IT’S OK WHEN BILL DOES IT!
Paul Joseph Watson | February 19, 2021
By Christine E. Black | OffGuardian | May 14, 2021
Casserian Engeri?” translated from the Swahili means, “And how are the children?” This is a traditional greeting among a Masai tribe in Africa.
One hoped to hear, “Sepati Ingera!” which means, “The children are well.”
A good indicator of the health of a society is the health of its children.
Sadly, in the US now, with the former Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Director Robert Redfield saying publicly in July 2020 that deaths from suicides and drug overdoses among high school students far outweighed their deaths from Covid and failures among school children, especially high school students, is at epidemic levels, the answer to this question would have to be, “No. The children are not well. Not well at all.”
And I am astounded by the lack of outcry among most of our public officials.
For more than a year now, children and teens have been robbed of most of what gives their lives value and meaning – seeing their friends at school, club meetings, church groups, camps, family gatherings, singing groups, playing with school bands and orchestras.
Some schools have continued sports programs, but many have not, sometimes with heartbreaking consequences, such as the death by suicide of Dylan Buckner, age 18, as reported in the April 21 edition of The Epoch Times. Dylan’s father, Chris, said he is certain that his state, Illinois’, school closures and extended stay-at-home orders worsened his son’s mental health and contributed to his death.
Dylan had a 4.7 grade point average, loved playing football, which his father said helped him keep a structured routine, according to the article, “The Cost of Lockdowns.” He was on his way to college with football scholarships. And yet this year, the school system cancelled the football program because of fears of Covid.
Dylan attempted suicide in September 2020 and succeeded in ending his life in January 2021.
For more than a year, fearful adults and misguided politicians have discouraged children and teens from getting together with friends and from living their lives normally. Child development experts agree that peer relationships are among the most important to teens’ mental and emotional health.
How could we have done this to a nation of children? For a virus that even former CDC Director James Redfield said poses almost no risk to them. He has said that the flu is 5 to 10 times more dangerous to children and that they have a 1 in a million chance of dying from Covid.
Early death projections from the virus have been shown to be overstated and terribly wrong. Yet, most politicians have not publicly issued retractions and corrections to calm fears and help people, especially children, resume normal lives. Instead, they let the fear-mongering and harm remain.
In March 2020, at the start of the pandemic, politicians and bureaucrats stated publicly that children could infect their parents or grandparents with Covid, even if the child had no symptoms. Members of the Coronavirus Task Force, said that children, teens, and young people, just by living their normal lives – socializing with friends, playing sports, attending school events and parties – could unknowingly catch and then carry the virus to older family members and possibly cause death — even if the young person was not sick, even if they did not have so much as a sniffle.
This was called “asymptomatic spread,” one of the many bizarre terms we have been forced to learn and think about for more than a year now.
Politicians and bureaucrats stood at the US White House podium at the start of this crisis and said that after infecting an older family member and perhaps causing sickness leading to death, a child would “have to live with that.” What a devastating, harmful, and irresponsible thing to say within hearing of children, teens, and young adults – that they could be a danger to others merely by breathing, by being, by living their normal lives.
What an especially horrible and harmful thing to say when we were not even sure it was true.
It sounded unbelievable from the start. And it turns out that it was not true. Dr Maria Van Kerkhove, head of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) emerging diseases and zoonosis unit, said at a June 7, 2020 press conference that from the known research, “asymptomatic spread was very rare”.
A more recent Chinese study of 10 million people, published in Nature magazine found that asymptomatic spread was not only rare but almost non-existent.
On November 22, 2020, Jeffrey A. Tucker published a comprehensive article on the American Institute for Economic Research website, tracing information on asymptomatic spread over the past year.
When I read Tucker’s article and then the study published in Nature magazine, I wondered: where are our elected officials now?
Where are those same high-paid politicians, bureaucrats, and public health authorities who had touted these terrible and alarming messages that had so comprehensively devastated the lives of young people for more than a year? Why were they not retracting these statements about asymptomatic spread, reassuring children, teens, and young adults that it is simply is not a worry? That they, just by living their lives and being themselves, are not and never were “super spreaders,” are not automatic disease carriers.
Why were officials not issuing calming and strengthening messages to young people – after more and different information on this virus has emerged? Where was the outcry to protect the mental and emotional health and academic lives of young people, especially teenagers?
Another article by Micha Gartz for the American Institute for Economic Research reminds us that the median age for death from this virus is 80 years old. Most people who contract the virus never get symptoms at all. Most people who get symptoms become only mildly ill, and even the majority of those who become severely ill recover.
Harm to communities from widespread lockdowns has been very real, however.
The Crisis Text Line, a non-profit organization that provides free mental health texting to people in crisis, received 180,00 texts in November 2020, their largest number ever, Gartz notes in her article More “Covid Suicides” than Covid Deaths in Kids.
Even strong students, who have historically earned good grades, have been failing classes at alarming levels during school this past year’s school shutdowns and predominantly online classes, according to published studies, including one from Fairfax County Public Schools, one of the largest school districts in the US.
Parents, who had previously heeded advice from groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics’ to limit children and teen’s screen time, for their health, to a maximum of two hours of quality content per day, have now succumbed to allowing their children to spend several hours per day on computers while missing friends, failing classes, and losing hope.
Too much computer time can be a health hazard to young people, especially those who may be vulnerable to addiction. In 2019, the WHO listed computer gaming addiction as a disease, one that harms children, teens and young adults mostly. How are the children? Not well at all.
Lockdowns, massive fear, and school shutdowns have had a devastating effect on children and teens’ health. A national independent non-profit organization called Fair Health that studies health care costs, reported in March 2021 a 333% increase in intentional self-harm claims among young people ages 12–18 from the period August 2019 to August 2020.
The study, The Impact of COVID-19 on Pediatric Mental Health: A Study of Private Healthcare Claims, analyzed 32 billion private health care claims. Claims have also increased dramatically for overdoses, obsessive-compulsive disorders, depression, and anxiety among children 12–18, according to the study. The CDC reported over the summer of 2020 that 25 percent of young adults, ages 18–25 had seriously considered suicide.
Many experts have said publicly that lockdowns, including school closures, have been a disastrous and unnecessary mitigation strategy, causing immeasurable harms and countless deaths.
Dr Jay Battacharya, Professor at Stanford University Medical School, called the lockdowns, “the biggest public health mistake we’ve ever made” in a March 2021 Newsweek article.
Battacharya is one of the authors of a petition called The Great Barrington Declaration, published in October of 2020, which calls for safety strategies for older people while calling for an end to lockdowns of whole societies, stating that lockdowns cause far more harm than benefit.
“Keeping children out of school is a grave injustice,” states the declaration, which has been signed by 14,000 medical and public health scientists, 43,000 medical practitioners, and almost 800,000 citizens. Dr Martin Kulldorff, Professor of Medicine at Harvard University and Dr Sunetra Gupta, Professor at Oxford University are also authors of the petition.
Many studies now published show that states that remained open for the past year fared no worse, and some better, than states that had the most restrictive closures and shutdowns. Further, there have been treatments for this virus, all along, such as Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin that, if given early, could have saved tens of thousands of lives, according to many sources.
