserve public health, it must urgently understand the wider process that is underway and take action to stop it. The pandemic express must be halted by the weight of evidence and basic principles of public health.
Funding a global pandemic bureaucracy
“The FIF could be a cornerstone in the construction of a truly global PPR system in the context of the International Treaty on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response, sponsored by the World Health Assembly.” (WHO, 19 April 2022)
The world is being told to fear pandemics. Ballooning socio-economic costs of the COVID-19 crisis are touted as justification for increased focus on PPR funding.
Calls for ‘urgent’ collective action to avert the ‘next’ pandemic are predicated on systemic ‘weaknesses’ supposedly exposed by COVID-19. As the WHO steamed ahead with its push for a new pandemic ‘treaty’ during 2021, G20 members agreed to establish a Joint Finance & Health Task Force (JFHTF) to ‘enhance the collaboration and global cooperation on issues relating to pandemic prevention, preparedness and response’.
A World Bank-WHO report prepared for the G20 joint task force estimates that US$ 31.1 billion will be required annually for future PPR, including US $ 10.5 billion per year in new international financing to support perceived funding gaps in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Surveillance-related activities comprise almost half of this, with US $4.1 billion in new funding required to address perceived gaps in the system.
In public health terms, the funding proposed to expand the global PPR infrastructure is enormous. By contrast, the WHO’s approved biennium programme budget for 2022-2023 averages US $3.4 billion per year. The Global Fund, the main international funder of malaria, tuberculosis and AIDS – which have a combined annual mortality of over 2.5 million – currently dispenses just US $ 4 billion annually for the three diseases combined. Unlike COVID-19, these diseases cause significant mortality in lower income countries and in younger age groups, year in, year out.
In April 2022, the G20 agreed to establish a new ‘financial intermediary fund’ (FIF) housed at the World Bank, to address the US $10.5 billion PPR financing gap. The FIF is intended to build upon existing pandemic funding to ‘strengthen health systems and PPR capacities in low-income and middle-income countries and regions’. The WHO is predicted to be the technical lead, landing them with an assured role irrespective of the outcome of current ‘treaty’ discussions.
The establishment of the fund has proceeded with breathtaking speed, and it was approved on June 30 by the World Bank Board of Executive Directors. A short period of consultation precedes an expected launch in September 2022. To date, donations totalling US $1.3 billion dollars have been pledged by governments, the European Commission and various private and non-government interests, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and the Wellcome Trust. The initial areas for the fund are somewhat all-encompassing, including country-level ‘disease surveillance; laboratory systems; emergency communication, coordination and management; critical health workforce capacities; and community engagement’.
In scope, the fund has the appearance of a new ‘World Health Organization’ for pandemics – to add to the existing (and ever-expanding) network of global health organisations such as the WHO; Gavi; the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI); and the Global Fund. But is this increased expenditure on PPR justified? Are the escalating socio-economic costs of COVID-19 due to a failure to act by the global health community, as is widely claimed; or are they due to negligent acts of failure by the WHO and global governments, when they discarded previous evidenced-based pandemic guidelines?
COVID-19: failure to act or acts of failure?
In the debate surrounding the growing pandemic industry, much attention is being directed towards the central role of the WHO. This attention is understandable given the WHO’s position as the agency responsible for global public health and its push for a new international pandemic agreement.
However, the WHO’s handling of the response to COVID-19 creates serious doubts about the competency of its leadership and raises questions about whose needs the organisation is serving.
The WHO’s failure to follow its own pre-existing pandemic guidelines by supporting lockdowns, mass-testing, border closures and the multi-billion-dollar COVAX mass-vaccination program, has generated vast revenue for vaccine manufacturers and the biotech industry, whose corporations and investors are major contributors to the WHO. This approach has crippled economies, damaged existing health programs and further entrenched poverty in low-income countries. Decades of progress in children’s health are likely to be undone, together with the destruction of the long-term prospects of tens of millions of children, through loss of education, forced child marriage and malnutrition. In abandoning its principles of equality and community-driven healthcare, the WHO appears to have become a mere pawn in the PPR game, beholden to those with the real power; the entities who are providing its income and who control the resources now being directed to this area.
Corporatizing global public health
Recently established health agencies devoted to vaccination and pandemics, such as Gavi and CEPI, appear to have been highly influential from the beginning. CEPI, is the brainchild of Bill Gates, Jeremy Farrar (director of the Wellcome Trust), and others at the pro-lockdown World Economic Forum. Launched at Davos in 2017, CEPI was created to help drive the market for epidemic vaccines. It is no secret that Bill Gates has major private financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry, in addition to those of his foundation. This clearly places a question mark over the philanthropic nature of his investments.
CEPI appears to be a forerunner of what the WHO is increasingly becoming – an instrument where individuals and corporations can exert influence and improve returns by hijacking key areas of public health. CEPI’s business model, which involves taxpayers taking most of the financial risk for vaccine research and development whilst big pharma gets all the profits, is notably replicated in the World Bank-WHO report.
Gavi, itself a significant WHO donor that exists solely to increase access to vaccination, is also under direct influence of Bill Gates, via the Bill and Melinda Gate Foundation. Gavi’s involvement (alongside CEPI) with the WHO’s COVAX program, which diverted vast resources into COVID-19 mass-vaccination in countries where COVID-19 is a relatively small disease burden, suggests the organisation is tied more strongly to vaccine sales than genuine public health outcomes.
Pandemic funding – ignoring the big picture?
At first glance, increased PPR funding to LMICs may seem a public good. The World Bank-WHO report claims that ‘the frequency and impact of pandemic-prone pathogens are increasing.’ However, this is belied by reality, as the WHO lists only 5 ‘pandemics’ in the past 120 years, with the highest mortality occurring in the 1918-19 H1N1 (‘Spanish’) influenza pandemic, before antibiotics and modern medicine. Apart from COVID-19, the ‘Swine Flu’ outbreak in 2009-10, which killed less people than a normal flu year, is the only ‘pandemic’ in the past 50 years.
Such a myopic focus on pandemic risk will do little to address the most serious causes of illness and death, and it can be expected to make matters worse for people experiencing the most extreme forms of socio-economic disadvantage.
Governments of low-income countries will be ‘incentivised’ to divert resources to PPR related programs, further increasing the growing debt crisis. A more centralised, top-down public health system will lack the flexibility to meet local and regional needs. Transferring support from higher burden diseases, and drivers of economic growth, has a direct impact on mortality in these countries, particularly for children.
The WHO-World Bank report states that the pillars of the global PPR architecture must be built on the ‘foundational principles of equity, inclusion and solidarity’. As severe pandemics occur less than once per generation, increased spending on PPR in LMICs clearly violates these basic principles as it diverts scarce resources away from areas of regional need, to address the perceived health priorities of wealthier populations. As demonstrated by the damage caused by the COVID-19 response, in both high and low-income countries, the overall harm of resource diversion from areas of greater need is likely to be universal. In failing to address such ‘opportunity costs’, recommendations by the WHO, the World Bank, and other PPR partners cannot be validly based in public health; nor are they a basis for overall societal benefit. .
One thing is certain. Those who will gain from this expanding pandemic gravy train will be those who gained from the response to COVID-19.
The pandemic gravy train – following the money
The new World Bank fund risks compounding existing problems in the global public health system and further compromising the WHO’s autonomy; although it is stated that the WHO will have a central ‘strategic role’, funds will be channelled through the World Bank. In essence, it financially side-steps the accountability measures at the WHO, where questions of relative worth can be raised more easily.
The proposed structure of the FIF will pave the way for organisations with strong ties to pharmaceutical and other biotech industries, such as CEPI and Gavi, to gain even greater influence over global PPR, particularly if they are appointed ‘implementing entities’ – the operational arms that will carry out the FIF’s work program at country, regional and global level.
Although the initial implementing entities for the FIF will be UN agencies, multilateral development banks and the IMF, plans are already underway to accredit these other international health entities. Investments are likely to be heavily skewed towards biotechnological solutions, such as disease surveillance and vaccine development, at the cost of other, more pressing, public health interventions.
Protecting public health rather than private wealth
If the world truly wants to address the systemic weakness exposed by COVID-19, it must first understand that this pandemic gravy train is not new; the foundations for the destruction of community- and country-based global public health began long before COVID-19.
