CDC and Census Bureau had direct access to Twitter portal where they could flag speech for censorship
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | December 7, 2022
Emails between an employee at the United States (US) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Twitter have revealed that at least one CDC staff member and the US Census Bureau had access to Twitter’s dedicated “Partner Support Portal” which allows approved government partners to flag content to Twitter for censorship.
The emails were released by the nonprofit organization America First Legal and show Twitter enrolling a CDC employee into this portal through their personal account in May 2021 (pages 182-194).
On May 10, 2021, the CDC’s Carol Crawford sent Twitter employee Todd O’Boyle a list of example posts highlighting “two issues that we [the CDC] are seeing a great deal of misinfo about.” O’Boyle responded by saying that enrolling in Twitter’s Partner Support Portal is the best way for Crawford to get posts like this reviewed in the future.
Crawford asked O’Boyle if she could enroll in the portal with her personal Twitter account and on May 27, 2021, O’Boyle confirmed that Crawford had been enrolled in the portal.
In other emails, Crawford asked O’Boyle whether the federal government could flag “COVID misinformation on the portal using the existing census.gov accounts that have access” and questioned how to flag “misinformation” via the portal.
June 2021 emails (pages 359-360) also show another CDC employee attempting to enroll in a Facebook portal but getting error messages. While these emails don’t describe the portal, it appears to be Facebook’s content takedown portal which is similar to the Twitter portal and allows government agencies to flag content for censorship.
Additionally, a February 4, 2021 email (pages 354-355) shows Facebook’s US Head of Public Policy, Payton Iheme, asking Crawford whether she’s aware of the US Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS’s) misinformation work.
“I saw that DHS/CISA is planning /possibly working on COVID-19 misinfo concerns?” Iheme wrote to Crawford. “Are you aware of that aspect?”
This email was sent more than a year before the DHS announced its controversial “Disinformation Governance Board” in April 2022.
Another revelation from this email is that Iheme acknowledges the focus on misinformation “growing among members of Congress.”
These emails provide more evidence of the Big Tech-Biden administration censorship collusion that’s currently facing a legal challenge over potential First Amendment violations.
“In recent months, millions of Americans have witnessed the peeling of the ‘misinformation’ onion,” Gene Hamilton, America First Legal Vice-President and General Counsel, said. “Beneath each layer of shocking details about a partnership between the federal government and Big Tech is yet another layer of connections, conspiracy, and collaboration between power centers that seek to suppress information from the American people. We are proud to play a leading role in fighting for the rights of all Americans and revealing this vital information to the American people.”
We obtained a copy of the emails for you here.
The emails also shine a light on the government departments that have access to these direct Big Tech censorship portals. Previous reports and document releases have shown that the California Secretary of State’s Office of Elections Cybersecurity (OEC) has access to the Twitter portal while the DHS and the New Zealand government have access to the Facebook portal.
Washington rejects ICC probe into Israel’s murder of Al Jazeera reporter
The Cradle | December 7, 2022
US State Department spokesperson Ned Price on 6 December said the White House opposes Al Jazeera taking the murder of Palestinian-American reporter Shireen Abu Aqla to the International Criminal Court (ICC).
“We oppose it,” Price told reporters when pressed about the ICC probe. He went on to add Washington maintains its “longstanding objections to the ICC’s investigation into the Palestinian situation and the position the ICC should focus on its core mission, and that core mission of serving as a court of last resort and punishing and deterring atrocity crimes.”
Abu Aqla was shot dead by Israeli troops on 11 May as she was covering a raid in the Jenin refugee camp. At the time of her death, she was wearing full body armor with clearly visible press markings.
Washington has long opposed Palestinian-led efforts to take up Israeli human rights abuses with international bodies, including the UN and the ICC.
The ICC has reportedly reviewed the evidence presented by the Qatari news network, and will make a decision on whether or not it will launch an investigation. The uncertainty comes naturally, as Israel has attempted to shut down any form of an objective inquiry into the incident since it took place.
Independent investigations by the UN, human rights groups, and western media outlets have all concluded Abu Aqla was deliberately shot by an Israeli soldier in an area where no Palestinian gunmen were present.
Last month, the White House disavowed an FBI investigation into the killing in order to appease Israel.
Israel, which rights groups accuse of imposing a system of apartheid on Palestinians, receives $3.8 billion in US security assistance annually.
Price’s reaction to the ICC probe echoes that of Israeli officials, who on Tuesday called for the expulsion of Al Jazeera journalists from the occupied territories.
“Al Jazeera is an anti-Semitic and false propaganda network working against Israel in the world,” Jewish supremacist official Itamar Ben Gvir said in a tweet, before calling for the journalists’ expulsion.
Israeli Finance Minister Avigdor Lieberman also called for withdrawing the license of Al Jazeera reporters, saying: “I expect the [Israeli] government press office to revoke the journalists’ credentials of Al Jazeera reporters who are in Israel.”
Outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid, for his part, has said he will not allow any interrogation of army soldiers in connection with Abu Aqla’s death.
In a statement on Tuesday, Al Jazeera said its lawsuit with the ICC includes “new witness evidence and video footage that clearly show that Abu Aqla and her colleagues were directly fired at by Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF).”
“The evidence presented to the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) confirms, without any doubt, that there was no firing in the area where Shireen was, other than the IOF shooting directly at her,” the statement added.
“My family still doesn’t know who fired that deadly bullet and who was in the chain of command that killed my aunt,” Abu Aqla’s niece, Lina Abu Aqla, said at a press conference in The Hague.
“The evidence is overwhelmingly clear, we expect the ICC to take action,” she said, adding that they had asked for a meeting with prosecutor Karim Khan.
Israel is not an ICC member and disputes the court’s jurisdiction. The US is also not a member.
