Human rights « Aletho News

What They Did to the Children

By David Bell | Brownstone Institute | August 9, 2023

Children, as any parent knows, are not small adults. Their brain is growing and being acutely shaped by their environment and experience. Social skills and values are learnt from those around them, with teamwork, risk-management, personal boundaries, and tolerance being learned through play with other children. Their immune system is imprinting environmental contact into a set of responses that will shape health in later life. Their bodies grow physically and become adept at physical skills. They learn both trust and mistrust through interaction with adults.

This rapid physical and psychological growth makes children highly vulnerable to harm. Withdrawal of close contact with trusted adults and enforced distancing has large emotional and physical impacts, in common with other primates. Lack of experience also leaves them vulnerable to manipulation by adults who are pushing certain attitudes or beliefs – often called ‘grooming.’ For these reasons, our forebears put specific protections and norms of behaviour in place that elevated the needs of children above adults.

However, protecting children did not involve enclosing them in a padded cell – policy-makers knew this to be harmful to psychological and physical development. It involved allowing children to explore their environment and society, whilst taking measures to shield them from malfeasance, including from those who would harm them directly or through ignorance or neglect.

The act of imposing risks on children for the perceived benefit of adults was therefore considered one of the worst crimes. The most cowardly use of ‘human shields.’

Article 3 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child places children at the centre of public decision-making:

“In all actions concerning children…. the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration.”

When we are complicit in acts that we know are wrong, we naturally look for ways to avoid acknowledging our part in it or excuse the actions as being ‘for a greater good.’ But lying to ourselves is not a good way to correct a wrong. As we have seen in other acts of institutional child abuse, it allows the abuse to fester and expand. It advances the interests and safety of the perpetrators over that of the victims.

Covid as a means for targeting children

In early 2020, a virus outbreak was noted in Wuhan, China. It was soon clear that this relatively novel coronavirus overwhelmingly targeted the sick and elderly, particularly those on unhealthy Western diets. The Diamond Princess incident showed, however, that even among the elderly the vast majority would survive the illness (Covid-19), with many not even becoming ill.

In response, Western public health institutions, politicians, and media turned on children. Society implemented policies never seen before; a whole-of-society approach that was expected to increase poverty and inequality, particularly targeting lower-income people. and disrupt childhood development. It included restrictions on children’s play, education, and communication, and used psychological manipulation to convince them that they were a threat to their parents, teachers, and grandparents. Policies such as isolation and travel restriction, normally applied to criminals, were applied to whole populations.

The novel public health response was designed by a small but influential group of very wealthy people, often called philanthropists, and international institutions which they have funded and co-opted over the past decade. These same people would go on to be greatly enriched through the ensuing response. Encouraged by these same but now even wealthier people governments are now working to entrench these responses to build a poorer, less free and more unequal world into which all children will grow.

Whilst rarely discussed in public spaces, strategies of targeting and sacrificing children for the gratification of adults are not new. However, it is a practice that normally elicits disgust. We can now understand better, having been part of it, how such actions can creep into a society and become integral to its character. People find it easy to condemn the past, whilst excusing the present; asking reparations for past slavery whilst advocating for cheaper batteries produced through current child slavery, or condemning past institutionalized child abuse whilst condoning it when it happens within their own institutions. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was not asking us to look to the past, but to the present. The most mature society is one that can face itself, calmly and with its eyes open.

The abandonment of evidence

Aerosolized respiratory viruses, such as coronaviruses, spread in tiny airborne particles over long distances and are not interrupted by cloth face coverings or surgical masks. This has been long- established and has been confirmed again by the US CDC in a meta-analysis of influenza studies published in May 2020.

The SARS-CoV-2 virus was somewhat unusual (though not unique) in its targeting of a cell receptor in the lining of the respiratory tract, ACE-2 receptors, to enter and infect cells. These are expressed less in children, meaning children are intrinsically less likely to be severely infected or transmit large viral loads to others. This explains the study outcomes early in the Covid-19 epidemic that demonstrated very low transmission from children to school teachers, and adults living with children having a lower-than-average risk. It explains why Sweden, following former evidence-based recommendations from the World Health Organization (WHO), kept schools open with no ill effects on health.

Armed with this knowledge, we (as a society) closed schools and forced children to cover their faces, reducing their educational potential and impairing their development. Knowing that school closures would disproportionately harm low-income children with poorer computer access and home study environments, we ensured that the children of the wealthy would widen their advantage for the next generation. In low-income countries, these school closures worked as expected, increasing child labour and condemning up to 10 million additional girls to child to child marriage and nightly rape.

Abusing children at home

For many, school provides the only stable and secure part of their lives, providing the vital pastoral and counselling work which identifies and supports children in crisis. When pupils are out of school the most vulnerable are the most affected, teachers can’t pick up the early warning signs of abuse or neglect, and children have no one they can tell. For children with special needs, essential access to multi-agency support frequently ceased.

Sport and extracurricular activities are important in children’s lives. Events such as school plays, school trips, choirs, and the first and last days at school mark out their lives and are vital for their social development. Friendships are crucial for their emotional development, particularly during the crucial stages of growth – childhood, adolescence and young adulthood – and especially when there are vulnerabilities or special needs, children need access to family, friends, services, and support.

The result of this neglect, as highlighted by a recent a UCL study on the outcomes of UK government restrictions on children in 2020-2022, was nothing short of a disaster:

“The impact of the pandemic will have detrimental consequences for children and young people in the short and long-term, with many not yet visible, it will have continuing consequences for their future in terms of professional life trajectories, healthy lifestyles, mental well-being, educational opportunities, self-confidence and more besides.”

As the study finds:

“Children were forgotten by policymakers during Covid lockdowns.”

Infants, children, and teenagers endured numerous lockdowns during their most formative years, despite accounting for a diminutive proportion of Covid hospitalisations and deaths. The UCL study found that politicians did not consider children and young people a “priority group” when English lockdowns were enforced. Infants born into the Covid restrictions have marked delays in brain and thought development.

Education is provided to children as it benefits their educational and psychological development, provides a safe and protective environment, and is a way of improving equality. So it was to be expected that when schools closed there would be development losses in very young children, reduced education attainment throughout the age profile, mental health issues, and a rising tide of abuse.

In the UK, 840 million school days were lost to the class of 2021 and nearly two million of England’s nine million pupils are still failing to attend school regularly. As early as November 2020, Ofsted, the body which inspects and reports on schools in England, reported that the majority of children were going backwards educationally. Regression was found in communication skills, physical development, and independence. These impacts are seen across Europe, and are likely to be lifelong. Despite this, the policies continued.

In the United States, school closures affected an estimated 24.2 million US schoolchildren absent from school (1.6 billion worldwide) and the educative deterioration there is particularly clear. Schoolchildren have fallen behind in their learning by almost a year according to the latest assessments from the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP). About a third of the students didn’t reach the lowest reading benchmark and maths saw the steepest decline in history. As poorer students will have less access to the internet and support for remote learning, school closures also widen racial and ethnic inequalities.

And when schools did reopen in the UK a damaging and restrictive set of regulations were introduced wearing masks, testing, bubbles, playground restrictions, and static timetables. Post-primary children were spending all day in the same room, masked for 9 hours per day if they used public transport to get to school. Isolation and quarantining led to continual absences. Teachers trained to know this approach was harmful continued to implement it.

The recent Ofsted report from Spring 2022 highlighted the damaging effects of the restrictions on the development of young children and should have been enough to set alarm bells ringing as it recorded:

Delays in babies’ physical development
A generation of babies struggling to crawl and communicate
Babies suffering delays in learning to walk
Delays in speech and language (noted to be partly attributable to imposition of facemasks).

This latter has also been noted by practitioners such as the Head of the Speech and Language unit in N. Ireland:

“A growing number of young children are experiencing significant communication problems following the lockdowns and some who can’t talk at all, they grunt or they point at things they want and who don’t know how to speak to the other children.”

A study by Irish researchers found that babies born during March to May 2020, when Ireland was locked down, were less likely to be able to say at least one definitive word, point, or wave goodbye at 12 months old. A further study published in Nature found children aged 3 months – 3 years scored almost two standard deviations lower in a proxy measurement of development similar to IQ. With 90 percent of brain development taking place in the first five years of life, this has been tragic. Many children in this age group are now starting school far behind, biting and hitting, overwhelmed around large groups and unable to settle and learn with the social and educational skills of a child two years younger.

