Statement From Medical Professionals & Scientists Supporting Parental Rights and Medical Freedom
Brownstone Institute | January 22, 2023
This letter has been signed by Dr. Rachel Corbett, Dr. George Fareed, Dr. Melanie Gisler, Dr. Brian Hooker, Dr. Pierre Kory, Dr. Katarina Lindley, Dr. James Lyons-Weiler, Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Liz Mumper, Dr. Meryl Nass, Dr. David Rasnick, Dr. Richard Urso and hundreds more physicians, scientists and medical professionals.
The original authors are Michael Kane and Meryl Nass, M.D., and it is being distributed by Children’s Health Defense. Medical and scientific professionals can sign the letter, which is a basic statement of principles that should be at the core of medicines but which have sidelined or violated since the beginning of the crisis.
Executive Summary
- There is no scientific rationale for continuing any COVID-19 mandates in 2023 and beyond.
- Mask and vaccine exemptions must be offered at the discretion of the physician and patient as opposed to one-size-fits-all government edicts.
- Parental rights and decisions must be preserved to ensure the health and well-being of their children.
- The ability of medical professionals to speak freely to their patients and the public must not be compromised.
Informed consent is the basis of medical ethics. Shared decision-making is a model of the patient-physician relationship that is considered the most desirable by both the US and UK government health establishments. Patients want to make their own medical decisions, and they have the legal right to do so. They expect their physicians to share knowledge with their patients to inform the best choices.
The corollary to informed consent is that medical decisions ought to be made by individual patients based on their individual situation and personal best interest. ‘One-size-fits-all’ medicine is incongruent with these principles. It denies informed consent and personal autonomy.
During the last three years, we have experienced unprecedented interference with the doctor-patient relationship by the government. Considerable financial incentives were paid to medical industries and medical providers to offer certain treatments and to refuse others.
When financial incentives did not achieve universal vaccination, mandates were imposed. One way this was done was by requiring COVID-19 vaccinations for healthcare workers whose employers received Medicare payments after we had learned that vaccinations did not protect patients or coworkers from infection.
Grants to school districts were conditioned on mask mandates in schools. These newly imposed incentives, and punishments for noncompliance, fly in the face of long-established medical ethics, especially informed consent and shared decision-making. They must end.
COVID-19 Mandates
There is general agreement that all available COVID-19 vaccines fail to prevent viral transmission and only briefly reduce cases. After several months, people who are vaccinated become more susceptible to COVID-19 infections than the unvaccinated. Therefore, mandates for COVID-19 vaccines are scientifically and logically indefensible.
In response, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) adapted its guidelines for managing COVID-19, quietly suggesting that both vaccinated and unvaccinated Americans should be treated identically with respect to isolation, quarantining and testing. Yet the CDC continues to exhort Americans to receive more COVID-19 vaccine booster doses and supports federally imposed vaccine mandates.
Essentially everyone in our country has been exposed to COVID-19 by now, and nearly everyone has been infected at least once. We can anticipate that the US will continue to face evolving COVID-19 variants, but we can also anticipate that COVID-19’s severity will keep weakening over time.
Yet patients and doctors are still not permitted to choose the COVID-19 therapies best suited to each patient. Mandates must end, and patients and doctors must reassert their human and legal rights to determine the medical care each patient receives.
Vaccine and Mask Exemptions
Patients are individuals. They experience different risks from vaccinations and may have medical or psychological issues that preclude safe masking. Pretending that these differences don’t exist is denying reality. Historically, doctors were able to issue waivers for masks and vaccinations, as they were considered to have the best knowledge and judgment to issue such waivers.
Although every state by law accepts that doctors can issue medical waivers for vaccines and masks, many health and education departments have started nullifying these waivers, superseding physician authority. States have also been investigating and punishing doctors for issuing medical waivers. It appears that federal and state governments want to make themselves the arbiters of these medical decisions. This must not stand.
Parental Rights
States decide on the age of consent, and until that age is reached, parents are wholly responsible for their children, with a few limited exceptions. But during the past two years, we have seen a dangerous trend. State requirements that parents must consent to vaccinations given to their underage children are being ignored in multiple jurisdictions. This happened in Washington, DC, for children ages 11 and older by order of the Mayor and City Council. The law they passed kept the fact that their children had a medical procedure secret from the parents. While Congress, which oversees the law in the District of Columbia, could have said no, it instead failed to act. A lawsuit challenging this law was won in November 2021, so the law no longer stands in DC.