Musk: Twitter Counsel Fired Over Concerns About His Role in Information Suppression
Samizdat – 07.12.2022
Elon Musk said in a tweet that he had fired Twitter’s deputy general counsel over concerns about his role in information suppression under the previous management.
“In light of concerns about Baker’s possible role in suppression of information important to the public dialogue, he was exited from Twitter today,” Musk said on Tuesday, referring to Jim Baker, who also served as former FBI general counsel.
Last week, journalist Matt Taibbi in collaboration with Musk published the so-called “Twitter Files” – Twitter’s internal communications to disclose links with political actors and with a focus on how the social network blocked stories related to Hunter Biden’s laptop in the lead-up to the 2020 US presidential election.
The published files alleged that the previous management of Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress reporting regarding Hunter Biden’s laptop ahead of the 2020 US presidential election.
According to the Twitter Files published by Taibbi, Baker played a role in the discussion about whether the laptop story fell under Twitter’s “hacked materials” policy.
“I support the conclusion that we need more facts to assess whether the materials were hacked,” the documents published by Taibbi cited Baker as saying in one of the emails. “At this stage, however, it’s reasonable for us to assume that they may have been and that caution is warranted.”
Hunter Biden reportedly abandoned his laptop at Isaac’s repair shop in 2019, while his father, Joe Biden, was running to become US president. The contents of the laptop were later made public. Emails obtained by Western media from the laptop proved Russia’s claims that the US president’s son helped fund bioweapon research in Ukraine.
The Bidens have faced scrutiny and criticism from Republicans and others for their alleged misconduct in Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings, which came into the public spotlight following the release of the emails.
Read more about James Baker in an article by Jonathan Turley.
Trump Is Toast
Jewish Power will trump Trump
BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • DECEMBER 6, 2022
There is considerable irony in the fact that Donald Trump when president virtually crawled to do Israel’s bidding more than any of his predecessors. He moved the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, he accepted brutal Israeli settlement and control of the Palestinian West Bank, approved of the Israeli annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights, and ignored repeated Israeli war crimes using US provided weapons. Yet for all his gifts to Israel, which did not serve any actual US interest, he is currently being crucified by the Jewish/Israel Lobby because of an idiotic dinner with a pair of alleged anti-Semites, one of whom has been labeled a “holocaust denier.”
And the extreme reaction of Jewish groups to the affront also itself possesses a certain irony in that it demonstrates how extraordinarily powerful promoters of Jewish and Israeli interests actually are, something that those selfsame groups take pains to deny at every opportunity, just as they deny having “dual loyalty” to Israel. The fact is that force majeure will prevail and we will now see the deliberate and methodical destruction of Donald J. Trump’s 2024 proposed presidential campaign by American Jewish and Israeli apologists.
Trump had already been taken out to the back woodshed for a good whipping once after he posted a comment on his Truth Social network on October 16th. He boasted how “No President has done more for Israel than I have. Somewhat surprisingly, however, our wonderful Evangelicals are far more appreciative of this than the people of the Jewish faith, especially those living in the US… US Jews have to get their act together and appreciate what they have in Israel — Before it is too late!”
But the rage unleashed by folks like the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) Jonathan Greenblatt, who labeled the October 16th comment as “insulting and disgusting,” combined with the attacks on three black celebrities, is already beginning to produce pushback, particularly from many normally apolitical blacks who are upset at the viciousness of the Jewish take-no-prisoners response due to its perceived racial overtones. Other observers also are concerned at how the Jewish groups and individuals are overstating the significance of some of the alleged anti-Semitic incidents (by their definition) in a self-serving effort to validate their view that Jewish suffering is unique and cannot be compared with other crimes against humanity.
Also, for those who choose to defend the First Amendment right to free speech, it is discouraging to observe how it is possible to say nearly anything as long as it does not offend Jewish sensibilities. There have already been moves in congress to criminalize criticism of Jews or Israel, making such actions the ultimate “hate crime.” Those specifically Jewish sensibilities absurdly include declaring anyone to be an anti-Semite who criticizes the behavior of Israel as it destroys schools and shoots a Palestinian teenager nearly every day. Indeed, the US media of late has been awash with stories about surging anti-Semitism which taken all together celebrate Israeli/Jewish victimhood while also ignoring Jerusalem’s war crimes and focusing instead on alleged conspiracies against Jews. Most despicable of all in the eyes of those protectors of all things Jewish are the few visible critics who have recognized that the standard holocaust narrative that has been artfully and deliberately shaped since the Second World War is full of inconsistencies and errors in demonstrable fact. So-called “holocaust deniers” are denigrated beyond all others because they attack the very raison d’etre that constitutes the “miraculous” Israel creation myth.
Examining what Kanye West and Donald Trump did and said suggests that there has been considerable overreaction from the Greenblatts of this world and their allies in the media and in government. Starting with Kanye West, currently going by the name Ye, one finds that his initial comments made were not particularly startling, suggesting that Jews directly own or control and manage the entertainment industry in the United States, which is manifestly true. As the criticism of Ye, who believes that blacks are descended from the ancient Hebrews, intensified, he responded with some heat, eventually coming out with an incoherent tweet to “go death con 3 ON JEWISH PEOPLE.”
The comedian Dave Chappelle followed up on the controversy by delivering a stinging monologue on “Saturday Night Live” on “the Jews” and their numbers in the entertainment industry saying that it’s “not a crazy thing to think” that Jews exert outsized influence in Hollywood and the media. He also suggested that Kanye had violated Hollywood’s “rules of perception,” saying, “If they’re Black, then it’s a gang. If they’re Italian, it’s a mob. But if they’re Jewish, it’s a coincidence and you should never speak about it.”