It is unarguable that COVID-19 has proved to be a lucrative cash cow for vaccine manufacturers and the biotech industry. The public-private partnership model that now dominates global health enabled vast resources to be channelled into the pockets of corporate giants, through programs they directly influence, or even run. CEPI’s ‘100 days Mission’ to make ‘safe and effective’ vaccines against ‘viral threats’ within 100 days – to ‘give the world a fighting chance of containing a future outbreak before it spreads to become a global pandemic’ – is a permit for pharmaceutical companies to appropriate public money on an unprecedented scale, based on their own assessments of risk.
The self-fulfilment of the ‘increasing frequency of pandemic’ prophecy will be ensured by the push for increased disease surveillance – a priority area for the FIF. To quote the World Bank-WHO report:
“COVID-19 highlighted the need to connect surveillance and alert systems into a regional and global network to detect zoonotic transmission events, raise the alarm early to enable a swift public health response, and accelerate the development of medical countermeasures.”
Like many claims being made about COVID-19, this claim has no evidence base – the origins of COVID-19 remain highly controversial and the WHO’s data demonstrate that pandemics are uncommon, whatever their origin. None of the ‘countermeasures’ have been shown to significantly reduce the spread of COVID-19, which is now globally endemic.
Increased surveillance will naturally identify more ‘potentially dangerous pathogens’, as variants of viruses arise constantly in nature. Consequently, the world faces a never-ending game of seek and ye shall find, with never-ending profits for industry. Formerly once per generation, this industry will make ‘pandemics’ a routine part of life, where rapid fire vaccines are mandated for every new disease or variant that arrives.
Ultimately, this new pandemic fund will help to hook low- and middle-income countries into the growing global pandemic bureaucracy. Greater centralisation of public health will do little to address the genuine health needs of people in these countries. If the pandemic gravy train is allowed to keep growing, the poor will get poorer, and people will die in increasing numbers from more prevalent, preventable diseases. The rich will continue to profit, while fuelling the main driver of ill-health in lower income countries – poverty.
Dr. David Bell is a clinical and public health physician with a PhD in population health and background in internal medicine, modelling and epidemiology of infectious disease. Previously, he was Director of the Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in the USA, Programme Head for Malaria and Acute Febrile Disease at FIND in Geneva, and coordinating malaria diagnostics strategy with the World Health Organisation. He is a member of the Executive Committee of PANDA.
Australian Academy of Science demands social media platforms ban climate “misinformation”
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | September 3, 2022
In a public submission to tech giants in the 2022 review of the Australian Code of Practice on Misinformation and Disinformation, the Australian Academy of Science and the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering called on online platforms to crack down on “climate denialism misinformation.”
The academies want online platforms to fight what it calls “climate denialism” by “actively promoting reliable, peer-reviewed, and appropriately labeled material from trusted sources.”
The academies’ submission noted that the Code of Practice on Misinformation and Disinformation “excludes professional news content that is published under a publicly available editorial code.” It adds that the exclusion “allows climate science denialism and other misinformation to flourish, either through lack of enforcement of the disinformation provision of the code or failure of news outlets’ misinformation to meet the higher bar of being considered disinformation.”
The submission singles out Sky News Australia as a “key source of climate misinformation globally,” citing a recent report from the UK titled “Deny, Deceive, Delay.”
The paper refers to “political right-wing top influencers” as being part of an “intellectual dark web.” It names prominent staff at Sky News Australia, including Rita Panahi, as well as other skeptics from Europe, the UK, and North America.
“While climate issues are not part of their [conservative pundits] main content strategy, they nevertheless engage in frequent criticism of their respective governments’ environmental policies, attack or ridicule prominent climate activists, or employ narratives outlined in the previous section of this report,” the paper reads.
The Toxic Ten paper attacks online platforms for failing to censor climate change denialism and taking money from organizations that profit from fossil fuels.
“It is the greatest crisis ever faced by our species… We are calling on Facebook and Google to stop promoting and funding climate denial, start labeling it as misinformation, and stop giving the advantages of their enormous platform to lies and misinformation. As long as Facebook and Google carry on doing business with climate deniers, they cannot claim to be ‘green.’ They owe it to us and the planet we all share, to deliver.”
The academies also called on online platforms to crack down on health misinformation, even though health experts have continued to change their minds on what is actually “misinformation,” especially information related to COVID-19.
It Was Birx. All Birx.
BY DEBBIE LERMAN | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | AUGUST 31, 2022
In two previous articles, I looked into the shady circumstances surrounding Deborah Birx’s appointment to the White House Coronavirus Response Task Force and the laughable lack of actual science behind the claims she used to justify her testing, masking, distancing and lockdown policies.
Considering all that, the questions arise: Who was actually in charge of Deborah Birx and whom was she working with?
But first: Who cares?
Here’s why I think it’s important: If we can show that Birx and the others who imposed totalitarian anti-scientific testing, masking, social distancing, and lockdown policies, knew from the get-go that these policies would not work against an airborne respiratory virus, and nevertheless they imposed them FOR REASONS OTHER THAN PUBLIC HEALTH, then there is no longer acceptable justification for any of those measures.
Furthermore, whatever mountains of post-facto bad science were concocted to rationalize these measures are also completely bunk. Instead of having to go through each ridiculous pseudo-study to demonstrate its scientific worthlessness, we can throw the whole steaming pile in the garbage heap of history, where it belongs, and move on with our lives.
In my admittedly somewhat naive optimism, I also hope that by exposing the non-scientific, anti-public-health origins of the Covid catastrophe, we may lower the chances of it happening again.
And now, back to Birx.
She did not work for or with Trump
We know Birx was definitely not working with President Trump, although she was on a task force ostensibly representing the White House. Trump did not appoint her, nor did the leaders of the Task Force, as Scott Atlas recounts in his revelatory book on White House pandemic lunacy, A Plague Upon Our House. When Atlas asked Task Force members how Birx was appointed, he was surprised to find that “no one seemed to know.” (Atlas, p. 82)
Yet, somehow, Deborah Birx – a former military AIDS researcher and government AIDS ambassador with no training, experience or publications in epidemiology or public health policy – found herself leading a White House Task Force on which she had the power to literally subvert the policy prescriptions of the President of the United States.
As she describes in The Silent Invasion, Birx was shocked when “at the halfway point of our 15 Days to Slow the Spread campaign, President Trump stated that he hoped to lift all restrictions by Easter Sunday.” (Birx, p. 142) She was even more dismayed when “mere days after the president had announced the thirty-day extension of the Slow the Spread campaign to the American public” he became enraged and told her “‘We will never shut down the country again. Never.’” (Birx, p. 152)
Clearly, Trump was not on board with the lockdowns, and every time he was forced to go along with them, he became enraged and lashed out at Birx – the person he believed was forcing him.
Birx laments that “from here on out, everything I worked toward would be harder—in some cases, impossible,” and goes on to say she would basically have to work behind the scenes against the President, having “to adapt to effectively protect the country from the virus that had already silently invaded it.” (Birx, pp. 153-4)
Which brings us back to the question: Where did Birx get the nerve and, more mysteriously, the authority to so blithely act in direct opposition to the President she was supposed to serve, on matters affecting the lives of the entire population of the United States?
Atlas regrets what he thinks was President Trump’s “massive error in judgment.” He argues that Trump acted “against his own gut feeling” and “delegated authority to medical bureaucrats, and then he failed to correct that mistake.” (Atlas, p. 308)
Although I believe massive errors in judgment were not unusual for President Trump, I disagree with Atlas on this one. In the case of the Coronavirus Response Task Force, I actually think there was something much more insidious at play.
Trump had no power over Birx or pandemic response
Dr. Paul Alexander, an epidemiologist and research methodology expert who was recruited to advise the Trump administration on pandemic policy, tells a shocking story in an interview with Jeffrey Tucker, in which bureaucrats at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and lawyers from the Justice Department told him to resign, despite direct orders from President Trump and the White House: “We want you to understand that President Trump has no power,” they reportedly told Alexander. “He cannot tell us what to do.”
Alexander believes these bureaucrats represented the “deep state” which, he was told repeatedly, had decided first not to hire or pay him, and then to get rid of him. Alexander also writes in an upcoming exposé that the entrenched government bureaucracy, particularly at the NIH, CDC, and WHO, used the pandemic response to doom President Trump’s chances for reelection.