Dr Peter McCollough spoke before Congress on early treatment and on the criminal silencing of doctors, including preventing doctors from treating Covid patients with drugs that work. These drugs were instead politicized with doctors barred from prescribing them. With more courage and independent thinking, fear and harm could have been contained; instead many simply stood by and watched the light go out in children’s eyes, month after month for more than a year.
Children in sports have been made to wear masks though masks deplete oxygen and may impede focus and cause more accidents, some parents have complained, while professional athletes on TV do not have to wear them. While many schools have reopened to in-person classes, government-created school re-opening documents, with the repressive six-feet apart, sanitizing, and mask mandates, read almost like manuals for operating a concentration camp.
I have taught in a prison, and these public school re-opening plans read and feel more repressive than conditions inside a prison. I have seen children in school this past year eating, spaced six feet from one another, only allowed to remove the mask to eat and not being permitted to eat with their friends. I can hardly keep from crying seeing them this way.
School rooms and cafeterias these days look more like rooms where children are sent to serve detention. Students look like they are being punished when they have done nothing wrong. How can this be? How can we remain silent?
Some students may feel so depressed with these conditions that they do not even want to attend school. It can be almost overwhelmingly sad to not see human faces and smiles for extended periods. For years, teachers have studied and promoted the importance of children’s social and emotional learning, and now we expect children to attend schools that look and feel like prison camps. Or worse. How can we treat our children this way?
We want to believe that the information we receive about this virus is unbiased and nonpartisan — especially if government mandates have affected children and young adults so severely. Surely the measures must have been neutral and necessary. But sadly, information we receive is not unbiased; we have to keep questioning, reading, listening and thinking.
Writer and researcher Dr. Namoi Wolf notes that the CDC created a foundation to receive money from big pharmaceutical companies, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and from technology companies that profit from online education.
While some politicians and high-paid bureaucrats still promote fear, panic, and paranoia, others have begun speaking up on failed lockdown policies.
In an April 21 Epoch Times article, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said that elected officials, establishment media, and Big Tech have been to blame for perpetuating fears and selectively censoring one side of the mitigation debate. Why? Because they have made money off the fear, panic, and paranoia.
“Media and big tech giants benefitted from lockdowns as people stayed home and consumed their products,” DeSantis said. Google removed videos of DeSantis talking to doctors who criticized failed lockdown policies. “Google and YouTube have been throughout this crisis censors in service of the ruling elite,” he said.
While millions of people lost their businesses or jobs – and school children, teens, and young people struggled with despair, loneliness, and school failures – 614 US billionaires increased their wealth by 931 billion dollars, according to a December 1, 2020 USA Today article.
For the health of our communities and our children, we have to keep rising above fear, confusion, paranoia, and even shame and guilt for getting the virus response so wrong. We have to keep returning to the question, “And how are the children?” And if the children are not well, we must change course to stop harming them while working diligently to mitigate the harms that have already been done.
Christine E. Black‘s poetry has been published in Antietam Review, 13th Moon, American Journal of Poetry, New Millennium Writings, Nimrod International, Red Rock Review, The Virginia Journal of Education, Friends Journal, The Veteran, Sojourners Magazine, Iris Magazine, English Journal, Amethyst Review, St. Katherine Review, and other publications.
By Will Jones • Lockdown Sceptics • May 12, 2021
The Telegraph‘s Global Health Security correspondents Paul Nuki and Sarah Newey claimed this morning that there is “no trade off” between the economy and public health when it comes to COVID-19 and lockdowns.
Writing in the newspaper, the correspondents (whose coverage is partly funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) write that the “‘health v economy’ trade-off” is “false” because “countries where the virus was swiftly contained – such as Vietnam – have seen less economic damage, plus far fewer deaths”.
This claim, based on one country, fails to acknowledge that the entire South East Asian region, regardless of the measures taken, has had a much milder experience of COVID-19 than some other parts of the world, particularly Europe and the Americas. Furthermore, while it may be true that Vietnam’s early border closures produced better outcomes (there is some evidence of this), that bird has well and truly flown for most of the world so the example of Vietnam is now irrelevant as far as this pandemic is concerned.
Perhaps, though, they have a future pandemic in mind. In fact, the peer-reviewed evidence is that lockdowns have no impact on the epidemic death toll (although it’s worth noting that Vietnam, which Nuki and Newey hold up as an example we should follow in future, has never imposed a full, country-wide lockdown). It’s also not clear how countries which close their borders to an endemic virus can ever hope to open them again – a problem Vietnam is currently experiencing. Vietnam is also not exactly an international global hub.
The article is part the Global Health Security team’s promotion of an agenda to give the World Health Organisation more funding and more power to declare pandemics faster and be more proactive in ensuring compliance amongst states with public health edicts. They note approvingly that the pandemic has “thrust health to the centre stage, and may be an opportunity to promote a ‘green and healthy recovery’”. They appear to like the idea of a fast-acting global government imposing lockdowns so we can all be like Vietnam and “contain” the virus quickly, supposedly without suffering economic damage despite the vast disruption to the global economy this would bring.
Nuki and Newey highlight the problem of “viral misinformation” as one of 13 “mistakes” made early in the pandemic, though they blame the internet and social media rather than the WHO, despite its part in promoting myths about the virus such as that it doesn’t spread between humans and it doesn’t spread via aerosols.
But are Nuki and Newey engaging in disseminating misinformation of their own, making the bizarre claim that public health containment strategies have no trade-off with the economy based on a single unrepresentative country? When the U.K. economy shrank by a record 9.9% in 2020, this claim is frankly ridiculous and such claims are at odds with the Telegraph’s overall coverage of the way different countries have managed the pandemic, which has been quite balanced. Should the paper really be allowing a team of journalists whose work is partly funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to use its platform to promote an agenda of enhanced global control in the name of public health?
By Dr. Joseph Mercola | March 30, 2021
In 2000, everything about Bill Gates’ public persona changed. He morphed from a hardnosed and ruthless technology monopolizer into a soft, fuzzy and incredibly generous philanthropist when he and his wife launched the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.1
It was a public relations coup. May 18, 1998, the U.S. Justice Department, in collaboration with 20 state attorneys, filed an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft.2 At that time, the company was 23 years old and was ruling the personal computer market. The Seattle Times described the fallout from the antitrust lawsuit:3
“The company barely escaped being split up after it was ruled an unlawful monopolist in 2000 for using its stranglehold on the PC market with its Windows operating system to cripple competitors, such as Netscape’s Navigator Web browser.”
How would the world be different today if the company had been split? Yale law professor George Priest described the antitrust lawsuit as “one of the most important antitrust cases of its generation.”4 In 2002, a court settlement placed restrictions on Microsoft to curb some of its practices for five years.