If Greenblatt had ignored Ye it is likely that his poorly expressed comments would have been quickly forgotten, but that is not how the Greenblatts of this world operate. Every offense against the standard narrative of Jewish victimhood requires full scale war. Reports early last week suggest that the efforts by ADL and others to convince businesses associated with Ye to cut off all ties with him have been successful, meaning that he is no longer a billionaire and likely has a fortune reduced to something in the $400 million range.
There have been similar responses to basketball player Kyrie Irving’s recent tweet supporting the so-called Black Hebrew Israelite theory that he shares with Ye which asserts that blacks are in fact Jews while black comedian Dave Chapelle making fun of the ADL overreaction on Saturday Night Live is under the gun from that organization, which has accused him of “popularizing” and “normalizing” anti-Semitism. Kyrie Irving, who also believes the earth is flat, was denounced as a “person unfit to associate with” by his team owner and was suspended for eight games without pay by the Brooklyn Nets even though he characteristically offered several abject apologies.
This all led up to the dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Ye and a so-called white supremacist Nick Fuentes. It is not clear what was discussed at dinner, but Ye states that Trump was impressed by Fuentes. In the aftermath of the meal, when news of it appeared in the media, a shit storm erupted. Trump claimed both that he did not know Fuentes and that he had been tricked by Ye, that the man was brought to the meal as Ye’s guest. Those assertions, most likely lies, have been assailed all over the media and also by the usual suspects like Greenblatt who announced that “The normalization of antisemitism is here.” On the following day, Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic majority leader and himself a Jew who fancies himself the “Protector of Israel in the Senate” went to the Senate floor to denounce Trump’s actions as “disgusting and dangerous,” before calling them “pure evil.”
Prominent Republicans like Kevin McCarthy and Marco Rubio have also piled on, suggesting that Trump will find little support even among those politicians that he would normally consider to be favorable to his reelection. Notably, the Republican Jewish Coalition has joined in the attacks, which means that campaign money will not be flowing to Trump from that usually reliable source. And even Trump’s former lawyer and the man he named ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, has condemned his old boss and patron, saying “Even a social visit from an antisemite like Kanye West and human scum like Nick Fuentes is unacceptable.” Ironically, Friedman, whose loyalty to the United States might be considered questionable, was a persistent apologist for Israel during his time in that country rather than a promoter of US interests.
I have to confess that I had never heard of Nick Fuentes, so I did a little checking on the claim that he was a “holocaust denier.” Fuentes is well-documented as making comments reflecting his rather intense dislike for Jews, but concerning the holocaust all I could come up with was a comment allegedly made by him attacking the claim that six million Jews died in what have been described as death camps, with a suggestion that it was more likely 200,000 to 300,000 as a realistic figure supported by official and other records. He described those deaths as “cookies,” which are baked in the oven and which may have angered critics more than the comment about the numbers. Interestingly, the six million number is one of the more ridiculous assertions that are part and parcel of the holocaust narrative as it appears to have been arbitrarily arrived at as “acceptable” and there has been considerable disagreement over its reliability.
So, Fuentes, it seems, is not a holocaust denier, rather he appears to be skeptical regarding the standard narrative, as am I and many others who have bothered to look into the verifiable historical record. But that does not mean that anyone in power will be standing in line to excuse his behavior. And his dinner partner Donald Trump has evidently now outstayed his welcome by the standards of the noble protectors of Jewish and Israeli interests. The large dollops of campaign cash will not be coming in, those willing to endorse his candidacy will be far fewer, and the media will turn on him even more than it has done over the past six years. Indeed, it is doing so already. There are numerous articles in the mainstream every day telling over and over again the tale of the fateful dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Trump has clearly crossed the notorious red line on Jewish issues. The only remaining question is what will it do to people like Greenblatt? If he keeps hammering away, which he will because that is how he is wired, could the worm turn and will Americans begin to wonder how 2% of the population has obtained so much power? That would be a really interesting development.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
One Health: what is it and why is it important?
One Health is being embedded into the WHO’s International Health Regulations (IHRs) and Pandemic Treaty/Accord
By Meryl Nass | December 5, 2022
First, what is One Health? It is essentially a meaningless concept that is important to the WHO, CDC and the new pandemic regulations being negotiated, as I heard it mentioned several times by country representatives discussing the new IHR amendments. My best guess is that One Health will be invoked as the justification to move people off the land in certain rural communities. The authors of a June 2019 article titled “The One Health Approach—Why Is It So Important?” provide 3 definitions and a graphic to try and explain the term:
The most commonly used definition shared by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the One Health Commission is: ‘One Health is defined as a collaborative, multisectoral, and transdisciplinary approach—working at the local, regional, national, and global levels—with the goal of achieving optimal health outcomes recognizing the interconnection between people, animals, plants, and their shared environment’. A definition suggested by the One Health Global Network is: ‘One Health recognizes that the health of humans, animals and ecosystems are interconnected. It involves applying a coordinated, collaborative, multidisciplinary and cross-sectoral approach to address potential or existing risks that originate at the animal-human-ecosystems interface’. A much simpler version of these two definitions is provided by the One Health Institute of the University of California at Davis: ‘One Health is an approach to ensure the well-being of people, animals and the environment through collaborative problem solving—locally, nationally, and globally’. Others have a much broader view, as encapsulated in Figure 1.
I hope you agree that these definitions shed no light on the meaningfulness of this concept, nor how it might be relevant to public health. However, the definitions seem to rope a lot of other things into a consideration of “health” which I fear is its main objective—eventually to justify social engineering under the rubric of health, or rather ‘One Health.’
The authors of the piece cited above note that they have not gotten buy-in from the medical community:
“Interdisciplinary collaboration is at the heart of the One Health concept, but while the veterinarian community has embraced the One Health concept, the medical community has been much slower to fully engage, despite support for One Health from bodies such as the American Medical Association, Public Health England, and WHO. Engaging the medical community more fully in the future may require the incorporation of the One Health concept into the medical school curricula so that medical students see it as an essential component in the context of public health and infectious diseases.”
