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‘Deeply Flawed’ Report Praising Pandemic Mandates Used to Promote ‘Lockdown Doctrine,’ Critic Says

By John-Michael Dumais and Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 1, 2023

The U.K.’s Royal Society — acclaimed as the world’s oldest scientific academy — last week issued a report saying there was “clear evidence” that lockdowns, masks, contact tracing, travel restrictions and other nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) were effective at reducing COVID-19 transmission “in some countries.”

However, in an article published Wednesday in UnHerdKevin Bardosh, Ph.D., research director at Collateral Global — which is “dedicated to researching, understanding and communicating the global impacts of policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic” — called the report “deeply flawed,” saying it revealed “an unfortunate detachment from reality in our prestigious scientific institutions.”

Bardosh called out the report, particularly for its use of the word “unequivocally,” which stated:

“In summary, evidence about the effectiveness of NPIs applied to reduce the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 shows unequivocally that, when implemented in packages that combine a number of NPIs with complementary effects, these can provide powerful, effective and prolonged reductions in viral transmission.”

Bardosh, whose work has focused on the epidemiology and control of human, animal and vector-borne infectious disease in over 20 countries, is co-author of more than 50 peer-reviewed publications.

In this 2022 analysis of the unintended consequences of COVID-19 vaccine policy, published in BMJ Global Health, Bardosh and co-authors concluded: “mandatory COVID-19 vaccine policies have had damaging effects on public trust, vaccine confidence, political polarization, human rights, inequities and social wellbeing.”

Failure to ‘evaluate the harmful consequences’ of policies

Bardosh said the central problem with the Royal Society report — and similar work like last year’s Lancet Commission report and Nature’s review — is that they fail to comprehensively evaluate the harmful consequences of pandemic policies.

Instead they “exclude or minimize the uncomfortable outliers and data that question orthodoxy and sidestep the hard policy questions.”

Without such critical inquiry, “simple narratives and comfortable popular projections” become entrenched, said Bardosh, in part by the mainstream media’s constant repetition of messages — like “masks worked” and “lockdowns slowed the spread” — and by admonitions to not question the conclusions or the authorities or institutions responsible for pushing them.

Among the most glaring yet unexamined consequences, according to Bardosh, are the hundreds of millions of people pushed into poverty and food insecurity by COVID-19 pandemic mandates and the lost educational opportunities for children.

In another article in UnHerd, Bardosh called out the U.K. COVID-19 inquiry — after more than 40 child rights charities and advocates issued a “scathing indictment” — saying it “must address the harms to children,” and that “lockdown ‘experts’ need to be held to account.”

Bardosh wrote:

“Children were not vectors of disease, despite pervasive media propaganda that toddlers would kill grandma. They were at minuscule risk from severe outcomes. Schools were never places of high transmission, something known as early as April 2020.

“Yet the expert classes, media and politicians hyped the risk to kids, dressing it up in a garb of unquestionable moralism that fed on our deepest fears: hurting children.”

What’s wrong with the Royal Society analysis?

The Royal Society report found individual NPIs in isolation had no effect on transmission, and it considered only the reduction of transmission in its overall analysis, not the illness or death outcomes, Bardosh pointed out.

In its analysis of lockdown and social distancing data, the Royal Society inconsistently applied targeting of time periods and effect sizes, and failed to distinguish between voluntary and mandated behavior change, he said.

Bardosh further criticized the report for relying heavily on observational studies from high-income countries and for cherry-picking cases from countries like South Korea, New Zealand and Hong Kong while ignoring those from Sweden, India, Haiti and Nicaragua.

“For the 17% of the world that could stay home (about 500 million people) during the height of global lockdown, reports are now written that render the other 83% invisible,” he wrote.

The report’s review of the evidence on masks, noted Bardosh, contradicts the recently updated meta-analysis of 78 randomized control trials (RCTs) by Cochrane which, while admitting the flaws in the study, nonetheless found “the pooled results of RCTs did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks” and “wearing N95/P2 respirators … may make little to no difference in how many people catch a flu-like illness.”

In his article last week about mask mandates, Bardosh also cited the recent RCT studies of community-wide cloth masking in Bangladesh and Guinea-Bissau during the pandemic, which found little to no benefit from the interventions.

Bardosh wrote:

“Before Covid, population-wide medical masks were not viewed as a particularly effective tool for respiratory viruses. In a 2018 address at the National Academy of Medicine, science writer Laurie Garrett stated that ‘the major efficacy of a mask is that it causes alarm in a person and so you stay away from each other.’”

The many downsides of facemask use also remained unexplored in the report. In his masking article Bardosh wrote:

“Oddly, the pro-mask narrative ignores the … harmful effects on social and emotional cognition, the toxicity of poorly manufactured masks, environmental pollution, psychological and physical discomfort (especially in people with a history of trauma or abuse), as well as increased social conformity to illogical bureaucracy and greater acceptance of mass surveillance technologies.”

Collateral Global in April brought together a group of 30 scholars, activists and experts from across the globe to discuss the impacts of pandemic restrictions in low- and middle-income countries — many of which were not considered in the Royal Society study, according to Bardosh.

They issued a report calling for focusing on human rights and centering local actors’ knowledge and experience, disaggregating risk based on local conditions, consistent public investment in healthcare across the world, open and accurate information flow from central authorities to regional areas and back, and for governments to avoid unnecessary and unworkable restrictions on movement, freedoms and the economy.

They also called out the acceleration of the global trend toward authoritarianism, the unlawful granting of emergency powers to the state and the manipulation of public opinion through the exploitation of fear.

Bardosh warned of a global policy “domino-effect” where lockdown policymaking in major countries invariably leads, through political pressure, to the herding of lower-income countries into the same mandates, regardless of the social and economic harm.

A new ‘lockdown doctrine’?

Despite the shortcomings of the Royal Society report, it is already being used as a rallying point for a new global preparedness vision, according to Bardosh, to make sure that NPIs such as lockdowns are rolled out early in the next pandemic.

This is part of the 100-day mission roadmap promoted by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness (CEPI), Bardosh said.

CEPI, a global partnership of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust and the World Economic Forum (WEF), was launched in 2017 in Davos, Switzerland, home of the WEF.

CEPI is closely connected to efforts to develop a vaccine for “Disease X,” raising over a billion dollars from governments and organizations such as the Gates Foundation.

According to the 100 Days website, “In preparing for Disease X, it’s important to be clear about the knowns and the unknowns: The X in ‘Disease X’ stands for everything we don’t know” and “What we do know is that the next Disease X is coming and that we have to be ready.”

CEPI recently hosted the Global Pandemic Preparedness Summit with the U.K. government “to explore how we can respond to the next ‘Disease X’ by making safe, effective vaccines within 100 days,” stating it has a $3.5 billion “pandemic-busting plan” that “will kickstart and coordinate this work.”

According to the Daily Mail, countries have pledged $1.5 billion for this plan.

Bardosh called this “our new lockdown doctrine.”

In a June article, he wrote that this doctrine represents the consolidation of the world’s resources toward pandemic preparedness and building “the critical infrastructure for rapid lockdown,” and that “Shutting down harder and faster next time is the wrong idea.”

Bardosh wrote:

Sir Jeremy Farrar, previous director at the Wellcome Trust and current WHO [World Health Organization] Chief Scientist, warned the inquiry not to be complacent in our ‘new pandemic age.’

“Views expressed this week sounded similar to those outlined in Bill Gates’s recent book, ‘How to Prevent the Next Pandemic.’ The Gates Foundation has become the WHO’s second largest donor, giving it an oversized influence in determining the shape of future pandemic responses.

“In his book, Gates outlines a plan echoed so far in the U.K. inquiry: lock down fast and make reopening dependent on a vaccine.”

Bardosh warned the successful rollout of lockdowns, vaccines and therapeutics would require “mechanisms to shape public opinion, curtail civil liberties and deploy massive government spending programs.”

Bardosh sees the Royal Society report — driven by “powerful interests, spin and egos” — functioning as just such a mechanism, forming the latest brick in the wall of a new and expanding global command-and-control system.

“We have seen in the years since 2020,” he wrote, “that once you impose a slew of government mandates, repealing them is just as difficult.”

Bardosh hopes that “skeptical academic oddballs” like him can make enough noise to make a difference.


John-Michael Dumais is a news editor for The Defender. He has been a writer and community organizer on a variety of issues, including the death penalty, war, health freedom and all things related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

September 6, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Local Lockdown in Paris for Break-Bone Fever

The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | September 1, 2023

Public health tasted the power they gained during the pandemic and now they are hungry once more. Any excuse to make themselves relevant again and they will take it.

This time it happened in France’s capital, Paris. On Wednesday and Thursday, the city undertook its first ever large-scale mosquito control campaign after two people contracted dengue fever. It is also known as break-bone fever due to the joint pain that accompanies illness.

Although the individuals were infected with dengue whilst abroad, officials were concerned that the Asian tiger mosquito might bite them and spread the disease around the country.

That seems like a very small risk to me but apparently, nowadays, however small the risk, public health must intervene. So they closed roads and sent out stay at home alerts (mini local lockdowns), allowing insecticides to be sprayed around the city over a couple of days.

Naturally, the situation was blamed on climate change. Apparently, there have been hotter temperatures and increased flooding meaning the mosquitos are more likely to cause a problem.

Most people who get dengue don’t have any symptoms but it is estimated that around half a million people worldwide are hospitalised with the disease each year. Approximately 20,000 to 40,000 of these die, however with good healthcare, death is unlikely.

Dr Jolyon Medlock, head of medical entomology and zoonoses ecology at the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) told the Telegraph newspaper, that “in 10 to 15 years the UK will probably also have embedded populations of mosquitoes that pose a threat to health”.

At the bottom of the Telegraph article it says “Protect yourself and your family by learning more about Global Health Security”.

Lo and behold, who do we find funding the Telegraph’s Global Health Security? The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation of course. The Telegraph insists that the support comes without strings but it seems like it does come with some benefits as the paper brags that “we were among the first to warn of an approaching pandemic”. However did they know!?

And is the break-bone fever panic really being caused by climate change? In 2017, it was announced that France and the Netherlands backed the release of Oxitec’s genetically modified mosquitoes to fight dengue, chikungunya and zika.