It was later extended twice and then expired May 12, 2011. The lawsuit had a dramatic effect on “the emergence of an entirely new field called IP (intellectual property) antitrust,” Iowa law professor Herbert Hovenkamp told the Seattle Times.5
Later, large sums donated from the foundation made the news multiple times, including $9.5 million to GAVI (Global Alliance for Vaccines), a second $7.5 million to GAVI and $6.8 million to the World Health Organization in 2017.6
By June 2020, in the middle of a global pandemic, the Gates Foundation’s donations totaled 45% of WHO’s funding from nongovernmental sources.7 Once mainstream media’s attention was no longer on Gates’ antitrust activities and focused on the philanthropist actions of the foundation, Gates publicly turned his attention to vaccinating the world, long before COVID-19.8
Event 201: A Preplanned Pandemic
In a deep dive into the Gates Foundation’s charitable donations, The Nation found there were $250 million in grants to companies where the foundation held corporate stocks, including Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Sanofi and Medtronic. The money was directed at supporting projects “like developing new drugs and health monitoring systems and creating mobile banking services.”9
What Gates had discovered was an easy path to political power, allowing him to shape public policy without being elected to office. In other words, favorable headlines could be bought with charitable contributions.10 One event that Gates has personally supported and participated in was Event 201.11
Writing in The Defender, Robert Kennedy Jr. describes the exercise that Gates organized in October 2019. Many high-ranking men and women with governmental authority participated in Event 201, which coincidentally simulated a worldwide pandemic triggered by a novel coronavirus, just months before SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, changed the world.12
They included representatives from the World Economic Forum, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Johns Hopkins University Population Center, the World Bank, the Chinese government and vaccine maker Johnson & Johnson. During the event, the group developed strategies to control a pandemic, the population and the narrative surrounding the event.
At no time did they investigate using current therapeutic drugs and vitamins or communicating information about building immune systems. Instead, the aim was to develop and distribute patentable antiviral medications and a new wave of vaccines.
As Kennedy reports, Gates spoke to the BBC13 April 12, 2020, and claimed these types of simulations had not occurred, saying “Now here we are. You know we didn’t simulate this; we didn’t practice, so both the health policies and economic policies … we find ourselves in uncharted territories.”
Yet, videos of the event are available14 and Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security released a statement naming the Gates Foundation as a partner in sponsoring the pandemic simulation.15 It seems strange and alarming that a man with the responsibility of running the Gates Foundation and the powerful influence he has over global public policy decisions had forgotten an exercise he organized only six months before the interview.16 Or was it deception?
Uncanny Prediction or Planned Event?
During the pandemic exercise, the global experts “modeled a fictional coronavirus pandemic.”17 After questions arose about whether the exercise had “predicted the outbreak in China,” Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security released a thinly supported statement, saying:18
“… the exercise served to highlight preparedness and response challenges that would likely arise in a very severe pandemic … Although our tabletop exercise included a mock novel coronavirus, the inputs we use for modeling the potential impact of that fictional virus are not similar to nCoV-2019.”
Kennedy characterizes the fourth simulation in Event 201, writing that “the participants primarily focused on planning industry-centric, fear-mongering, police-state strategies for managing an imaginary global coronavirus contagion culminating in mass censorship of social media.”19
The transcript of the fourth simulation shows that the participants discussed communication strategies using dissemination of information and censorship on social media.20,21 Communication strategist Hasti Taghi, who works for a major media company and leads strategic initiatives with the World Economic Forum,22 said:
“So, I think a couple of things we have to consider are even before this began, the anti-vaccine movement was very strong and this is something specifically through social media that has spread.
So, as we do the research to come up with the right vaccines to help prevent the continuation of this, how do we get the right information out there? How do we communicate the right information to ensure that the public has trust in these vaccines that we’re creating?”
The question the group undertook wasn’t how to communicate the truth about the vaccine development, manufacture and distribution, but rather how to “communicate the right information to ensure the public has trust in these vaccines that we’re creating?”
The issue of gaining public trust to take a vaccine was significant in this simulation, even though the U.S. population is well indoctrinated in the perceived value of annual flu shots and childhood vaccinations. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a list of 26 different types of vaccines currently in use in the U.S.
In addition to the long list of recommended childhood vaccinations, there are adult vaccines against shingles, tetanus and pneumococcal pneumonia that are routinely given. Why, then, did the global experts in communication and control believe communicating the “right information” would be necessary to “ensure the public trust”?
Group Calls for Social Media Censorship
This was only one of the highly predictive conversations during Event 201 that played out in 2020 as the global COVID-19 pandemic unfolded. George Gao, director-general, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention,23 predicted:24
“By and long, we have more cases in China and also death cases reported. And also, my staff told me that before there’s misinformation and there’s some belief. People believe, ‘This is a manmade … some pharmaceutical company made the virus,’ so there’s some violations of human … That is because of this misinformation.”
Others agreed with the need for social media censorship as it may pertain to the spread of “disinformation” about the pandemic or vaccines and vaccine injury, without regard to the source. The idea was to remove any information that did not align with the government’s mandates and ideas. Kevin McAleese, who is a communications officer with a Gates-funded agricultural project, said:25
“To me, it is clear countries need to make strong efforts to manage both mis- and disinformation … If the solution means controlling and reducing access to information, I think it’s the right choice.”
During the ensuing conversation, Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security,26 replied, “In this case, do you think governments are at the point where they need to require social media companies to operate in a certain way?”27
At each step of the simulation, the global “experts” agreed that information censorship through media platforms would be necessary to control the flow of the “right information” in order for people to willingly follow the leader.
What is interesting about the transcript from Event 201 is that what was planned and shared was frighteningly close to what has happened since January 2020. It may have been a coincidence to predict one or two major public health decisions, but it appears that the group was either phenomenally prophetic or they shaped the decisions and events of 2020 from behind the scenes.
Framing the Vaccine Message to Trigger Action
From the outside, the driving force behind economically devastating lockdowns, warp speed vaccine development and population control and surveillance strategies has been to “flatten the curve” and lower the death rate of SARS-CoV-2. Yet, as I and others have exposed, when these strategies are analyzed, it’s apparent there is more than what meets the eye.
In July 2020, Yale University28 announced a study of the trigger words and phrases that would have a higher likelihood of promoting an otherwise individualistic society to quietly follow mandates (not laws) to control behavior. The phrases tested were believed to be most successful at conveying feelings about health, helping others and fear.
The hope was to manipulate behavior in such a way that it lowered the governmental risk for riots and dissidence. The study was conducted by Yale University using 4,000 participants who were randomized to receive one of 12 different messages. After the message, they were then evaluated to “compare the reported willingness to get a COVID-19 vaccine at three and six months of it becoming available.”29
The primary outcome of the study was to find the right combination of phrases and messaging that would increase the number of people who got the vaccine. The study began July 3, 2020, and the last participant underwent testing by July 8, 2020.30 To date, the results of the study have not been published.
The president of the U.S. announced in July 2020 that there would be an “overwhelming” vaccine campaign launched by November 2020.31 In December 2020, the National Institutes of Health released a COVID-19 vaccination communication recommending behavioral and social science actions that might address vaccine hesitancy and increase the number who take the vaccine, including:32
In other words, many of the messages that you’ve been seeing in the media and your doctor’s office have been designed to trigger emotions that would lead you to take the vaccine. These same pressure tactics are not routinely used in the media for some of the more common adult vaccinations including pneumococcal, tetanus, hepatitis or shingles vaccines.