And so cheap fixes are being applied. November 3 has been designated “One Health Day” since 2016 by the One Health Commission, the One Health Platform Foundation, and the One Health Initiative. One Health Day is celebrated through One Health educational and awareness events held around the world. Students are especially encouraged to envision and implement One Health projects, and to enter them into an annual competition for the best student-led initiatives in each of four global regions.
After titling their article as if it was going to explain why One Health is important, in the end all we get is a spurious sentence asserting that it is so:
Today’s health problems are frequently complex, transboundary, multifactorial, and across species, and if approached from a purely medical, veterinary, or ecological standpoint, it is unlikely that sustainable mitigation strategies will be produced.
I went to the WHO website to see if I could get a more satisfying explanation of this concept, but was left with the same sense—that it was simply an attempt to throw every living thing, plus every ‘ecosystem’ on the planet into the One Health basket, where pretty much everything might in future be manipulated under the guise of public health. See if you get a different take:
https://www.who.int/health-topics/one-health#tab=tab_1
One Health is an integrated, unifying approach that aims to sustainably balance and optimize the health of people, animals and ecosystems.
It recognizes that the health of humans, domestic and wild animals, plants, and the wider environment (including ecosystems) are closely linked and interdependent.
While health, food, water, energy and environment are all wider topics with sector-specific concerns, the collaboration across sectors and disciplines contributes to protect health, address health challenges such as the emergence of infectious diseases, antimicrobial resistance, and food safety and promote the health and integrity of our ecosystems.
By linking humans, animals and the environment, One Health can help to address the full spectrum of disease control – from prevention to detection, preparedness, response and management – and contribute to global health security.
The approach can be applied at the community, subnational, national, regional and global levels, and relies on shared and effective governance, communication, collaboration and coordination. Having the One Health approach in place makes it easier for people to better understand the co-benefits, risks, trade-offs and opportunities to advance equitable and holistic solutions.
It matters because One Health appears to be a necessary part of the globalist, WEF plan to corral the earth’s people, akin to vaccine passports. Please help educate those who have ears to hear and eyes to see. This needs to be stopped. The best way is by exiting the WHO. Trump started the process, which was immediately reversed by the Biden administration. We can do it again. Or they will keep coming up with cockamamie programs designed to control us under the guise of health.
World Health Organization meets to discuss granting of increased surveillance powers under pandemic treaty
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | December 6, 2022
The unelected global health agency the World Health Organization (WHO) is currently meeting to consider a draft version of a controversial international pandemic treaty that will give the WHO increased surveillance powers.
The new surveillance powers are detailed in Article 10 (“Strengthening and sustaining capacities for pandemic prevention, preparedness, response and recovery of health systems”) and Article 17 (“One Health”) of the draft treaty. They include requirements for the WHO’s member states to “build and reinforce surveillance systems” across both the public and private sector and to strengthen the WHO’s “One Health surveillance systems.”
In its fact sheet on One Health, the WHO cites Covid-19 as one of the main drivers for expanding its One Health approach and notes that the COVID-19 pandemic “put a spotlight on the need for a global framework for improved surveillance and a more holistic, integrated system.”
While the draft treaty doesn’t mention contact tracing and testing, these were two of the main surveillance tools that were used to track the spread of Covid-19 during the pandemic and create a mass surveillance dragnet. Not only did this result in many citizens being forced to use surveillance apps and devices but the data was often abused by governments and third parties.
Not only does this treaty grant the WHO new surveillance powers but it also recognizes “the central role of WHO” and deems it to be “the directing and coordinating authority on international health work.”
We obtained a copy of the draft international pandemic treaty for you here.
The three-day meeting to discuss this draft treaty began on Monday (December 5) and ends Wednesday (December 7). Members of an intergovernmental negotiating body (INB) that was created by the WHO’s decision-making body, the World Health Assembly (WHA), are in attendance and have been tasked with drafting and negotiating this international pandemic treaty.
The INB is projecting that it will finalize this international pandemic treaty by May 2024 and present a final report to the seventy-seventh WHA meeting.
We obtained a copy of the INB’s current proposed timeline for you here.
If it passes, the treaty will be adopted under Article 19 of the WHO Constitution. This provision allows the WHA to impose legally binding conventions or agreements on the WHO’s 194 member states (which represent 98% of all the countries in the world) if two-thirds of the WHA vote for them.
Unlike the lawmaking process within many democratic nations, where officials are elected to implement national laws that reflect the will of the people in the country and voted out if they fail to achieve this goal, the WHO empowers a small number of global representatives, who are often unelected diplomats, to decide on international laws that are imposed on the WHO’s 194 member states.
Before these meetings took place, the WHO demonstrated its love of mass surveillance. It has publicly supported vaccine passports multiple times. The WHO also initially commended China’s response to Covid, which relies heavily on digital surveillance, and only recently changed its stance to criticize China’s zero-Covid policy.
Many powerful nations support this WHO power grab including the United States (US), United Kingdom (UK), Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the European Council (EC) (which represents 27 European Union (EU) member states).
While some politicians in these countries have opposed this treaty, the pushback has so far failed to stop or slow down the progress of this international pandemic treaty and the May 2024 finalization is still very much in play.
Responses to FOIA requests reveal shocking disregard for children
Masking children was a political decision that was not risk-assessed for 17 months
UsForThem | Broken Custodians | December 5, 2022
In August 2020, as schools prepared for the return of pupils — many for the first time in six months — No 10 performed a succession of u-turns on the wearing of masks in schools.
The initial advice was that “masks could impede communication between teachers and staff and have little health benefit”, but with teaching unions piling on pressure and the Scottish government deciding to recommend masks in their classrooms, the advice changed at the end of August. Masks became recommended in communal areas but not in classrooms because, in the words of then PM, Boris Johnson, “that is clearly nonsensical – you can’t teach with face coverings; you can’t expect people to learn with face-coverings.”