From a mental health viewpoint, we as a society attacked the mental health of children, following policies we knew were harmful and even designed to stoke fear; a direct form of abuse. Children were shut away in their bedrooms, isolated from friends, told they were a danger to others and that non-compliance may kill granny. An agenda of fear was imposed on them.

In the UK there are an astonishing one million children awaiting mental health support, whilst more than 400,000 children and young people a month are being treated for mental health problems – the highest number on record. More than a third of young people said they feel their life is spiralling out of control and more than 60 percent of 16-25-year-olds said they were scared about their generation’s future, 80 percent of young people reporting a deterioration in their emotional well-being.

As early as autumn 2020, UK’s Ofsted had identified:

A 42 percent in self-harm and eating disorders
An ‘explosion’ of children with disabling tic disorders
record numbers of children being prescribed antidepressants
Increases in self-harm

In addition, five times more children and young people committed suicide than died of COVID-19 during the first year of the pandemic in the UK. In the US, CDC reported that emergency department visits were 50.6 percent higher among girls aged 12–17 due to suicide attempts From early 2020, it was known that children were barely affected by the virus, having a 99.9987 percent survival chance, while they were not a danger to others.

Abusing children far away

Numbers are not people, so when we discuss dead or harmed children in large numbers, it can be difficult to understand the real impact. This allows us to gloss over the impact. However, UNICEF tells us that almost a quarter of a million children were killed by the lockdowns in 2020 in South Asia alone. That is 228,000, each with a mother and father, probably brothers or sisters.

Most additional child lockdown deaths will have been particularly unpleasant, as malnutrition and infections are hard ways to die. These deaths were anticipated by the WHO and the public health community in general. They would have lived without the lockdowns, as (so) they were ‘added’ deaths.

The WHO estimates about 60,000 additional children are dying each year since 2020 from malaria. Many more are dying from tuberculosis and other childhood illnesses. With about a billion additional people in severe food deprivation (near starvation), there will probably be some millions more hard, painful deaths to come. It is hard to watch a child dying. But someone like us, often a parent, watched and suffered through each of these deaths.

While many in the public health and ‘humanitarian’ industries tell tales about stopping a global pandemic, those watching these deaths knew they were unnecessary. They knew that these children had been betrayed. Some perhaps can still claim ignorance, as the Western media has found discussion of these realities awkward. Their main private sponsors are profiting from the programs causing these deaths, as others once benefitted from the abuse and killing to secure cheap rubber of the Belgian Congo or the mining of rare metals in Africa today. Exposing mass child deaths-for-profit will not please the investment houses that own both media and media’s Pharma sponsors. But deaths are the same whether the media covers it or not.

Why we did this

There is no simple answer as to why society reversed its norms of behaviour and pretended, en masse, that lies were truth and truth was a lie. Nor a simple answer as to why child welfare came to be considered dispensable, and children a threat to others. Those who orchestrated the closing of schools knew that it would increase long-term poverty and, therefore, poor health. They knew of the inevitability of increased child labour, child brides, starvation, and death. This is why we run clinics, support food programmes, and try to educate children.

None of the harms from the Covid response were at all unexpected. The children of the wealthy benefitted, whilst the children of the less well-off were disproportionately harmed. This is the way society has worked historically – we just fooled ourselves that we had developed something better.

What is most concerning is that three years in, we are not just ignoring what we did, but are planning to expand and institutionalize these practices. Those who gained most financially from Covid-19, who backed this society-wide attack on the most vulnerable, wish this to be a permanent feature of life. There is no serious enquiry into the harms of the global response because these were expected, and those in charge have profited from them.

The desired reset was achieved; we have reset our expectations regarding truth, decency, and the care of children. In an amoral world the happiness, the health, and the life of a child only carries the importance we are told to attach to it. To change that, we would have to stand against the tide. History will remember those who did and those who did not.

David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health. He is a former medical officer and scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO), Programme Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, Switzerland, and Director of Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in Bellevue, WA, USA.

August 12, 2023 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Human rights | Leave a comment

Maine Hospital That Fired Unvaccinated Nurses Over Mills’ Mandate Is Begging Them to Return Two Years Later

By Steve Robinson | Maine Wire |August 9, 2023

Nurses and other health care workers at MaineGeneral Health, one of Maine’s largest healthcare providers, were unceremoniously fired two years ago if they refused to take the experimental mRNA injections touted as COVID-19 preventatives.

Some of those workers were even slapped with misconduct charges for refusing to comply with the mandate, many were later denied unemployment benefits, and no requests for religious exemptions were honored.

Now, one of the nonprofit hospitals that left some employees jobless and without recourse to Maine’s unemployment insurance benefits is sending text messages to the same employees it cast aside practically begging them to come back to work.

“You were once a proud member of the MaineGeneral team. Would you consider rejoining us? We would be pleased to discuss options with you,” the MaineGeneral Health Recruitment team said in a text message to former registered nurse Terry Poland.

“As you know, nearly 2 years ago MaineGeneral had to comply with a state mandate for COVID-19 vaccination. We lost a number of great employees as a result, including you,” MaineGeneral said.

“MaineGeneral has eliminated the COVID-19 vaccination as an employment condition,” MaineGeneral said.

Poland, who lives in Augusta, had worked as a registered nurse for 33 years. Her career included employment with MaineGeneral, Central Maine Medical Center, Pen Bay Medical Center, and the Aroostook Medical Center.

She couldn’t believe that the hospital would contact her in such a manner after casting her life into chaos for nearly two years.

“I was livid. Like, how dare you force me out of a career that I’ve dedicated my whole life to, taken away my livelihood, my ability to earn a good income, and now you think I’m gonna come grovel back to you?” Poland said. “I don’t hardly think so. And that’s the attitude of most everybody that I’ve been in contact with since yesterday.”

A source told the Maine Wire that about 15 former MaineGeneral Health employees received similar text messages.

Poland refused to take the experimental COVID-19 shots after Gov. Janet Mills decreed on August 12, 2021 that healthcare workers would be forced to receive the shots as a condition of working in healthcare by October 1, 2021.

Documents reviewed by the Maine Wire show that MaineGeneral established a speedier timeline of Sept. 17 for compliance.

Eventually, the State pushed back the deadline to the end of October.

Poland was never opposed to vaccines generally speaking. Though she previously used a religious exemption to avoid taking an influenza shot, she willingly took the other vaccines required to work in healthcare prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, including immunizations for Measles, Mumps, Rubella, and Hepatitis-B.

She said she was concerned about the novel nature of the mRNA technology, a form of gene therapy, which prior to COVID-19 had not been used in the standard schedule of immunizations.

“I knew enough not to take it. I’ve been a nurse long enough to know I need to question what new products are,” Poland said. “I’m not going to be the first one to jump on board of an experiment.”

When she discovered that fetal tissues are commonly used in the development and production of the drugs, that only strengthened her resolve as a Christian not to get the injections.

In previous years, Poland has said she was allowed an exemption from taking the influenza shot so long as she wore a mask during flu season. However, the hospital was unwilling to provide this accommodation for COVID-19.

As a result of her choice, Poland faced not only termination, but also an allegation of misconduct from her former employer.

When she applied for unemployment benefits, she was rejected because of the misconduct allegation.

When she appealed, she was turned away.

Documents reviewed by the Maine Wire show that the Maine Department of Labor determined that MaineGeneral Health “discharged” her; however, the agency concluded that Poland’s refusal to get the injections was a violation that constituted a “culpable breach of obligations to the employer.”

As a result, Poland had to rely on her savings to get by in the middle of economically disastrous government lockdowns and soaring inflation.

Poland then sought help from the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, claiming that she’d been discriminated against on the basis of her religious beliefs.

MaineGeneral Health, in responding to the commission, argued that allowing Poland religious accommodations would impose an “undue hardship” on the hospital. On that basis, the commission declined to take on her case.

The Maine Human Rights Commission also rejected her discrimination complaint.

“[T]here has been positive energy between human resource personnel and managers who are in the process of working together to reach out to former employees to see if they are interested in returning,” said Joy McKenna, director of communications for MaineGeneral, in an email.