Was the entire anti-scientific totalitarian pandemic response, all over the world, a political maneuver to get rid of Trump? It’s possible. I would contend, however, that the politics were only a sideshow to the main event: the engineered virus lab leak and coverup. I believe the “deep state” Alexander repeatedly butted up against was not just the entrenched bureaucracy, but something even deeper and more powerful.
Which brings us back to deep state frontwoman Deborah Birx.
After lamenting Trump’s delegation of authority to “medical bureaucrats,” Scott Atlas also hints at forces beyond Trump’s control. “The Task Force was called ‘the White House Coronavirus Task Force,’” Atlas notes, “but it was not in sync with President Trump. It was directed by Vice President Pence.” (Atlas, p. 306) Yet, whenever Atlas tried to raise questions about Birx’s policies, he was directed to speak with Pence, who then failed to ever address anything with Birx:
“Given that the VP was in charge of the Task Force, shouldn’t the bottom-line advice emanating from it comport with the policies of the administration? But he would never speak with Dr. Birx at all. In fact, (Marc) Short [Pence’s chief of staff], clearly representing the VP’s interests above all else, would do the opposite, telephoning others in the West Wing, imploring friends of mine to tell me to avoid alienating Dr. Birx.” (Atlas, p. 165-6)
Recall that Pence replaced Alex Azar as Task Force director on February 26, 2020 and Birx’s appointment as coordinator, at the instigation of Asst. National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger, came on February 27th. Subsequent to those two appointments, it was Birx who was effectively in charge of United States coronavirus policy.
What was driving that policy, once she took over? As Birx writes, it was the NSC (National Security Council) that appointed her, through Pottinger, and it was her job to “reinforce their warnings” – which, I continue to speculate, were related to the accidental release of an enhanced pandemic potential pathogen from a US-funded lab in Wuhan.
Trump was probably made aware of this, as evidenced not just by his repeated mentions, but by what Time Magazine called his uncharacteristic refusal to explain why he believed it. The magazine quotes Trump saying “I can’t tell you that,” when asked about his belief in the lab leak. And he repeats, “I’m not allowed to tell you that.”
Why in the world was the President of the United States not allowed to override AIDS researcher/diplomat Birx on lockdown policies nor explain to the public why he believed there was a lab leak?
The answer, I believe, is that Trump was uncharacteristically holding back because he was told (by Birx, Pottinger and the military/intelligence/biosecurity interests for whom they worked) that if he did not go along with their policies and proclamations, millions of Americans would die. Why? Because SARS-CoV-2 was not just another zoonotic virus. It was an engineered virus that needed to be contained at all costs.
As Dr. Atlas repeatedly notes with great dismay: “the Task Force doctors were fixated on a single-minded view that all cases of COVID must be stopped or millions of Americans would die.” (Atlas, p. 155-6) [BOLDFACE ADDED]
That was the key message, wielded with great force and success against Trump, his administration, the press, the states, and the public, to suppress any opposition to lockdown policies. Yet the message makes no sense if you believe SARS-CoV-2 is a virus that jumped from a bat to a person in a wet market, severely affecting mostly people who are old and debilitated. It only makes sense if you think, or know, that the virus was engineered to be especially contagious or deadly (even if its behavior in the population at any given moment might not justify that level of alarm).
But, again, before indulging in more speculation, let’s get back to Birx. Who else did she (and her hidden handlers) bulldoze?
She dictated policy to the entire Trump administration
In his book, Atlas observes with puzzlement and consternation that, although Pence was the nominal director of the Task Force, Deborah Birx was the person in charge: “Birx’s policies were enacted throughout the country, in almost every single state, for the entire pandemic—this cannot be denied; it cannot be deflected.” (Atlas, p. 222)
Atlas is “dumbstruck at the lack of leadership in the White House,” in which, “the president was saying one thing while the White House Task Force representative was saying something entirely different, indeed contradictory” and, as he notes, “no one ever set her [Birx] straight on her role.” (Atlas, p. 222-223)
Not only that, but no matter how much Trump, or anyone in the administration, disagreed with Birx, “the White House was held hostage to the anticipated reaction of Dr. Birx” and she “was not to be touched, period.” (Atlas, p. 223)
One explanation for her untouchableness, Atlas suggests, is that Birx and her policies became so popular with the press and public that the administration did not want to “rock the boat” by replacing her before the election. This explanation, however, as Atlas himself realizes, crumbles in the face of what we know about Trump and the media’s hostility towards him:
“They [Trump’s advisors] had convinced him to do exactly the opposite of what he would naturally do in any other circumstance—to disregard his own common sense and allow grossly incorrect policy advice to prevail. … This president, widely known for his signature ‘You’re fired!’ declaration, was misled by his closest political intimates. All for fear of what was inevitable anyway—skewering from an already hostile media.” (Atlas, p. 300-301)
I would suggest, again, the reason for the seemingly inexplicable lack of gumption on Trump’s part to get rid of Birx was not politics, but behind-the-scenes machinations of the (to coin a moniker) lab leak cabal.
Who else was part of this cabal with its hidden agendas and oversized policy influence? Our attention naturally turns to the other members of the Task Force who were presumably co-engineering lockdown policies with Birx. Surprising revelations emerge.
There was no troika. No Birx-Fauci lockdown plan. It was all Birx.
It is universally assumed, by both those in favor and those opposed to the Task Force’s policy prescriptions, that Drs. Deborah Birx, Tony Fauci (head of NIAID at the time) and Bob Redfield (then director of the CDC) worked together to formulate those policies.
The stories told by Birx herself and Task Force infiltrator Scott Atlas suggest otherwise.
Like everyone else, at the onset of his book, Atlas asserts: “The architects of the American lockdown strategy were Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx. With Dr. Robert Redfield… they were the most influential medical members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force.” (Atlas, p. 22)
But as Atlas’s story unfolds, he presents a more nuanced understanding of the power dynamics on the Task Force:
“Fauci’s role surprised me the most. Most of the country, indeed the entire world, assumed that Fauci occupied a directorial role in the Trump administration’s Task Force. I had also thought that from viewing the news,” Atlas admits. However, he continues, “The public presumption of Dr. Fauci’s leadership role on the Task Force itself… could not have been more incorrect. Fauci held massive sway with the public, but he was not in charge of anything specific on the Task Force. He served mainly as a channel for updates on the trials of vaccines and drugs.” (p. 98) [BOLDFACE ADDED]
By the end of the book, Atlas fully revises his initial assessment, strongly emphasizing that, in fact, it was primarily and predominantly Birx who designed and disseminated the lockdown policies:
“Dr. Fauci held court in the public eye on a daily basis, so frequently that many misconstrue his role as being in charge. However, it was really Dr. Birx who articulated Task Force policy. All the advice from the Task Force to the states came from Dr. Birx. All written recommendations about their on-the-ground policies were from Dr. Birx. Dr. Birx conducted almost all the visits to states on behalf of the Task Force.” (Atlas, p. 309-10) [BOLDFACE ADDED]
It may sound jarring and unlikely, given the public perception of Fauci, as Atlas notes. But in Birx’s book the same unexpected picture emerges.
Methinks the lady doth protest too much
As with her bizarrely self-contradictory statements about how she got hired, and her blatantly bogus scientific claims, Birx’s story about her mind-melded closeness with Fauci and Redfield falls apart upon closer examination.
In her book, Birx repeatedly claims she trusts Redfield and Fauci “implicitly to help shape America’s response to the novel coronavirus.” (Birx, p. 31) She says she has “every confidence, based on past performance, that whatever path the virus took, the United States and the CDC would be on top of the situation.” (Birx, p. 32)
Then, almost immediately, she undermines the credibility of those she supposedly trusts, quoting Matt Pottinger as saying she “‘should take over Azar, Fauci, and Redfield’s jobs, because you’re such a better leader than they are.’” (Birx, p. 38-9)
Perhaps she was just giving herself a little pat on the back, one might innocently suggest. But wait. There’s so much more.
Birx claims that in a meeting on January 31 “everything Drs. Fauci and Redfield said about their approach made sense based on the information available to me at that point,” even though “neither of them spoke” about the two issues she was most obsessed with: “asymptomatic silent spread [and] the role testing should play in the response.” (Birx, p. 39)
Then, although she says she “didn’t read too much into this omission,” (p. 39) just two weeks later, “as early as February 13” Birx again mentions “a lack of leadership and direction in the CDC and the White House Coronavirus Task Force.” (p. 54)
So does Debi trust Tony and Bob’s leadership or does she not? The only answer is more self-contradictory obfuscation.