By March 2021, though, the Department for Education had recommended that all secondary school pupils wear a mask in class. As Matt Hancock (then Health Secretary) later pointed out when justifying his own infringements of Covid regulations, this was guidance not law, but most schools understood it to be a requirement and headteachers refusing to comply with the ‘guidance’ were pressured to conform. Consequently for most students the implementation occurred as if it were a legal requirement.
Astonishingly for someone who professed to ‘follow the science’ at all times, Matt Hancock has now suggested in his serialised diary extracts that the introduction of masks in classrooms was driven exclusively by crude political considerations, and to have had no grounding in assessments of risk, efficacy or safety.
“Nicola Sturgeon blindsided us by suddenly announcing that when schools in Scotland reopen, all secondary school pupils will have to wear masks in classrooms. In one of her most egregious attempts at one-upmanship to date, she didn’t consult us. The problem is that our original guidance on face coverings specifically excluded schools. Cue much tortured debate between myself, education secretary Gavin Williamson and No 10 about how to respond. Much as Sturgeon would relish it, nobody here wants a big spat with the Scots. So, U-turn it is.”
Given the scale and speed of this u-turn, and in view of the Government’s dogmatic insistence on following the science, one might reasonably assume that once forced into this decision there would have been a concerted effort to establish the evidence and to assess the science-based health risk.
UsForThem asked repeatedly through this period for the DfE to confirm the evidence basis for its policies on masks in schools, and latterly for the Department to produce any evidence that it had carried out a risk assessment prior to those decisions, or for confirmation simply that someone somewhere in government had evaluated the harms and benefits of the policy for the millions of children it had impacted. Our requests were variously ignored or avoided.
In October of 2022, however, after repeated FOI challenges by our team and after the DfE had claimed that its paper trail could not be disclosed because to do so would constrain future policy-making processes, DfE officials have now finally provided access to some of their paperwork. Despite heavy redactions across the documents revealed by the DfE, the picture that emerges, and seemingly now confirmed by Matt Hancock’s diaries, is both astounding and deeply concerning.
There was no assessment of harms for masks in schools under Sir Gavin Williamson
The first notable revelation is that the first time an evaluation of the masks in class policy was provided to the Education Minister, at that time Nadhim Zahawi, appears to have been on the 30th December 2021. That is seventeen months after schools had first been advised by his department to require children to wear masks in schools.
Any harms to children appear to have been of subsidiary importance to making adults feel safe
The second notable revelation is that more than one third of the DfE’s evaluation document supporting its briefing to the Minister was given over to concerns about the risk of teaching unions encouraging their teachers to walk out of schools on the insidious grounds that schools had become dangerous places to work. Those concerns were given materially greater airtime in that December 2021 briefing document than the few paragraphs devoted to the risks of harm for schoolchildren.
It is evident that the adversarial approach of teaching unions had a material influence on the DfE’s advice to the Minister. The evaluation document notes that mandating the wearing of masks in school “could help reduce the risk of some teachers invoking sec[tion] 44 of [the] Employment Rights Act” (a statutory provision that allows employees, exceptionally, to decline to work in materially unsafe conditions), a provision the NEU and Unison had apparently flagged to their members in January 2021. It also cited surveys recording that 71% of Unison members had reported in March 2021 that masks in class were thought to be “an important safety measure”, and 79% of respondents to a private schools survey around the same time had “noted benefits of wearing face coverings in the classroom”.
The deeply troubling implication of this limited and largely-redacted paper trail is that policy-making within the DfE was led not by a rational evaluation of scientific evidence or after a weighing-up of actual and potential risks and harms for children against known or perceived benefits. Rather, the motivation for the August 2020 policy appears to have been a direct response to union-led pressures, and perhaps also to incitements from some elements of the mainstream media, who seemed intent on shutting down schools in order to ‘protect’ teachers and other adults.
The evidence on which the decisions were based was shallow, inconclusive and tardy
Also notable from DfE’s disclosures is the imbalance in the scant and woefully tardy risk-benefit analysis that had been done, and despite which the Minister had been encouraged to press ahead with the masking of schoolchildren.
The evidence provided in DfE’s briefing papers for the efficacy of masks is heavily caveated with benefits expressed in “can”, “potentially”, “tentatively” and “may” terms, rather than “will”. And the most substantial pieces of evidence referenced in support of masking children were an observational study of 123 schools carried out by the DfE over a period of 2-3 weeks in Autumn 2021 (a year after masks had first been imposed on schoolchildren), and a study carried out in the US in Spring 2021, from which had been extrapolated a tentative prediction that between 26,000 and 210,000 children might have been saved from missing school if they had been masked.
At the same time, however, the DfE’s document acknowledges that its study had not established a causative connection between masking in classrooms and a reduction of missed school days; nor could that study do anything to take account of the impact of other society-wide interventions, including interventions applied to the broader adult population, which had been implemented over the same observational period.
In any event, and crucially, none of the reports or studies relied on for Nadhim Zahawi’s briefing in December 2021 had been carried out in August 2020 when DfE made its first u-turn policy decision to introduce masks in classrooms in England and Wales. So the DfE appears to have been flying blind from August 2020 until late 2021 – with no idea about the risks and harms to which it was exposing kids by introducing what amounted to a nationwide mandate for masking schoolchildren for up to eight hours a day; something, incidentally, that the Government never ultimately demanded of the general population, or indeed of its own ministerial teams.