It’s Time to Speak With One Voice and Fight for Freedom
As I’ve written before, what we lose as a society when we acquiesce to these mandates and controls will be exponentially harder to get back. One of the freedoms we give away is allowing our thoughts and beliefs to be censored on social media without fighting back.
It is essential to safeguard your constitutional rights and civil liberties against unlawful overreach, and yet many appear to be willing to give up easily. Although the government has a duty to protect the health and welfare of its citizens, this must be balanced against the loss of civil rights and liberties.
We’re currently facing a battle of freedom versus tyranny. For example, multiple studies have demonstrated that long-term lockdowns are clearly not in the public’s best interest.33,34 Instead, it’s tantamount to abuse. And yet many have gone along with these mandates, which were not laws.
It’s vital to understand that the vast majority of information you consume in mainstream media is carefully designed propaganda that has been crafted from nearly two decades of personal data collected from you.
Although Yale University undertook a study with 4,000 participants for a COVID-19 messaging campaign, that data had been gathered and collated through your use of social media.
As I have carefully identified in many previous articles, this plan will result in a progressive loss of your freedom and liberty that eventually results in tyranny and slavery. It is crucial to be vigilant and seek the truth so that you can understand how to distinguish between fact and a fictional narrative that promises you liberation but eventually enslaves you.
My newest book, “The Truth About COVID-19,” will be available April 29, 2021, on Amazon. In it, I investigate the origins of the virus and how the elite has used it to slowly erode your personal liberty and freedom. In addition, I’ll also show you how to protect yourself against the disease and what you can do to fight back against the technocratic overlords.
Sources and References

By Dr. Joseph Mercola | March 19, 2021
Hundreds of farmers and human rights groups are boycotting the 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit because they believe it favors agribusiness interests, elite foundations and the exploitation of African food systems.
The Summit claims it is convening to “launch bold new actions to transform the way the world produces and consumes food,”2 but critics say it is biased toward industrial, corporate farming while leaving out those in regenerative agriculture and the knowledge of indigenous people.3
The controversy began right from the start, when U.N. secretary general António Guterres appointed Agnes Kalibata as the event’s head. Kalibata is the former Rwandan agriculture minister who is now the president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), an organization funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.4
AGRA is essentially a Gates Foundation subsidiary, and while some of its projects appear to be beneficial, most of its goals are centered on promoting biotechnology and chemical fertilizers.
Corporate Interests Dominating Food Summit
After Kalibata was appointed special envoy to the 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit in December 2019, 176 civil society organizations and farmer groups from 83 countries urged Guterres to withdraw the appointment due to Kalibata’s clear conflicts of interest with corporate interests.
A second statement, signed by more than 500 academics and organizations, also opposed Kalibata’s appointment to, and her organization of, the Summit.5 AGRA is known to promote the interests of agribusiness, leading civil society organizations to argue that Kalibata’s appointment was a clear conflict of interest.
“This concern over Kalibata’s nomination has been largely borne-out by Kalibata’s top-down approach to organizing the Summit and her exclusion of those most affected by food insecurity and malnutrition in the planning process,” according to an August 2020 report by AGRA Watch.6
A dozen individuals representing development banks, academic institutions and the private sector came forward in support of Kalibata, but “11 had past or current connections to the Gates Foundation,” AGRA Watch reported, adding:7
“These findings illustrate the influence of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) on global food and agricultural policy. AGRA Watch has continually documented the role of the BMGF in influencing agricultural development, which has grown immensely in recent years.
That Gates Foundation seeks to exercise influence not only through its funding of projects and shaping of expertise, but also in funding the governance platforms that determine food and agricultural policy. This role of the BMGF in driving policy decisions based on its proprietary and technological model of agricultural development is often overlooked.”
Precision Agriculture, Genetic Engineering Take Center Stage
Concerns that the Summit was dominated by corporate industry heightened when its concept paper included precision agriculture, data collection and genetic engineering as pillars for addressing food security while leaving out regenerative agriculture.
As reported by The Guardian, Michael Fakhri, the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food, wrote to Kalibata stating that the Summit was focused on “science and technology, money and markets” while leaving fundamental questions about inequality, accountability and governance unaddressed:8
“It [appears] heavily skewed in favor of one type of approach to food systems, namely market-based solutions … it leaves out experimental/traditional knowledge that has the acute effect of excluding indigenous peoples and their knowledge. The business sector has been part of the problem of food systems and has not been held accountable.”
The 300 million-member Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism announced plans to boycott the Summit and set up a meeting of their own, while others, including Sofía Monsalve Suárez, head of nutrition rights group Fian International, questioned the Summit’s legitimacy:9
“We cannot jump on a train that is heading in the wrong direction … We sent a letter last year to the secretary general about our concerns. It was not answered. We sent another last month, which has also not been answered. The summit appears extremely biased in favor of the same actors who have been responsible for the food crisis.”
Other nutrition experts also expressed the need for the Summit to be more inclusive of initiatives such as agro-ecology and food sovereignty.
Food Group Calls On UN To Sever Ties With WEF
A group of 148 organizations from 28 countries also called on the U.N. to revoke their 2019 strategic partnership formed with the World Economic Forum (WEF). WEF’s involvement with the Summit has been called a form of “corporate hijacking” that would infringe on people’s rights to food and food production. According to the People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty:10
“The WEF will exploit the Summit to streamline neoliberal globalization, which it has espoused for the past 50 years. It is the perfect venue to push for the role of ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies’ to transform food systems, which the WEF has been championing since 2017.
A corporate-led FSS [Food Systems Summit] would be a great advantage to the political elites and corporate billionaires, enabling them to pose hypocritically as responsible entities that promote healthier diets and climate action.
… The sidelined and marginalized sectors in society — the poor farmers, workers, Indigenous Peoples, herders, pastoralists, fisherfolks, urban poor, women, Dalits, and youth — should replace these corporate moguls in shaping the Summit’s proceedings and reforms.”
Beyond the Summit, WEF’s takeover of the U.N. has been denounced by more than 400 civil society organizations and 40 international networks, which claim it will only accelerate the move toward a privatized, undemocratic global takeover. Monsalve Suárez stated:11
“Corporations in the global industrial food chain alone destroy 75 billion tons of topsoil annually and are responsible for the annual loss of 7.5 million hectares of forest. This destruction, along with other factors, leaves 3.9 billion underfed or malnourished people. The WEF represents the interests of those who destroy the environment and abuse our human rights. It cannot be considered a strategic partner in solving the world’s crises.”
Africa’s Traditional Food Systems Under Attack
Planning documents for the Summit also reveal plans for a “radical transformation shift” in Africa, away from traditional farming practices and toward industrial farming — even describing the potential as the “new oil.”12 The African Centre for Biodiversity (ACB), which released the documents, said the plans recycle the “same false solutions … with the same narrow benefits accruing to a limited number of actors.”13
For instance, one section of the documents is titled “the promise of digital and biotechnologies and the transformation of food systems,” and describes “the significant potential for capturing large economic, social and environmental payoffs from the use of biotechnology products … In West Africa, for instance, farmers can benefit significantly from the adoption of Bt cotton.”14
Technology and development take center stage, along with “strengthening the use of big data” for decisions on things like fertilizer use, genetically engineered crops and “accessing markets.” As noted by U.S. Right to Know:15
“This agenda aligns perfectly with the plans of the agrichemical industry, the Gates Foundation and its main agricultural development program, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, which encourages African countries to pass business-friendly policies and scale up markets for patented seeds, fossil-fuel based fertilizers and other industrial inputs they say are necessary to boost food production.”