Birx is horrified that nobody is taking the virus as seriously as they should: “then I saw Tony and Bob repeating that the risk to Americans was low,” she reports. “On February 8, Tony said that the chances of contracting the virus were ‘minuscule.’” And, “on February 29, he said, ‘Right now, at this moment, there is no need to change anything you’re doing on a day-to-day basis.’” (Birx, p. 57)
This does not seem like the kind of leader Birx can trust. She half-heartedly tries to excuse Redfield and Fauci, saying “I now believe that Bob and Tony’s words had spoken to the limited data they had access to from the CDC,” and then, in another whiplash moment, “maybe they had data in the United States that I did not.”
Did Tony and Bob provide less dire warnings because they had insufficient data or because they had more data than Birx did? She never clarifies, but regardless, she assures us that she “trusted them” and “felt reassured every day with them on the task force.” (Birx, p. 57)
If I was worried that the virus was not being taken seriously enough, Birx’s reports on Bob and Tony would not be very reassuring, to say the least.
Apparently, Birx herself felt that way too. “I was somewhat disappointed that Bob and Tony weren’t seeing the situation as I was,” she says, when they disagreed with her alarmist assessments of asymptomatic spread. But, she adds, “at least their number supported my belief that this new disease was far more asymptomatic than the flu. I wouldn’t have to push them as far as I needed to push the CDC.” (Birx, p. 78)
Is someone who disagrees with your assessment to the point that you need to push them in your direction also someone you “implicitly trust” to lead the US through the pandemic?
Apparently, not so much.
Although she supposedly trusts Redfield and sleeps well at night knowing he’s on the Task Force, Birx has nothing but disdain and criticism for the CDC – the organization Redfield leads.
“On aggressive testing I planned to have Tom Frieden [CDC director under Obama] help bring the CDC along,” she recounts. “Like me, the CDC wanted to do everything to stop the virus, but the agency needed to align with us on aggressive testing and silent spread.” (p. 122) Which makes one wonder: If she was so closely aligned with Redfield, the head of the CDC, why did Birx need to bring in a former director – in a direct challenge to the sitting one – to “bring the CDC along?” Who is “us” if not Birx, Fauci and Redfield?
Masks were another issue of apparent contention. Birx is frustrated because the CDC, led by her “we’ve-got-each-other’s-back” bestie, Bob Redfield (Birx, p. 31), will not issue strict enough masking guidelines. In fact, she repeatedly throws Bob’s organization under the bus, basically accusing them of causing American deaths: “For many weeks and months to come,” she writes, “I fretted over how many lives could have been saved if the CDC had trusted the public to understand that …masks would do no harm and could potentially do a great deal of good.” (Birx, p. 86)
Apparently, Fauci was not on board with the masking either, as Birx says that “getting the doctors, including Tom [Frieden] and Tony, to be in complete agreement with me about asymptomatic spread was slightly less of a priority. As with masks, I knew I could return to that issue as soon as I got their buy-in on our recommendations.” (Birx, p. 123)
Who is making “our recommendations” if not Birx, Fauci and Redfield?
The myth of the troika
Whether or not she trusted them (and it’s hard to believe, based on her own accounts, that she did), it was apparently very important to Birx that she, Fauci and Redfield appear as a single entity with no disagreements whatsoever.
When Scott Atlas, an outsider not privy to whatever power plays were happening on the Task Force, came in, his presence apparently rattled Birx (Atlas, p. 83-4), and for good reason. Atlas immediately noticed strange goings-on. In his book, he repeatedly uses words like “bizarre,” “odd” and “uncanny” to describe how Fauci, Redfield and Birx behaved. Most notably, they never ever questioned or disagreed with one another in Task Force meetings. Not ever.
“They shared thought processes and views to an uncanny level,” Atlas writes, then reiterates that “there was virtually no disagreement among them.” What he saw “was an amazing consistency, as though there were an agreed-upon complicity” (Atlas, pp. 99-100). They “virtually always agreed, literally never challenging one another.” (p. 101) [BOLDFACE ADDED]
An agreed-upon complicity? Uncanny agreement? Based on all of the disagreements reported by Birx and her repeated questioning and undermining of Bob and Tony’s authority, how can this be explained?
I would contend that in order to obscure the extent to which Birx alone was in charge of Task Force policy, the other doctors were compelled to present a facade of complete agreement. Otherwise, as with any opposition to, or even discussion of, potential harms of lockdown policies, “millions of Amercans would die.”
This assessment is strengthened by Atlas’s ongoing bafflement and distress at how the Task Force – and particularly the doctors/scientists who were presumably formulating policy based on data and research – functioned:
“I never saw them act like scientists, digging into the numbers to verify the very trends that formed the basis of their reactive policy pronouncements. They did not act like researchers, using critical thinking to dissect the published science or differentiate a correlation from a cause. They certainly did not show a physician’s clinical perspective. With their single-minded focus, they did not even act like public health experts.” (Atlas, p. 176)
Atlas was surprised, indeed stunned, that “No one on the Task Force presented any data” to justify lockdowns or to contradict the evidence on lockdown harms that Atlas presented. (Atlas, p. 206) More specifically, no data or research was ever presented (except by Atlas) to contradict or question anything Birx said. “Until I arrived,” Atlas observes, “no one had challenged anything she said during her six months as the Task Force Coordinator.” (Atlas, p. 234) [BOLDFACE ADDED]
Atlas cannot explain what he’s witnessing. “That was all part of the puzzle of the Task Force doctors,” he states. “There was a lack of scientific rigor in meetings I attended. I never saw them question the data. The striking uniformity of opinion by Birx, Redfield, Fauci, and (Brett) Giroir [former Admiral and Task Force “testing czar”] was not anything like what I had seen in my career in academic medicine.” (Atlas, p. 244)
How can we explain the puzzle of this uncanny apparent complicity by the Task Force troika?
Methinks the intelligence agent also doth protest too much
An interesting hint comes from the string of anecdotes comprising Matthew Lawrence’s New Yorker article “The Plague Year.” Lawrence writes that Matt Pottinger (the NSC liaison to Birx) tried to convince Task Force members that masking could stop the virus “‘dead in its tracks’” but his views “stirred up surprisingly rigid responses from the public-health contingent.” Lawrence continues to report that “In Pottinger’s opinion, when Redfield, Fauci, Birx, and (Stephen) Hahn spoke, it could sound like groupthink,” implying that those were the members of the “public-health contingent” who did not agree with Pottinger’s masking ideas.
But wait. We just noted Birx’s frustration, indeed deep regret, that the CDC led by Redfield, as well as Fauci (and even Frieden) did not agree with her ideas on asymptomatic spread and masking. So why does Pottinger imply that she and the “public-health contingent” of the Task Force were group-thinking this issue, against him?
I would suggest that the only way to make sense of these contradictions within Birx’s narrative and between her, Atlas and Pottinger’s stories, is if we understand “align with us” and “our recommendations” to refer not to the perceived Birx-Fauci-Redfield troika, but to the Birx-Pottinger-lab leak cabal that was actually running the show.
In fact, Birx and Pottinger put so much effort into insisting on the solidarity of the troika, even when it contradicts their own statements, that the question inevitably arises: what do they have to gain from it? The benefit of insisting that Birx was allied with Fauci, Redfield and the “public-health contingent” on the Task Force, I would argue, is that this deflects attention from the Birx-Pottinger-cabal non-public-health alliance.
The explanation of Atlas’s perceived “puzzle of the Task Force doctors” that makes the most sense to me is that Deborah Birx, in contrast and often in opposition to the other doctors on the Task Force, represented the interests of what I’m calling the lab leak cabal: those not just in the US but in the international intelligence/biosecurity community who needed to cover up a potentially devastating lab leak and who wanted to impose draconian lockdown measures such as the world had never known.
Who exactly they were and why they needed lockdowns are subjects of ongoing investigations.
In the meantime, once we separate Birx from Trump, from the rest of the administration, and from the others on the Task Force, we can see clearly that her single-minded and scientifically nonsensical emphasis on silent spread and asymptomatic testing was geared toward a single goal: to scare everyone so much that lockdowns would appear to be a sensible policy. This is the same strategy that was, uncannily in my opinion, implemented almost to the letter in nearly every other country around the world. But that’s for the next article.