However, in Philadelphia, PA, San Francisco, CA and Kings County, WA, the local health officers issued guidelines in early 2021 allowing local medical providers to vaccinate children as young as age 12 without parental permission, which still stand.
This is a dangerous usurpation of parental rights by local public health authorities. It also violates state and federal law. Furthermore, there has been a recent accompanying trend by ‘medico-legal’ professionals to assert in published journal articles that 12-year-olds have the maturity to decide on their own medical procedures.
Most states don’t allow children to consent to use tanning salons or get tattoos below the age of consent. To bypass parents and allow underage children to decide what gets injected into them is inconsistent with state laws, medical ethics, common sense, and optimal medical care of children. It needs to end.
Free Speech for Medical Professionals
An attack on the free speech of doctors and medical scientists is being waged across America today. While controversy is inherent in scientific advancement, and scientific knowledge continuously evolves, disagreement with the federal public health recommendations has led to draconian censorship and suppression. Doctors have been investigated, lost their specialty board certifications, and even lost their medical licenses for speaking out publicly against federal guidelines.
Yet no health authority is infallible, and the COVID-19 pandemic proved this. In fact, both the World Health Organization (WHO), NIH and CDC changed their COVID-19 policies, guidelines, and recommendations numerous times throughout the pandemic.
The suppression of medical professionals’ speech is illegal, according to the First Amendment and state statutes, and must immediately end.
This letter continues to be signed by medical professionals and scientists around the world. View the growing list of signatures.
The War on Doctors and Patients
By Pierre Kory | Brownstone Institute | January 27, 2023
Whenever I republish my newspaper op-eds on this Substack, I tend to introduce them with some comments on “how I really feel,” instead of the more staid language and arguments used in those pieces. In this one, I essentially argued that the new Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government should be ground zero for investigating how the administration is using COVID-19 to wage war on doctors who won’t follow its orthodoxy.
Although I am not under the delusion that its actions will actually result in meaningful changes in public health policy, I felt I should provide some guidance to them in the support we doctors (and thus patients) really need. I highlighted some of the most harmful actions taken to silence and suppress physicians, which would have been absolutely unthinkable a few years ago but now are becoming the norm, what with Clownifornia’s new bill (which just got slapped with an injunction!) threatening doctors’ livelihoods if their speech does not support the dominant consensus, er, I mean “narrative.”
I am doing this while every week new data piles up showing the immense toxicity and lethality and negative effectiveness of the latest vaccines. Yet the Biden administration and its allies in media and medicine only push them harder, inventing batshit crazy narratives to explain their shortcomings. Imagine their gratitude learning about this Canadian physician’s discovery of a “stroke season!”
By now we all understand that these profoundly anti-scientific, unethical positions are driven by an unholy and terrifying alliance of government, the pharmaceutical industry, and media. The evidence is damning in how they have co-opted public health institutions to suppress dissent so they can continue raking in astronomical profits. The American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM), a nonprofit organization that certifies physicians’ medical licenses, is chief among the once-trusted institutions that has bent the knee.
Last year, the ABIM accused myself, Paul Marik, and Peter McCullough of spreading “misinformation” and threatened our ability to practice medicine, ignoring the ever-widening disconnect between the Biden administration’s statements and the reality on the ground.
A reality which literally amounts to a humanitarian catastrophe with young people dropping dead “unexpectedly” and the best analyses estimating over 500,00 having died directly from the vaccine in the US alone with further millions disabled. And we wonder why restaurants often cannot open or ski mountains can only run half their lifts on even the most bluebird of powder days (of course there are multiple factors leading to this reality, but the vaccine lethality is the only “never mentioned” one).
As an aside, although it is devastating to do so, I think that everyone should read Mark Crispin Miller’s Substack and his daily series entitled “In Memory of Those Who Died Suddenly.” He compiles and presents media reports of human deaths at a frequency and regularity that is difficult to behold (especially for an expert in sudden cardiac death, a subject I studied deeply during my years as an expert in therapeutic hypothermia in post-arrest patients, an event which was distinctly rare in active healthy people outdoors prior to the vaccination campaign).