“Since Monday, we are only aware of a few people who have indicated that they are interested in having a conversation about applying for an open position,” she said. “We currently have 453 open positions, which is similar to our pre-COVID open position count.”

McKenna said the hospital did not intentionally fire unvaccinated employees in a way that would block them from getting unemployment benefits.

Some of those positions have been filled by foreign nationals with greencards, McKenna said, though she was not able to provide an exact number on Wednesday.

At the time MaineGeneral fired her, Poland was working at the MaineGeneral Rehabilitation and Long Term Care at Gray Birch facility in Augusta.

The facility provides nursing home and assisted living services and has a 37-bed capacity. Federal stats show the facility had 141 staff before the mandate and 110 after it was enforced.

In the years since she was fired, she estimates she’s earned only $12,000 and $17,000 as a home healthcare worker, a position that hasn’t provided similar benefits to the job she lost.

As a registered nurse, Poland was making about $75,000 per year.

She’s still not willing to give MaineGeneral another shot.

Poland is not the only one whose career was derailed by Gov. Mills’ mandate policy.

Jessie Boda worked for St. Mary’s Health System as a registered nurse in Psychiatric and Detox services for 13 years, her first job out of college.

When the mandate came down, she applied for a religious exemption.

In her letter requesting the exemption, Boda pointed to her religious faith and her concern over adverse vaccine reactions.

She also pointed out that natural immunity from a COVID-19 infection was in some cases a better protection against contracting the virus.

St. Mary’s, which has a formal affiliation with the Catholic Church, denied the request.

Like MaineGeneral, St. Mary’s also found a way for Boda’s exit from the company to prevent her from getting unemployment benefits.

“I did not comply and I never submitted a letter of resignation. Nor would they give me a letter of termination,” Boda said.

“The kind lady in the HR office gave me a letter stating my start date and end date of employment but told me she could not use the words ‘terminated’ or ‘fired’,” she said.

Boda took her case to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which agreed to investigate her case but concluded there was no grounds for the complaint.

Kevin Palmer worked as a credentialing coordinator for Southern Maine Health Care, the Biddeford location of MaineHealth.

Palmer, who is in his 30s, was never opposed to taking vaccines before COVID-19, but he was skeptical of what he saw as a rushed process to roll out the COVID-19 shots.

“I had heart surgery in high school, survived brain cancer in my 20s, and now they’re telling me I have to get this shot over a virus with a 99.99 percent survival rate?” he said.

Like Boda and Poland, Palmer sought a religious exemption and was denied.

Like Boda and Poland, Palmer was fired in a way that later prevented him from obtaining unemployment.

In his termination letter, the HR department wrote: “This is also to confirm that September 30 will be your last day of employment. We want to thank you for your service.”

Even though the hospital gave him an employment date in an email, the Maine Department of Labor ruled against him.

“I never got a penny,” Palmer said.

He wasn’t able to find another job until four months later and the job he eventually found came with a 20 percent pay cut.

“I ran out of money like everybody else. It was crazy. I was trying to apply to jobs, similar to what I had done in credentialing. And I couldn’t even get a job with with the experience I had because they were mandating the vaccine even for remote positions,” said Palmer.

“How crazy is that?” he said.

A Healthcare Worker Crisis Caused by Authoritarian Policies

Thousands of former healthcare workers in Maine are currently unemployed or working in other fields because they refused to comply with Gov. Mills’ order that they receive injections.

Some refused because they were skeptical of all vaccines or because of religious beliefs concerning the ethical problems with vaccine research that uses fetal tissue.

Others were fearful that the long-term consequences of the experimental products were unknown, unknowable, and potentially harmful.

But in every case, the substantial drop in employment in Maine’s healthcare sector because of the mandate has severely exacerbated a workforce shortage that threatens to undermine healthcare quality in the state.

Text messages like the one Poland received will hardly fix the problem.

It’s virtually impossible to determine how much of the sharp drop in healthcare employment has been caused by Mills’ order, how much of it was caused by COVID-19, and how much of it was caused by lockdown policies generally.

Regardless, labor statistics show Maine is in the middle of the steepest decline in healthcare jobs. Ever.

According to stats from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, those losses have been particularly acute in Maine’s nursing homes and assisted living facilities, like the facility where Poland worked.

In 2019, Maine had more than 22,600 individuals employed at nursing homes.

That number hit 19,800 in 2022.

At skilled nursing facilities, employment dropped from 8,426 in 2019 to 6,907 in 2022, according to Maine Department of Labor statistics.

The shortage of long-term care workers is all the more severe in Maine since the state consistently ranks as the oldest in the nation. As demand for nursing home beds increases, the number of workers available to provide that care has plummeted.

In home healthcare, total employment has declined from 4,401 workers in 2019 to 4,054 in 2022.

The same shortage can be seen in employment figures for hospitals in Maine. Mainers working in Maine hospitals declined from 33,000 in 2019 to 30,900 in 2021, according to federal statistics.

Even as Maine’s opioid epidemic has continued to break records for overdoses and deaths, the number people employed in the health sector that includes substance abuse facilities has declined from 7,509 workers in 2019 to 7,149 in 2022, according to Maine Department of Labor numbers.

One health care area that hasn’t seen such sharp declines is ambulatory health care, which includes facilities that are out-patient only, such as urgent care clinics and dentists offices.

At the same time the medical field is suffering from a lack of employees, Mainers have never spent more money on their health care.

Personal consumption of outpatient and in-home care topped $11,897,000,000 in 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. That’s a massive increase over the $11.2 billion reported for 2019.

At least some of that money is making its way into the pockets of Maine’s remaining health care workers. According to federal stats, Mainers who work in health care or social assistance made a record $7,028,362,000 in collective wages — the highest ever in Maine history.

Vaccine Mandate Victims Seek Discrimination Case

Gov. Mills’ mandate was based on the theory that the pharmaceutical products being touted as “vaccines” or “immunizations” would prevent healthcare workers from contracting the virus or transmitting it to patients.

It’s now generally understood that the vaccine never inhibited transmission of the virus.

Mills, who has followed the recommended injection schedule, has herself caught COVID-19 twice despite getting the jabs.

The Aug. 3 decision by the Mills Administration to rescind the mandate after nearly two years followed on the heels of an embarrassing legal defeat in a case challenging the constitutionality of Mills’ decision to eliminate religious and philosophical exemptions from the mandate.

That court case hinges on the fact that Mills continued to allow medical exemptions while denying a comparable exemption for medical reasons.

Although the plaintiffs in that case, several healthcare workers who lost their jobs over the mandate, initially lost in Maine District Court, an appeals court panel has determined that the lower court erred when it rejected their claim of religious discrimination.

In May, when that decision came down, Matt Staver, who represents the plaintiffs via Liberty Counsel, said he was looking forward to discovery.

“We’re frankly looking very much forward to going to discovery and holding Governor mills and the Maine authorities accountable for this terrible and, frankly, unconstitutional decision,” said Staver.

August 11, 2023 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States | Leave a comment

ULEZ – Another Imperial Con

Ulez Expansion Predicted to Cut Air Pollution by Just 1.5%

By Alex Kriel | Thinking Coalition | August 9, 2023

Listening to the discussion over Ulez expansion feels like an action replay of the way in which many were convinced to overreact to Covid, leading to policy responses which caused significantly more harm than good. The Ulez ‘discussion’ has all of the same elements, with modelled health benefits calculated by Imperial College and Mayor Khan’s justification that he is “saving lives”, implying that opponents are wannabe murderers. Of course, this time around, the public is thankfully much more sceptical.

In this short note, we wanted to set out how those ‘lives saved’ numbers are derived and to demonstrate that at best the numbers are seriously misrepresented and at worst completely wrong. In fact, applying the Government and Imperial’s own logic, there is a very strong case to say that the expansion of Ulez will, on balance, harm Londoner’s health when considering the downstream economic consequences of this policy.

The major flaw in Imperial’s model is the one-dimensional nature of its assumption that air pollution drives health and life expectancy. In the real world health is driven by a number of interacting factors with income being the primary driver. There are many assumptions one could dispute that (perhaps unsurprisingly) work towards inflating the claimed health benefits of reducing air pollution, but we focus only on the flaw of largely ignoring policy consequences.