I’ll close this chapter of the Birx riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, with Scott Atlas’s report of his parting conversation with President Trump:
“‘You were right about everything, all along the way,’” Trump said to Atlas. “‘And you know what? You were also right about something else. Fauci wasn’t the biggest problem of all of them. It really wasn’t him. You were right about that.’ I found myself nodding as I held the phone in my hand,” Atlas says. “I knew exactly whom he was talking about.” (Atlas, p. 300)
And now, so do we.
Debbie Lerman has a degree in English from Harvard. She is a retired science writer and a practicing artist in Philadelphia, PA.
Public Health Agency of Canada is hiring security guards for ‘quarantine facilities’
The Counter Signal | August 31, 2022
The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) has listed openings for security guards for its “quarantine facilities” in Toronto, York and Halton, Ontario.
The posting requires “risk management and security services for Designated Quarantine Facilities in Ontario.”
The job posting was published last week and will close on September 9 at 2 p.m. EST.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the government of Canada created “Designated Quarantine Facilities” for Canadians unable to quarantine at home after international travel due to proximity with family members. The public became aware of these facilities following reports of Canadians taken from the airport in unmarked vehicles and forcibly placed in a government facility.
In most cases, the facility was a modified hotel. Travellers were typically required to stay in the room for three nights or until they received a negative COVID test.
Quarantine facilities were manned by hotel staff and security guards.
According to the Government of Canada website, “Travellers arriving in Canada who do not have a suitable place to quarantine or isolate may be referred to a designated quarantine facility, upon the direction of a quarantine officer.”
During a stay, travellers are “required to remain in your room until you receive permission and a specific time to leave from a Quarantine Officer at the facility.”
Horror stories frequently emerged from those who stayed at the facilities. Those in forced quarantine were given little to eat and were not allowed to order food. Complaints arose that facilities didn’t comply with specific dietary concerns.
In Quebec, one woman was sexually assaulted during her stay at a facility.
Later in the pandemic, the government required anyone entering Canada by air travel to quarantine at a Designated Quarantine Facilities, costing travellers around $300 per night. Canadians who crossed the border by land were largely exempt from this policy.
The job posting comes as most Canadians have received two doses of a Health Canada-approved COVID-19 vaccine. Federal and provincial governments have dangled COVID-19 vaccination status as a means to return to normal.
Yet, even Canadians with two doses of the vaccine were not exempt from the government’s stringent travel measures during the pandemic, including a stay at a government hotel.
In August, Ottawa announced funding for a “safe voluntary isolation site” in the Windsor-Essex region in Ontario. The government said the isolation site will be used to accommodate foreign agri-workers who can’t find a place to isolate when they enter Canada.
The Historic Suppression of Scientific Debate in COVID
Never before in modern history have entire topics in Medicine been actively prevented from discussion in public forums
By Pierre Kory, MD, MPA | Medical Musings | August 30, 2022
I started reading about the definition, history, and legal background of censorship. The entry on Wikipedia (ugh) was quite revealing:
Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information. This may be done on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, or sensitive. Censorship can be conducted by governments, private institutions and other controlling bodies.
But get this, look at the examples of topics that have traditionally been censored:
General censorship occurs for a variety of claimed reasons including national security, to control obscenity, pornography, and hate speech, to protect children or other vulnerable groups, to promote or restrict political or religious views, and to prevent slander and libel.
Note that “scientific opinion” is not on there. Because scientific data nor interpretations of that data, should ever be considered offensive. You can argue that wrong interpretations of data can be harmful, but debate is how you resolve that, not censorship! Science literally rests on open debate and the sharing of data and exchanging of interpretations amongst not only experts, but the wider public.
Now, also from Wikipedia:
Censorship has been criticized throughout history for being unfair and hindering progress. Censorship is counterproductive as it prevents the censored topic from being discussed. Those who impose censorship must consider what they censor to be true, as individuals believing themselves to be correct would welcome the opportunity to disprove those with opposing views (just ask Steve Kirsch).
But again, science is not on there as a category of discourse to censor. Although history is replete with attempts to censor individuals with scientific views contrary to established orthodoxy, in all the instances I can think of, the person being censored was eventually proven correct! Galileo (earth is round), Seimelwess (importance of handwashing), Scopes (teaching of evolutionary theory) etc.
Yet, in the last 2 years we have undergone a massive censorship of the discussion and sharing of scientific data in public forums. I believe this was the proximate cause of what can now only be viewed as humanitarian catastrophes resulting from 1) the suppression of knowledge of early treatment with effective repurposed drugs and 2) the suppression of data showing the toxicity, lethality, and ineffectiveness of the vaccines.
This period should serve as one of the most damning arguments against censorship.
We were not allowed to openly discuss our data or our interpretations and applications of that scientific data (i.e. scientific opinions) in major media or social media. The journalist Matt Taibbi called me “the ghost of the internet” because whenever I had scientific discussions with folks who are now dear friends and colleagues, their content and podcasts were de-platformed or demonetized (as in the case of my dear friend Dr. Been), and/or they immediately founds their posted videos of those discussions taken down, like immediately (the speed in which I “disappeared” was astonishingly fast at times). All because we had a scientific discussion where I had shared data and interpretations of that data. I was honored with the opportunity to make my case in front of some truly expert and deep thinkers. Folks who could challenge me, ask questions, express concerns or offer alternative interpretations or hypotheses. I would say that the only problem with those discussions is that the data in support of ivermectin was just so overwhelming. It is a drug with proven efficacy in COVID. Note that conclusion is shared by some of the most highly published doctors in the history of our specialty (the FLCCC) as well as by a group of some of the top evidence-based medicine researchers in the world (Tess Lawrie, Andrew Bryant, Edmund Fordham et al. of EBMc2).
And therein lay the problem. The data could not be debated because any other interpretation than ivermectin being effective was pretty much indefensible in the face of a mountain of repeatedly and almost universally supportive data from myriad sources. So, instead, such discussions were banned from wider public view. Strong move. I think the only thing that saved a good portion of humanity was that individual and organizational websites (like the FLCCC’s, AAPS, c19early.com, and others) were largely secure and not taken down or booted off of hosting servers. But I imagine they could have been.
So, in COVID, Big Pharma and Big Government literally got media companies to shut down debate and discussion on certain topics like HCQ and IVM and vaccine toxicity and ineffectiveness. See YouTube’s community guidelines, which are so absurd, I literally turn purple with rage every time I read it. But it is also sort of comical because they literally put it in writing, right out in the open, plain to see, essentially saying “thou shalt not discuss these medicines on our platform.” And they did it while their efficacy was still being debated. In a global pandemic with thousands dying each day. Safe medicines.
Check it out:
Insane. Crazy town. Clown world. Now, keep in mind that these “guidelines” restricting any discussion of the efficacy, even potential efficacy during a global pandemic, were employed by every major media company in the world with few exceptions, like Trial Site News (although massively impactful, not yet “major media”) and maybe on a few occasions Fox News or some conservative radio hosts.
But all was not lost. Independent podcasters and some radio hosts saved the day, contributing to the dissemination of life-saving information to millions of people in this country and world. Folks like Bret Weinstein, Joe Rogan, John Campbell, Dr. Been, Dr. Mercola, Greg Hunter, Vicki McKenna and countless others. But the print and TV media giants did not have that policy written and made public for all to see (and laugh at). It was under the table, understood by all media that ivermectin should instead only be referred to as a horse dewormer. Not subtle. Alex Berenson’s recent sharing of evidence that the White House was behind his Twitter de-platforming shows how high up the censorship was coming from.
So you literally had the government and Pharma pressuring all the media and social media giants (all of them – Facebook, Linked in, Instagram, Twitter etc) to outlaw, yes, outlaw discussion of even the possibility these medications were effective. Never, ever forget this. Note how YouTube wrote that their guidelines were based on WHO recommendations. Control the top, you control everything beneath it. Read my detailed deep dive uncovering the corruption of ivermectin at the WHO here and here.
Now, one of the reasons Paul Marik was such a famous critical care doctor is that he had long been successful at debunking prevailing orthodoxy supporting standard of care practices in our specialty. He did it via lecturing and debating at national conferences and in publications within medical journals. It was how he and I met, when he congratulated me on an editorial I wrote in a major journal, where I argued against using ultrasound to measure the size of the inferior vena cava to estimate central venous pressure (CVP), largely drawing on the science and rationale he had compiled and published.