“The main problem with AGRA,” Global Justice Now explains, “is that it is laying the groundwork for the deeper penetration of African agriculture by agribusiness corporations,” and:
“The BMGF, through AGRA, is one of the world’s largest promoters of chemical fertiliser. Some grants given by the BMGF to AGRA have been specifically intended to ‘help AGRA build the fertiliser supply chain’ in Africa. One of the largest of AGRA’s own grants, worth $25 million, was to help establish the African Fertiliser Agribusiness Partnership (AFAP) in 2012 whose very goal is to ‘at least double total fertiliser use’ in Africa.”16
Bill Gates Is The Biggest Owner Of US Farmland
The BMGF’s involvement in the Summit is also self-serving, as Bill Gates owns more farmland in the U.S. than any other private farmer, having purchased a total of 242,000 acres — much of it considered some of the richest soil in the U.S. — at a frenzied pace over the past few years.17
Gates, however, isn’t interested in regenerative agriculture but instead is furthering an agricultural agenda that supports agrochemicals, patented seeds, fake meat and corporate control — interests that undermine regenerative, sustainable, small-scale farming. One of the key players in this agenda is the widespread adoption of synthetic meat.
Gates has made it clear that he believes switching to synthetic beef is the solution to reducing methane emissions that come from animals raised on concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs).18
The strong recommendation to replace beef with fake meat is made in Gates’ book “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need,” which was released in February 2021.19 In an interview with MIT Technology Review, he goes so far as to say that people’s behaviors should be changed to learn to like fake meat and, if that doesn’t work, regulations could do the trick.20
What many aren’t aware of, however, is that Gates is either personally invested in, or invested in via Breakthrough Energy Ventures, fake meat companies like Beyond Meats, Impossible Foods, Memphis Meats and other companies he actively promotes.21
When asked whether he thinks plant-based and lab-grown meats could “be the full solution to the protein problem globally,” he says that, in middle- to above-income countries, yes, and that people can “get used to it.”22
Small Farmers, Regenerative Agriculture Are The Answer
The U.N. Food Summit is poised to bow down to corporate ideology instead of embracing the small farmers and regenerative practices that have true potential to feed the world and heal the planet. If you’re new to this discussion, you can find the top six reasons to support regenerative agriculture here. As Timothy Wise, senior adviser at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, told The Guardian :23
“A growing number of farmers, scientists and development experts now advocate a shift from high-input chemical-intensive agriculture to low-input ecological farming. They are supported by an array of new research documenting both the risks of continuing to follow our current practices and the potential benefits of a transition to more sustainable farming.”
Sources and References
By Richie Allen | March 13, 2021
The Telegraph is reporting this morning that Education Secretary Gavin Williamson is facing a legal challenge on the guidance that children should wear face coverings in classes.
Lawyers acting for the National Deaf Children’s Society (NDCS) have sent a Letter Before Action to Williamson claiming that the guidance is unlawful and must be changed.
According to the The Telegraph :
Gavin Williamson has been sent a Letter before Action by lawyers acting for the National Deaf Children’s Society (NDCS) who say the guidance is “unlawful” and must be urgently changed.
It comes amid rising pressure on the Government over its latest guidance on masks, which says they should be worn by secondary school pupils in lessons as well as anywhere indoors at school where it is not possible to socially distance.
The NDCS say that face masks create a “wholly avoidable additional barrier” to learning and social interaction for deaf children who need to be able to see the faces of their peers and teachers in order to lip read.
Last Autumn, when asked about facemasks in classrooms, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said; “You can’t teach with face coverings and you can’t expect people to learn with face coverings.” Johnson didn’t change his mind. The fact is, he’s not in charge. SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) is running the show.
A few dozen scientists, most of whom have strong ties to Bill Gates and his subsidiaries The WHO, GAVI and CEPI, are calling the shots now. It was a bloodless coup and it happened almost a year ago to the day. SAGE mission is to vaccinate every man woman and child in the country.
Covid restrictions and guidelines were never about keeping people safe. They were designed to pressure us into taking big pharma’s experimental mRNA medicine. The Pandemic is a hoax. That should be apparent to everyone now.
By Gary Jordan | Wake the F… Up | March 11, 2021
Is there a more egregious attack on human rights than being forced to accept an injection of experimental, toxic junk into your body with the threat of social benefit sanctions, hefty fines and/or imprisonment should you refuse?
Apparently, President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo of Indonesia doesn’t see it that way. Nor do the folks at the George Soros-funded Human Rights Watch.
On Monday, February 15th 2021 a Jakarta Post headline screamed out ‘Get vaccinated or lose your social aid’, sending a message to the poorest of the poor in the archipelago nation that they would suffer the consequences dearly, should they refuse to be administered the Chinese Sinovac Biotech COVID-19 vaccine. Anyone who has ever visited Indonesia knows that ‘social aid’ is in very short supply and that the Indonesian government dole it out sparingly. But if you’re going to coerce and threaten a segment of the population why not start with the most destitute and poverty-stricken, right? At least that’s the idea Jokowi and his gaggle of drug pushers have. As a friend of mine remarked, Indonesia went from being a nation that severely punishes those who do drugs to one that severely punishes those who don’t. Another example of the inverted, upside-down state of our existence in the 2020s to date.
Further into the Jakarta Post article, it’s explained that measures would be put in place to ensure steady vaccine uptake and that those who were not willing to be compliant participants in the ongoing trials would be deemed a hindrance to the campaign and therefore could potentially be hit with heavy fines and possible jail time. Does it matter that even the Food and Drug Administration has expressed efficacy and safety concerns and have gone as far as stating that it would NOT be recommending frontline workers are vaccinated with the Sinovac product? Or does it matter that clinical trials in Indonesia have shown a mere 65% efficacy rate? Of course not. Did you think you were living in 2019 and had the freedom to choose what goes into your body? Have the jab or go to jail! Jokowi’s orders.
Of course, as shocking as it is to think that such freedom is a thing of the past in the thriving and modern predominantly Muslim nation of Indonesia, when you scratch the surface and delve into the previous actions of their Globalist agenda-pushers called politicians, you’ll soon find that they are on the same road to techno-Fascism as the remaining 192 United Nations members states are. As we speak, for example, a well-known artist from the island of Bali sits in a prison cell for supposed ‘hate speech’ after he publicly declared on social media that the COVID-19 tests are inaccurate (something since acknowledged by authoritative sources) and that the Indonesian Doctor’s Association (IDI) were ‘flunkeys’ to the World Health Organization (WHO). Meeting a similar fate was a 19-year-old girl from the island of Kupang who was arrested after she appeared on video setting fire to a face mask and calling the pandemic out as a hoax. Both are victims of one of the world’s most Orwellian laws, known as the Information and Electronics Transaction Act (UU ITE), which has created a modern-day Stasi-like system in Indonesia where neighbours report neighbours for the sins of speaking their minds. This is the wet dream of Indonesia’s notorious CIA-backed ex-Dictator, Suharto. Had he lived to experience his mata-mata (eyes everywhere) police state be so enabled and enhanced by the current technological advancements in his country he would have thought he’d died and gone to heaven. And now, with the introduction of ‘virtual police’ who will directly contact you on your mobile device to warn you that what you are about to post may break the law, it appears the people of Indonesia can do no wrongthink.