The Imperial team presents several numbers, including: attributable deaths (3,600 to 4,100), improved life expectancy (five to six months) and life-years saved (6.1 million). We wanted to focus on the claimed benefits of the Mayor’s Transport Strategy in terms of life expectancy and life-years saved.

Before leaving attributable deaths, it is important to note that these are not in any sense deaths that can be avoided, nor are they deaths that are subject to reduction by the Transport Strategy. The figure appears to compare current death rates with death rates if all human emissions had been removed for all prior periods. It is a theoretical construct (similar to an unmitigated pandemic) and only a small fraction of this number would be theoretically impacted by road transport (around 15%). Only the going-forward numbers (life-years saved) relate to the Transport Strategy and there the benefits are relatively low at 0.4%. It is important to note that there has only ever been one death, of a young and chronically unwell girl ever recorded in England (56 million population) where the death certificate mentions air pollution. Tragic as this death clearly is, it again highlights the disconnect between the theoretical attribution number and actual deaths recorded; we suggest ignoring the attributable deaths figure.

Looking at the claimed benefits of implementing the Transport Strategy, it is possible for a layman to understand the main assumptions on which these health benefits are based. In summary, it is assumed that reducing 10 µg m^-3 achieves roughly a 6% reduction in all cause mortality. Note however 10 µg m^-3 is more than all anthropogenic PM 2.5 emissions as estimated for England as a whole, so any benefits are scaled down from 6%. So a 1 µg m^-3 reduction generates roughly a 0.6% improvement in life expectancy (i.e., ten times less).

Looking at life-years saved and extended life expectancy, the key assumptions are poorly explained. For those in a hurry, the detail shows that all of the Transport Strategy initiatives to 2050 combined will deliver a projected 0.4% reduction in life-years lost to air pollution using projections to 2154. There is a claimed five to six month extension in life expectancy, so the life expectancy of a London male of around 80 years would be extended to around 80.4 years.

These gains are stated relative to a baseline and for some inexplicable reason the Imperial team has decided to use 2013 pollution levels to establish the baseline and in the process to ignore the available data for 2019. This serves to inflate the baseline.

The acid test is: are the results of modelling compatible with observed reality? And on that basis the Imperial Ulez modelling falls flat. The model covers the impact of the entire Transport Strategy to 2050 which covers many more steps than Ulez. The Imperial document is somewhat vague about what those steps are – they are cryptically referred to as 2025 LES, 2030 LES and 2050 LES. It is enough to note that the goal of Mayor Khan’s 2018 Transport Strategy is to “aim for 80% of all trips in London to be made on foot, by cycle or using public transport by 2041”. So the first thing to clarify is that the claimed 6.1 million saving of life years relates to a significant number of measures, well beyond Ulez expansion. In effect these combined steps will largely eliminate private car traffic.

The chart below is constructed from the Imperial material and shows that PM 2.5 µg m^-3 population weighted (PWAC) pollution falls over a number of steps and Ulez on a standalone basis has a near zero impact. Also, you can also see that a fair chunk of gains have already been banked between 2013 and 2019.

The failure of Ulez to achieve any meaningful reduction in pollution is very clearly shown in a separate document prepared by Jacobs which looks at the impacts of Ulez only. The table below shows the impact of Ulez expansion on PM 2.5 µg m^-3 concentration, with an estimated improvement of less than 2%.

There is a slightly better outcome for NO_x pollutants which are reduced by 5.4% across Greater London. This feeds in to the health impact assessment which unsurprisingly shows near zero benefit from Ulez for PM 2.5 reductions, for most health-related metrics.

Looking at life expectancy, the report does acknowledge that due to the large population (around 8.9 million) and the extraordinary long time period over which these benefits are expected to crystalise (up to 2154) then there are around 1.5 billion life-years involved (years × population). For any stated benefit to be meaningful, it needs to referenced to the base case value. The 6.1 million life-years saved is then within the context of a total of around 1.5 billion life-years; this saving is around 0.4%. Correspondingly, the impact on life expectancy from all of the pollution schemes (not just Ulez) adds up to around 22 to 27 weeks additional life expectancy. In the context of male life expectancy of 80 years (roughly) this would improve to 80.4 years as a consequence of 30 years’ worth of restrictive climate policies (ignoring any economic consequences).

The core flaw in the calculation is the one-dimensional thinking that underpins this (and all similar calculations) in that all reductions in PM 2.5 concentrations lead to a reduction in the mortality rate. This thinking ignores any link between people’s incomes and health outcomes, which is the primary driver of health. This is the same dishonest cop out that Professor Ferguson made in his infamous Covid paper. This facilitates a myopic focus on ‘safety’ and generates solutions that do far more harm than good.

In setting out the methodology that states that health outcomes will improve with a reduction in air pollution on a more or less linear basis, the Government’s own figures show that real world data prove that this assumption is not correct (or at least over-simplified). Its own data for the regions of the U.K. show that (if anything) this relationship is reversed.

Life expectancy in Scotland is much lower despite having far and away the lowest concentration of anthropogenic PM 2.5 pollutants. Many studies with and between countries show this clearly (e.g. life expectancies by national deprivation deciles, England: 2018 to 2020).

In order to get a handle on how much more significant factors other than PM 2.5 can be, we looked at a recent paper that considers the impact of changes in different factors on life expectancy across 29 European countries (the paper also looks at each factor in isolation using multivariate analysis). The chart below shows the life expectancy impact of a 1% change in the listed factors. There are of course some caveats, but you can immediately see that economic activity dominates the outcomes with a 13-month gain in life expectancy for a 1% gain in GDP versus say a 2.7 month gain for a 1% change in PM 10-2.5. Also note there is no statistically significant relationship between CO₂ and life expectancy.

In another section of the same paper the author states: “France and Sweden, some of the countries closest to their potential LE (life expectancies), are also amongst those with the highest NO_xlevel.” The real message, though, is that if you dent people’s income by narrowly pursuing PM 2.5 reduction, you will, on balance, shorten life expectancy and not increase it. The Jacobs’ report confirms that there will be multiple negative impacts on business and economic activity. We guess that on balance Ulez will lower life expectancy when factoring in the impacts on business and family incomes, as well as quality of life considerations.

In the post Covid world, we have understood that politicians of all stripes will shamelessly use emotional manipulation in order to get reasonable people to comply with their unreasonable edicts. That is why understanding how reliable, or otherwise, attributable deaths, life-years saved and life expectancy figures are is so important. You can almost guarantee that these estimates will be manipulated and potentially used to rationalise illogical and damaging policies.With opaque models it is relatively easy to produce results to order.

The political process assumes that the individuals involved are able to understand competing objectives and arrive at a sensible compromise. However, we saw in the case of Covid that many politicians have limited scientific understanding and will tend to pursue unachievable safety, at any cost.

The State seems to be redefining its role with a narrow group of ideologically-driven technocrats setting somewhat arbitrary targets. Achieving those targets requires wholesale changes to people’s lives. Very often economic, mental health and other impacts are barely considered and historically established constitutional boundaries between the State and the citizen are often ignored.

In the case of Ulez expansion, the 59% of respondents to the public consultation who clearly opposed the expansion were simply ignored.

Various sops will no doubt be offered to voters, but is it important that readers realise that there is a direction of travel to these various steps. Finally, remember Albert Camus’s wise warning that, “The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants.”

Alex Kriel is by training a physicist and was an early critic of the Imperial Covid model. He is a founder of the Thinking Coalition, which comprises a group of citizens who are concerned about Government overreach.

August 11, 2023 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Supremacism, Social Darwinism | Human rights, UK | Leave a comment

X CEO Linda Yaccarino: “Lawful But Awful” Content To Be Hidden

Who gets to decide what’s awful?

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | August 10, 2023

Linda Yaccarino, X CEO and a former NBC advertising executive, underscored her autonomy in managing the day-to-day operations of X, previously known as Twitter, and shed some light on the shadowbanning operation at Twitter.

Appointed CEO by Elon Musk, she reasserted her independence from the entrepreneur, placing him firmly in a tech-based role. Her remarks have reignited debates surrounding freedom of speech and the direction online platforms should take in moderating content.