Talking to Paul this morning, he told me he is most proud of his work (note he accomplished this feat on his own) in teaching a global generation of critical care doctors that measuring the CVP to estimate the fluid needs of a patient was useless outside of a very narrow set of circumstances like hemorrhage (in those circumstances though, you don’t need the CVP to estimate fluid needs as the patients vitals and clinical presentation will tell you all you need to do.
You have to understand that the CVP was used for decades by critical care doctors in ICU patients who were in states of shock (dangerously low blood pressure). It was the standard of care in ICU’s. Paul did a deep dive into the published literature and especially into the complex physiology of the factors which influence CVP and wrote pretty much the coolest and most impactful paper ever called “Does Central Venous Pressure Predict Fluid Responsiveness?: A Systematic Review of the Literature and the Tale of Seven Mares.” The papers most memorable sentence was “the only study we could find demonstrating the utility of CVP in predicting volume status was performed in seven standing, awake mares undergoing controlled hemorrhage.” Brilliant. Funny.
His paper triggered fierce and I mean, fierce debate in critical care… for years. Reversing established orthodoxy in medicine (and anywhere really) is nearly impossible. But Paul singlehandedly pulled it off with his papers and lectures (helped by a lot of folks like me who followed his work closely). I would argue that today, the obsession with using the CVP to guide fluid resuscitation has largely (but never completely) been abandoned. Wow.
But, again, back then, you could have “debates” on controversial topics, in fact, such topics demanded them! I remember when the United Hospital Fund used to put on this terrific conference in Manhattan where they invited experts in the field to debate “controversies” in critical care (like CVP). Each speaker was given ten minutes and were assigned the pro side or the con side of a topic, but the assigned debaters could not choose the side to argue! After both speakers were heard, the audience voted on which conclusion was based on the more compelling data and argument. I was invited several years in a row and sometimes had to argue the side I was not on intellectually. Which made it even more enlightening an exercise – imagine getting Berenson to have to argue in support of ivermectin? It just might happen that he learns something important. Also, it was a “hard” ten minutes they gave you. So much so, I remember one year I got the whole room laughing because I did not shut up when the big timer hit ten minutes and the big red stoplight turned on, so a close colleague of mine ran up to the podium, put me in a headlock and started to drag me away from the podium as I was still yelling my final points. That was fun. Now, not so much.
More trips down the memory lane of debates. One of the first “corruptions” by Pharma that I experienced in my career was when Eli Lilly invented a national campaign called “Surviving Sepsis” in an attempt to create guidelines supporting optimal care practices. They involved all the professional societies in critical care to participate. Leaders in the field all with a seat at the table.
Yep, you guessed it, it turned out to be cover for their efforts in making a $5,000 harmful drug (Xygris) the standard of care in sepsis. Every single one of those committee members got money. The entire campaign and strategy was developed by a PR firm. Recall that Disinformation tactics were first invented by a PR firm in the 1950’s working for the Tobacco Industry at a time when their products were starting to look bad in the scientific literature.
I would argue that Pharma is the most skilled practitioner of Disinformation amongst all industries. I mean 20 years ago already, the entire country’s critical care doctors gave a very expensive, harmful drug to every septic patient for years based on a manipulated trial with the tiniest of mortality benefits amidst a splashy “public health” campaign concocted by a PR firm working for a pharmaceutical company.
When Xygris was eventually shown to be harmful it was abandoned. But that decision occurred on the back of fierce debates and constant re-analysis and discussion of the accumulating data. Hmm, I wonder when that will happen to Remdesivir? Fun fact: during my fellowship training in pulmonary and critical care, my mentors, Dr. Paul Mayo and Dr. Samual Acquah essentially forbade the use of Xygris at a time when every other fellow in training was using it like water. I never once ordered it for any patient.
But there were other controversial aspects of the sepsis guidelines that Paul was a beast in demolishing at national conferences. He was so good, his take on the data so expert and compelling that his lectures were always packed, like standing room only type packed. For a medical lecture.
The most debated aspect of sepsis treatment (and yes, it was debated repeatedly at national conferences) was called “early goal directed therapy” (EGDT) which required that you resuscitate patients using fluids and vasopressors to a target central venous pressure (CVP) and a target central venous oxygen saturation (SCV02), but to monitor the latter continuously, you had to insert a special catheter into the large neck veins to do it. I will not go into the detailed physiology of those parameters but the need to measure them was nonsense.
I knew it (even as a fellow), my mentors knew it, Paul knew it, yet EGDT was widely adopted across the country and world. The protocol was based on a single center study whose Principal Investigator Manny Rivers held the patent on that catheter (unknown by most at the time). Further, information later came out that the data were manipulated. That information was leaked by a whistleblower who was a fellow of Rivers at the time. The fellow was threatened by the hospital with the ending of his career if he were to continue to speak publicly about it. They even apparently threatened to “kill his kids.”
But the point is, the debates were fierce, in the open, and at conferences and hospital auditoriums across the country and world. They were data driven arguments by experts with decades of scientific inquiry and clinical expertise who reviewed the physiology and published literature. And sometimes led to conflicting interpretations. Yes, we all had biases when interpreting the data (all humans do), but we debated. It was not outlawed to say that SCV02 and IVC were unnecessary. Or to say they were critical. And you were not forced to use all aspects of EGDT in the care of patients back then as they were just “guidelines,” not rigid protocols supported by Federal government funded bonuses in every patient you used it in like we have now with Remdesivir.
Interestingly, widespread EGDT adoption actually showed consistent impacts in reducing mortality, but we knew it was not from the targeting of those parameters but instead just from the early recognition and resuscitation of sepsis. Might even be the one instance in history where a corrupt action by Big Pharma actually led to a benefit in public health. Anyway, eventually studies showed that targeting those parameters versus simply using clinical judgement led to the same outcomes and the practice was abandoned. Paul was right again.
Another aspect of the U.S resuscitation guidelines that Paul was absolutely brilliant in debunking was the decision to target a reduction in lactate as a resuscitation endpoint. This was another fiction like the CVP. Again, almost all of emergency and critical care medicine had been indoctrinated with the physiologic concept that lactate is a marker of hypo-perfusion (reduction in blood flow to organs). Now, in certain, specific clinical instances (ischemic bowel etc), a rise in lactate can reflect hypo-perfusion. But in most septic patients it is simply a marker of illness and stress. It is not harmful, in fact, if anything, lactate is better utilized by organs to maintain function and energy. However, doctors were taught to target lactate as a resuscitation endpoint instead of simply interpreting it as a marker of disease severity.
But, in this instance, that practice and belief was not the result of corruption. No-one as far as I can tell was making money off of dumb doctors and nurses being forced to check lactates repeatedly. It simply stemmed from ignorance and established practice, with leading “experts” (dotards) arrogantly teaching that it was important to target (because they were taught that and did not critically think about it). Paul’s research revealed that targeting lactate was the result of a gross misunderstanding of lactic acid physiology. It was again one of the most masterful papers I have read. He marshaled tons of physiologic knowledge and logically presented the concepts and data which defined the cause and purpose of lactic acid production.
Just like with his teachings on CVP, again you had one man arguing against an entire generation of doctors who believed that reducing lactate was important in the general septic patient. I totally agreed with Paul’s papers and conclusions. Which made my life difficult because I tried in vain to disseminate this knowledge among my trainees, trying to stop what I saw as the pervasive “lacto-bolo reflex” they were all exhibiting. Paul actually invented the term, and it was brilliant: “bolo” refers to a bolus of fluids, and the “reflex” was the ordering of an infusion of a half liter or liter of fluids every time a high lactate was measured.
Lacto-bolo reflexes unfortunately led to what he also brilliantly coined as “salt water drowning,” i.e the receipt of excessive amounts of saline fluids by patients. Every time a doctor or nurse received a report of a high lactate… the doc ordered fluids. Lacto-bolo reflex. What is crazy is that the excess fluid administration that resulted paradoxically worsened kidney function and led to more kidney failure despite the fact the doctors were trying to preserve kidney function with fluid infusions! It was insane and I knew it because of Paul’s research and teaching. I also tried for years to fight the lacto-bolo reflex in my trainees and colleagues with little success except for when I was physically present in the ICU. When I went home for the night though, my fellows and residents all continued with their lacto-bolo reflexes. When the cat’s away the mice will play.