These mosquitos are meant to use a biological method to suppress wild populations of dangerous mosquitos. The genetically modified males don’t bite or transmit disease and when released, search for a female mate. Their offspring inherit a self-limiting gene that causes them to die before reaching functional adulthood. Seems a bit Jurassic Parky to me and if there’s one thing I learnt from Jurassic Park, it’s that life always finds a way.

Oxitec is also the company that released genetically modified mosquitoes in Florida… which is now seeing a rise in malaria. Definitely not connected though. Their business is supported by $18 million of funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

But who is Oxitec? Founded in 2002 as a spinout from Oxford University, they were purchased by US based Intrexon and Third Security in early 2020.

Intrexon changed its name to Precigen in 2020, a year after creating the company as a subsidiary. Weirdly, if you try to go to Intrexon’s website you get taken to DNA.com which is just a landing page with a creepy logo.

Under its current name, Precigen, the company informs us that it “is a dedicated discovery and clinical stage biopharmaceutical company advancing the next generation of gene and cell therapies using precision technology to target the most urgent and intractable diseases in our core therapeutic areas of immuno-oncology, autoimmune disorders, and infectious diseases”.

I used to think this technology would bring great advancement to medicine but, since the pandemic, I think they are just playing with fire.

September 4, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Gates Foundation, DOD Helping Fund Pandemic ‘Early Warning’ Surveillance System in Africa

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | August 23, 2023

Scientists are developing a proprietary “early warning system” — powered by CRISPR gene-editing technology — to “detect and characterize deadly pathogens” in Africa “before they spread across the globe,” STAT News reported.

The surveillance system — dubbed Sentinel — was launched with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and others. It uses “participatory” digital health tools developed with funding from the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.

Sentinel’s lead developers are Pardis Sabeti, M.D., D.Phil., and Christian Happi, Ph.D., who are patenting the technology to commercialize it in the U.S.

Sabeti is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, Harvard professor and director of the Broad Institute’s Sabeti Lab. Happi is a professor of molecular biology and genomics at Redeemer’s University in Nigeria, an adjunct professor of immunology and infectious diseases at Harvard and director of the African Centre of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases (ACEGID), a genomic research institute focused on Africa, which he co-founded with Sabeti in Nigeria.

Sentinel aims to use rapid testing at “points-of-care” — anywhere tests can be administered, including non-clinical settings — across rural Africa to identify and genetically sequence pathogens. Then researchers will use cloud-based technology to share that information across the public health information sphere.

Global public health researchers can then track and predict “threats” and use that information to rapidly develop new diagnostics and vaccines — what the researchers call a “virtuous cycle,” according to a 2021 paper published in Viruses by the developers.

The Sentinel project was officially launched in 2020 with funding from TED’s Audacious Projectbacked by Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife MacKenzie Scott, Open Philanthropy, the Skoll Foundation and the Gates Foundation.

But DARPA, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Wellcome Trust and others funded the development of the CRISPR technology the project will use to detect pathogenic threats.

In an interview with The Defender, University of Illinois international law professor Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., a bioweapons expert who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, said:

“They fully intend to use synthetic biology to research, develop and test biological warfare weapons. That’s DARPA’s motivation for funding this.

“It fits in with Predict and its successor, also funded by USAID [U.S. Agency for International Development], which is a front organization for the CIA, to go out into the world and find every exotic disease, fungus, toxin, virus they possibly can and bring them back here and then weaponize them in their BSL3 [biosafety level 3] and BSL4 labs.”

According to Boyle, the Broad Institute is one of the country’s leading DARPA-funded synthetic biology research centers.

Happi and Sabeti officially launched Sentinel in West Africa one month before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. By early February 2020, they were using it to deploy COVID-19 rapid testing and genomic sequencing in hospitals across Sierra Leone, Senegal and Nigeria — before anywhere in the U.S. was doing so, STAT reported.

In March 2020, Happi’s lab confirmed the first COVID-19 case in Nigeria and became the first African lab to sequence a SARS-CoV-2 genome.

“Experts” told STAT that Africa is a “hot spot for emerging infectious diseases” because the existing system of disease surveillance is too centralized and top-down.

Happi and Sabeti aim to change that, they said, by making disease surveillance “bottom-up” — getting “everyday Africans” and community frontline workers working as “sentinels” to surveil their friends and communities for diseases.

They said their project can change how disease surveillance works globally. “Everybody in the world should be a sentinel, a sentinel not only for his own immediate community, for his own country — but a sentinel for the globe,” said Happi.

‘Very wealthy people have figured out how they can get extremely rich from this’ 

The developers said the Sentinel program is needed because viruses can mutate at any time to become pandemic threats, and this system is designed to find them early.

Sabeti described the work in a video tweeted last year by Bill Gates.

https://twitter.com/BillGates/status/1528816410343878656

Sentinel is designed to identify pathogens at the most localized level possible and then disperse diagnostic and genomic information as quickly as possible to public health officials and researchers designing treatments, vaccines and new tests.

Clinicians or others are meant to administer “point-of-care” tests that use CRISPR gene-editing technology, which turns gene editors into pathogen detectors through different techniques, some of which are still in development.

Sentinel’s first line of intervention is the SHINE (SHERLOCK and HUDSON Integration to Navigate Epidemics) diagnostic tool, easily administered at almost any location. It tests blood or urine samples and reveals the results on a piece of paper without any high-tech equipment.

Happi told STAT that administering the test is like “doing a PCR on a sheet of paper” and that it is so simple that his grandmother could do it in her village.

But SHINE — an improvement on Sabeti’s earlier Specific High-sensitivity Enzymatic Reporter UnLOCKing, or SHERLOCK test — can test for only one pathogen at a time.

If that test fails to detect anything, Sentinel researchers launch their next-level test, CARMEN (Combinatorial Arrayed Reactions for Multiplexed Evaluation of Nucleic acids), which can screen for up to 16 pathogens at a time and must be implemented at a nearby rural hospital.

Research on the CARMEN technique was funded by DARPA, NIH, and Wellcome and published in Nature in 2020.

If CARMEN fails, the sample is “escalated” to a regional genomics hub, where every virus in the sample, “known or unknown,” is sequenced.

Researchers can use those sequences to quickly make new diagnostic tests for the newly identified pathogens, STAT reported.

The data collected through Sentinel is shared across healthcare clinics and public health officials’ proprietary mobile apps and cloud-based reporting systems developed by Dimagi — a Gates Foundation-funded for-profit tech company that targets low-income communities — and Fathom — a for-profit software developer funded by Sabeti labs.

Sabeti filed patents for the technology and co-founded a biotech startup, Sherlock Biosciences, to commercialize these tests for use in the U.S.

Sherlock also has startup funding from the Gates Foundation, Open Philanthropy and a number of other biotech venture capitalist companies.

With funding from DARPA, Battelle National Biodefense Institute, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the NIH and others, the Broad Institute and Princeton University researchers also used SHINE to create a rapid test for COVID-19.

Sabeti sits on the board and serves as a shareholder of the Danaher corporation, which develops research tools determining the causes of disease and identifies new therapies and tests of drugs and vaccines.

Happi also collaborates with the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute and bioengineering firm Ginkgo Bioworks to deploy Ginko’s automation technologies to his lab to sequence genomes.

But Sabeti told STAT that providing people with access to testing is her true priority. And she is on the board of a nonprofit that will work to send the tests her new company makes to low- and middle-income countries “at cost.”

Sentinel’s real contribution, Sabeti said, is its focus on “empowerment.”

Sabeti and Happi are currently field testing SHINE and CARMEN. In the process, they are training scientists in genomic surveillance and collecting hundreds of thousands of genomes.

STAT didn’t specify whether those are virus genomes or people’s genomes, but Boyle said the testing would make it possible to also collect the genomes of African people, which he said is a form of biopiracy.

Other notable collaborators on the 2021 Viruses paper that helped publicly launch Sentinel include Scripps Research Institute virologist Kristian Andersen, Ph.D., co-author of the now infamous Nature “Proximal Origins” paper used to promote the theory that COVID-19 evolved in nature. Andersen’s private communications later revealed he suspected a segment of the SARS-CoV-2 genome may have been engineered in a lab.

Happi and Andersen have collaborated on several projects and publications.

Examples of conflicts of interest among the Virus paper’s co-authors also include Anthony Philippakis, M.D., Ph.D., a venture partner at Google Ventures; Jonathan Jackson, CEO of Dimagi; and Robert Garry, Ph.D.Matthew L. Boisen, Ph.D., and Luis M. Branco, Ph.D., who all work for Zalgen Labs, a “biotechnology company developing countermeasures to emerging viruses.”

Garry also co-authored the “Proximal Origins” paper.

Zalgen has a contract with the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations to develop vaccines for Lassa fever, the disease used in the development of the Sentinel system.

They all stand to profit from Sentinel’s success.

Dr. David Bell, a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health, told The Defender the Sentinel program reflected a broader problem with global public health priorities.

“Public health has become a for-profit industry that’s very, very lucrative,” Bell said. As a result, the field no longer works to provide people with better economies, sanitation, nutrition, access to basic medicines and research on major endemic infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis and malaria.

Instead, research funding is diverted to “pandemic preparedness,” diseases that kill relatively few people.

Bell said:

“We’ve got to a point where very wealthy people have figured out how they can get extremely rich from this and they have enough money to completely control the agenda. So now they essentially control the agenda of global health.

“So you don’t hear much about sanitation and nutrition any more because that’s not where the people who are running the agenda can make their money.”

What they’re doing is not “intrinsically bad,” Bell said. “The question is whether it is proportionate to the need or is it a diversion of resources that in doing so will cause a net harm? And that’s a question that people won’t talk about.”

Sabeti, Happi and Broad Institute at forefront of viral hemorrhagic research in Africa for years

Sabeti, Happi and the Broad Institute have also been at the forefront of viral hemorrhagic fever research in Africa, including Lassa virus and Ebola.

Andersen, Garry, Sabeti and Happi all serve on the board of the Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium (VHFC), founded in 2010 with funding from the NIH, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and Tulane University.

Sabeti and Happi began working together in 2008, studying the virus that causes a viral hemorrhagic fever known as Lassa fever, which infects hundreds of thousands — most of whom recover — and kills about 5,000 people globally per year, according to recent estimates. Lassa fever is considered a category A (most dangerous) bioterror threat.

The Viruses paper provides an account of Sabeti and Happi’s work on Lassa. By mapping human genomic variation in West Africa, they found the Lassa virus existed for half a millennia there, but had gone undetected because people had developed genetic resistance to it.