During a CNBC interview, Yaccarino discussed the demarcation of duties between herself and Musk, with the latter focusing on “product design” and leading “a team of extraordinary engineers [focusing] on new technology.”

However, it is her stance on the website’s content policies that has raised eyebrows among free speech enthusiasts.

In clarifying X’s approach to moderation, Yaccarino introduced the concept of “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach,” a policy where users, when posting narratives that are not in line with approved standards, are labeled, possibly demonetized for that content, and have their visibility reduced on the platform.

“If it is lawful but it’s awful, it’s extraordinarily difficult for you to see it,” she remarked, insinuating that even legally permissible content might be obscured if deemed undesirable by the company.

Some free speech advocates are concerned that this strategy of content labeling and demotion can quickly escalate into censorship. They argue that the distinction between “awful” and “lawful” is often a subjective one and fear the potential for misuse.

The decisions and comments made by Yaccarino might seem like a strict stance against divisive or hurtful rhetoric but critics may see it as an alarming move away from the ethos of open dialogue and free speech.

Video interview

August 10, 2023 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Human rights | Leave a comment

FBI Memo Linking Catholic Faith to ‘Extremists’ Drafted by Several Offices – GOP Lawmakers

By Fantine Gardinier – Sputnik – 10.08.2023

House GOP lawmakers have blasted the FBI director for “inconsistencies” in his testimony after he claimed that a report from the bureau’s Richmond, Virginia, field office identifying “radical traditionalist Catholic ideology” as a potential source of “violent extremism” was an isolated incident. They say that new evidence suggests otherwise.

In a Wednesday letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray that was published by US media, US Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA), who chairs the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government, requested a slew of bureau documents related to communications between FBI field offices in Richmond, Virginia; Portland, Oregon; and Los Angeles, California.

“From information recently produced to the Committee, we now know that the FBI relied on information from around the country – including a liaison contact in the FBI’s Portland Field Office and reporting from the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office – to develop its assessment,” they wrote.

“This new information suggests that the FBI’s use of its law enforcement capabilities to intrude on American’s First Amendment rights is more widespread than initially suspected and reveals inconsistencies with your previous testimony before the Committee,” they lawmakers said. “Given this startling new information, we write to request additional information to advance our oversight.”

They noted that in his testimony before the committee last month, Wray claimed that a January 2023 memo on the potential of right-wing activists motivated by “radical traditionalist Catholic ideology” to pose a violent threat to certain minority groups had been the sole product of the field office in Richmond, the Virginia state capital.

The memo, which was leaked to the press in February, said the office had received a tip from a local informant leading them to believe in an “increasingly observed interest of racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists (RMVEs) in radical-traditionalist Catholic (RTC) ideology.” This, they said, was especially associated with the sect of Catholics who rejected the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in 1965 and with “white supremacist ideology.”

This threat, they said, “presents opportunities for threat mitigation through the exploration of new avenues for tripwire and source development.”

Notably, the unredacted parts of the document do not contain the words “potential terrorists,” as reported in some parts of the American press.

In response to the lawmakers’ letter, the FBI gave a statement to US media on Wednesday doubling down on Wray’s testimony, saying the lawmakers had become confused by similar terminologies used by multiple FBI field offices.
“Director Wray’s testimony on this matter has been accurate and consistent. While the document referred to information from other field office investigations of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremist (RMVE) subjects, that does not change the fact the product was produced by a single office,” the statement said.

“To be clear, the document was a domain perspective which is an intelligence product designed to address potential threats in a particular area – in this case, the Richmond Field Office’s area of responsibility,” the bureau continued. “Because the product failed to meet FBI standards, it was quickly removed from all FBI systems and a review was launched to determine how it was produced in the first place.”

The situation has revived anger at the FBI for its wiretapping activities and profiling of religious groups, for which the bureau became notorious after spying on American Muslims in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

However, conservatives especially have accused the FBI of political bias for years, pointing to its investigation of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in the months preceding the 2016 presidential election and its August 2022 raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate to serve a search and seizure warrant for hundreds of classified files Trump did not return to the National Archives after leaving office. The former president is facing dozens of criminal charges related to alleged mishandling of the secret files.

August 10, 2023 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Deception, Islamophobia | FBI, Human rights, United States | Leave a comment

The EU is a ‘failed project’ – AfD

RT | August 7, 2023

The European Union’s migration, climate, and monetary policies have “completely failed,” according to a policy document adopted by the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party on Sunday. However, the party aims to change the EU from within rather than withdraw from the bloc.

AfD delegates adopted the document at a party conference in the eastern city of Magdeburg on Sunday. The paper describes the EU as a “failed project,” and calls for the bloc to be reformed as a “federation of European nations,” with significant sovereignty ceded back to its member states.

“The EU and the globalist elites that support it have strayed from the original idea of the founding fathers of a European community adopted many years ago,” the document states, citing the 2007 Lisbon Treaty – which gave the EU the power to act as a single legal entity and made EU law supersede national law – as the moment when the bloc became “an EU super state.”

Among a lengthy list of reforms, the AfD is proposing that the EU strengthen its external borders, lessen its military reliance on the US by following a policy of “strategic autonomy,” and protect the “diversity of cultures and traditions of the peoples of Europe” from immigration.

While a draft version of the document released in June called for the “orderly dissolution of the EU,” this language is absent from the final version.

The party also chose 35 candidates to contest next year’s European Parliament elections at the Magdeburg conference. The list is led by Maximilian Krah, who has been an MEP since 2019. The AfD currently holds nine seats in the parliament, and is the third-largest German party in the EU legislature.

At home, the AfD is currently polling at a record high of 21%, according to Politico. This figure puts the party ahead of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD) and behind only former chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU). However, Germany’s mainstream parties have repeatedly ruled out entering into coalition with AfD, and a government-funded watchdog group recently called for the party to be banned for its “racist and nationalist” positions.

The latest polling figures suggest a doubling in the AfD’s support since 2021, when it garnered 10.3% of votes in the parliamentary elections. This surge in popularity comes as Germany’s economy reels in the wake of Berlin’s decision to impose sanctions on Russia, which was formerly the country’s leading energy supplier. At a rally last year, AfD co-leader Tino Chrupalla accused Scholz’s government of waging an “economic war” on the German people by cutting the country off from Russian energy imports.

August 7, 2023 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Economics, Russophobia | European Union, Germany, Human rights | Leave a comment

How long before all browsers are required by law to prevent users from opening allegedly infringing sites?

BY GLYN MOODY | WALLED CULTURE | AUGUST 4, 2023

Mozilla’s Open Policy & Advocacy blog has news about a worrying proposal from the French government:

In a well-intentioned yet dangerous move to fight online fraud, France is on the verge of forcing browsers to create a dystopian technical capability. Article 6 (para II and III) of the SREN Bill would force browser providers to create the means to mandatorily block websites present on a government provided list.

The post explains why this is an extremely dangerous approach:

A world in which browsers can be forced to incorporate a list of banned websites at the software-level that simply do not open, either in a region or globally, is a worrying prospect that raises serious concerns around freedom of expression. If it successfully passes into law, the precedent this would set would make it much harder for browsers to reject such requests from other governments.

If a capability to block any site on a government blacklist were required by law to be built in to all browsers, then repressive governments would be given an enormously powerful tool. There would be no way around that censorship, short of hacking the browser code. That might be an option for open source coders, but it certainly won’t be for the vast majority of ordinary users. As the Mozilla post points out:

Such a move will overturn decades of established content moderation norms and provide a playbook for authoritarian governments that will easily negate the existence of censorship circumvention tools.

It is even worse than that. If such a capability to block any site were built in to browsers, it’s not just authoritarian governments that would be rubbing their hands with glee: the copyright industry would doubtless push for allegedly infringing sites to be included on the block list too. We know this, because it has already done it in the past, as discussed in Walled Culture the book (free digital versions).

Not many people now remember, but in 2004, BT (British Telecom) caused something of a storm when it created CleanFeed:

British Telecom has taken the unprecedented step of blocking all illegal child pornography websites in a crackdown on abuse online. The decision by Britain’s largest high-speed internet provider will lead to the first mass censorship of the web attempted in a Western democracy.