I feel responsible to read/witness what he is presenting to the world. I am tired of dueling and conflicting medical papers and agency data, cherry-picked or manipulated to support the dominant delusion that these vaccines are benign. When you read Mark’s Substack, you are faced daily with reading about the untimely and sudden ends to the lives of real people, every day, around the world, amidst this terror of a global vaccination campaign.
They are dying “unexpectedly” at enormous rates and falling ill with cancer at enormous rates. He seems to be the only one who is presenting these data in such a human, highly personal way by compiling individual media stories of the sudden ending of human lives at ever younger ages with an unimaginable regularity. Unfortunately, as per the most visited English language media outlet in the world, doctors don’t know why yet and the vaccines are not even mentioned as a possibility in this clown article published in the Daily Mail.
Unrelenting reports of people in largely perfect health, out in society doing routine or pleasurable activities and then dropping dead or unconscious, often being captured on television studio sets, auditorium stages, subway platforms, street surveillance cameras, playgrounds, sporting events, athletic fields, and even broadcaster desks. To date, I am not aware of a single newspaper report (even from tiny local papers) which openly implicates the vaccine as even a possible cause let alone an almost certain one. An unimaginably dystopian nightmare all around us… while society seemingly carries on as normal.
Back to the ABIM: despite its status as a private organization with no statutory authority (insane right?), the ABIM has morphed into an “enforcement” arm of the government, wielding the ability to control certification and the livelihood of doctors, who are subject to career-ending threats for trying to alert the public to all the death and disability resulting from the vaccine campaign. Paul and I are fighting those charges tooth and nail. I am looking forward to soon sharing on this Substack the brilliant response we worked on with our assassin of an FLCCC lawyer, Alan Dumhof. I predict a clown world of a response and will share with you as soon as we get it.
Anyway, here is my Op-Ed:
Two years of one-party rule in Washington are over, and the new Republican House majority must now restore balance through vigorous oversight. The Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government is expected to focus on allegations of collusion between social media companies and the Biden administration.
But it should expand its focus to include the government’s use of COVID to wage war against doctors — which continues to this day.
The suppression of doctors’ freedom to advise and treat patients began early in the pandemic. Promising alternative courses of treatment, such as generic drugs like ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine, were shouted down by false news narratives.
Media companies took their cues from public health agencies, which exaggerated concerns over people using medicines to treat COVID in ways that were not intended and against medical advice. Positive clinical data was ignored.
The next major front in the war on doctors opened up with the vaccine rollout. President Joe Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci and other public officials promised these novel, rushed vaccines would prevent illness and even transmission.
Biden’s declaration that, “If you get vaccinated, you won’t get COVID” has now been exposed as a lie, but it’s crucial to understand how it came to this.
In the past, broad skepticism would have greeted plans to mass distribute a “safe and effective” vaccine that was developed and approved in just 12 months.
And society would have flatly rejected government mandates that pushed people to get vaccinated or risk losing their jobs and becoming social outcasts. Science and medicine, practiced correctly, should challenge the powers that be, not blindly follow them.
But in our ongoing ordeal, no skepticism has been allowed, no discussion, no options. Those who raised questions or suggested different approaches were smeared as “deniers” or even worse, “anti-vaxxers.”
Even as the public learned more about the virus’s actual threat, the vaccines’ disappointing performance, and the tragic reality of vaccine injuries which began occurring at an unprecedented scale, the political imperative from Biden and Fauci never wavered.
They continued to preach a single-minded focus on the experimental vaccines. More and more vaccine products were rushed through Emergency Use Authorizations from the Food and Drug Administration, resulting in astronomical profits for their manufacturers.
This unholy alliance of government, the pharmaceutical industry and media deprived the public of full and fair advice from the medical community. The American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM), a nonprofit organization that certifies physicians’ medical licenses, has issued letters to me and my colleagues threatening our ability to practice medicine.
They accused us of spreading “misinformation” — ignoring the huge disconnect between the government’s statements and the medical reality on the ground. Despite their status as a private organization with no statutory authority, the ABIM has morphed into the “enforcement” arm of the government, wielding the ability to control certification and the livelihood of doctors, who are subject to career-ending threats for veering from the government’s narrow and singular approach.