I wonder if they agree that the idea of a vaccine mandated, centrally controlled, hive mind, AI driven, Fascist police and military-run Brave New World for the future is just the rant of a crazy conspiracy theorist? Maybe they could ask the Fact-Checkers. After all, when a nation deploys the military to engage in contact tracing and to enforce travel restrictions, as Indonesia has recently done, it’s nothing to be worried about. It’s all for the greater good, right? Best to ignore the fact that the same military which is about to be let loose amongst the public and given unprecedented power over it are the same that have, in relatively recent times, committed human rights abuses that include, but are not limited to, the shooting dead of four young students, the public stripping and hog-tying of dozens of indigenous men for the horrific act of raising a flag, the assassination of two men and the subsequent burning and disposal of their corpses and the rape and torture of sex slaves. What could go wrong?
Sarcasm aside, as someone who has spent over a decade living in Indonesia, I find the state of affairs there extremely worrying. A government that demands an emergency authorized, non approved, low efficacy, potentially harmful, experimental vaccine be administered into the veins of every man, woman and child against their wishes, is a government of occupation – working against its very own people. That same worry is felt by many in the nation with some even resorting to hiding in the woods for fear of being injected. Of course, mainstream media in the country presents these same people as being outsiders and lunatics who have watched too many YouTube videos and ridicules them as subjects of disinformation. We should trace our minds back to recent history, which is littered with stories of demonized persons hiding in the woods for fear of government policy. Perhaps Jokowi and his Big Pharma cartel should be reminded of that.
Perhaps Human Rights agencies should be too.
On receiving the disturbing news of coercion and injection by force in Indonesia, I reached out to several of them, starting with Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. To date, I have not had a reply from Amnesty. Human Rights Watch, however, did send me a note from their office in Amsterdam stating that they did not have the capacity to handle individual requests. This I accept as I can imagine an organization of their notoriety receives vast amounts of correspondence from people all over the world who are victims of human rights violations. Nevertheless, I have to ask again; is there a more egregious attack on human rights than being forced to accept an injection of experimental, toxic junk into your body with the threat of social benefit sanctions, hefty fines and/or imprisonment should you refuse?
And if indeed the organization is too busy to investigate this very serious issue in Indonesia, what exactly is keeping them busy? What could be more threatening to the rights of a human being than the accelerated pauperization of social aid recipients or the imprisonment of conscientious objectors? I soon found out the answer to this question was…
Britney Spears.
The state of well being of the multi-millionaire pop princess takes priority over a nation of 275 million people who are about to be turned into guinea pigs. As many people will have heard, Britney Spears was thrust into the spotlight again as a result of a recent documentary that highlighted her plight in regards to her father’s standing as her legal guardian and the implications of this on her career and finances. Poor Britney. Human Rights Watch used this opportunity to jump on the #FreeBritney bandwagon. In their defence, the coverage they had given to the movement did shed light on the issue of guardianship over the many people worldwide who are under the control of others due to mental health or psycho-social issues. Still, it made me take a more in-depth look at Human Rights Watch in specific. As far as I’m concerned, they did not need a random email from myself or anyone else to highlight the horrendous laws which have been passed in Indonesia, threatening the freedom and finances of those who object to being vaccinated. For that reason, they cannot consider themselves serious challengers of Fascist, authoritarian rights-abusing governments who medically terrorize their population. They certainly can’t consider themselves purveyors of human rights when they are turning a blind eye to the arbitrary whims of pharmaceutical cartel-driven establishment policy. So what is the main reason for their ignorance of the current status quo – not just in Indonesia, but in regards to what has been happening worldwide since the COVID-19 cult hijacked our planet?
Have Human Rights Watch stepped forward to voice their disdain when employees of a corporation in the UK called Metropolitan Police were arresting peaceful protestors en masse in London? Were they loudly condemning the presence of 20 agents of the state in Dublin, Ireland when they turned up in cars and riot vans in front of a beauty salon to arrest the owner, who had opened her business during lockdown because she had no other way of earning a living? Were they up in arms over the callous Big Pharma-owned politicians who spat on the faith and beliefs of the people of New York City by eliminating religious exemption to vaccine requirements? Were they vocal when vicious thugs within the Victoria Police Department in Australia were abducting journalists who were reporting on the anti-lockdown street protests? Did they kick up a fuss when perverts, hired by Justin Trudeau’s government in Canada as security guards in mandatory quarantine centers, sexually assaulted detainees? Or how about when a Canadian citizen was forced to skip a potentially life-saving cancer treatment appointment at the demands of malevolent public health officials who insisted he checked into a government detention center? Were they even heard objecting to mandatory quarantine, to begin with?
Have they been heard crying out their disapproval of the apartheid conditions imminent in society as a result of proposed phoney vaccine passports and immunity certificates? Have they condemned the neglect of the unvaccinated in Israel who presently will not be allowed to enter establishments without proof of vaccination via their ‘Green Passport?’ Are they sounding the alarm bells in recognition of the tsunami of discrimination about to be unleashed on unvaccinated people?
No. Tumbleweed. Deafening silence.
These topics matter as much to Human Rights Watch as the penalization of poor Indonesians who are too terrified to come out of the jungle, for fear of being damaged by an ineffective and dangerous vaccine amid credible and very real reports of adverse reactions worldwide.
Where you will be sure to hear the voice of the Human Rights Watch team though is anywhere that the agendas of the Globalists are threatened. Belarus for example. When the dark suits of the IMF and World Bank showed up in mid-2020 and attempted to bribe the nation’s leader, Aleksander Lukashenko, with almost a billion dollars in exchange for permission to destroy the country with lockdowns and COVID-19 restrictions, thus creating absolute dependence on the ubiquitous parasites, Lukashenko refused. What would result was the demonization of the President worldwide in the left-wing bought-and-paid-for mainstream media. At the very forefront of this campaign was Human Rights Watch. As police and security personnel in the nation clashed with protestors, this was suddenly viewed by Human Rights Watch as an act of abuse on civil liberties on behalf of the Belarussian law enforcement personnel. The same, and sometimes even worse, behaviour, when committed by police on anti-lockdown protestors in London, Edinburgh, Berlin, Toronto, or Dublin is ignored though. Why is that? Simply because the demonization of the Belarussian President and his security force is part of the Globalist banking agenda, which serves the interest of Human Rights Watch major donor, George Soros. Why bother with trivial matters such as the greatest attack on civil liberties this century, as is occurring worldwide with tyrannical practices that are being put in place in the name of keeping us safe from a virus with a 99.97% recovery rate? This is of no significance to Human Rights Watch, who are more interested in the agendas of the Open Society Foundation – for example, Black Lives Matter, Transgender rights and anything anti-Russian. Poor Indonesian families be damned. They’ve got more important people to serve, such as the IMF and World Bank billionaires… and Britney Spears of course.