Here’s how it worked:

Subscribers to British Telecom’s internet services such as BTYahoo and BTInternet who attempt to access illegal sites will receive an error message as if the page was unavailable. BT will register the number of attempts but will not be able to record details of those accessing the sites.

The key justification for what the Guardian called “the first mass censorship of the web attempted in a Western democracy” was that it only blocked illegal child sexual abuse material Web sites. It was therefore an extreme situation requiring an exceptional solution. But seven years later, the copyright industry were able to convince a High Court judge to ignore that justification, and to take advantage of CleanFeed to block a site, Newzbin 2, that had nothing to do with child sexual abuse material, and therefore did not require exceptional solutions:

Justice Arnold ruled that BT must use its blocking technology CleanFeed – which is currently used to prevent access to websites featuring child sexual abuse – to block Newzbin 2.

Exactly the logic used by copyright companies to subvert CleanFeed could be used to co-opt the censorship capabilities of browsers with built-in Web blocking lists. As with CleanFeed, the copyright industry would doubtless argue that since the technology already exists, why not to apply it to tackling copyright infringement too?

That very real threat is another reason to fight this pernicious, misguided French proposal. Because if it is implemented, it will be very hard to stop it becoming yet another technology that the copyright world demands should be bent to its own selfish purposes.

GLYN MOODY, journalist, blogger on openness, the commons, copyright, patents and digital rights.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon.

August 7, 2023 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | France, Human rights | Leave a comment

COVID QUESTIONERS DEEMED ‘DOMESTIC TERRORISTS’

The Highwire with Del Bigtree | August 3, 2023

A trip down memory lane chronicling how Homeland Security labeled us all ‘domestic terrorists’ for trying to warn people about the harms of the COVID shots, masking kids, warnings and attacks meant to achieve COVID compliance. Will the same op be run during a climate emergency?

August 7, 2023 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Video | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States | Leave a comment

How the current version of the WHO’s Pandemic Treaty (aka Bureau Text) encourages rather than prevents pandemics

BY MERYL NASS | AUGUST 5, 2023

Weapons of Mass Destruction: Chem Bio

Traditionally, Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) were Chemical, Biological, Radiologic and Nuclear (CBRN).

The people of the world don’t want them used on us—they are cheap ways to kill and maim lots of people at once. And so international treaties were created to try to prevent their development (sometimes) and use. First was the Geneva Protocol of 1925, banning the use of biological and chemical weapons in war. The US and many nations signed it, but it took 50 years for the US to ratify it, so we believed we were not bound by it.

The US used chemical weapons subsequently. The US probably used biological weapons in the Korean War, and perhaps in Vietnam, which experienced an odd outbreak of plague during the war. The use of napalm, white phosphorus, agent orange (with its dioxin excipient causing massive numbers of birth defects and other tragedies) and possibly other chemical weapons led to much pushback, especially since we had signed the Geneva Protocol and we were supposed to be a civilized nation.

In 1968, a young Seymour Hersh wrote a book about the US chemical and biological warfare program. In 1969 Congressman Richard D. McCarthy wrote the book “Ultimate Folly” about the US production and use of chemical and biological weapons. Prof. Matthew Meselson’s review of the book noted,

Our operation, “Flying Ranch Hand, ” has sprayed anti-plant chemi-

cals over an area almost the size of the state of Massachusetts, over

10 per cent of it cropland. “Ranch Hand” no longer has much to do with

the official justification of preventing ambush. Rather, it has become

a kind of environmental warfare, devastating vast tracts of forest in

order to facilitate our aerial reconnaisance. Our use of “super tear

gas” (it is also a powerful lung irritant) has escalated from the originally

announced purpose of saving lives in “riot control-like situations” to the

full-scale combat use of gas artillery shells, gas rockets and gas bombs

to enhance the killing power of conventional high explosive and flame

weapons. Fourteen million pounds have been used thus far, enough

to cover all of Vietnam with a field effective concentration. Many

nations, including some of our own allies have expressed the opinion

that this kind of gas warfare violates the Geneva Protocol, a view

shared by M cCarthy.

A Biological Weapons Convention

Amid great pushback over US conduct in Vietnam, in November 1969 President Nixon announced to the world we were going to end the US biowarfare program (but not the chemical program). In February 1970 Nixon announced we would also get rid of our toxin weapons (snake, snail, frog, fish, bacterial and fungal toxins that could be used for assassinations, etc.). Furthermore, Nixon said the US would initiate an international treaty to prevent the use of these weapons ever again. And we did: the 1972 Convention on the prohibition of the development, production and stockpiling of bacteriological (biological) and toxin weapons and on their destruction, or Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) for short, which entered into force in 1975.

The BWC established conferences to be held every 5 years to strengthen the Convention. The expectation was that these would add a method to call for ‘challenge inspections’ to prevent cheating and would add sanctions (punishments) if nations did not comply with the treaty. However, the US has consistently blocked the addition of protocols that would have an impact on cheating. By now, everyone knows that cheating occurs and is likely widespread.

A leak in an anthrax production facility in Sverdlovsk, USSR in 1979 caused the deaths of about 60 people. A clear BWC violation. US experiments with anthrax production during the Clinton administration, detailed by Judith Miller et al. in the 2001 book Germs were also thought by experts to have transgressed the BWC.

In 1997 a Chemical Weapons Convention came into force. It took over 20 years, but all official stocks of chemical weapons have been destroyed by the USA and by Russia and the other 193 member nation signatories.

Pandemics or Biological Warfare?

So here we are. It is 2023 and the WHO Director General has declared 2 pandemics (the current terminology is ‘Public Health Emergency of International Concern’) over the past 3 and a half years: COVID-19 and monkeypox, which was renamed MPOX to “avoid stigma.” I am sure the monkeys were relieved by the name change.

I have previously (in my substack) described why I believe both SARS-CoV-2 and MPOX were bioengineered pathogens that came from labs. I do not know if they leaked or were deliberately released, but I am leaning toward deliberately released for both of them, based on where they appeared, how they spread, and in particular the official responses to each—neither of which was explained accurately to the public, and yet we never changed course, even when the lack of efficacy with masks, social distancing, EUA drugs and vaccines had become clear.

Vaccines: the Chicken or the Egg?

Both the monkeypox vaccines (there are two, Jynneos and ACAM2000) are known to cause myocarditis, as do the two COVID-19 mRNA vaccines and the Novavax vaccine. The Novavax vaccine was first associated with myocarditis during its clinical trial in Australia. I have written about all this previously on substack.

How frequently does myocarditis occur after these vaccines? If you use elevated cardiac enzymes as your marker, ACAM2000 caused this in one in thirty people receiving it for the first time. If you use other measures like abnormal cardiac MRI or echo, according to the CDC it occurs in one in 175 vaccinees. We do not know the number for Jynneos, but there was some degree of elevation of cardiac enzymes in 10% and 18% of recipients in two small prelicensure studies. My guess for the mRNA vaccines is that they are somewhere in this range. I don’t know about Novavax’ vaccine.

Why would our governments push 5 separate vaccines all known to cause myocarditis on young males who have been at extremely low risk from COVID, and who simply get a few pimples for 1-4 weeks from monkeypox unless they are immunocompromised? It’s an important question. It does not make medical sense. Especially when the vaccine probably does not work — Jynneos didn’t on the monkeys in whom it was tested. And CDC has clammed up about the 2,000 Congolese healthcare workers on whom CDC tested it for efficacy and safety in 2017. (I have detailed this too in earlier substacks.)

The health authorities could have just been ignorant—that could explain the first 8 months of the COVID vaccines’ rollout. But once they figured out, and even announced in August 2021 that the vaccines did not prevent catching COVID or transmitting it, why did they still push it on low risk populations who were clearly at greater risk from a vaccine side effect?

Once this is acknowledged, you realize that maybe the vaccines were not made for the pandemic, and instead the pandemic was made to roll out the vaccines. I’m not sure. But I’m suspicious. And the fact that multiple countries contracted for 10 doses per person makes me even more suspicious—for vaccines whose safety and efficacy had not been established. WHY would you want ten doses apiece? Three maybe. But ten?

Furthermore, you don’t need a vaccine passport aka digital ID aka justification to convert to all-electronic money unless you are giving out regular boosters. Were the vaccines conceived of as the pathway to getting our vaccinations, health records, official documents and financial transactions all online—as Ukraine has already done?