In contrast, the evidence on “downsides” (i.e. harms) of masking pupils is couched in definitive terms, referencing impacts on communication, cognition, educational performance, confidence; and the fact that “Masks will become highly contaminated with upper respiratory tract and skin micro-organisms”, such that used masks could become a source of viral transmission. Even at the start of 2021, it was already clear and indeed had been referenced by the Prime Minister, and later union leaders who had acknowledged that wearing masks in class would impact communication. DfE surveys carried out in March 2021 and cited in the newly-revealed December 2021 briefing for Nadhim Zahawi had confirmed that 94% of teachers believed communication would be harder with a mask, emphatically reinforcing what everyone, including the Prime Minister and the Education Minister, already knew. DfE also noted at that time that BAME and children in deprived areas were expected to struggle most with masks – adding to the stress of pandemic strictures for those children.
Of the gravest concern then, and potentially of legal significance, the evidence revealed in these briefing documents lays bare that DfE officials, and latterly the Minister, knew that wearing masks in class would impact children’s educational performance, cognitive abilities and attention as well as communication.
The evidence cited in December 2021 also raised concerns about the safety and hygiene for children of wearing masks, the need to dispose of them safely, and that children would need to be able to increase their hygiene if they were to avoid increasing the risk of transmission via masks – or to put it another way, DfE officials had evidence that mandating masks in class could in certain circumstances increase transmission rates in school settings if at the same time hand-washing and other associated sanitary measures could not be guaranteed; yet they appeared rather more concerned by the belligerence of teaching unions. This by itself is quite an astonishing revelation.
Were masks introduced in schools to make union officials, teachers and other adults feel safer?
On the basis of the documents now revealed by the DfE, buttressed by Matt Hancock’s more recent disclosures, it appears that science played no meaningful part in this pernicious episode of policy-making, and that no health risk analysis was carried out before the DfE required schoolchildren to wear masks for up to eight hours a day. Of grave concern for parents, this implies that masking schoolchildren was a politically-driven decision reacting to pressure from teaching unions and mainstream media, and seeking to avoid unhelpful comparisons to the earlier decision of the Scottish government to mask schoolchildren in Scotland.
It is hard not to draw the conclusion from this wafer-thin paper trail that DfE’s decision to mask children in classrooms was yet another instance during the pandemic when the best interests of children were subordinated or ignored for the appearance of safety for adults, or worse still for reasons of political expediency and in particular to avoid the embarrassment of a walk out by teaching staff at the behest of union leaders.
The Covid Inquiry has an opportunity to review the adequacy of the Government’s risk assessment activity for pandemic intervention measures, and more broadly the governance processes around significant decision-points such as occurred in relation to masks in class in August 2020. It should not be controversial now for the Inquiry to probe why the only risk assessment for what has been one of the most significant interventions in the educational life, and health and wellbeing, of our nation’s schoolchildren appears to have been prepared an astonishing 17 months after masks were first recommended; and to ask how public health policy-making of this magnitude could have been better informed and more impervious to inappropriate politicised influences.
Though it is not yet a matter of investigation within the domain of the Covid Inquiry, if in time serious health or developmental impacts are revealed in the generation of young children most affected by the masks in class policy such that questions of legal accountability may need to be assessed, we hope that the information revealed by our FOI team’s efforts will provide a basis for evidencing what DfE, union officials, and crucially the Ministers who made the key decisions, knew of the risk of harms and the limited benefits of masking schoolchildren; and of their motives for imposing this damaging intervention on our children.
US Congressman Gosar Calls Washington’s Support for Kiev ‘Immoral’
Samizdat – 06.12.2022
Republican Congressman Paul Gosar, in response to the shelling of a church by Ukrainian troops in the city of Donetsk, called Washington’s support for Ukraine “immoral,” adding that the Kiev regime is “authoritarian.”
“Our continued support of this war in Ukraine is immoral. The deaths continue and Ukraine has become an authoritarian regime not worthy of any support. I support peace talks, not death and destruction. Not bombing churches,” Gosar tweeted.
On Monday, a Sputnik correspondent reported that the Church of Nativity of Christ in Donetsk was shelled by Ukrainian troops.
In late October, the US congressman invited Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for peace talks in the state of Arizona. Two weeks later, Gosar said he would continue opposing additional US aid to Ukraine.
Climate lockdowns coming? You will be tracked in your suburb and happy about it.
By Jo Nova | December 3, 2022
The 15 Minute City is a UN and WEF plan, because they care about you want you to drive less.
A cartoon from the WEF just for you good girls and boys:
In the WEF’s own words — this rearrangement of cities is absolutely about climate change:
As climate change and global conflict cause shocks and stresses at faster intervals and increasing severity, the 15-minute city will become even more critical.
And the solution was the pandemic (they really say that):
The obvious, yet incomplete, answer is the pandemic… with COVID-19 and its variants keeping everyone home (or closer to home than usual), the 15-minute city went from a “nice-to-have” to a rallying cry. Meeting all of one’s needs within a walking, biking or transit distance was suddenly a matter of life and death.
And then the dark hand of the totalitarian managers appears, as James Woudhuysen, warned in Spiked in late October:
The madness of the ‘15-minute city’
The green agenda is taking inspiration from the illiberal days of lockdown.
To this end, Oxfordshire County Council, which is run by Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party, wants to divide the city of Oxford into six ‘15 minute’ districts. In these districts, it is said, most household essentials will be accessible by a quarter-of-an-hour walk or bike ride, and so residents will have no need for a car.
On the surface, these 15-minute neigbourhoods might sound pleasant and convenient. But there is a coercive edge. The council plans to cut car use and traffic congestion by placing strict rules on car journeys.
Residents will have to register their cars with the council and they will be tracked to count their journeys through the key gateways. It’s the social credit scheme that starts with your car and works like anti-frequent-flyer points.
Under the new proposals, if any of Oxford’s 150,000 residents drives outside of their designated district more than 100 days a year, he or she could be fined £70.
The concept of the 15-minute city was born with ‘C40’. Chaired today by London mayor Sadiq Khan, C40 calls itself a ‘network of mayors of nearly 100 world-leading cities collaborating to deliver the urgent action needed right now to confront the climate crisis’.