For certain, the last people on the planet that would object to President Jokowi of Indonesia’s forced medical experimentation on his people are the Human Rights Watch crew. 2020 proved to be a year that would see them run off their feet, waging war week after week with Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, who refused to allow undocumented immigrants to swarm his country as and when they pleased – much to the detriment of the radical leftist extremist Soros, who was as hell-bent as ever on transforming the tradition and culture of all European nations. An issue of this importance would never allow Human Rights Watch the time to concern themselves with menial points such as bodily autonomy and freedom to choose. In fact, they seemed to develop a case of amnesia on the ‘my body, my choice’ argument that they’ve spouted for decades.
Nuremberg Code-evading practices in Indonesia were no where near as important to Human Rights Watch as the trial of Alexey Navalny, a man who mainstream media dubiously reported had been poisoned on the orders of Vladimir Putin – amidst no evidence of such an incident occurring. The anti-Putin tool of the Globalists would be given massive amounts of attention by them as they ignored the health violations of the pre-dominantly Muslim citizens of Indonesia. It was imperative that a man who once compared Muslims to cockroaches was given higher priority than Muslims that were been subjected to Big Pharma crime and corruption,
The organization’s bias can only be matched by its hypocrisy. When they are not pushing the Globalist anti-Putin agenda then it’s the anti-China rhetoric. In their 2020 end of year report on China they complained;
“In April, authorities in Guangzhou, home to China’s largest African community, forcibly tested Africans for the Coronavirus, and ordered them to self isolate or to quarantine in designated hotels.”
It’s wrong when China does this to Africans, you see, but when Canadian authorities do exactly the same thing to their own citizens and to tourists today, there isn’t a peep to be heard out of Human Rights Watch.
They continue;
“To combat COVID-19, Chinese tech giants developed an app known as the Health Code. Using unknown algorithms, the app generates one of three colours (green, yellow or red), depending on a range of factors such as whether people have been to virus-hit areas. That colour has a wide-ranging impact on people’s lives, including their freedom of movement, as local authorities throughout the country require people to show the app when they move around.”
Once again, if China does this, it’s wrong. However, no mention has ever been made by them concerning, for example, the UK’s NHS Test and Trace app which supposedly serves the same purpose and undoubtedly creates the same restrictions on freedom of movement as the app in China. Nor is there a mention of the ‘Green Passport’ of Israel or the proposed vaccine passports that have been planned in the UK, Ireland and Australia among other nations. The closest we have come to Human Rights Watch addressing the worldwide Fascist takeover of the past twelve months is a special report entitled ‘COVID Free Speech Abuses’, in which the usual suspects, e.g, China, Russia, Egypt, Brazil, Hungary and Belarus are admonished, with no mention of the severe abuses of the pro-Davos leaders on their people, such as Trudeau, Johnson and Merkel.
But all roads lead to Gates. The likelihood of Human Rights Watch questioning vaccine mandates is slim when we delve into their financial records and see that Bill Gates and his ever-present bribes are at work. In my book, The Covid-19 Illusion; A Cacophony of Lies, I cover the inner workings of Gates and show how far his tentacles stretch. It appears he’s found his way into the grubby little paws of Human Rights Watch’s Board of Directors too. In December 2018, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded the NGO a US$200,000 grant for ‘general operating support’. The philanthro-capitalist vaccine vendors have wriggled their way in alongside Soros to keep Human Rights Watch on the straight and narrow, focusing on the goals of the techno-fascist agendas and neglecting the populations of nations that are bound for a vaccine mandated Orwellian dystopia. The only saving grace now is with the people themselves and their desire to reject the Great Reset and all its horrors. For, surely, it will be a cold day in hell before groups like Human Rights Watch concern themselves with anything that remotely resembles human rights if it means disrupting the plans of their wealthy, cash-wielding overlords.
Indeed it may be that Human Rights Watch will fit in just fine with the upcoming techno-Fascist New World Order. Perhaps they will feel right at home with Klaus Schwab, the son of a man who was at one time owned a company referred to as a National Socialist Model Company by the Nazis. They themselves have a history with individuals who greatly admired the Third Reich. Their former senior military analyst, Marc Garlasco, was in possession of a rather large collection of Nazi memorabilia. Perhaps Human Rights Watch don’t consider President Jokowi’s ‘injection by force’ method so abhorrent at all – considering the company they’ve kept in the past.
One thing that’s for certain, it is highly unlikely that their European Media Director, Andrew Stroehlein, will be moved to action by this article – considering he only reads what he agrees with and avoids everything contrary to his narrative. Stroehlein, an active Twitter user, advises his followers, in a pinned Tweet to ‘block early and often’ and singles out ‘fact deniers’ and ‘propagandists for abusive governments’ among those that should be blocked. Firmly entrenched in his echo chamber he tells his followers not to share anything from ‘powerless fools looking for attention’ or to ‘hateful headlines and clickbait’.
I guess when you work for a Human Rights organization that avoids investigating serious human rights violations, you may as well be a Media Director that shuns opinions you disagree with.
Human Rights Watch have fumbled and fidgeted in the face of monstrous crimes against humanity, scoffing at those who called out their Globalist masters for what they are. They are an extension of the cult of COVID-19 that is toying with the world today for evil intentions.
Without a doubt, 2020 was the year the cult that runs the world stepped out of the closet and showed their faces. It was also the year that organizations like Human Rights Watch proved to the world that they have no interest in human rights and are merely a front for political agendas. Going forward we should embrace the fact that once these groups opened the door to the closet, it was firmly latched behind them and the masks slipped off. They now have to be confronted for their atrocities and held accountable for their failure to act on their duties.
thecovid19illusion@protonmail.com
By James Bovard | AIER | February 24, 2021
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is falling from grace at epic speed. His administration is now the target of a Justice Department probe for policies that resulted in the death of one out of eight nursing home residents in the state. Regardless of whether the New York legislature impeaches Cuomo, the standard he championed poses a continuing peril.
From the start of the Covid pandemic, the media idolized Cuomo for his “safety through absolute power” mantra. Last March 20, Cuomo imposed a statewide lockdown on 20 million New Yorkers, closing schools and businesses. Cuomo labeled his decree a “pause” and declared: “If everything we do saves just one life, I’ll be happy.” At that point, most counties in New York state had five or fewer people who have tested positive for coronavirus.
Cuomo’s “just one life” standard for lockdowns should have obliterated his credibility. Instead, Cuomo’s maxim was treated as a triumph of idealism and benevolence. Cuomo’s power grab was enabled by media allies that fanned hysteria. As AIER editorial director Jeffrey Tucker recently noted, the New York Times’ Donald G. McNeil Jr. “was the first reporter from a major media venue to stir up virus panic and advocate for extreme lockdown measures… The Times allowed its voice to be used to promote a primal and primitive disease panic, which they surely knew would create a cultural/political frenzy.” Presidential candidate Joe Biden hailed Cuomo last Spring for setting the “gold standard” for leadership on Covid.