And this month, California’s new law empowering state agencies to disbar medical professionals who deviate from the party line has taken effect. Gov. Gavin Newsom recently called California the “True Freedom State.” The scores of its residents—and its doctors—fleeing for Florida and Texas know better.
A “one-size-fits-all” approach to vaccines, or to any other health issue, is almost never warranted. Here, proponents of vaccine (and of government and Big-Tech coercion and censorship) flatly refuse to consider patient factors, such as age, medical history, and overall health, to determine who needs what treatment.
By virtue of their professional training, doctors must advise patients on available treatments and known risks of any treatment or procedure. By threatening doctors who might provide information different than their preferred worldview, ABIM is disrupting the doctor-patient relationship.
When allowed to practice their craft freely, physicians can prevent societal disaster by focusing on individual patients, informed by clinical experience.
Groups like the ABIM, and public medical officials like Fauci, should support and encourage evidence-based debate and patient-centered care.
Instead, they have suppressed both that debate and treatment approach by persecuting its proponents. This campaign must be stopped, its origins and evolution must be thoroughly documented, and it must never be allowed to recur. Physician autonomy must be restored lest all patients suffer.
Oversight is a core congressional function, and it’s particularly important when the government is under divided party control.
The new Select Subcommittee has a long to-do list, but the people deserve a thorough accounting of the ongoing war on doctors.
Pierre Kory is a Pulmonary and Critical Care Specialist, Teacher/Researcher. He is also the President and Chief Medical Officer of the non-profit organization Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance whose mission is to develop the most effective, evidence/expertise-based COVID-19 treatment protocols.
Bill Gates — After Reaping Huge Profits Selling BioNTech Shares — Trashes Effectiveness of COVID Vaccines
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | January 27, 2023
Bill Gates, long recognized as one of the world’s foremost proponents of vaccines, raised some eyebrows at a recent talk in Australia when he admitted there are “problems” with current COVID-19 vaccines.
Speaking at Australia’s Lowy Institute as part of a talk entitled “Preparing for Global Challenges: In Conversation with Bill Gates,” the Microsoft founder made the following admission:
“We also need to fix the three problems of [COVID-19] vaccines. The current vaccines are not infection-blocking. They’re not broad, so when new variants come up you lose protection, and they have very short duration, particularly in the people who matter, which are old people.”
Such statements came as a surprise to some in light of Gates’ longstanding support of — and investments in — vaccine manufacturers and organizations promoting global vaccination. However, they were the latest in a string of developments in recent weeks that have increasingly called the COVID-19 vaccines, in particular, into question.
‘This is a grift’: Gates’ investments in mRNA vaccines reveal ‘conflict of interest’
Several analysts and commentators were critical of Gates — but not due to disagreement with the statements he made in Australia. Instead, they argued that he had previously heavily invested in mRNA vaccines at the same time he encouraged a global COVID-19 vaccination campaign and supported mandatory vaccination.
Speaking Jan. 25 on The Hill TV’s “Rising,” co-hosts Briahna Joy Gray and Robby Soave addressed Gates’ statements. Soave initially agreed at face value with Gates’ criticism of current mRNA vaccines, saying:
“He really nails it on the issues that we’re having: the short duration of protection, not a significant discernable impact on the transmission of cases … not a massive benefit for a lot of otherwise healthy and younger people.”
However, Soave — who on Jan. 19 revealed “Facebook files” indicating the CDC significantly influenced content moderation and censorship on the platform pertaining to COVID-19 vaccines — then pointed out Gates’ prior investments that contributed to the development of mRNA vaccine technology.
Soave said, “Bill Gates was a major proponent of mRNA technology … he was an investor in BioNTech, which developed the mRNA vaccine for Pfizer.”
“We were just doing some digging,” continued Soave, “[and] we saw that he sold a lot of those shares at … how much profit was that?”
“10x,” replied Gray. “He invested $55 million in BioNTech back in 2019 and it’s now worth north of $550 million. He sold some stock … at the end of last year, I believe it was, with the share price over $300, which represented a huge gain for him over when he invested.”