And many people with Lassa were being misdiagnosed because they had nonspecific symptoms.

This work led them to an epiphany moment — “the realization that in many parts of the world, we are largely blind both to the prevalence of known infectious diseases and to the appearance of new threats,” the paper said.

By developing better diagnostic tools for local healthcare workers, the paper concluded, diseases can be detected and better treatments and vaccines and then even better diagnostic tools can be created, “instead of awaiting the next outbreak.”

Lassa virus is a BSL4 pathogen, the paper notes — although in West Africa it is studied at a research facility without that safety level — and it makes a plug for BSL4 research in Africa.

“With increased globalization and an ever-expanding human population, the need for large-scale research initiatives on BSL-4 pathogens remains acute,” it says.

“Further, as only one BSL-4 lab exists in the entire region of West Africa … even today, transnational partnerships are critical to allow ongoing investigation of BSL-4 pathogen samples.”

Their work on Lassa led the researchers to begin developing a broader surveillance model and then to establish ACEGID at Redeemer University with support from Tulane, the NIH and the World Bank.

ACEGID then, according to the article, played a key role during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, which happened just as ACEGID was launched in March of that year.

Happi’s team identified the first case of Ebola in Nigeria and sequenced the genome of the Ebola virus in 2014, it said.

The mainstream press reported that the 2014 Ebola outbreak — which claimed 11,000 lives in West Africa — came from a two-year-old boy in Guinea playing in a bat-infested tree stump.

But U.S. Right to Know reported that independent evidence and phylogenetic analysis cast doubt on that narrative.

Chernoh Bah, an independent journalist and historian from Sierra Leone, reported errors in the established narrative identified through his interviews.

Research by investigative journalist Sam Husseini and virologist Jonathan Latham, Ph.D., built on Bah’s research and pointed to a leak at the U.S. government-supported research laboratory in Kenema, Sierra Leone, where the VHFC was doing research on Ebola and Lassa.

Boyle also made this same argument in 2014.

An article co-authored by VHFC’s Sabeti, Happi, Andersen and dozens of others published in Science argued that the Ebola outbreak had a zoonotic origin in Central Africa.

Happi’s lab also sequenced the Lassa virus in a 2018 outbreak.

According to an article in Nature, Happi’s sequencing also provided evidence that the Lassa outbreak had a zoonotic origin, rather than being from a mutation that made the disease more transmissible.

The Viruses paper said the success of ACEGID in addressing the Ebola crisis, along with its work on Lassa, laid the groundwork for Sentinel, launched just a few months before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Given that history, Boyle said:

“I wouldn’t trust anything Sabeti’s doing. And I’d be very skeptical of any claims that are being made [about Sentinel] given the involvement of DARPA, the involvement of Broad and Broad’s previous involvement at that Kenema lab with the outbreak of the Ebola pandemic.”


Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

August 24, 2023 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Thought Police

The Center For Countering Digital Hate

BY DAVID MARKS | AUGUST 17, 2023

The assembling of a compelling and fair response to an infectious viral outbreak is an immense challenge. Ideally, unbiased experts without conflicts of interest develop a survey of potentially effective remedies. The team includes seasoned pathologists, broad-thinking social psychologists, experienced epidemiologists, holistic dieticians, and veteran practitioners of complementary and indigenous medicine.

Imagine a broadly trusted, well-meaning group gathering knowledge, and through consensus, generating recommendations and medical guidelines designed to have the greatest impact towards minimizing suffering. In making the best efforts to evaluate solutions and means of relief, they never lose sight of weighing risks versus benefits.

This did not happen. During the recent pandemic, all of those who considered or attempted to approach the crisis without the blessings of authorities were summarily belittled, repressed, and disgraced.

Many voices of reason were confounded by the enigmatic organization, the Center For Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). Their duplicitous activities were neither creative nor supportive, and simply aimed at destroying those who refused to agree with dogmatic mandates and protocols generated by the pharmaceutical industry.

At the peak of CCDH’s influence, they released a malicious piece of propaganda, called The Disinformation Dozen. The document was a frontal, full-scale attack on those who questioned the viability and motives of the mainstream response to the pandemic. This manifesto was conceived as a distractive and deceptive instrument — disseminated among the willing world press corps. Not only was the news media compromised by their funders, but they were also hungry for a scapegoat and eager to enthusiastically repeat easily drawn, though suspect conclusions.

The CCDH’s overt purpose was to stop any alternative thinking about how to respond to a viral outbreak. Their offense against those who failed to accept vaccines as a panacea presents a telling window into the boldness of authoritarian bullying over the last three years.

The Missouri v. Biden lawsuit alleges that the White House pressured social media to close accounts of pandemic policy dissenters. During discovery, Eric Waldo, the Senior Advisor to the Surgeon General admitted CCDH briefed their office before they pressured Facebook for more censorship.

Most recently CCDH has come under increased scrutiny with a lawsuit by Twitter claiming they are masquerading as a legitimate research firm and that they illegally obtained data to use it in a scare campaign to deter advertisers from the platform.

Concurrently, the publications and damage done by Imran Ahmed, the chief executive officer of CCDH, and his collaborators, are being examined by the House Judiciary Committee. The ongoing investigation into government censorship of alternative viewpoints during the pandemic has determined that CCDH’s activities are of interest. Ahmed was notified that he must supply all documents related to CCDH and its relationship with the federal government and social media companies.

CCDH purports to be a non-profit organization without political affiliation or funding, protecting the public from dangerous misinformation. As they face increasing scrutiny and pressure, a thorough examination of their origins and tactics reveals the mechanics of an organization whose mission is to censor enemies of the state and the pharmaceutical industry.

On The Attack

As the COVID crisis escalated, Ahmed assembled a primary list of competitors to Big Pharma; disparaging those who simply questioned a single prescribed solution. Without presenting evidence, The Disinformation Dozen claimed twelve individuals held the primary responsibility for vaccine hesitancy and thousands of deaths. While leaping to these conclusions, Ahmed also surmised that the motivation of anyone who expressed opinions that did not conform with industry and government — was financial. The report insists that sources of alternative information must be de-funded and de-platformed.

CCDH’s The Disinformation Dozen was preceded and followed by lesser-know reports and op-eds, including; The Anti-Vax Playbookthe Anti-Vax IndustrySubstack & Anti-Vax NewslettersPandemic Profiteers, and How to Deal With Coronavirus Misinformation. This assembly of outright propaganda had a single intent: ending any dissent to unswerving allegiance to vaccine therapy.

Incredibly, there are no details in all of these publications that informs or assures the public about vaccine safety and effectiveness. What the CCDH reports all have in common is the assumption that vaccines are Big Pharma’s gift to mankind and that all other responses to infectious disease are heresy and worthy of scorn and condemnation. These assaults on dissenters are filled with strongly worded guidance, both for individuals and governments, urging people to resist and disregard those who dare counter the pharmaceutical narrative. Strikingly, the reports show complete indifference to free speech, lateral thinking, and medical autonomy.

CCDH leadership’s lack of qualifications in public health and epidemiology is indicative that their intentions and strategy are other than altruistic. Despite his organization’s goal to identify and counter digital hate, Imran Ahmed’s résumé reveals no recognition of medical or humanitarian ethics.

Not surprisingly, Ahmed has a history of blindly supporting Big Pharma’s dictates concerning the viability and safety of vaccines. For years, he and his associates have specialized in attacking anyone who doesn’t follow the narrow guidelines of pharmaceutical industry preferences.

Ahmed is not medically qualified and shows no understanding of healthcare. However, he has been a political operative and has worked behind the scenes for power brokers at the highest level.

Profiles In Deception

Of particular interest is a telling British political scandal dubbed, Brickgate. Ahmed had been working for MP Hilary Benn, another pharma cheerleader. During the brief challenge in 2016 to the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbin, he became the communications director for Angela Eagle, an MP who was one of two possible replacements for Corbin. Ahmed was the point man on an allegation that a brick was thrown through a window in Eagle’s office, with the implication that she was being threatened by her political opponents. The UK press promoted the story, reporting on Ahmed’s accusations and outrage.

The facts proved otherwise. The window turned out to be in a shared stairwell and broken from the inside. A brick was never found, and a police inquiry determined it was very unlikely a hostile act. Whereas Ahmed undoubtedly knew these details, he attempted to portray a different story to gain political points for his boss.

This seemingly minor tale illustrates that the noble role Ahmed presents currently was preceded by his willingness to do whatever it takes to serve his masters. It also confirms that his work has been other than in the service of revealing truth.

Ahmed’s shadowy background and relationships with politicians, including his co-founder of CCDHMorgan McSweeney, certainly do not qualify him to judge anyone’s ethical standards.

Within a few years of Brickgate, Ahmed followed his political godfather, McSweeney, in further machinations toward engineering the agenda of Labour Party leadership. Ahmed took the helm of CCDH, and McSweeney remains integral to the senior staff of MP Keir Starmer. He is a serving member of the vaccine-friendly Trilateral Commission, the current head of the Labour Party, and a likely future UK Prime Minister. Starmer was an early proponent of the COVID vaccine and has a close relationship with Lexington Communications, a lobbying firm that represents Pfizer. With the strong support of Starmer, the United Kingdom was the first country to release the Pfizer COVID vaccine. Even as it was rolled out, he pressed for government repression in a joint effort with CCDH, harassing those who dared to question vaccine safety and effectiveness.

Most of Ahmed’s cohorts all have common interests that have little to do with well-being.

Board Member and MP Damian Collins is another pro-Pharma devotee. Pfizer’s main UK plant was in Kent — Collin’s home district — and he was a strong proponent of the early release of their COVID vaccine. He is also directly associated with the military intelligence group, Integrity Initiative, and a member of the Henry Jackson Society, a secretive association that has connections with the CIA.

The fabric of CCDH’s personnel is embroidered with intelligence community assets. There is no better example of this than Ahmed’s communications director, Lindsay Moran, a self-declared former CIA operative, with experience in consulting for mainstream media. Her previous employment does not make her a criminal, though it does bring further into question the intent and operations of CCDH.

Considering Imran Ahmed’s credentials, known associates, and the profile of other CCDH figures, it can be asserted that there is more to the organization than its stated purpose. At a minimum, this background brings into serious doubt Ahmed’s ability to inform and advise the public in an unbiased manner.

Without awareness or mention of his political affiliations, Ahmed has been relied on for stories and quoted by many news outlets, who present CCDH as a pristine source of factual information.