Climate lockdowns? Seriously?
It all sounds a bit ridiculous to suggest a lockdown “for the climate” but listen to the BBC. They’re working awfully hard to persuade us — they obviously think voters won’t want this. Here they are connecting the “15 Minute City” to the fun of covid lockdowns, and setting this up as though it’s totally normal for the government to decide who your friends are:
How ’15-minute cities’ will change the way we socialise
And furthermore lockdowns in Paris were great social moments where we all made friends. Who knew how much fun it would be to be told you couldn’t drive far?
… for Fraioli, the two-month lockdown that began on 17 March – confining her to a 1km radius of her home – gave her a nuanced, enriching view of her neighbourhood. “I discovered it’s possible to feel like you’re in a small village in Paris,” she says. “To get to know your neighbours, to maintain good links with shopkeepers, to favour local craftsmen and shops over large supermarkets. I even joined a citizens’ movement where people prepare food baskets for homeless people. I thought I would have a hard time living the lockdown, but I was perfectly at home, in a quiet place.”
I don’t seem to recall “getting to know neighbours” as being part of any lockdown anywhere?
And lookout — the 15 minute city is not just Oxford, but turning up in Brisbane, Melbourne, Barcelona, Paris, Portland and Buenos Aires. It’s everywhere.
Oxford City Council is moving faster than the rest
Apparently, not enough people are catching buses or riding bikes. But instead of making that more appealing, the totalitarians will force it through tracking and fines. Oxfordshire has just approved on November 29th, the “traffic filters” trial which will turn the city into a “fifteen minute city”. The Trial will start in Jan 2024.
It’s a crowded area, Oxfordshire, and no one likes traffic congestion, but in a free world the problem is self-limiting as drivers get fed up with delays and exorbitant parking costs, and they car-pool or choose to catch the bus or ride a bike. But in Big Nanny State the local rulers start making rules about who can and can’t visit and how often, and they want your car registered on their own special list with cameras to track you and fines to punish you. They offer exemptions of course, but then you have to apply for them and get permission.
Oxfordshire County Council Pass Climate Lockdown ‘trial’ to Begin in 2024
Vision News, November 30th
Oxfordshire County Council yesterday approved plans to lock residents into one of six zones to ‘save the planet’ from global warming. The latest stage in the ’15 minute city’ agenda is to place electronic gates on key roads in and out of the city, confining residents to their own neighbourhoods.
Under the new scheme if residents want to leave their zone they will need permission from the Council who gets to decide who is worthy of freedom and who isn’t. Under the new scheme residents will be allowed to leave their zone a maximum of 100 days per year, but in order to even gain this every resident will have to register their car details with the council who will then track their movements via smart cameras round the city.
Every resident will be required to register their car with the County Council who will then monitor how many times they leave their district via number plate recognition cameras.
In the end, these aggressively overmanaged schemes mean more paperwork, more tracking, more jobs for bureaucrats and more free passes for “friends” of Big Government.
The more rules you have the more corrupt the system gets. For example, some city blocks are included in the favored list with 100 passes, while others get just 25 — so the property values of the inner circle addresses rise. As a bonus, in years to come property developers “in the know” and on the favoured list with certain councilors can arrange for rezoning on the right day (the one after they buy the property) and voila — that’s a nice capital gain for them
“Reconnecting Oxford” wants to end these artificial blockages
From “Reconnecting Oxford” –– a protest movement to stop filters and road closures.
The councilors held a major consultation process but apparently knew the outcome. It says rather a lot about the attitude of one councilor who said it was going ahead whether people liked it or not.
Traffic filters will divide city into six “15 minute” neighbourhoods, agrees highways councillor
Oxford Mail, October 24
ROAD blocks stopping most motorists from driving through Oxford city centre will divide the city into six “15 minute” neighbourhoods, a county council travel chief has said.
And he insisted the controversial plan would go ahead whether people liked it or not.
Businesses in Oxford are not impressed:
Hotelier Jeremy Mogford, who owns the Old Bank Hotel in High Street and the Old Parsonage Hotel and Gees, both in Banbury Road, described the plan as disastrous for business.
He previously told the Oxford Mail : “What we have is people making decisions that don’t live in the city centre or spend much time in the city.
“The council has adopted the position that climate change is real”
Skeptic and long range weather forecaster Piers Corbyn spoke to the council to warn them:
[Piers Corbyn said] “The point is that the basis of these documents are false – man-made climate change does not exist and if you don’t believe me, look at the sky. You should have a special meeting to discuss whether man-made climate change exists or not.”
Responding to Mr Corbyn’s claims, councillor Andrew, the council’s cabinet member for highways management, said: “Mr Corbyn said climate change is not real – this council has formally adopted a position that climate change is real.
“Mr Corbyn you are wrong, we are right.”
Well that’s it then. Councils control the weather. If this had nothing to do with climate change they could have said “we’ll see” and dismissed him anyway. But they have to believe…
Oxfordshire council has already infuriated local businesses earlier this year with road closures and traffic calming measures which have reduced the customer base significantly. Drivers destroyed 20 bollards in less than three weeks, and one frustrated cafe owner put up a giant billboard in protest saying “So much for democracy”. Even cyclists don’t like the traffic slowing measures, saying their road trips are more dangerous. There is at least one Oxford protest group that seems to have some success in stopping the road closures.
So who does want the traffic filters? Oxford University and the bus companies, and the council which expects to make £1.1m from fining errant drivers.
From the Oxford City Council Consultation page we see the plan is to reduce journeys that you think are necessary but the councilors don’t.
Why are we introducing trial traffic filters?
Across our county, we want to reduce unnecessary journeys by private vehicles and make walking, cycling, public and shared transport the natural first choice.