Soave then unleashed critical comments directed at Gates:
“Let’s follow that trajectory: [Gates] invests heavily in BioNTech, ‘mRNA vaccines are great, this is the future,’ he talks about the vaccine timeline and how we can develop it faster, ‘we might have to cut some corners on safety’ … All in … sells it … makes a huge amount of money … but now it’s ‘yeah, it’s okay, it could be better, but what we really need is this breath spray.’”
Soave was referring to a statement Gates made during his recent talk in Australia, immediately prior to his remarks regarding the mRNA vaccines, where he said:
“We think we can also have, very early in an epidemic, a thing that you can inhale that will mean that you can’t be infected, a blocker, an inhaled blocker.”
Gray raised the issue of conflicts of interest between individuals such as Gates who hold significant positions with drug and vaccine manufacturers, and the federal government’s spending of large sums of taxpayer money to purchase these products. She said:
“This is a grift. These companies are extracting money, taxpayer money as it were, to pay for medical treatments that are not indicated by medical professionals and are less useful than what we already have.
“At the same time, the Biden administration is opening its doors, revolving doors, to people from these various industries like Jeff Zients, who is the new chief of staff for Joe Biden … who has spent his entire career at the kinds of companies, investing in the kinds of companies, that have been overcharging the government for Medicare and Medicaid payments and exact kinds of overpayments. It is an enormous grift and one that is incredibly common.”
Zients was formerly the Biden administration’s “COVID czar” and publicly pushed for universal vaccination.
Soave then said that Gates’ statements, and the broader issue of conflicts of interest between drug and vaccine proponents and the federal government, give credence to the assertions long made by “anti-vaxxers and the like.” He said:
“For there not to be more interrogation of his conflict of interest here by the mainstream is deeply disturbing, and for people who have been skeptical of this aspect of Pfizer and the drug development around COVID and who have been shot down in the media as kooks, anti-vaxxers and the like, I frankly think that this issue of pharmaceutical corruption and people pushing various interventions, having an investment in profit, should have been an issue that the left was leading on.
“We have to be more transparent about the fact that people who are having input in what the government policy is going to be, what’s going to be required people, the Biden administration tried to require people to get this, shouldn’t it be known at least when there are hundreds of millions of dollars of financial interests at stake for the people advising this? And their tune changes as it follows the money!”
Investigative journalist Jordan Schachtel also had scathing remarks following Gates’ statements in Australia, writing on his blog:
“Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who served as one of the architects of Covid hysteria and had more of an impact than any other individual on the disastrous global pandemic policies, has finally acknowledged that the mRNA shots he’s been promoting for two years are nothing more than expired pharma junk.
“Translation: Gates admits that the shots are impossible to align with rapidly developing variants, they expire in lighting speed, and they don’t stop transmission. And they don’t work for the only at-risk portion of the population.”
Schachtel called this “an incredible reversal from the man who once advertised the shots as the cure to the coronavirus,” drawing upon Gates’ previous statement: “everyone who takes the vaccine is not just protecting themselves but reducing their transmission to other people and allowing society to get back to normal.”
In 2021, Gates described the mRNA vaccines as “magic,” saying they would be a “game changer” in the next five years.
Gates warns about ‘next pandemic,’ praises lockdowns, calls for more pandemic simulations
As reported by the Daily Mail Jan. 23, Gates’ talk in Australia was notable for some additional statements he made.
Gates “called for greater global cooperation using the COVID-19 pandemic as an example of how countries could improve on their response if they worked together,” arguing that “political leaders needed to set aside their differences and work together to prepare for the next virus.”
He also praised Australia’s strict lockdown policies, saying:
“Some of the things that stand out are that Australia and about seven other countries did population scale diagnostics early on and had quarantine policies.
“That meant you kept the level of infection low in that first year when there were no vaccines.”
Gates also called for more “pandemic simulations” to assist world leaders in dealing with “future pandemics.” He said:
“The one thing that still hangs in the balance is will we have the global capacity and at the regional and country levels that would mean that when an (infectious disease) threat comes up we act in such a way that it doesn’t go global.
“We need to be doing every five years a comprehensive exercise at both country and regional levels of pandemic preparedness and you need a global group that’s scoring everybody.”