However, in this instance, despite Paul’s papers and lectures on the topic, the unthinkable became true. “Experts” (dotards) eventually established the checking of repeated lactate as a national quality of care standard. Those standards are what hospitals are judged on which affects their reimbursement and accreditation.
So, doctors across the country are now literally mandated to repeatedly check and respond to lactates in septic patients. Again, another example of an orthodoxy based on fiction. Despite all of Pauls efforts in teaching, lecturing, and publishing on the topic, this time, he was unsuccessful in changing orthodoxy. He may have been if his career didn’t end but History marches on. I would argue that his efforts in singlehandedly trying to reverse orthodoxies unfounded by “the science” led to a widespread respect, admiration, and reverence for the deep knowledge and scientific acumen he consistently displayed. But not so much anymore it seems.
And that is solely because Paul’s final effort in academic medicine was in trying to reverse the fiction that ivermectin was ineffective in COVID. That effort ended his career because for the first time, unrealized by him at the time, instead of fighting ignorant knowledge of physiology, he was poking The Bear, i.e tackling a subject that threatened Big Pharma. In a big, big way. Thus, that effort ended his career. But let’s be specific about that – his former hospital (SENTARA GENERAL IN NORFOLK, VIRGINA) was the one who actually ended his career.
Now, how they ended it is pretty interesting, as my last job was ended in the same way. They did it by using a process that hospitals have long employed when a physician “doesn’t toe the line.” In COVID, Paul was a clinical leader in a major hospital and was employing a highly effective protocol using a combination of repurposed drugs and not using Remdesivir. And he was vocal about it. And he was teaching the doctors in training about the harms of Remdesivir and all of the data supporting “unapproved therapies.” So, they invoked a process called “sham peer review” to get rid of him. What the heck is “sham peer review?”
From a seminal paper on the topic:
In 1986, the United States Congress enacted the Healthcare Quality Improvement Act (HCQIA). which granted immunity to hospitals and reviewers participating in “good faith” peer review of physicians and dentists. These reviews were envisioned to be vehicles by which it could be determined if any actions or recommendations against a physician should become necessary on the measures of incompetence, unprofessional conduct, or behaviors that impact the doctors’ clinical privileges. However, of late, HCQIA has resulted in many unforeseen consequences, not the least of which is the rise of ‘sham peer reviews’ —and the consignment of guiltless, lifesaving, pre-eminent physicians into obscurity.
What is “Sham” Peer Review?
Sham peer review is an adverse action taken in bad faith by a hospital for purposes other than the furtherance of quality health care. It is a process that is disguised to look like legitimate peer review. But sham peer review is not objectively reasonable, precisely because it is not performed to advance the quality of health care (violation of safe harbor provision).
A sham peer review happens when the hospital invents some pretext on which to attack the physician and acts to disguise the adverse action against the targeted physician by conducting a such a review—where the truth and the facts do not matter, because the process is contrived to be rigged, and the outcome is predetermined.
Over the years, sham peer reviews have unfortunately become fairly well-known. Hospitals in the United States have mounted these proceedings for at least four decades to rid themselves of physicians who “get in their way.” Often, they are doctors who don’t ”follow the party line” and whom they consider “disruptive.” Hospital officials are resistant to physicians who bring patient safety or care quality concerns to their attention. Some hospitals retaliate against these whistleblowers, by instigating these sham peer reviews.
How Sham Peer Review works
Hospitals that use sham peer review bring trumped up, fabricated, and thoroughly false charges against the targeted physician. Although no court of law would permit depriving an accused person of files or records needed to defend himself, as it is fundamentally unfair and in violation of due process, hospitals that employ sham peer review frequently refuse to provide records required to the physician under review. Based on these totally erroneous and phony charges the physician’s hospital privileges are summarily suspended. The physician is usually given 14 days to respond in writing to the sham charges. The charges and the physician’s response are then supposedly shared with the Medical Executive Committee (MEC). The physician then meets with the Medical Executive Committee. The physician is usually denied legal representation (which is unlawful), and the meeting takes the form of a Kangaroo court.
And the above, is EXACTLY what happened to Paul. Like.. to the T. Most importantly, he had no rights during the process. No ability to bring a lawyer in to help defend him. No ability to discover the identity of the complainant or exact documentation of the complaint. That is how they can just make shit up.
I won’t go into the details because the above explains everything that happened to Paul but his was particularly egregious (mine was short and simple). They generated at least 8 anonymous, invented complaints by other providers, nurses and employees inventing things he said or did and characterizing his behavior as “disruptive.” He had never gotten a single complaint from a patient or colleague in his entire career. They even accused him of malpractice for treating a patient for severe COVID who had tested negative for COVID. I saw the patient’s films and labs, heard his history, and presentation. The guy had COVID, period. Plus, the guy was super sick, on a ventilator, and Paul saved him with his protocol. No small feat for a COVID patient on a ventilator. The patient survived yet the hospital used the case as a mark against him. Insane.
Everything was right out of the sham peer review playbook. And it resulted in the ending of his career.
My “sham peer review” was different given that I was working as an independent contractor running an ICU for a hospital in central Wisconsin. The hospital administration had been asking my partners who hired me to get rid of me as soon as they heard I had been hired, likely due to my public profile (ya think?). My partners refused as we got along great and they deeply appreciated my skills, contributions, COVID expertise and protocols. They told the administration “if he goes, we go.” And this was a hospital with a long track record of difficulty recruiting physicians. Yet, my partners were continually harassed by the administration who kept sending them “hit pieces” they found about me in newspapers and magazines.
Six months later, in November 2021, the Chief Medical Officer of the hospital knew I was not vaccinated and that a mandate was about to start. So he called me and asked if I was going to be vaccinated because he had to plan for contingencies. I asked him for a couple of days to think about it. I decided I would just get a vaccine card instead. Not proud of that plan but I knew the vaccines were built on unconscionable lies. He called me two days later, and I told him I would get vaccinated.
The next morning after my shift, my lead partner called and told me “they didn’t need me anymore.” I asked what happened (I knew they needed me, badly). He explained that I had told some ER patient to not get vaccinated and that their practice believed in vaccination so could not be associated with someone who was not. One catch – I had not been in the ER for two weeks. I defended myself, to no avail. My partner knew I was telling the truth, but I knew he was likely under an ultimatum. He apologized and said, “I am so sorry, but there is a war going on and you are unfortunately a casualty of that.” We said pleasant goodbyes and wished each other well. Pretty quick sham peer review because I was not an employee so they had the right to cancel my contract at anytime. Done. Gone.
So, as you can see from the above, COVID is not our first rodeo battling ignorance and corruption in Medicine. But we battled with debate using data, published literature, and deep knowledge of physiology. Now, no more.
Steve Kirsch has been offering 1-2 million dollars for anyone in academia or the agencies to participate in a public or even privately recorded, moderated debate of the evidence to support vaccine safety and efficacy. No-one took him up on it.
An organization in Kansas City asked me, Peter McCullough and two other experts to participate in a debate with the clinical leaders at KU. They refused to show. Their table sat empty on the stage while we debated the public statements they had made with a local TV program instead. They literally told the TV presenter that “we do not debate in public forums, only in journal clubs amongst fellow doctors.” Note he said this on TV then went on to support their policies citing what we know are corrupt and easily disprovable evidence-free narratives. What a farce.
Just as sad as the above is that Paul had long been invited every year by a medical education organization to lecture to anesthesiologists as he was a perennial favorite lecturer. This past year, he gave a masterful lecture on the data supporting the use of ivermectin in COVID. Soon after, he was told that he will never again be invited to give lectures.
He also gave the same lecture to the Anesthesia Department at Mass General (Harvard). The evaluations by attendees all complained that his lecture was full of mis-information. He will never be invited back.
Twitter, which describes itself as a “public square” has de-platformed many of my colleagues (multiple times) for sharing newly emerging data supporting the efficacy of ivermectin. Hey Juan Chamie, how many times have you been Twitterwhacked? One of life’s greatest mysteries (slight overstatement) is how I am still alive on Twitter, although to be accurate, I am only half-alive as they severely shadow ban me on that platform.
