There aren’t many ways to make something as objectively awful as civil asset forfeiture worse, but the FBI has found a way to do it. As it stands now, forfeiture allows law enforcement to take cash and property from people under the (unproven) theory that it was illegally obtained. The rest of the process does nothing to prove the theory. The burden of proof is often shifted to people who had their stuff taken by law enforcement and the process of seeking the return of property is so expensive and counterintuitive, most people just take the L and move on.
The FBI wants to make asset forfeiture even shittier. It’s rolling out what appears to be a pilot program in Charlotte, North Carolina — supposedly a major hub on the East Coast drug distribution chain. Behold these (also unproven) claims the FBI has deployed to justify its new forfeiture ride-along program.
The FBI Charlotte Field Office is offering cash rewards for tips that help agents intercept drug trafficking shipments through Charlotte. With multiple interstates running directly through the Queen City, the route is appealing to traffickers who deliver their products and transfer the cash proceeds up and down the East Coast. While law enforcement agencies are effective at intercepting many of the shipments, the FBI recognizes the value the public can offer to our investigations.
Did you get that? Multiple interstates leading to a large city is all the “evidence” the FBI needs to call literally any city with a network of accessible roads a hotspot for drug trafficking activity. Everything is a hub and every road is an artery. That’s how the interstate highway system works. And because it works, every road must be a drug trafficking route and every city must be simultaneously a source for drug distributors and the home to thousands of drug customers.
All of North Carolina is suspect, according to the FBI. To clean up this southeastern drug paradise, the FBI is asking the public to contribute to its government theft program.
If a drug/cash shipment is successfully seized, the tipster could receive up to 25% of the seized money. FBI Charlotte will use the Department of Justice Asset Forfeiture Program to pay tipsters. Currently, the new program is only active in the Charlotte metro area with plans to expand across North Carolina in the future.
The FBI has set up an SMS accessible tip line in addition to its normal field office phone numbers. Tipsters who know where some drug cash might be found can directly profit from providing information that points agents in the direction of seizable property.
Unlike other tip lines with reward offers like CrimeStoppers, there’s no need to wait around to see if the tip results in arrests or convictions. The civil asset forfeiture process doesn’t require arrests and convictions, only nebulous accusations about the cash itself, which is named as the “defendant” in forfeiture proceedings as though it committed criminal acts all by itself.
And while it might be tempting to flood the tip line with bogus reports, keep in mind making false statements to federal agents is a federal crime, one that can lead to real, in-fucking-federal-prison sentences. It isn’t like filling out a false police report, which may lead to little more than a few months of probation and local cops treating future reports as highly suspect. Federal crimes are no joke and the FBI loves to catch people lying because it allows the DOJ to add to its prosecutorial wins even when agents are unable to find evidence of any actual criminal activity.
The hard rule (DON’T!) about talking to federal agents without a lawyer present applies here as well. Think about it. You provide a tip, thinking you’re doing a good deed by sending agents to seize the ill-gotten gains of an alleged criminal enterprise. But if any entity is capable of ensuring no good deed goes unpunished, it’s the FBI.
Agents may decide the submitted tip indicates the tipster is involved in drug trafficking or, at the very least, may be able to provide even more tips on criminal activity. This may lead to some in-person “interviews” with agents who — as noted above — can always accuse a tipster of lying if they believe they’re not being fully honest about their relationship to the seized cash or the people who formerly possessed it. They may also attempt to pressure a tipster into becoming a federal snitch and make their lives miserable if they refuse to play ball.
No good can come of this. No good comes from civil asset forfeiture and this invitation for the public to skim the federal government’s take makes it much, much worse. If the FBI’s going to be this stupid, it’s time for federal lawmakers to take this abusable revenue stream away from it by requiring forfeitures to be tied to convictions.
March 21, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Corruption | FBI, Human rights, United States |
Leave a comment
Ukrainian refugees in Nürnberg
Bayerischer Rundfunk (Bavarian Public Radio) notices that Ukrainian refugees are overwhelmingly unvaccinated:
Only about a third of Ukrainians have been vaccinated against Corona, in part with vaccines that are unapproved in the EU. The low vaccination rate could cause problems in the refugee centres. The city of Nürnberg, for example, has set up three gymnasiums to accommodate 600 people, where many must share a small space. …
Anyone who wants to can receive a vaccination a few hundred metres away … free of charge for Ukrainian refugees.
“Unfortunately, we’re finding that the refugees aren’t exactly snatching the vaccines out of our hands,” says Nürnberg Mayor Marcus König.
“Many new arrivals are very worried about ‘forced vaccinations’,” adds Thomas Jung, Mayor of Fürth. He says you have to approach the topic with sensitivity. …
It’s been months of overt coercion to accept vaccination from politicians and the press here in the Federal Republic of Germany. Months of social exclusion and jeopardised careers and all the rest of it. Nobody has given the slightest thought to “sensitivity.” Why are they now at pains to accommodate the feelings of Ukrainians?