A Pandemic Treaty and Amendments: Brought to you by the same people who mismanaged the past 3 years, to save us from themselves?

The same US government and western governments that imposed draconian measures on their citizens to force us to be vaccinated and take dangerous, expensive, experimental drugs and withheld the good drugs, decided in 2021 we needed a pandemic treaty to prevent and ameliorate future pandemics or biological warfare events… so we would not suffer as we did with the COVID pandemic.

Except COVID was a disaster due to its mismanagement (or should I say dismanagement or malmanagement?) by our nations’ rulers, their bosses and the WHO. Hundreds of millions of our fellow human being were slammed into extreme poverty—by nations following guidelines issued by the WHO, whose main job it was to protect exactly those people. Tens of millions died from starvation as a result. Yet the WHO blathers on about equity, diversity and solidarity—having itself caused the worst (manmade) food crisis in our lifetimes. Have you heard any apology or explanation?

How can anyone with a brain believe the public health officials who messed up COVID so badly want to spare us from another medical and economic disaster, after they imposed the last one on us? And the fact that no governments or health officials will admit their mistakes — especially how they made it nearly impossible to obtain the cheap and safe drugs that effectively treat COVID — why would we let them plan anything, let alone an international treaty that will bind our governments to obey the WHO’s dictates? How thoughtful of these officials to want to spend a king’s ransom of our money to prevent the next government-caused disaster.

We are fed up with secret vaccine contracts, waivers of liability for junk medical products, and spikes in sudden deaths and chronic disabilities. No more secret negotiations. Please shove your pandemic planning where the sun…

The Gain of Function farce

Obviously, the best way to spare us from another pandemic is to immediately stop funding “Gain of Function”* research, and get rid of what has already been funded and created. Let all the nations make big bonfires and burn up their evil creations at the same time, while allowing other nations to inspect their biological facilities and records.

But the WHO in its Bureau Text of the draft Pandemic Treaty has a plan that is the exact opposite of this. In the WHO’s world, which almost all nations’ rulers have bought into, all the governments will share any and all viruses and bacteria they come up with that have “pandemic potential” — share them with all the other governments. They are supposed to sequence them and then put the sequence online. No kidding. Then the WHO and all the Faucis of the world would gain access to every Frankenstein virus, at once. Presumably a bunch of hackers would also gain access to the sequences. Does this make you feel more secure?

The WHO Treaty draft incentivizes Gain Of Function research

At least this plan makes clear whose side everyone is on. Fauci, Tedros and their ilk at the WHO, and those managing biodefense and biomedical research for nation states are on one side, the side that gains access to even more biological weapons, and the rest of us are on the other, at their mercy.

This crazy plan used to be called proliferation of weapons of mass destruction—and it is almost certainly illegal. But it is their plan. Governments will all share the weapons. And they are to put a lot more money into biolabs, and especially into genomic sequencing. Presumably so they can make even better weapons, and maybe they will even get around to cures or antidotes. But who will get the cures? It wasn’t us during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here is where you can read the current Treaty draft:

https://apps.who.int/gb/inb/pdf_files/inb5/A_INB5_6-en.pdf

Pages 10 and 11:

What else is in the Treaty? Gain of Function research (designed to make pathogens more transmissible or more virulent) is explicitly incentivized. Administrative hurdles to it must be minimized, while unintended consequences (pandemics) should be prevented: (page 14)

Vaccines will be rolled out speedily under future testing protocols

Just in case you thought the COVID vaccines took too long to be rolled out, the WHO has plans to shorten testing. There will be new clinical trial platforms. Nations must increase clinical trial capacity. (Might that mean mandating people to be human subjects in out-of-the-way Africa, for example?). And there will be new “mechanisms to facilitate the rapid interpretation of data from clinical trials” as well as “strategies for managing liability risks.” (page 14)

Manufacturer and government liability will be “managed”

Nations are supposed to use existing models as a reference for compensation of injuries due to pandemic vaccines. Of course, most countries do not have vaccine injury compensation schemes, and when they do the benefits are usually minimal. The US government scheme for injuries due to COVID pandemic products (the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program or CICP) has compensated 4 (yes, FOUR) people as of July 1, 2023. All pandemic EUA drugs and vaccines fall into this program (monoclonal antibodies, early remdesivir, paxlovid, molnupiravir, some ventilators and all COVID vaccines). There have been nearly 12,000 claims made to the CICP related to a COVID product. Slightly over 1,000 have been adjudicated while 10,886 are pending review. Twenty claims were deemed eligible and are waiting to see whether they can collect. A total of 983 people, or 98% had their claims denied. About 90% of all claimants filed for a vaccine injury.

The treaty draft also demands weakening the regulation of medical drugs and vaccines during emergencies under the rubric of Regulatory Strengthening. As announced in the UK last week, where ‘trusted partner’ approvals will be used to speed licensure, this is moving toward a single regulatory agency approval or authorization, to be immediately adopted by other nations (p 25)

Why would any developed country sign up for this? Is this what we the people want?

The WHO did sweeten the pot, however. Remember how the need to respect “human rights, dignity, and freedom of persons” was removed in the WHO’s draft IHR Amendments that are being negotiated? Well, WHO apparently did not like us pointing that out—so the old human rights language that was removed from the International Health Regulations draft has been added to this newest version of the Treaty.

There is much more I could say about problems with this draft of the Treaty, but I will save them for another time.

Please share this brief analysis of the WHO’s Pandemic Treaty. We must EXIT the WHO.

*Gain of Function is a euphemism for biological warfare reserch or germ warfare research. It is so foolhardy that it was banned in the US for SARS coronaviruses and avian flu viruses from 2014-2017 due to public outcry by scientists. Then in 2017 Fauci and Collins lifted the moratorium, claimed they were putting safeguards in place, which were just a handwaving exercise, and off we were to the races: creating new bioweapons. Fauci and Collins had the nerve to publish their opinion that the risk was ‘worth it.’

August 6, 2023 Posted by aletho | Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, WHO | Leave a comment

PSYOP-19 UPDATE: New Variant Spreading Across UK – As Overall Cases Continue to Rise

2nd Smartest Guy in the World | August 5, 2023

The followup “pandemic” trial balloon intended to gauge the level of future societal “mandate” compliance has now been officially deployed.

According to the latest Mockingbird article by SKY NEWS entitled, COVID-19: New variant spreading across UK – as overall cases continue to rise:

A new COVID variant is spreading across the UK, according to the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) – and already makes up one in seven new cases.

Scientifically known as EG.5.1, it is descended from the Omicron variant of COVID.

The UKHSA has been monitoring its prevalence in the country due to increasing cases internationally, particularly in Asia, and it was classified as a variant here on 31 July.

Since viruses never mutate into more virulent strains, we must ask: is this another gain of function (GoF) release by the usual Intelligence Industrial Complex criminals, and their useful idiot “expert” apparatchiks ahead of the fall and winter flu season, or is this a consequence of the ~~“vaccinated”~~ genetically modified humans incubating and transmitting new viral mutations as a function of the Modified mRNA slow kill bioweapon injections?

In the week beginning 10 July, one in nine cases were down to the variant.

The latest data suggests it now accounts for 14.6% of cases – the second most prevalent in the UK.

It appears to be spreading quickly and could be one reason why there has been a recent rise in cases and hospitalisations.

COVID-19 rates have continued to increase – up from 3.7% of 4,403 respiratory cases last week to 5.4% of 4,396 this week.

The latest data also shows the COVID-19 hospital admission rate was 1.97 per 100,000 population, an increase from 1.17 per 100,000 in the previous UKHSA report.

Officials say they are “closely” monitoring the situation as COVID case rates continue to rise.

It is no surprise that the wholly fraudulent PCR tests are what these “officials” are yet again referencing; in other words, they are up to their same old junk science tricks.

“We have also seen a small rise in hospital admission rates in most age groups, particularly among the elderly,” said Dr Mary Ramsay, head of immunisation at the UKHSA.

“Overall levels of admission still remain extremely low and we are not currently seeing a similar increase in ICU admissions.

“We will continue to monitor these rates closely.”

Senicide is the gift that keeps on giving, as said “officials” happily discharge liabilities and assets of the elderly useless eaters. Any eugenics program worth it’s salt always commences with the oldsters, and then works it way across ever larger swaths of society.