In one glowing personal profile, his work is described in an article from 2021 on the Global Citizen website. Avoiding questions about his past work, Ahmed’s views are swallowed whole by the authors and repeated gleefully, including the outrageous claim that almost all COVID deaths are among the unvaccinated. The most telling information in the entire piece is at the end: This series was made possible with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

It is important to evaluate this hagiographic portrait and consider that it is presented by Global Citizen, an international non-profit that does not hide ecstatic support of vaccination. According to its website, the organization’s central pursuit is raising and directing funds toward global poverty and health. Global Citizen sponsored a spectacular fundraising concert in 2021 called VAX Live — where among the luminaries who appeared among performers was President Biden, who described the crisis as a pandemic of the unvaccinated; perhaps the best advertising the pharmaceutical industry ever had. The concert successfully promoted and procured COVID-19 vaccines with funds raised by the event.

The Money Trail

Global Citizen has intimate relationships with the Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the World Health Organization. These partners share a common interest in vaccine advancement and have gained undue influence over governments and the press. As political leadership floundered in the face of the building healthcare scare, these unelected power brokers stepped in to persuade the world that vaccination was the only remedy to consider.

CCDH insists that it does not take money from partisan organizations or receive government funds, however, this is difficult to confirm when they refuse to reveal all details of its funding. The world of non-profits has numerous routes for financing to be directed in ways to avoid scrutiny.

Some of the not-for-profit organizations that are partners with CCDH claim to have high-minded goals, yet support an organization that betrays indifference to freedom of expression. The Institute For Strategic Dialogue facilitates and defends CCDH in contrast to its stated mission:

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) is an independent, non-profit organisation dedicated to safeguarding human rights and reversing the rising tide of polarisation, extremism and disinformation worldwide.

ISD structure and membership betray a different agenda. Attacking those with dissenting opinions who question mainstream corporate concerns is a cause of the polarized environment that they claim to safeguard.

Evidence points to well-endowed philanthropic organizations with ties to the pharmaceutical industry propping up CCDH and their hostile scheming. Support also includes money funneled through the shady world of PR agencies that are paid millions by Big Pharma to promote their interests. The Paris-based, Publicis Groupe, has directed such resources, admitting to relationships with fact-checkers that support their client’s positions. CCDH and a similar entity, Newsguard, both depend on minimal scrutiny of the structure and motivation for their financing. The perception of these non-profits would change dramatically if the public realized how their presentations are influenced by money.

Although financing has yet to be tracked, there are signals that point to a possible Bill Gates — CCDH relationship. Ahmed instinctively and repeatedly protects Gates and consistently attacks those who question his motivation for supporting vaccination.

In the Anti-Vaxx Playbook, Ahmed claims Gates is attacked symbolically within a word slaw that sidesteps the powerful influence of the Gates Foundation:

Anti-vaccine campaigners have collaborated with alternative health entrepreneurs and conspiracists to ensure that global health philanthropist Bill Gates has become a symbolic figure that represents all of their attacks on the trustworthiness of vaccine advocates.

These attacks are not aimed at influencing the ongoing debate over a Covid vaccine, in which the role of Bill Gates takes a back seat to more practical issues. The real utility of this campaign of vilification is to create a symbol and associated memes that aid the communication of interrelated beliefs about Covid, vaccines and conspiracies.

Bill Gates has come to represent a complex of anti-vaxxer talking points and conspiracy theories. Virtually every element of the on line anti-vaxx movement has found ways of featuring him in their narratives, in a variety of contexts and tones.

This description is a conspicuous attempt to deflect well-deserved attention from Bill Gates, claiming so-called anti-vaxxers are simply mentioning his name as a talking point.

Contrary to where Ahmed would direct us, an examination of Gates is central to understanding how philanthropy, corporate influence, and profiteering form government policies. Attempts at blurring the role of Gates and his foundation as they support vaccines and COVID response policies reveal CCDH’s loyalty to protecting the milieu of its political and financial benefactors.

The philanthropic and corporate worlds’ support and reliance on CCDH is at the nucleus of this deceptive contrivance, enhancing the facade that protects CCDH from scrutiny.

There are a wide variety of theories about why this shaping of public perception is so important. One consequence is obvious; the fraud increases the amount of profits for the pharmaceutical industry and the billionaires who support vaccine sales. Financing organizations like CCDH is a necessity in the general plan to minimize public doubt about an immensely lucrative product.

CCDH is paid to manipulate sentiment without substantiation. It remains stunningly apparent that no supporting details, scientific reports, or verifiable sources of facts appear in any CCDH reports. They merely use the premise that vaccination is the only trustworthy solution for infectious diseases — to vilify their targets.

Defending The Indefensible

The repercussions of the antics of the pharmaceutical-philanthropic consortium are exhibited in this sordid tale. Yet the damning revelations about Imran Ahmed and CCDH are unreported as yet by a press corps that trusts and mimics a political hack.

There remains a wholesale and uncritical acceptance of CCDH while its ability to present an objective assessment of any medical or healthcare opinion is demonstrably biased. Their mission has no basis in exposing the truth, yet nodding promoters still acquiesce to their alleged veracity.

The growing evidence of connections between individuals and entities that promote vaccines and so-called fact-checkers underlines the degradation of news gathering and reporting. The willingness of the news media to accept and disseminate CCDH disinformation without scrutiny reveals these dynamics and the dangerous trend toward authoritarian censorship.

As CCDH faces legal consequences for its negligence and a congressional inquiry into its relationship with the government, the organization continues to manipulate the truth with deceptive lies. They must rely on the press and the public to remain blind to their duplicity.

As a response to the Twitter (X) lawsuit, in an open letter signed by its supporters, CCDH dares to invoke a threat to their rights to free speech;

We view these efforts as a threat to the right to the freedom of expression, resulting in a dangerous chilling effect on civil society, experts, and advocates – and ultimately the public, which deserves to know how X and similar platforms are spreading hate and disinformation.

The appeal ends with desperate phraseology that reflects the height of hypocrisy:

The misuse of the legal system and other forms of intimidation against researchers, experts, and advocates who seek to hold social media companies accountable is an attack of the right to freedom of expression and access to information and must cease. The bullying of those seeking to speak truth to power cannot be tolerated.

Indeed.

In attempting to defend themselves, these words further betray CCDH’s hypocrisy. And the list of those signing on to this rebuttal only indicates how deeply compromised the corporate world has become in pretending to have noble exploits.

It is most important to view the activities of CCDH from the broadest historical perspective.

Their censorship efforts are at the epicenter of an open collaboration between corrupt industrialists and compromised politicians; repressive methodology with hostile tactics display the apparatus and consequences of merging the corporate world with the government.

August 23, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

‘A Fauci Clone’: New NIAID Director Oversaw Remdesivir Trials, Has Ties to Biosafety Lab Research

By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | August 15, 2023

When he retired in December 2022, Dr. Anthony Fauci, then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) was the highest-paid federal employee and the recipient of the largest federal retirement package in history.

Fauci’s successor, Dr. Jeanne M. Marrazzo, will soon take over leadership of the agency — and its $6.3 billion budget.

Fauci praised Marrazzo, telling CNN, “She’s very well-liked. She’s a really good person. I think she’s going to do a really good job.”

But some of her critics, including medical and public health experts interviewed by The Defender, questioned Marrazzo’s suitability for leading NIAID, citing her limited experience as a medical practitioner and her role in supervising clinical trials of remdesivir, a controversial drug used to treat hospitalized COVID-19 patients.

Critics also called out her steadfast support for strict restrictions and countermeasures during the pandemic, and her receipt, since 1997, of more than $20 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and payments from Big Pharma — including from Gilead, the manufacturer of remdesivir.

And lastly, some pointed to Marrazzo’s key administrative role in a University of Alabama (UAB) institution which houses a BSL3 (biosafety level 3) laboratory that conducts gain-of-function research.

Before being named director of the NIAID, Marrazzo was director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the UAB at Birmingham. She will replace Dr. Hugh Auchincloss, who has served as NIAID’s acting director following Fauci’s departure.

Commenting on the appointment, Brian Hooker, Ph.D., senior director of science and research for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), said:

“It looks like Dr. Marrazzo will give us more of the same, unfortunately. Her flip-flopping, penchant for Big Pharma, and support of draconian public health (control) measures mean that she’ll take a reactionary posture to any ‘pandemic threat’ and may be as gleeful as Fauci at the prospect of new pandemics.

“I have dim hopes that she may learn some lessons while the investigations into Fauci lying to Congress play out. However, these bureaucrats don’t really believe that the law applies to them.”

The NIAID is the second largest center at the NIH. According to CNN, it “supports research to advance the understanding, diagnosis and treatment of infectious, immunologic and allergic diseases,” as well as “research at universities and research organizations around the United States and across NIAID’s 21 laboratories.”

“Marrazzo fits the mold of every public health leader so far that has led the charge during the pandemic,” Dr. Kat Lindley, president of the Global Health Project and director of the Global COVID Summit, told The Defender.

Lindley added:

“My concern with Marrazzo is actually her Big Pharma ties, her lack of clinical experience with COVID-19 in particular, and her blatant ignorance on early treatment and support for unproven, scientifically debunked measures, in particular masking.

“Any scientist or physician should understand that masking has never proven to be effective and, in the case of children, even detrimental.”

Touted remdesivir as ‘silver bullet’ for treating COVID

During her tenure at UAB, the university served as one of the clinical trial sites for remdesivir, an antiviral originally developed by Gilead Sciences as a treatment for Hepatitis C and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).

According to the NIH, the trial was intended “to evaluate the safety and efficacy of the investigational antiviral remdesivir in hospitalized adults diagnosed with coronavirus disease 2019.” Marrazzo supervised the UAB trial site.

UAB has long served as a research site for remdesivir. A February 2021 UAB report states, “Gilead entered into collaboration with the UAB-led Antiviral Drug Development and Discovery Center … to study remdesivir against coronaviruses” in 2014.

“These earlier studies enabled remdesivir to more quickly be tested and approved for human use as a treatment for COVID-19 when the 2020 pandemic struck,” UAB stated.

The trial results, published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) in November 2020, found remdesivir shortened “the time to recovery in adults who were hospitalized with COVID-19 and had evidence of lower respiratory tract infection.”

Fauci later praised remdesivir as the “standard of care” for treating COVID-19.

However, according to investigative journalist Jordan Schachtel, studies “show that there are zero clinical benefits to injecting patients with remdesivir. Many studies show that remdesivir can severely injure vital organs such as the heart and kidneys.”