This will help us deliver an affordable, sustainable and inclusive transport system that enables the county to thrive whilst protecting the environment and making Oxfordshire a better place to live for all residents.
And it is about “protecting the environment” by tracking you and resisting your movement.
Canterbury is planning something spookily similar –– dividing up the city into five different districts with drivers unable to cross between zones without being fined. The old grid system of cities made for shorter distances and more choices. The new system offers only more obstacles and less freedom.
Elon Musk says PayPal is moving in the “direction of social credit”
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | December 5, 2022
“PayPal seems to be moving in the direction of social credit and restricting transactions – that’s concerning,” PayPal co-founder, and now Tesla and Twitter CEO, Elon Musk, said in a recent Spaces.
Last month, Twitter filed registration paperwork to pave the way for it to process payments, according to a filing with the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, which was obtained by The New York Times.
Following that, Musk said that he envisioned users connecting their online bank accounts to the social media service, with the company moving later into “debit cards, checks, and whatnot.”
Following public backlash, PayPal recently abandoned a proposed update to its Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) that would have led to penalties of $2,500 for spreading “misinformation.” However, the company still maintains a policy carrying similar penalties for “intolerance.”
The AUP prohibits the “promotion of hate, violence, racial or other forms of intolerance.” Free speech advocates feel that the policy is vague and is left to the interpretation of PayPal staff.
Aaron Terr, a senior program officer of the rights group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said at the time that the policy “suffers from the same defect as a lot of the other proposed prohibitions on speech, in that it’s vague.”
Terr added: “And it’s left open to interpretation by PayPal employees, and because of its vagueness, that gives them a lot of discretion to essentially just enforce that provision against disfavored speakers, and to do so in a viewpoint-discriminatory manner.”
The revoked misinformation policy update was condemned by PayPal founders. Co-founder Elon Musk said the update “goes against everything I believe in.”
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From the Archives
Who Runs Our World?
Netanyahu addresses US Congress
By Richard Hugus | January 4, 2019
Our world is run by oligarchs, the holders of vast wealth from monopolies in banking, resource extraction, manufacturing, and technology. Oligarchs have such power that most of the world doesn’t even know of their influence over our lives. Their overall agenda is global power — a world government, run by them — to be achieved through planned steps of social engineering. The oligarchs remain in the background and have heads of state and entire governments acting in their service. Presidents and prime ministers are their puppets. Bureaucrats and politicians are their factotums.
Who are politicians? Politicians are people who work for the powerful while pretending to represent the people who voted for them. This double-dealing involves a lot of lying, so successful politicians must be good at it. It’s not an easy job to make the insane agenda of the powerful seem reasonable. Politicians can’t reveal this agenda because it almost always goes against the interests of their constituents, so they become adept at sophistry, mystification, and the appearance of authority. For example, wars for Israel have been part of the agenda of the powerful for years. Since 2001, wars for Israel have been sold as “the war on terror” and lots of lies had to be made up as to why the war on terror was a real thing. The visible faces promoting the war on terror were neoconservatives in the US, almost all of whom were advocates for Israel, or Zionists. Zionists are not the only members of the oligarchy, but they seem to be its lead actors. ... continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Palantir touts record expansion and ‘battlefield’ AI value
- Israeli telecom networks used for mass surveillance across countries
- US claim of sinking Iranian boats ‘a lie’, senior military official tells IRIB
- New KC-46 Supertankers Promise Israel Conventional Samson Option Strike Сapability
- No, New York Times, We Don’t Need to Dam the Bering Strait
- Gates-Funded ‘Big Catch-Up’ Delivers 100 Million Vaccine Doses — Including High-Risk DTP Vaccine Not Used in U.S.
- No commercial ship or oil tanker transited Strait of Hormuz in past hours: IRGC
- Russia warns of escalating NATO military activity in Baltic region
- Government Kills the Spirit
- How ‘Israel’s’ Iran regime change plot failed – again
- If Americans Knew
- As in Gaza, Israel is targeting rescue workers in South Lebanon, killing more than 100 since March
- Israel’s Obliteration Ecocide from Gaza to Lebanon and Beyond
- Israel Said It’s Applying the Gaza Model in Lebanon. This Is What the Devastation Looks Like.
- New Member of Trump’s Iran Negotiating Team Comes From Notoriously Pro-Israel Think Tank
- Israeli army demolishes Christian monastery, nuns’ school in southern Lebanon
- Tokenizing Christians In Israel
- One Gaza is not enough: Israel is turning southern Lebanon into another Gaza – Daily Update
- As Palestinians die, Ben-Gvir celebrates birthday with golden noose cake – Daily Update
- Israel’s New Ambassador to the ‘Christian World’ Served as Envoy to Azerbaijan During the Ethnic Cleansing of Christians from Nagorno-Karabakh
- US set to sell $1B “Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System” to Israel – Daily Update
- No Tricks Zone
- Another Study Links Warming To Cloud Forcing, Shortwave Radiation, Natural Atmospheric Circulation
- Wind Energy Is Toxic, Hazardous To Human Health, Scientific Review Shows
- Oversupply Of Volatile Solar Energy Leads To Record NEGATIVE Prices!
- New Study: Extreme Heat Records, Heatwaves, Extreme Cold Records Declining Across US Since 1899
- It’s The Cold, Stupid! Cold 20 Times More Lethal Than Heat, Multiple Studies Show
- European Institute For Climate And Energy: “Climate Debate is Seldom About Science”
- New Study: The Climate May Be 5 Times More Sensitive To Solar Forcing Than Commonly Assumed
- EV Industry Reached $70 Billion In Losses In 2024 Due To Delusional Green Ideologies
- Reality Check: Maldives Have Actually Grown In Size Or Remained Stable Over Recent Decades
- Abrupt Climate Change Also Occurred NATURALLY In The Past …25 Times During Last Ice Age
Aletho News 