As part of such preparedness, Gates called upon countries to have “standby tools,” including vaccines, in place for the next pandemic:
“So there’s a class that’s got measles in it, a class of flu, a class of coronavirus, and a fourth class, all of which we need to have standby tools, both antivirals and vaccines that can deal with those. It’s very doable. So on the tools front, we can be far more prepared.”
Schachtel noted that Gates was a sponsor of Event 201, a simulation conducted Oct. 18, 2019, which “predicted” a global coronavirus pandemic. One of the sponsors of Event 201 was the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF).
The BMGF is a partner of Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance and holds a seat on its board. In turn, Gavi closely collaborates with the ID2020 Alliance, a strong proponent of “vaccine passports,” as previously reported by The Defender. Microsoft and the BMGF are founding members of ID2020.
According to the same report by The Defender, the BMGF in September 2022 pledged $1.27 billion in support of “global health and development projects.”
And as previously reported by The Defender, the BMGF previously committed, in June 2020, $750 million toward the development of the AstraZeneca vaccine at Oxford University, and conditional funding of $150 million to the Serum Institute of India — the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer by number of doses produced and sold.
The Serum Institute also received a $4 million grant from the BMGF in October 2020 to support research and development as part of the COVID-19 response, while in August 2020, the Serum Institute, in partnership with the BMGF and Gavi, agreed to produce up to 100 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines for low- and middle-income countries.
In a posting on his official blog in December 2020, Gates wrote that his foundation “took on some of the financial risk” for the vaccine, so that if the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was not approved, the Serum Institute wouldn’t “have to take a full loss.”
Gates’ remarks latest in a string of negative press for COVID, mRNA vaccines
Gates’ remarks in Australia — and the attention they received from the press — represent the latest in a series of less-than-flattering media portrayals about COVID-19 and mRNA vaccines in recent weeks.
On Jan. 22, the Wall Street Journal published a highly critical editorial regarding the FDA’s non-disclosure of data pertaining to the efficacy of the COVID-19 bivalent boosters. Allysia Finley, a member of the newspaper’s editorial board, wrote:
“Federal agencies took the unprecedented step of ordering vaccine makers to produce them and recommending them without data supporting their safety or efficacy.”
She also accused vaccine makers of “deceptive advertising.”
On. Jan 13, during a live television appearance on the BBC, cardiologist Dr. Aseem Malhotra “truthbombed” the network when he made the “unprompted” suggestion that mRNA vaccines pose a cardiovascular risk.
An undercover video released by Project Veritas released Jan. 25 showed Jordon Trishton Walker, Pfizer’s director of research and development, strategic operations, admitting the pharmaceutical company is “exploring” mutating COVID-19 “ourselves” via “directed evolution,” to then “preemptively develop new vaccines” against them.
A follow-up video showed Walker assaulting Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe when confronted with the recording of his statements.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) on Thursday called for a Congressional investigation against vaccine manufacturers and the COVID-19 vaccine approval process, in response to the Project Veritas revelations.
“Federal health agencies have been captured by Big Pharma and grossly derelict in their duties throughout the pandemic,” said Johnson.
“It’s time for Congress to thoroughly investigate vaccine manufacturers and the entire COVID vaccine approval process,” he added.
And today, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) sent a letter to Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla in response to the Project Veritas videos, stating:
“I write in response to troubling reports on Pfizer’s intention to mutate the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID) virus through gain-of-function, or ‘directed evolution,’ as detailed by Pfizer Director of Research and Development, Jordan Walker.
“As has been proven time and time again, attempts to mutate a virus, particularly one as potent as COVID, are dangerous. If the claims detailed in the video are true, Pfizer has put its desire for profit over the concern of national and global health and must hold itself accountable.”
Statements made by cartoonist Scott Adams of “Dilbert” fame regarding the COVID-19 vaccines also garnered attention. In a video dated Jan. 22, Adams said, “The anti-vaxxers clearly won, you’re the winners!” due to their distrust of the government and corporations.
And Elon Musk, owner and CEO of Twitter, responding to separate comments made by Adams about the significant prevalence of COVID-19 vaccine-related adverse events, tweeted: “I had major side effects from my second booster shot. Felt like I was dying for several days. Hopefully, no permanent damage, but I dunno.”