After Cuomo swayed the New York legislature to give him “authorization of absolute power,” as the New Yorker declared, he issued scores of decrees, including one compelling nursing homes to admit Covid-infected patients and permitting Covid-infected staffers to keep working at those homes. A New York democratic legislator said that Cuomo was “inclined towards tyranny. But in a crisis that’s what people want.”
A New Yorker profile, entitled “Andrew Cuomo, King of New York,” explained that Cuomo and his aides saw the battle over Covid policy as “between people who believe government can be a force for good and those who think otherwise.” For many liberals and much of the nation’s media, placing people under house arrest, padlocking schools, bankrupting business, and causing two million people to lose their jobs vindicated government as “a force for good.”
MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace declared that Cuomo is “everything Trump isn’t: honest, direct, brave.” Entertainment Weekly hailed Cuomo as “the hero that America never realized it needed until he was on our television screens every night.” As National Review recently noted, local reporters failed to ask questions on his nursing home edict “for months, as the governor held his much-praised daily press briefings about the pandemic. There were literally hundreds of hours of Cuomo press conferences in the first half of 2020 where not a single question was asked about nursing homes.”
The docile media paved the way to Cuomo winning an Emmy award for his “masterful use of television” during the pandemic. The media’s valorization of Cuomo helped make his self-tribute book, American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic, a bestseller.
Cuomo has always known how to milk the media. When he was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, he explained to the Washington Post in 1999 how he would fix HUD’s dismal image: “The PR is the most important thing I do … Eighty percent of the battle is communications.” (I christened Cuomo as “the Clinton administration’s most megalomaniacal cabinet secretary in a 2000 American Spectator piece titled, “Andy At It Again: How to Keep Reinventing HUD to Advance Yourself.”) Flash forward to last June, and Cuomo prematurely issued a poster celebrating his and New York state’s victory over Covid. The political art (sold for $14.50 plus shipping and handling) featured a steep mountain symbolizing the rise and fall of Covid cases. The poster was plastered with insipid phrases such as “The sun on the other side, “The power of ‘We,’” “Winds of Fear,” “Follow the Facts,” and “Love Community Support,” and included a jibe against Trump. Though poster sales failed to deter second and third waves of Covid outbreaks, the PR campaign further encouraged the media to focus on Cuomo’s words instead of his deeds.
During the pandemic, “legitimacy” came not from adhering to the U.S. and state Constitutions but from continually invoking “science and data,” as Cuomo did. . Cuomo’s entitlement to absolute power came from modeling concocted by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), a Washington State-based institution bankrolled by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. As investigative journalist Jordan Schachtel noted last week in an AIER analysis, IHME forecasts presumed a death rate 30 times higher than the rate that actually occurred. That horrendous miscalculation sufficed for one governor after another to nullify Americans’ freedom with lockdown orders. Absurd statistical extrapolations forecasting future harm made tyranny irrelevant.
Cuomo describes himself as a “great progressive,” perhaps thereby entitling himself to any power he presumes necessary “for the good of the people,” Bill of Rights be damned. November, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down New York state restrictions that limited religious gatherings to ten or fewer people while permitting far more leeway for businesses to operate, declaring that Cuomo’s rules were “far more restrictive than any Covid-related regulations that have previously come before the Court… and far more severe than has been shown to be required to prevent the spread of the virus.” Cuomo’s allies in the liberal establishment reacted with horror to the limit on his sway. An American Civil Liberties Union official fretted to the New York Times that “the freedom to worship… does not include a license to harm others or endanger public health.” Harvard law professor Lawrence Tribe and Cornell professor Michael Dorf babbled that the ruling signaled that the Supreme Court belonged in “the theocratic and misogynist country in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’”
Cuomo remained revered even though his repressive policies failed to prevent New York from having among the nation’s highest Covid death rates. But a Justice Department probe into his nursing home policies launched last August may be his undoing. New York state reported barely half of the total of more than 12,000 New York nursing home patients who died of Covid. Cuomo’s top aide, Melissa DeRosa, told Democratic legislative leaders that “basically, we froze” when the feds demanded information. “We were in a position where we weren’t sure if what we were going to give to the Department of Justice… was going to be used against us,” DeRosa said according to a leaked transcript.
But Cuomo’s culpability goes beyond hiding corpses. Early in the pandemic, he pushed to include a legislative provision written by the Greater New York Hospital Association to give a waiver of liability to nursing homes and hospitals whose patients died of Covid. A report last month by the New York Attorney General warned, “The immunity laws could be wrongly used to protect any individual or entity from liability, even if those decisions were not made in good faith or motivated by financial incentives.” As the Guardian noted, “Cuomo’s political machine received more than $2 million from the Greater New York Hospital Association (GNYHA), its executives and its lobbying firms.”
But Cuomo’s credibility should have been dethroned long before the latest disclosures. As early as last May, barely two months after the start of the state lockdown, a New York Post columnist groused: “So Gov. Andrew Cuomo killed Grandma and cratered New York’s economy. But he looked good doing it.” Cuomo’s cachet derived almost entirely from media scoring that until recently ignored almost all of the harms he inflicted.
Cuomo and other politicians have used Covid policy lodestars that were akin to crossing the Pacific Ocean with navigators who insisted the earth was flat. Melinda Gates admitted last December: “What did surprise us is we hadn’t really thought through the economic impacts.” The politicians who imposed shutdowns based on data from the Gates’ funded by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation apparently never bothered to estimate the collateral damage from their decrees. Similar myopia spurred crackdowns and restrictions in many states that helped cause the sharpest reduction in Americans’ life expectancy since World War Two.
Unfortunately, there is no indication that either politicians or the media have recognized the authoritarian dangers inherent in governors or presidents claiming a right to boundless power to save “just one life.”
A similar standard is helping justify keeping schools closed in many areas. Teachers’ unions have rallied around the motto: “If one teacher dies, isn’t that too many?” But like Cuomo’s shutdowns, that standard ignores the horrific collateral damage on American children. A Journal of the American Medical Association analysis concluded that shutting down the schools would reduce the current crop of students’ collective years of life by more than five million, based on “lower income, reduced educational attainment, and worse health outcomes.” It remains to be seen how much, if any, the role of the well-being of children plays in school policy in the coming months.
While it is unlikely that the media lapdogs who adore Cuomo and other prominent politicians will admit their follies, the exposure of hard facts may help blunt the next stampede to submission. The Justice Department investigation into nursing home policies that boosted Covid death tolls in New York, New Jersey, Michigan, and Pennsylvania could tarnish some of the nation’s most aggressive Covid lockdowners. Other investigations by the media or private groups could expose far more evidence of misconduct or of gross negligence that boosted Covid death tolls.
In a tour of television talk shows shortly after President Biden was inaugurated, Cuomo recited his latest catchphrase: “Incompetent government kills people.” This intended slapdown of Trump is recoiling badly on the New York governor. If Cuomo is impeached or forced to resign for his Covid fiascos, maybe he could score plenty of media appearances with a new slogan: “Absolute power with impunity kills.”