The Arcturus XBB.1.16 variant – another descendant of Omicron – is the most dominant, UKHSA figures show. It makes up 39.4% of all cases.

Another variant with a menacing name and lots of decimals, another opportunity for the One World Government’s main eugenics node in the WHO to fear-monger:

The World Health Organisation (WHO) started tracking the EG.5.1 variant just over two weeks ago.

As this Substack has exposed on several occasions now, the WHO’s director-general is a Marxist war criminal deliberately selected for his extreme sociopathy by the Rockefeller Crime Syndicate’s most prominent puppet and genocidal frankenmosquito advocate Billy Boy Gates:

WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said though people are better protected by vaccines and prior infection, countries should not let down their guard.

“WHO continues to advise people at high risk to wear a mask in crowded places, to get boosters when recommended, and to ensure adequate ventilation indoors,” he said.

They also just can’t let up on the absurdly useless MK Ultra masks, because ensuring that the genetically ruined slaves reinforce their mass induced fear slavery is an effective means of self-policing into ever more mindless compliance.

“And we urge governments to maintain and not dismantle the systems they built for COVID-19.”

Of course, the WHO urges that their unconstitutional and anti-human systems for PSYOP-19 not to be dismantled because they need their said systems for their followup PSYOP-23 “pandemic” this fall.

What the WHO certainly does not want you to know is that inexpensive repurposed drugs will act as prophylaxis against all of their “pandemics,” along with the associated plethora of their “vaccine” induced adverse events like turbo cancers, and prion-based diseases, all while also protecting the genetically unmodified refuseniks from “vaccine” shedding, and environmental damage.

Do NOT comply.

August 6, 2023 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights | Leave a comment

Musk promises to help canceled workers sue their employers

RT | August 6, 2023

The billionaire owner of X, formerly known as Twitter, has offered legal help to users unfairly fired, canceled or otherwise mistreated by their employers over posts they had shared or liked.

“If you were unfairly treated by your employer due to posting or liking something on this platform, we will fund your legal bill,” Elon Musk tweeted on Saturday evening. “No limit. Please let us know.”

Musk, who has championed himself as a “free speech absolutist,” was forced to follow through on his promise to acquire the company for around $44 billion last October.

Since then, he has fired around three quarters of Twitter’s staff and introduced a controversial paid subscription model in a bid to make the company profitable. He has also rolled back many of the company’s restrictive speech policies and released troves of documents detailing its collaboration under previous management with the US government and pro-censorship NGOs, to stifle anti-establishment content.

Critics have accused Musk of turning the social media giant into a haven for bigotry and hate speech by loosening its censorship policies.

However, the billionaire has struggled to convince some conservative Twitter users of his free speech credentials since hiring NBCUniversal advertising chief and World Economic Forum member Linda Yaccarino as the platform’s new CEO in June.

This comes despite his taking a swipe at liberal bogeyman and fellow billionaire George Soros, and hosting Republican presidential candidate and anti-woke crusader Ron DeSantis’ announcement of entry into the 2024 race.

Recently rebranded as X, Twitter has complied with 80% of all government takedown requests in the first six months since Musk took over as CEO, a significant increase from the 50% rate in the pre-Musk era.

August 6, 2023 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Human rights | Leave a comment

Brazil Censorship Regime: Popular Podcaster Criminally Investigated and Fined $75,000 For Online Speech

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | August 5, 2023

One of Brazil’s most popular podcasters, Monark (real name Bruno Monteiro Aiub), is under criminal investigation and has received a fine equivalent to $75,000 for his online conduct.

Critics of the authority’s behavior here – like Brazil-based investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald – see this as a way to completely silence the online personality known as the country’s version of Joe Rogan.

And do this without any due process, as well.

Reports in the Brazilian press say that the decision to fine Monark, whom they refer to as a digital influencer, came from Federal Supreme Court’s Minister Alexandre de Moraes.

Moraes is no stranger to taking an active part in controversial policies and decisions slammed for suppressing free speech on the internet.

In fact, he now has a fairly long history of involvement in this, dating back to the campaign to oust Brazil’s previous president.

In line with this reputation, Moraes’ decision was explained as the podcaster’s failure to comply with a court order, and in addition to the fine, includes blocking his bank account, suspending any new social media accounts, and demonetizing his channels.

In other words, a pretty thorough deplatforming and canceling. And the reason: Moraes says he’s fighting “disinformation” allegedly spread by Monark, as well as his tactic of trying to get his voice heard by creating a new account, once an old one gets banned.

Monark’s defenders, including his lawyer, say that the “crime” he committed is that of having an opinion that is not liked by the government, and that accusations of “instigation of anti-democratic acts” are not true.

On the other hand, the lawyer, Jorge Salomao, notes that in Brazil things like “disinformation and fake news” are not crimes at all, therefore cannot be criminalized, but must be dealt with in civil courts.

Salomao summed the situation up in a statement as, “summarily and unconstitutionally criminalizing thought.”

Meanwhile, Greenwald, who spoke about Monark’s case on his show “System Update,” asserted that censorship is now flourishing in Brazil, illustrated with this example of a podcaster who has over the past couple of years lost the ability to do his job and earn a living.

🚨 Brazil's Censorship Regime Becomes Even More Despotic

Monark, "Brazil's Joe Rogan," is now being criminally investigated and fined ~$75,000 for online conduct—fully silencing the once mega-popular podcaster without any due process.

This is what's coming for everyone.

The… pic.twitter.com/tHUAv8pDgP

— System Update (@SystemUpdate_) August 3, 2023

More than that, Greenwald believes that the West is (ab)using Brazil as a “censorship laboratory, learning how to implement and escalate their totalitarian assault on free expression.”

August 6, 2023 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Brazil, Human rights | Leave a comment

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Alarmist climate science as a textbook example of groupthink

By Paul MacRae | May 1, 2012

… Groupthink was extensively studied by Yale psychologist Irving L. Janis and described in his 1982 book Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes.

Janis was curious about how teams of highly intelligent and motivated people—the “best and the brightest” as David Halberstam called them in his 1972 book of the same name—could have come up with political policy disasters like the Vietnam War, Watergate, Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs. Similarly, in 2008 and 2009, we saw the best and brightest in the world’s financial sphere crash thanks to some incredibly stupid decisions, such as allowing sub-prime mortgages to people on the verge of bankruptcy.

In other words, Janis studied why and how groups of highly intelligent professional bureaucrats and, yes, even scientists, screw up, sometimes disastrously and almost always unnecessarily. The reason, Janis believed, was “groupthink.” He quotes Nietzsche’s observation that “madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups,” and notes that groupthink occurs when “subtle constraints … prevent a [group] member from fully exercising his critical powers and from openly expressing doubts when most others in the group appear to have reached a consensus.”[2]

Janis found that even if the group leader expresses an openness to new ideas, group members value consensus more than critical thinking; groups are thus led astray by excessive “concurrence-seeking behavior.”[3] Therefore, Janis wrote, groupthink is “a model of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”[4]

The groupthink syndrome

The result is what Janis calls “the groupthink syndrome.” This consists of three main categories of symptoms:

1. Overestimate of the group’s power and morality, including “an unquestioned belief in the group’s inherent morality, inclining the members to ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their actions.” [emphasis added]

2. Closed-mindedness, including a refusal to consider alternative explanations and stereotyped negative views of those who aren’t part of the group’s consensus. The group takes on a “win-lose fighting stance” toward alternative views.[5]

3. Pressure toward uniformity, including “a shared illusion of unanimity concerning judgments conforming to the majority view”; “direct pressure on any member who expresses strong arguments against any of the group’s stereotypes”; and “the emergence of self-appointed mind-guards … who protect the group from adverse information that might shatter their shared complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions.”[6]

It’s obvious that alarmist climate science—as explicitly and extensively revealed in the Climatic Research Unit’s “Climategate” emails—shares all of these defects of groupthink, including a huge emphasis on maintaining consensus, a sense that because they are saving the world, alarmist climate scientists are beyond the normal moral constraints of scientific honesty (“overestimation of the group’s power and morality”), and vilification of those (“deniers”) who don’t share the consensus. … Read full article

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