Yet, Marrazzo never disclosed a conflict of interest when publicly commenting on remdesivir, Schachtel said. She described it as a “silver bullet” in remarks shared with The Washington Post in July 2020, and in tweets praising the drug.

“Given the UAB-Gilead partnership, one would think that Dr. Marrazzo would refrain from commenting on issues through which she maintained a clear conflict of interest,” Schachtel wrote. “She did no such thing.”

According to the U.S. government’s Open Payments database, Marrazzo received seven payments from Gilead, totaling $2,474.93.

But as Marrazzo repeatedly praised remdesivir — and, according to Schachtel, has “never shown remorse” for this despite mounting evidence of the harm it has caused — she has repeatedly spoken out against hydroxychloroquine for treating COVID-19.

In June 2020, in reference to a study published in the NEJM claiming hydroxychloroquine is ineffective in protecting people from COVID-19, Marrazzo said these findings “should provide a very big nail in the coffin” for the use of this treatment.

The following month, Marrazzo called a video that went viral on social media describing hydroxychloroquine as a cure for COVID-19 “very irresponsible and despicable,” adding that she was “glad that video is hopefully not being shared very much.”

In October 2021, she said hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin hold “special appeal” to the unvaccinated.

Yet, in April 2020, prior to the conclusion of the remdesivir clinical trial, Marrazzo said, “We are using it [hydroxychloroquine] in our hospital … for a range of patients including when patients are beginning to deteriorate,” adding:

“And lots of media folks are asking what we think about hydroxychloroquine. And the reality is that we live and die by the evidence. And one issue is the argument about whether it’s even ethical to use these treatments when we don’t have the evidence.

“But I would get back to the compassionate use argument. When you have a patient who’s dying, you have to use what you can, what’s available.”

Cheerleader for COVID vaccines and Merck’s molnupiravir

Marrazzo has also praised COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics. In May 2020, she was “hopeful” about the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial — despite its enrollment of only eight volunteers, saying “We don’t have the luxury of time here in this case.”

In August 2021, she called the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the Pfizer Comirnaty COVID-19 vaccine “great news,” saying, “Vaccines are our best weapon against this disease” and are “working incredibly well to prevent severe disease” and reduce hospitalizations.

In January 2022, Marrazzo said “Vaccination makes the biggest difference” in fighting COVID-19, adding that “boosters, of course, are going to augment that protection.”

And in October 2021, Marrazzo praised molnupiravir, Merck’s antiviral pill for COVID-19, stating it had “extraordinary potential.” Results of a preprint study later showed the drug may fuel the development of new and potentially deadly variants of COVID-19.

Marrazzo has received five payments from Merck, totaling $8,820.

Cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough told The Defender Marrazzo “has been willfully blind to the failure of COVID-19 vaccines” and “appears incapable of mastering the four pillars of pandemic response to lead America through the next pandemic: 1) contagion control, 2) early treatment, 3) late treatment and 4) vaccination.”

A ‘slap in the face’ to vaccine, hospital protocol victims

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Marrazzo made frequent television appearances in which, according to a UAB statement, she “helped inform the world … sharing critical information and perspectives.” UAB touted Marrazzo as a COVID-19 expert during this period.

According to AL.com, Marrazzo was on Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey’s COVID-19 task force, supporting “emergency public health measures that closed business and mandated mask wearing.”

In March 2020, Marrazzo supported “flattening the curve,” calling on the public “to make personal sacrifices for the greater good.” In similar statements made on May 8, 2020, Marrazzo warned of a “backslide” if measures like social distancing were loosened.

In June 2020, she said masks can “change the trajectory of this epidemic.”

In a June 2020 YouTube video, “Why you should wear a mask,” Marrazzo said, “Masks have contributed to the control of this pandemic in other communities.” She called for masks for schoolchildren over age 6 and included mask-wearing in a list of “Three basic rules” along with hand washing and social distancing.

In an article she co-authored and in which she highlighted “the intersection of the COVID-19, HIV, and STI pandemics,” Marrazzo drew parallels between wearing masks and wearing condoms, writing:

“Condoms reduce transmission of HIV and bacterial STIs effectively, if used adequately and consistently, but lack of access to condoms or perhaps even personal preference limits their utility.

“As a correlate to barrier protection, masking has proven effective to reduce the expulsion of SARS-CoV-2 and other respiratory virus droplets.”

The paper also repeated claims regarding the “lack of benefit” of hydroxychloroquine, zinc and vitamins C and D in treating COVID-19. Conversely, referring to the COVID-19 vaccines, the authors stated, “There were few serious adverse events in either arm, and there were no deaths related to the vaccine.”

Blaming the unvaccinated

In May 2021, she criticized loosened Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommendations that the vaccinated do not need to wear masks, stating that because less than 50% were vaccinated in her community, she would still wear a mask indoors despite being fully vaccinated herself.

In July 2021 she warned of a “summer surge” that would be fueled by the unvaccinated.

In December 2021 Marrazzo again scolded the unvaccinated. “Your decision to get infected is unfortunately not just going to be affecting you,” she said. “It’s going to be serving a source of incredible infectiousness going forward.”

Dr. Scott Atlas, a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force during the Trump administration, told KUSI News San Diego that Marrazzo “was completely wrong about COVID … Pushing pseudoscience, pushing … her belief that vaccines stopped the spread of the infection, that children have high risk, and that masks were efficacious.”

“Marrazzo represents everything that was done wrong in the handling of COVID,” said Gail Seiler, Texas chairperson, Projects and Content, for the FormerFedsGroup Freedom Foundation and a survivor of the CDC’s COVID-19 hospital protocols, including administration of remdesivir.

Seiler told The Defender that Marrazzo advocated for no early treatment until the patient “worsened to the point of hospitalization,” and at that point to give remdesivir, “a drug that she profits from.”

Seiler added:

“Because of people like Marrazzo, patients in the hospital were given no hope of survival. Because of her ignoring the evidence, over a million people died who shouldn’t have.

“Her selection to the NIAID is a slap in the face to every family whose loved ones were killed by the protocols she profited from. And it exemplifies why the general public has lost trust in agencies such as the NIAID.”

Financial ties to Big Pharma

Marrazzo received a total of $20,405,337 in NIH grants for 67 studies between 1997 and 2023, according to NIH data. These grants ranged between $6,000 and $2.82 million and averaged over $304,000 per grant.

Open Payments data show Marrazzo has received $28,761,36 across 37 “general payments” and $152,208.42 across seven payments for “associated research funding,” including $18,636.59 in consulting fees, $4,500 in honorariums, and payments from companies such as Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Gilead, Janssen and Abbott Laboratories.

In December 2018, Marrazzo participated in a panel titled “Role of the Genital Tract Microbiome in Sexual and Reproductive Health,” during the Keystone Symposia Conference in South Africa, which was “made possible with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.”

Her employer, UAB, received at least two Gates Foundation grants pertaining to health-related research in recent years. This includes a June 2021 grant, “Modeling Impact of Service Delivery Redesign” totaling over $1.5 million, and a $124,921 grant in April 2020 for a project titled “COVID-19 CTA: HTS Core for screening compounds.”

UAB’s Division of Infectious Diseases boasts “an active research portfolio with approximately $39 million in external research funding.” Research specialties include “Pathogenesis of viral infections,” “Antiviral therapy,” “Travel medicine and international health” and “Host defenses and infectious diseases in immunocompromised patients.”

Big supporter of gain-of-function research

UAB also houses a BSL3 research laboratory, the Southeastern Biosafety Laboratory Alabama Birmingham (SEBLAB), funded in part by NIH. According to UAB, it is “one of a limited number of institutions,” adding that the university ranks “among the top 25 in funding from the National Institutes of Health.”

The university states that SEBLAB researchers are “able to bring their skills to bear on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, and other issues directly relevant to biodefense and emerging infectious disease,” with a focus on NIAID “priority pathogens” and discovery of “new treatments to prevent or combat” diseases caused by infectious agents.

These projects have also included “Testing drugs on SARS-CoV-2,” a process involving growing the virus in SEBLAB. According to UAB researcher Kevin Harrod, Ph.D.,“We grow the viruses, measure them and provide them to the BARDA [the U.S. government’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority] contractor.”

BSL3 and BSL4 laboratories across the U.S. and the world have been associated with controversial gain-of-function research, which some have said is responsible for the development and subsequent alleged leak from one such facility, the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, leading to prominent calls to end such research.

According to Independent Institute, “Marrazzo’s views on the origin of COVID-19 are hard to find,” as are her views on gain-of-function research.

Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., a professor of international law at the University of Illinois who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, told The Defender that Marrazzo’s selection signals that the NIH and NIAID have no intention of stopping gain-of-function research at BSL3 and BSL4 facilities.

Boyle said:

“They will have her in place to deal with the next pandemic that they know is coming out of their own BSL3 and BSL4 labs, just as Fauci dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic that came out of the Wuhan BSL4 and the University of North Carolina BSL3 and that Fauci and [former NIH Director] Francis Collins funded.

“Under her auspices NIAID will continue to research, develop, manufacture and stockpile every hideous type of Nazi biological warfare weapon known to humanity … There will be no end to it and to these death scientists like her … unless and until we stop them by criminal prosecutions.”

Boyle called Marrazzo a “Fauci clone, not an original and independent thinker,” adding, “The Bidenites and the globalists and Big Pharma behind them picked her to continue the Fauci/NIAID policies and programs across the board.”


Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

August 16, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Bill Gates and the total failure of his malaria eradication programme

By Guy Hatchard | TCW Defending Freedom | July 24, 2023

There has been a major eruption of fury because malaria has been found in mainland America in Texas and Florida. These are the same places where Bill Gates’s genetically modified mosquitoes have been released in their millions. This was part of an on-going programme funded by Gates for over ten years which is supposed to banish malaria from the world. It hasn’t.

The fun started when Twitter bloggers @TexasLindsay and @TheChiefNerd, among others, began to dig up not just the hype Gates has been promoting for more than ten years promising malaria eradication through genetic modification, but also the scientific concerns voiced at the time. Lo and behold, scientists suggested that the Gates programme would eventually lead to mutated mosquitoes which would promote the spread of malaria more effectively.