I guess we just have to accept the fact that two new commandments have come down from the mountaintop:
- Thou shalt not share favorable ivermectin data in any public media sphere
- Thou shalt not present analyses of the scientific data supporting ivermectin in lectures to physicians
The world has gone mad.
Next post, I will delve more specifically into the tactics Pharma deployed in pulling off their massive Disinformation campaign against ivermectin using propaganda as well as censorship of the FLCCC .
The Great Lab Leak Cover-Up By the U.S. Government
BY WILL JONES | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | AUGUST 30, 2022
Thomas Fazi, who has a book on The Covid Consensus coming out shortly with Toby Green, has written an excellent summary in UnHerd of the evidence of a cover-up of the possible lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 by those behind the kind of research that would have produced it.
Much of the work on SARS-like CoVs performed in Wuhan was part of an active and highly collaborative U.S.-China scientific research programme funded by the U.S. Government – primarily through the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), directed by Anthony Fauci, which is part of the NIH – and coordinated by the U.S.-based non-governmental organisation EcoHealth Alliance (EHA). The group’s research work went beyond the simple analysis of existing coronaviruses, and actually involved the engineering of ‘chimeric’ bat coronaviruses, some of which proved to be potentially more infectious to humans – a highly risky technique known as gain-of-function.
In 2018, EcoHealth and the WIV (in collaboration with other institutions) sent a grant proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which included a plan to insert furin cleavage sites into existing bat coronaviruses – spots in the surface protein of a virus that can boost its entry into human cells. The DARPA proposal was rejected – and yet the presence of a furin cleavage site is precisely what sets SARS-CoV-2 apart from all known SARS-like coronaviruses. Did the researchers carry out the research anyway, possibly using other sources of funding? Nobel Prize-winning virologist David Baltimore stated that he considered this to be “the smoking gun for the origin of the virus”.
In light of all this, it’s hardly surprising that in the early days of the pandemic, at the highest levels of the U.S. establishment, the question of whether the virus might have been engineered at the WIV, possibly through research part-funded by the U.S. Government, was taken very seriously. As a result of an FoIA request, we know that on February 1st 2020, Anthony Fauci convened a “totally confidential” conference call with at least a dozen high-level experts from around the world, many of whom privately admitted that there was a very high probability that the virus had been artificially engineered and had then “escaped” from the Wuhan lab.
Yet not only did the NIH fail to disclose this to the public or to Congress, but the emails released under the FoIA suggest that it took an early and active role in promoting the ‘zoonotic hypothesis’ and the rejection of the laboratory-associated hypothesis. Indeed, within days of the February 1st call, a group of virologists, including some who were on it and had endorsed the ‘artificial origin’ theory, prepared the first draft of a hugely influential paper on The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2 – subsequently published in Nature – that argued for the exact opposite.
Moreover, the NIH has resisted the release of important evidence, such as the grant proposals and project reports of EHA, and has continued to redact materials released under FoIA, including a remarkable 290-page redaction in a recent release. Even more incredibly, at some point after March 2020 a number of early SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequences were deleted from the NIH’s own archive at the request of researchers in Wuhan.
The strangeness doesn’t end here. In February 2020, an influential letter signed by 27 global experts was published in the Lancet, strongly condemning “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”. The letter proved crucial, alongside the aforementioned Nature paper, in nipping in the bud the lab-leak hypothesis and giving the illusion of scientific consensus. In late 2020, however, emails released following a FoIA request showed that the Lancet statement had been orchestrated by one of the 27 co-authors – none other than Peter Daszak, President of EcoHealth Alliance. It was also revealed that all but one of the other 26 scientists were linked to the Wuhan lab, their colleagues or funders.
Daszak was first appointed in late 2020 as Chair of the task force created by the Lancet COVID-19 Commission with the aim of establishing none other than “the origins of COVID-19”; and shortly thereafter as the only U.S. representative to a WHO fact-finding mission to China tasked with the same goal. Unsurprisingly, both task forces found that the virus was most likely zoonotic (i.e., natural) in origin, and that transmission through a laboratory incident was extremely unlikely.
The WHO report, in particular, came under heavy criticism, leading to the establishment of a specific work group tasked with ascertaining the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the Scientific Advisory Group on the Origins of Novel Pathogens, which published its first preliminary report in June 2022. The results were inconclusive, largely because “key pieces of data” from China were missing, leading the WHO to recommend in its strongest terms yet that a deeper probe was required into whether a lab accident may be to blame. As we have seen, however, it’s not only the Chinese government that is covering up its tracks about its possible involvement in the engineering of SARS-CoV-2 – but the American one as well.
Thomas notes that a new campaign is now underway to try to finally discredit the lab-leak theory, with two new studies that purport to provide more evidence that SARS-CoV-2 came from the Huanan Seafood Market leading several outlets to claim that “the Covid lab leak theory is dead” – a claim to which the Daily Sceptic‘s Dr. Noah Carl has responded here.
The question is, with those involved having closed ranks and refusing to speak or cooperate, who can force them to reveal their secrets, or must we accept that their cover-up has succeeded?
Featured Video
Macgregor: We Haven’t Seen the Worst of the Iran War Yet
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
New Book
Breast Cancer: Before You Consent
A new Unbekoming paperback
Lies are Unbekoming | September 18, 2026
Peter Gøtzsche reviewed every randomised mammography screening trial ever conducted for the Cochrane Collaboration. Cochrane’s headline is that, assuming a 15% mortality reduction, one woman in 2000 avoids dying of breast cancer over ten years. Ten are overdiagnosed and treated. Two hundred experience false alarms.
But that headline assumes the reduction. When Gøtzsche looked only at the trials with adequate randomisation — the higher-quality ones — the reduction disappeared. No effect on breast cancer mortality. No effect on all-cause mortality.
This is the Cochrane finding, published in the establishment’s own database of systematic reviews.
No woman being asked to consent to a mammogram this week knows it.
That is why the new Unbekoming paperback exists. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Araghchi: Military intervention cannot create security; coercion cannot bring peace
- Fraud Squared
- Breast Cancer: Before You Consent
- Iran’s Plan to Shut Down AI in the Persian Gulf
- Israel seeks ‘compensation’ from Washington over Saudi F-35 sale
- Saudi crown prince seeks dialogue with Ansarullah after Yemeni blows: Report
- Damascus rejects Saudi request for Syrian fighters to counter Yemen: Report
- South Korea says will not send troops to join terrorist US war on Iran
- Russia Just Struck the Eyes of NATO’s War Machine in Ukraine
- Russia summons UK charge d’affaires over Kiev drone support
- If Americans Knew
- Debunking The Claim That Macklemore Has A “History Of Antisemitism”
- CPJ demands release of arrested Palestinian-US journalist near Bethlehem
- Robert Kraft: The Billionaire Friend of Netanyahu Pulling The Strings Behind the Macklemore/Ed Sheeran Blow Up
- Columbia Administered Fund Gives Big Money to Pro-Israel Groups
- Deportation Case of Palestinian Activist Salah Sarsour Tests First Amendment
- ‘We Will Not Forget’: Palestinians Mark 44 Years since Sabra and Shatila
- Why do we let Zionists decide what we can and can’t say?
- US welcomes Israeli, Iranian delegations to UN, but not Palestinians – Daily Update
- Biden’s Genocide Accomplices Targeted by New Accountability Campaign
- AIPAC’s Network Has Already Spent $67.2 Million to Shape the Midterm Elections
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
- Economic Masterminds: German Socialists Suggest Taxing Productivity Gains Stemming From Using AI
- The South China Sea Has Not Been Cooperating With The Climate Change Narrative
- Energy Crisis: Germany Enters Heating Season With Historically Low Gas Reserve Fill Levels
- New Study: The Antarctic Ice Sheet Gained Mass From 2020-2024 Due To Staggering Snow And Ice Accumulation
- Study: Ocean Heating Rates From Thousands Of Years Ago ‘Dwarf’ Modern Ocean Heating Rates
- Climate Extremists Target, Attack Large-Scale Power Grid Infrastructure In Germany!
- New Study: Antarctic Ice Melt Has Contributed Less Than 1 Centimeter To Sea Level Rise In The Last 30 Years
- Fear Of Debate: Alarmist German Climate Scientist Calls On Mainstream Media To Discredit Skeptic Voices
- End-Of-August Arctic Sea Ice Extent Hasn’t Fallen In 20 Years, Official Data Show!
Aletho News 