Musk followed up with a second tweet, stating: “And my cousin, who is young & in peak health, had a serious case of myocarditis. Had to go to the hospital.”
Several comments from journalists tweeted in response to Musk’s statements anecdotally referred to increasing numbers of individuals experiencing such COVID-19 vaccine injuries.
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.
Who really killed RT France
The French establishment media took on the role of political commissars, making sure the outlet was not allowed to operate
By Matthieu Buge | RT | January 26, 2023
After a year of censorship, RT has now had to officially stop its activities in France. But would the French authorities have made this move without the influence of some prominent French journalists who put aside their ethics for the occasion?
From the very beginning, RT France had been a target of the French authorities and the mainstream media. In a notorious 2017 press conference, Emmanuel Macron, standing next to Vladimir Putin, said RT and Sputnik were “organs of influence and false propaganda.” At the time, RT France had already been working as an online media outlet for some years, and was merely criticized by other media for being financed by Moscow. But the accusations became more and more frequent and harsh as Macron took the lead of the country and RT France was about to launch its channel from studios in Boulogne-Billancourt, outside Paris. In 2018, the work of RT journalists during the Yellow Vest protests was the most exhaustive coverage by any media. This has been widely acknowledged, and the audience of the channel received a considerable boost. The Russian outsider annoyed the establishment media more and more when star television host Frédéric Taddeï started collaborating with RT and stated that it was the only channel that gave him carte blanche in an informational landscape where real debate had totally disappeared.
Although Taddeï is a very knowledgeable man, he forgot to underline that every outlet is in essence propaganda. The word comes from the Latin verb propagare (to spread) and was first used in the denomination of a Vatican department, the Propaganda Fide, dedicated to the propagation of the Catholic faith. Anything written or spoken for an audience is propaganda. Advertising is propaganda. Hollywood is the biggest propaganda machine in the world. Political rallies are propaganda. Even a good debate with friends at the bar is propaganda, as one tries to persuade others to agree with his views and understanding of the world. Taddeï’s show on RT France “Interdit d’interdire” (Forbidden to forbid) had this very open-minded spirit. Its name, though, was perhaps like a rabbit on a boat, a bearer of misfortune.
Four years later, on 27 February 2022, three days after the beginning of Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine, the non-elected president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, declared that RT and Sputnik were to be banned in the European Union. The attack on free speech was unprecedented. But in order to appease the worried journalist unions, the logic of this attack was such: RT France had its license revoked, but its reporters could keep working. RT France went on to appeal the ban to the European Court of Justice. On 27 July the court rejected the appeal, arguing that the ban did not infringe on free speech. Give an artist the right to paint, but not to exhibit his work. Give a baker the right to make bread, but not to sell it. They will then turn to the black market – in RT France’s case, the internet. Its team of remaining journalists kept working in difficult conditions and broadcasting on Odysee.
I personally know most of them and must say that their attitude, in such a context, has been remarkable. They are not tied to Russia. Some of them aren’t even interested in Russia – they simply wanted to tell the French public about French issues, an opportunity they weren’t given by other French-language media. They know that the world is complex and understand the origins of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. While their management struggled (and managed) to keep paying their salaries, they kept on working, in a state of utter uncertainty and job insecurity, knowing that it would be almost impossible to find new jobs as journalists in France. They are young French men and women who dedicated all these years to only one thing: giving French-speaking audiences another point of view. That was apparently too much for their colleagues in the mainstream media.
On 18 January 2023, “the General Directorate of the Treasury decided to freeze RT France’s bank accounts, making it impossible to continue our activity,” said the president of the channel, Xenia Fedorova. What’s interesting about this new development is that it wasn’t so much a push by the French authorities, who for a while have shown an indifference to the idea of free speech. The French authorities knew that RT France was still operating and did not care, believing it had lost its visibility anyway. The establishment media, however, were not going to just let it slide.