You will appreciate that this is relevant to the safety of genetic modification. As such, it was bound to raise the ire of tame ‘fact-checkers’. Associated Press weighed in on cue by splitting hairs. They noted that whilst the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation ‘supported’ Oxitec (the company releasing modified mosquitoes in Florida and Texas) with money, that doesn’t actually quite fit the definition of ‘funding’ the particular work being done in the US. AP also pointed out that the Florida malaria cases occurred 280 miles away from the site of the experiments, as if mosquitoes can’t fly or ride the wind.

Whatever is going on here, it is not being controlled. A deep dive into the Twitter threads linked above will show you that the Gates mosquito programme has never achieved any of its promised results. No worries, though, Gates is not just funding genetic modification of mosquitoes but also has a bet each way with his malaria vaccines. A win-win investment strategy for the man with a deep interest in population control (and money).

Where could the modification of mosquitoes really be taking us?

I have previously discussed the known possibility of general system collapse following genetic modification and editing, and suggested that this might be related to the record levels of excess deaths in New Zealand. I have pointed out that genetic structures are highly complex, evidenced by the trillions of atomic placements and relationships involved.

There is another way to consider this. These placements and relationships are highly specific, precisely because they support the highly specific capabilities of human physiology and psychology as well as the general stability.

The long-standing notion that replacing or editing targeted genes will not undermine the other genetic characteristics of organisms that make them what they are and enable them to function as such is a belief rather than a matter of science. A belief that increasingly looks misguided and dangerous. Using mRNA vaccines, biotechnology has blundered into the genetic modification of what it is to be human.

As our newspapers characterise the unrest in France as the Brink of Total Anarchy, a sort of general system collapse of society, we might also contemplate what has changed in the last three years that has brought us to the brink? It is not a million miles away from biotechnology.

July 28, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Revealed: Dark Money Funders Behind ‘Disinformation Dozen’ Report

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 27, 2023

A new report published Monday by GreenMedInfo revealed nine of the dark money sources funding the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), an influential nonprofit that allegedly colluded with social media platforms and the White House to censor Children’s Health Defense (CHD), Robert F. Kennedy Jr., CHD’s chairman on leave and others for spreading “disinformation.”

The report identified CCDH’s funders primarily as U.K.-based philanthropic organizations whose directors and trustees are affiliated with legacy media organizations, the U.K. government and major global philanthropic organizations such as the Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation.

Despite claims by Imran Ahmed, CCDH’s CEO and founder, that the organization has “never taken government money,” the report also found at least one of its funders has received U.K. government funding.

“It appears that CCDH may be an astroturf front operation for both NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] and the U.K. government to directly interfere with and target the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens, and this should be a concern for all Americans,” report author Sayer Ji told The Defender.

CCDH famously drafted a list of the so-called “Disinformation Dozen,” which included Kennedy, Dr. Joseph Mercola, the founders of The Truth About Vaccines and The Truth About Cancer websites Ty and Charlene Bollinger, and Ji, founder of the natural health website GreenMedInfo.

CCDH alleged in its report that just 12 accounts produced the majority of “anti-vaccine disinformation” on social media.

Facebook investigated and dismissed the report, releasing a statement saying that “There isn’t any evidence” to support its claims and that the small sample used in CCDH’s analysis was “in no way representative of the hundreds of millions of posts that people have shared about COVID-19 vaccines.”

“There is no justification for [CCDH’s] claim that their data constitute a ‘representative sample’ of the content shared across our apps,” Facebook stated.

Yet, the report was used by the White House and Twitter to censor those individuals and by legacy media outlets such as NPRThe Guardian and countless others to discredit the people on the list.

Despite its baseless claims, the report was extremely effective, Ji said.

Ji told The Defender :

“CCDH’s factually baseless campaign was amplified and disseminated globally by hundreds of colluding media outlets, such that today you can find over 3,400 news articles online uncritically citing their defamatory construct ‘disinformation dozen.’

“This has wrought profound reputational damage, and has dramatically curtailed our ability to share our message, given that over 2 million of our followers have been removed, following the deplatforming efforts of those spreading these lies.”

In Kennedy’s testimony before a U.S. House of Representatives hearing organized by the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government last week, he cited his inclusion on CCDH’s list as part of a “new form of censorship, which is called ‘targeted propaganda,’ where people apply pejoratives like ‘anti-vax’ … to silence me.”

The latest “Twitter Files” released July 18 by investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker detailed how Twitter and the White House used CCHD’s “Disinformation Dozen” report as justification for censoring the people on the list.

Thacker also profiled Ahmed, who previously worked for Merrill Lynch and was a British Labour Party political operative, and is the co-author of “The New Serfdom: The Triumph of Conservative Ideas and How to Defeat Them… .” Ahmed emerged during the pandemic as a “vaccine and disinformation expert,” although lacking any experience that would qualify him as such, Thacker reported.

Thacker raised questions about who funds CCDH and reached out to the organization to investigate, but received no response.

Ji’s report published Monday provides a partial answer to that question, seeking to “contribute to the collective effort to shed a sterilizing light on the dark agenda spear-headed by astroturfing organizations like CCDH,” he wrote in the report.

CCDH’s funders primarily global but U.K.-based nonprofits

Although CCDH does not make its funders publicly available and failed to respond to Thacker’s inquiries, Ji was able to identify some of them by examining the public grant-reporting website 360 GrantNav, along with other publicly available sites, including CCDH’s 2020 website archived on the Wayback Machine.

The funders identified are primarily U.K.-based charities, some of which operate globally and generally contribute to a wide variety of causes that cluster around issues of environment and poverty, rather than health or science.

According to the report, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation in 2021 gave CCDH a £100,000 grant earmarked for “growing the digital presence and impact of the Center for Countering Digital Hate.” The foundation’s trustees include the former general-director of the BBC Tony Hall, Baron Hall of Birkenhead, and Sir Anthony Saltz, formerly on BBC’s board of governors.

The Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, a large U.K. charity with a £1.5 billion endowment, whose mission is “to improve the natural world, create a fairer future and strengthen community bonds in the UK,” gave CCDH £200,000 in October 2021 to support a salary at the organization and to “disrupt the spread of online hate and misinformation.” It awarded CCDH a second £13,333 grant in January of this year.

The Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, which, according to the report, is a U.K.-based limited company — not a charity and therefore able to fund political causes — gave CCDH £53,400 in 2020.

CCDH is also funded by the Oak Foundation, a global environmentalist grantmaking foundation that gave CCDH $100,000 to help it shine a “spotlight on digital misinformation platforms that are polluting the public discourse.”

CCDH reported on its website that it received an undisclosed amount of money from the Barrow Cadbury Trust, whose mission is to “tackle profound social ills, including juvenile crime and urban poverty.”

The Pears Foundation, a U.K. charity that Ji’s report says focuses on “Israel-related projects” gave CCDH £250,000 over three years. The foundation is funded by the William Pears group and the U.K. government, according to the report.

The Hopewell Fund is a U.S.-based 501(c)(3) organization managed by a Washington, D.C.-based philanthropy consulting firm and is dedicated to funding “innovative social change projects.” It gave CCDH a small $15,000 grant in 2021.

Unbound Philanthropy, the final donor identified by the report, is a New York-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization whose executive director Taryn Higashi also sits on the advisory board of Soros’ Open Society Foundations and who formerly worked at the Ford Foundation.

But this is just a partial list, and in his report, Ji appealed to the public to continue researching the “dark money” behind the organization.

Ji also invited readers to take action on the Stand for Health Freedom campaign website “to send the message that the targeting of U.S. citizens to illegally suppress protected speech is unacceptable.”

The Defender examined CCDH’s 990 — the tax form nonprofits must file annually with the IRS — from fiscal year 2021, where the organization reported receiving $1,471,247 in contributions and grants and listed $860,457 in total assets.

The list of contributors was marked as “restricted,” and further information was not provided. It did report spending $12,633 on “lobbying activities.”

While The Defender was only able to find the single 2021 federal form 990, we did locate CCDH’s U.K. financial reporting form for fiscal year 2022 (ending Oct. 31, 2022), showing the organization received $904,452 from donations in 2022 and $638,499 in 2021.

Financial filings also reveal CCDH board member affiliations

The U.S. 990, the U.K. financial statements and the U.K.’s company information service also revealed CCDH’s frequently changing board members and directors, many of whom have close ties to government and media organizations.

Notable figures include Simon Clark, board chair, who was a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. The Atlantic Council is a NATO, arms industry and Persian Gulf monarchies-funded think tank.

Prior to his work at the Atlantic Council, Clark was a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, where he led the work that informed the Biden White House’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism.

Ji found it “unsurprising” that “CCDH’s rhetorical points made it into several U.S. Department of Homeland Security terrorism bulletins equating free speech and open debate about mRNA vaccine safety and efficacy, or Covid origins, as possible new forms of domestic terrorism.”

Another CCDH director, Kirsty McNeill has also worked as Save the Children’s executive director for Policy, Advocacy and Campaigns since 2016, a period during which the Bill & Melinda Foundation donated more than $40 million to the organization.

Save the Children has also partnered with Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. Gavi maintains a core partnership with the World Health Organization and the World Bank.

McNeill previously worked as a special adviser and speechwriter for former Prime Minister Gordon Brown. She is a member of the think tank European Council on Foreign Relations, funded by such entities as the Open Society Foundations, the United Nations and the Gates Foundation.

Aleen Keshishian and Zack Morgenroth are both CCDH board members and work at Lighthouse Management & Media, a Hollywood management agency representing top stars including Jennifer Aniston, who famously cut ties with her unvaccinated friends.

Damian Noel Thomas Collins, who joined CCDH in 2022, is a British Conservative Party politician who formerly served as a junior Minister for Tech and the Digital Economy in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport.

CCDH sought to silence the voices that were ‘most effective’ at warning the public

In addition to its government, social media and legacy media connections, CCDH has partnered with “fact-checking” firm NewsGuard — specifically, its HealthGuard product, described as “a vaccine against medical misinformation” and against critiques targeting the healthcare industry and global public health authorities.

According to an article by Off-Guardian, CCDH claimed the COVID-19 pandemic “will only be overcome by the most ambitious vaccination programme in human history” and those who question this program have “fringe and extremist views,” which “should not be permitted and should indeed be banned.”

They have also advocated for the imprisonment of “anti-vaxxers.”

Ji told The Defender that CCDH’s targeted campaign spoke to the validity of the ideas of those it sought to deplatform.

He said:

“George R. R. Martin once said, ‘When you tear out a man’s tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you’re only telling the world that you fear what he might say.’

“I believe CCDH’s campaign was intended to silence those of us who they believed were most effective at warning the public about the true dangers of the mRNA vaccine rollout and how this mass experiment violated the medical ethics principle of informed consent.”


Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

July 27, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Mosquitoes, Vaccines and Bill Gates

BY TOM RENZ | JULY 1, 2023

Let me begin this article with an AP Fact Check. According to the AP (A Bill Gates-tied mosquito project is not responsible for recent US malaria cases | AP News) the cases of malaria that have recently popped up in the United States were NOT related to Bill Gates, his funding of “mosquito research” related disease prevention (Gates-Funded World Mosquito Program Engages in Gain-of-Function Research – The American Spectator – USA News and Politics), or Oxitec’s (another Gates supported company) release of genetically modified mosquitoes for the past several years in Florida where the outbreaks occurred (see the previous two articles). The AP has noted that the Gates foundation does fund malaria work and GMO mosquitoes but states it’s funding for Oxitec’s genetically altered mosquitoes that are being released in Florida (where those mosquitoes are released) does not include any modifications related to malaria and so they could not be the cause.

The AP really did it’s homework here and also requested comment from Oxitec and noted they said it was “scientifically impossible” that they had anything to do with this coincidence. Apparently the gene editing in the Oxitec mosquitoes (that Gates has nothing to do with) is about fighting Dengue fever and Zika virus and they also only release male genetically altered mosquitoes so clearly none of this could have anything to do with the mosquitoes being worked on elsewhere that vaccinate against malaria (though these mosquitoes do exist as you can see in this story from NPR – Why mosquitoes were the vaccinators in a new malaria vaccine trial : Goats and Soda : NPR). Just in case anyone has any further doubts, the AP even talked to an entomologist at the Florida Medical Entomology Laboratory at the University of Florida and he said that the Oxitec mosquitoes “have nothing at all to do with malaria, and it’s absurd to claim otherwise.

Now that you are all aware of Bill Gates and his support for genetically altered mosquitoes to “fight disease”, and the malaria vaccine mosquitoes, I want to share a few important points.

First – did you know that “they” have developed a mechanism to vaccinate people through mosquitoes? As noted in the above, mosquitoes that act as flying syringes for malaria vaccines are a real thing. I have no evidence that they have been released anywhere but you do not spend the money to develop a product like this if you do not plan to use it. That leads to the question, how does Bill Gates plan to get informed consent from people potentially vaccinated by flying syringes? Will the mosquitoes carry legal documents with them with side effect lists and a spot to sign before they bite you? Or perhaps he simply does not care about informed consent… who knows?

The second issue I see is that it appears that the guy funding mosquito work all over the place is the only one that actually knows what is being funded and where. I ask this sincerely, but how do we the people know which GMO mosquitoes are biting us and how do we know the impact of the mosquitoes’ edited genes on the person bitten? This matters because if the mosquitoes’ bites can transfer enough material into the person that was bitten’s body to vaccinate how do we know the impact of these gene modifications more generally? Maybe there is no impact but has anyone studied it or are we just going to play God with genetics and hope it doesn’t have consequences?

I also feel I’d be remiss to point out that the fact check and everything else about this story requires that we trust what “they” are telling us. I’m not suggesting Oxitec or Gates would ever lie but can we agree that they qualify as interested parties? Or that we have not seen too many random cases of malaria popping up in the US typically?

From a scientific and evidentiary perspective I can certainly agree that we do not have evidence to prove that Gates or Oxitec had anything to do with the malaria cases. That said, isn’t it sad that the “conspiracy theories” being bandied about the internet that the AP is attempting to debunk hold ANY credibility? The trust for our public health system and people that claim to champion it is destroyed. For my part I admit I cannot prove any relationship exists but I completely understand why people would ask the question. Further, I think we all need to use this as an opportunity to draw focus on the idea that people like Gates and our federal government ARE creating numerous other means of vaccinating people that would either completely ignore informed consent laws/regulations or that would circumvent it. Mosquito borne vaccines, transmissible vaccines through the food supply (I’ve written about this extensively but here’s another article – Researchers aim to develop edible plant-based mRNA vaccines (news-medical.net), and even vaccines that are absorbed when you breathe (mentioned briefly in this article published by NIH – Development and Delivery Systems of mRNA Vaccines – PMC (nih.gov) are all being created and all are transmissible without informed consent.

Trust in public health has been destroyed for good reason. We now need accountability and reform to begin what will be a decades long process of rebuilding.

July 1, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

The not-so-heroic lockdown critic

By James Delingpole | TCW Defending Freedom | June 2, 2023

Dan Hannan has written another piece reminding us how heroically outspoken he was during lockdown. He writes in the Sunday Telegraph: ‘A handful of columnists – and it really was a handful, you could count us on your fingers – had argued from the beginning that the restrictions were excessive. We were almost universally howled down as murderers who wanted to cull the population . . .’

I’m sure many of us will remain eternally grateful for Lord Hannan’s selfless courage. But rather than resting on his laurels over what he may or may not have written three years ago, might not the noble lord more usefully direct his talents towards addressing the much more pressing problems of the present?

Foremost among these problems, I would suggest, is the looming WHO Pandemic treaty and the proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations (2005). If implemented they would give the World Health Organisation unprecedented powers over sovereign states. These powers would include the right to mandate all manner of highly restrictive measures: lockdowns, masks, quarantines, border closures, travel restrictions, medication of individuals including vaccination and medical examinations.

For full details I recommend the excellent summary by Dr Elizabeth Evans of the UK Medical Freedom Alliance published by TCW under the headline ‘Fight this sinister power grab by the unelected, unaccountable WHO’.  What becomes clear if you read the article and follow the links is that the threat posed by the WHO is very real. If its plans are implemented – as currently appears more likely than not – it will represent arguably the most egregious assault on human freedom in the history of the world.

Never before, after all, has an unelected, supranational body been given such power over the lives of pretty much every single person on the planet. The WHO won’t just be able to decide on freedom of movement (whether, for example, it is permissible to keep them under house arrest or in quarantine camps, as happened during lockdown) but even whether or not they live or die or spend the rest of their days as cripples as a result of a compulsory ‘vaccine’ programme.

So let’s read what that doughty freedom fighter Dan Hannan has to say on the subject, shall we? Here he is, further down his hero-of-the-lockdown article: ‘Even more incredibly, some leaders would suggest we set up an international ‘pandemic treaty’, potentially giving the World Health Organisation binding powers on such matters – almost as if they were trying to validate the conspiracy theorists.’

Hmm. I’ve read that sentence a number of times and still I can’t quite make sense of what he is saying. Why is he trying to turn a real problem into a merely theoretical one? Surely, verifiably, unquestionably the case is that the World Health Organisation IS pressing ahead with its treaty, and that sovereign nations around the world will probably sign up to it. Yet instead of acknowledging this fact, Hannan has chosen to dress it up as something highly improbable – ‘incredibly’ – being mooted by certain, unidentified silly politicians or newspaper columnists. Then, as if to pull the rug from under the possibility that this nonsense should ever come to pass, he adds that curious, distancing phrase ‘almost as if they were trying to validate the conspiracy theorists’.

Well, yes, indeed, it would unarguably make ‘conspiracy theorists’ more credible because they have been warning of this threat for quite some time. But would their being proved right really be such a bad thing? In Hannan’s view, it appears, yes it would because – as he hints in a subsequent paragraph – he has a bit of an axe to grind on this score.

‘Two people I know have been pushed by all this into conspiracist paranoia. They went from asking (perfectly reasonably) why young people needed to be jabbed for a disease that posed no danger to them to doubting the efficacy of all vaccines. Then they started muttering about Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab. Now they are parroting the Kremlin line on Ukraine.’

I’m not quite sure what the relevance of Ukraine is to lockdowns. But I think what Hannan is telling us from his lofty perch in the House of Lords is that there is a right way to think about things and a wrong way to think about things – and that he clearly knows which is which, whereas these paranoid conspiracists are so away with the fairies that their every argument can be dismissed.

But are they? Are they really? On the subject of vaccines, for example, there is a perfectly lucid and reasonable case to be made that they are not the medical miracle but a gigantic con trick which has done far more harm than good to the health of the public.

As for the dismissive line about Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab, this is plain dishonest. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the second-biggest funder of the World Health Organisation after the US. Klaus Schwab wrote and published a book in 2020 called Covid-19: The Great Reset, spelling out how the global pandemic was a beneficial crisis which political leaders groomed by his World Economic Forum could use to make a new world order in which we would own nothing and be happy. Using a dismissive word such as ‘muttering’ doesn’t magically vanish these men away into a paranoid fantasy world where they pose no threat to our real one. Rather, it suggests a writer who is using rhetorical tricksiness to lead his readers away from the truth.

On lockdown, he concludes: ‘It would be comforting to pin the responsibility on someone: autocratic politicians, cowardly bureaucrats, sensational broadcasters. But the horrible truth is that, as a country, we did this to ourselves; and, in all likelihood, we would do it again tomorrow.’

The deception here is worth of Iago. ‘Politicians’ pushed the lockdown and vaccine agenda not because they were ‘autocratic’ but because they were corrupt, spineless and under the thumb of supranational institutions such as the World Economic Forum and the WHO. Bureaucrats pushed it not because they are cowardly but because as Deep State functionaries that was precisely their job. Broadcasters and newspapers like the one Hannan writes for pushed it not out of sensationalism but because they were either bought and paid for – or bullied and cowed – by the government to pump out relentless Covid propaganda while suppressing inconvenient truths such as vaccine injury.

At no point in his piece does Hannan address the fact that the primary driver responsible for all those things he so laments about lockdown Britain (‘taped-off playgrounds’, ‘power-crazed coppers’, ‘listless moody teenagers’) was the military-grade, state-orchestrated propaganda campaign designed to brainwash the public into believing that a fairly routine flu bug was the worst thing since the Black Death. The public would never have overreacted in the way it did if it hadn’t been bullied, cajoled, bribed, blackmailed and tricked into doing so by the political class of which Lord Hannan is a card-carrying member.

June 2, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , | Leave a comment

The Putrid Underbelly of Woke Capitalism

By Michael Rectenwald – Mises Wire – 05/16/2023

Corporate intrigue reached a fevered pitch on May 6, 2023, in Omaha, Nebraska, when a shareholder was arrested during the annual shareholder meeting of Berkshire Hathaway. The shareholder challenged the affiliation of Warren Buffett with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Bill Gates’s association with Jeffrey Epstein, who was convicted in Florida for procuring a child for prostitution and soliciting a prostitute, and who reportedly committed suicide in a New York jail while facing charges for sex trafficking and conspiracy to engage in sex trafficking.