It was a sudden shootout. On 6 January, the major left-wing newspaper Libération published an article titled: “Forbidden RT France remains reachable and keeps on producing its Russian propaganda.” On the 14th, one of the country’s top newspapers, Le Monde, published an article on the issue: “The counterattack of pro-Russia media.” Both articles went on to show how RT was still operating, its journalists working, and their reports being broadcast and reachable through VPNs. Then came (for anyone who knows French affairs) the ultimate verdict. On the 16th, the influential journalist Patrick Cohen talked about this issue live on TV. He criticized people who gave interviews to RT France, including a French member of the European parliament who thinks the EU needs to engage in diplomacy and dialogue with Moscow. Commenting with sarcasm on these views, he added: “It is not surprising, but we are talking about a channel which is forbidden to operate.” As said previously, RT France was not forbidden to operate; it only lost its license. Moreover, Cohen was commenting on this issue in front of one of his guests, Nicolas Tenzer, one of the most prominent pro-US figures in France, who once declared that NATO never harassed anyone. Two days later, the Treasury made its move. Cohen is the journalist who in 2013 famously called some guests of Frédéric Taddeï’s talk show “sick-brains”. That was the beginning of the end for Taddeï in the mainstream media. Now, Cohen has again pronounced a ruling on who could and who could not talk. RT France had to share Taddeï’s fate.
Governments’ decisions and interests are one thing. The influence of journalists behaving like political commissars is another. Propaganda is one thing. Enforcing propaganda is another.
Judge calls California’s medical misinformation law “nonsense,” blocks it
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | January 25, 2023
A federal judge questioned the new California law that penalizes doctors for sharing COVID-19 “misinformation.”
The new law, which came into effect on January 1 this year, prohibits doctors from spreading what the state deems to be misinformation to patients, or risk being penalized for “unprofessional conduct,” which could result in their licenses being revoked.
Here’s a summary of the case so far if you’re not up to date.
The law has been challenged through separate lawsuits filed by two organizations and a group of doctors on the grounds of First Amendment violations. They filed a motion at the US District Court of Sacramento to hold the law until the cases are concluded.
In a hearing, Senior Judge William Shubb described the law’s definition of misinformation as “nonsense.”
We obtained a copy of the order for you here.
“Because AB 2098 [the misinformation law] implicates [plaintiff’s] First Amendment right to receive information, she has standing,” the court wrote.
“Vague statutes are particularly objectionable when they involve sensitive areas of First Amendment freedoms because they operate to inhibit the exercise of those freedoms,” the court added, referring to a 2001 case, California Teachers Association v. State Board of Education.
“When the challenged law implicates First Amendment rights, a facial challenge based on vagueness is appropriate.”
The court granted the plaintiffs a hearing to challenge the law and blocked the enforcement of the law until the case is decided.
The law defines misinformation as “false information that is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus contrary to the standard of care.”
Shubb noted that “standard of care” is not a new principle, but argued, “contemporary scientific consensus” is.
According to Deputy Attorney General Kristin Liska, who is representing Gov. Gavin Newsom, a medical professional has to violate all three aspects of the definition of misinformation for punishment to be applicable; share misinformation, contradict scientific consensus, and go against the standard of care.
However, she refused to give examples of statements that would fit the definition, saying that it would depend on the circumstances. Shubb then asked how she expects medical professionals to know what would violate the law.
Supporting the vaccine injured and bereaved

Health Advisory & Recovery Team | January 25, 2023
On Saturday 21st January 2023, the vaccine injured and bereaved gathered with people who support them in marches across the UK organised by Truth be Told. The London march saw thousands of protestors who began at BBC broadcasting house before a silent memorial procession. White roses were then thrown over the railings into Downing Street. Speakers included Andrew Bridgen MP, many vaccine injured individuals and those who have been trying to help amplify their voices like Mark Sharman, former ITV and BSkyB executive, who funded and produced the film Safe and Effective a Second Opinion.
Those campaigning for better compensation without huge barriers and delays have found themselves in conflict with those who want to stop vaccination completely. It is in the interest of the former to downplay the numbers affected and the latter would benefit from a larger number. There is nothing to be gained by such conflict when both sides are trying to hold politicians to account and struggling to do so. While data is suppressed it is not possible to quantify the extent of harm but the extent can’t remain hidden forever. Whatever figure is finally put on it, it will be too high for an intervention that many of the injured did not need and which was oversold in terms of its ability to prevent infection. Whatever figure is reached, those who are injured deserve compensation and the companies who have profited do not deserve indemnity.