Peter Flaherty, the chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC), stood to offer proposal number eight, which called for the roles of Berkshire CEO and chair to be separated and held by two persons. Flaherty argued that the separation of roles was necessary so that Berkshire “would be less identified with Mr. Buffett’s personal political activities.” Speaking of Buffett, Flaherty stated:

He’s donated tens of billions to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. As Bill Gates explained when the couple was still together, “although the foundation bears our names, basically half our resources have come from Warren Buffett.”

If “woke” culture is a disease, then philanthropy is the virus.

The Gates Foundation bankrolls the teaching of Critical Race Theory around the country, including that math is inherently racist.

The Gates Foundation offers a Gender Identity Toolbox which asserts that gender is the result of “socially and culturally constructed ideas.”

This is a lie. Gender is not a cultural construct. It is a genetic and biological fact. (emphasis mine)

Flaherty was interrupted by a Berkshire representative and pleaded to the chair (Buffett) to be allowed to continue. Buffett agreed that Flaherty could continue but warned him of the three-minute time limit for shareholder proposals. Flaherty then proceeded to throw down the gauntlet, until his microphone was shut off:

We know how much Bill Gates cares about children. He met and traveled with Jeffrey Epstein many times after Epstein was convicted of sex crimes.

The Gates Foundation had a huge influence over the COVID response fiasco.

Bill Gates defended China’s COVID policies and still discounts the possibility that the virus originated from a lab, even though U.S. intelligence agencies disagree. The Gates Foundation may be the largest single donor to the “dark money” machine known as Arabella Associates. . . .

It funds causes like defunding the police that are making American cities unlivable.

Money goes, too, to groups conducting—

At this point, Buffett declared from the stage: “You crossed the boundary.” Two security guards grabbed Flaherty by either arm and escorted him from the room. Flaherty was arrested and charged with trespassing.

The arrest of the Berkshire shareholder, apparently for merely mentioning Jeffrey Epstein in connection with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, coincided with a series of Wall Street Journal articles exploring Epstein’s calendar and a trove of Epstein emails and other documents. The Wall Street Journal revealed numerous Epstein meetings with high-profile contacts, long after Epstein served time for soliciting a child prostitute and was registered as a sex offender. Represented in Epstein’s calendar and emails are such notables as William Burns, director of the Central Intelligence Agency since 2021; Bill Gates, Microsoft founder and philanthropist; Jess Staley, former Barclay’s CEO; Reid Hoffman, cofounder of LinkedIn; Larry Summers, professor and former Harvard University president; Woody Allen, filmmaker; and Noam Chomsky, leftist MIT linguistics professor, among others. These and other meetings may reveal that many businesspersons and woke philanthropists were ensnared by a child sex trafficker.

The scene at the Berkshire annual meeting also followed on the heels of the lawsuit filed against JPMorgan Chase by the US Virgin Islands. Attorneys for the US Virgin Islands claim that the bank materially aided Epstein in his child sex trafficking scheme and is seeking damages for their clients. Four billionaires have been subpoenaed in the case so far, including Google cofounder Sergey Brin; Hyatt Hotels CEO Thomas Pritzker; real estate tycoon and owner of U.S. News and World Report Mortimer Zuckerman; and venture capitalist and Hollywood agent Michael Ovitz. Curiously, the US Virgin Islands has also attempted, without success, to serve a subpoena to Google’s other cofounder, Larry Page, whose whereabouts remain unknown and who obviously does not want to be found.

It should be remembered here that Google has represented the leading edge of woke capitalism, with its leftist ranking algorithms and its employment of “machine learning fairness” that corrects for so-called algorithmic unfairness by misrepresenting reality with affirmative action results. Clearly, Google’s founders did not rely on algorithms to identify and eliminate pedophiles from their list of business contacts.

While the US Virgin Islands asserts that JP Morgan Chase facilitated and possibly bankrolled Epstein’s pedophilia ring, US Republican lawmakers have claimed that the US’s largest bank has a penchant for cancelling the accounts of conservative and religious groups. The bank maintained its financial relationship with Epstein until 2013, long after he was convicted of sex crimes, yet recently cancelled the accounts of such groups as the National Committee for Religious Freedom. The bank’s touted “diversity and inclusion” policy has apparently included pedophiles but excluded avowedly Christian groups.

Much more has and could be said about why high-profile businesspersons, philanthropists, academics, and even intelligence officers had relationships with Jeffrey Epstein. For example, some have claimed that Epstein and his partner Ghislaine Maxwell were Israeli spies who ran a honey-trap operation to steer US policies in Israel’s favor and against US interests.

As the Wall Street Journal asked:

Epstein was a former schoolteacher. How did he become a billionaire? What was the source of his wealth? Was he paid for providing women or girls to his friends? Was he a blackmailer? Were women or girls an enticement to invest in his projects?

Finally, there’s the ridiculous, implausible matter of Epstein’s death in federal custody on Aug. 10, 2019, which 3½ years later remains under investigation by the Justice Department inspector general, only feeding conspiracy theories.

But the main question for our purposes is: How is that nearly all major corporate heads and influential members of society have simultaneously gone woke? Could it be that whoever controlled Jeffrey Epstein sets the agenda through the use of blackmail, directing these corporate heads and other leaders to convert to wokeness, while steering their philanthropy to designated ends, including the funding of critical race theory and the LGBTQIA+ agenda? In other words, is our capitalist class controlled by whoever oversaw Epstein’s thirty-year entrapment operation?

In addition to revealing the moral rot that has permeated the US establishment, the Epstein connections also show that those who claim the woke moral high ground, and impose woke policies on the rest of us, are perhaps the most corrupted people on the face of the earth.

Michael Rectenwald is the author of twelve books, including The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty: Unraveling the Global AgendaThought CriminalBeyond WokeGoogle Archipelago, and Springtime for Snowflakes.

May 18, 2023 Posted by | Corruption | , | Leave a comment

When the trading gets rough, the pros go insider

The farm to table vertical integration of the gates foundation investing racket

by el gato malo – bad cattitude – may 6, 2023

in the aftermath of great events, “who knew what and when did they know it?” is always an interesting question.

the US intelligence community (michael spenger substack ) was suspected to have caught wind of covid back in november 2019.

astonishingly, the IC itself denies this and claims they were in the dark until later

Every official interviewed by the Committee—from working level analysts at NCMI to an official with relevant knowledge at the NSC—said that their first indication of a novel virus came with the publication of the ProMED notice published at 11:59 p.m. on December 30, 2019 that reported the announcement of a novel virus by the Wuhan Municipal Health Committee.

In sum, the first warnings of COVID-19 came from the non-IC based public health track—in this case disease surveillance conducted by local public health authorities in Wuhan.

but this invites some pretty pointy questions about their competence, no?

because it sure looks like pretty much everyone on the super special inside track of business and finance CLEARLY knew by then.

bill gates knew. the WEF and team davos knew. and they were making big plays to make big money months before the intelligence community is even claimed, much less claims to have known what was going on.

it does make one wonder…

bill gates bought $55 million (with an option for $100mm) of bioNtech stock in september of 2019 right before they suddenly had the intellectual property for the most profitable vaccine in history.

they were not working on vaccines previously.

i wonder where they got the tech?

no one seems to know.

but it sure looks like billy g knew.

so, here’s a fun little nugget from the bill and melinda gates foundation investment into bioNtech, from whom pfizer licensed the IP for the covid vaccine.

pretty prescient for september 2019.

source

does this seem like “boilerplate?”

because it seems oddly specific (but deniable) as a “partnership” on something unrelated that could suddenly be “covid.”

and the timing is awfully provocative especially in light of some other events.

he did well getting out as well.

gates sold in 2021, banking $260 million, pretty much right at the top and has since changed his tune on mRNA vaccines, but this is hardly uncommon for “investors talking their book.”

the rest of this fact pattern looks a bit nastier though, more like the 3.0 sand hill road model of “buy up companies in a space and then mandate the adoption of their products.”

this has been the great game out there since even before kleiner perkins hired al gore to shill and lobby for their greentech portfolio. they are currently playing a similar (and more subtle) game playing hungry hungry hippos with HVAC companies and then pushing through new “air handling mandates” for new buildings, schools, offices, etc. cuz “public health.”

but the gates foundation makes them look like pikers.

if you’re going to make a big push into selling vaccines and drugs, why buy mere lobbyists when you can buy the WHO? gates is by far their largest private donor, 25X the size of the next biggest and was their number 2 donor overall.

$531 million buys A LOT of access and control. it’s perfect. the WHO is not only on the ground all over, but they also give advice and set policy/terms for assistance. so gates gets all the info instantly about what’s happening in diseases and then gets to tell the WHO what to tell everyone to do about it. play the hero and add a zero (to your bank balances).

it’s a truly great grift and few dare call it out as the nasty, hard-knuckle lobbying and advocacy it is because it looks like philanthropy.

weaponized philanthropy to be sure, but “philanthropy” and tax free to boot.

not only did bill get early word on wuhan and reach out and place big money on the one subtle square that was going to pay out huge by suddenly having the answer to the most asked question on earth and coming out of obscure nowhere to partner with pharma titan pfizer, but he went a full step further and actually held a pandemic war game under the auspices of john’s hopkins that gathered top policy makers and thought leaders to assess a global outbreak of an “imaginary” disease that happened to look exactly like SARS-cov2. this was the now infamous “event 201.

and look who threw the party: the WEF and the gates foundation.

it’s obvious that they knew exactly what was coming. this was the overt planning plenary for covid. it was not pretend. and many/most those attending must have known that. this is the same time gates was buying bioNtech.

the bioNtech investment was 9/4/19. event 201 was 10/18, five weeks later.

who knows how much earlier the due diligence and planning must have begun, especially for the investment.

there’s getting lucky, and there’s putting the fix in because you know what others do not.

tell me that this “imaginary scenario” 2-3 months before the whole world knew what was happening was just a lucky guess.

the “players” were a high powered gang including big business, healthcare companies, the UN, the head of china’s CDC, a number of academics, the head of US CDC preparedness and response, monetary authorities, and media firms.

May 6, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , , , | Leave a comment