Jung explains that city officials pressed a Ukrainian doctor into service, to begin delicately preaching the Gospel of Vaccination to refugees last Friday. It’s rare, because the West is so totalising, but every now and then you get an idea of what it must be like to look into this funhouse from the outside. You flee a war-zone and end up sleeping on the floor of some repurposed gym, while the locals scheme madly about how to inject you with their latest mRNA tech.
Dear Ukrainians: You’re entirely right to be terrified of forced vaccination. We are too.
March 21, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties | Human rights, Ukraine |
Leave a comment
Over 11,000 Americans signed a petition demanding General Mills shut down its Pillsbury factory in the illegal Atarot settlement, which is built on occupied Palestinian land.
The petition said, “The U.N. has named General Mills as one of the 112 businesses violating international humanitarian and human rights law by operating in occupied Palestinian territories.”
“It’s Pillsbury factory in the Atarot Industrial Zone, an illegal Israeli settlement in East Jerusalem, has displaced, exploited, stifled, and otherwise harmed local Palestinian lives, livelihoods, and land,” added the petition.
The petition said that General Mills “profits off of apartheid and is complicit in Israel’s occupation and annexation of the West Bank.”
The signatories demanded that General Mills shut down its factory in occupied East Jerusalem, stressing their commitment to boycotting Pillsbury products until this demand is met.
News of this comes as at least seven Palestinians were arrested by Israeli occupation forces in the West Bank today, including a 62-year-old.
Local sources said occupation forces arrested at least seven Palestinians, including 62-year-old Hamas official Shaker Amara from the Aqabat Jabr camp in Jericho, as well as released prisoners and other citizens.
The sources noted that the occupation forces also arrested municipal elections candidate from Al-Bireh, Islam Al-Taweel, head of the Al-Bireh Brings us Together list, researcher and released prisoner Emad Abu Awwad from Al-Bireh, released prisoner Nael Abu Asal, Omar Abu Jenadi from Jericho, Muath Abu Tarboush from Al-Ezza camp north of Bethlehem, and Mahdi Zakarneh and Rami Yaseen from Jenin.
Hamas leader Amara is a former prisoner, arrested more than 13 times by the occupation, and each time held under administrative detention – without charge or trial.
March 21, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Illegal Occupation, Solidarity and Activism, Subjugation - Torture | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, West Bank, Zionism |
Leave a comment
Ronald B. Standler, Esq. has produced an extraordinary resource that summarizes key legal precedents
I want to draw your attention to an extraordinary legal resource that I just discovered (hat tip to the brilliant @blueivyrose_ on Instagram). It’s a document prepared by Massachusetts lawyer Ronald B. Standler titled Legal Right to Refuse Medical Treatment in the U.S.A.
It summarizes all of the key court cases (up until 2012 when it was published) that establish the legal right to refuse medical treatment. He writes,
This essay discusses the history of judicial opinions that hold a mentally competent adult patient has the legal right in the USA to refuse continuing medical treatment for any reason, even if that refusal will hasten his/her death.
His summaries are excellent and really zoom in on the key quotes from the decisions:
Basis for Right to Refuse Treatment
History
The history of the right to refuse medical treatment in the USA is often traced back to two judicial opinions:
• Union Pacific Railway Co. v. Botsford, 141 U.S. 250, 251 (1891) Botsford sued railroad for concussion resulting from alleged negligence of railroad. Railroad wanted surgical examination of her injuries. Request of railroad denied. “No right is held more sacred, or is more carefully guarded by the common law, than the right of every individual to the possession and control of his own person, free from all restraint or interference of others, unless by clear and unquestionable authority of law.”
• Schloendorff v. Society of New York Hospital, 105 N.E. 92, 93 (N.Y. 1914) “Every human being of adult years and sound mind has a right to determine what shall be done with his own body; and a surgeon who performs an operation without his patient’s consent commits an assault, for which he is liable in damages.”
It goes on like this for 57 pages with summaries of key cases, discussion of the major issues raised by each case, and important insights into how the courts have interpreted these precedents over the years.
I imagine this will be a helpful resource for warrior mamas in child custody cases trying to keep their kids from being poisoned by vengeful spouses. I also think it may be helpful for our warrior litigators fighting against a wide range of Pharma fascist policies at the federal, state, and local level.
One bummer about the document is that it is a locked PDF — which makes it difficult to copy and paste. I imagine that clever people will find a way around that.
To recap where we are at in the legal fight against vaccine mandates:
There are four broad sets of legal doctrines that clearly support bodily autonomy:
1. The U.S. Constitution, including the right to freedom of speech and freedom of religion (1st Amendment), the right of people to be secure in their person (4th Amendment), the prohibition on involuntary servitude (13th Amendment), and the right to equal protection under the law (14th Amendment) — all support personal sovereignty.
2. International law and medical norms including:
• The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• The Nuremberg Code and
• The Declaration of Helsinki
support the absolute right to refuse medical treatment.
3. The mountain of case law cited in Legal Right to Refuse Medical Treatment in the USA shows that the courts have long-supported medical autonomy.
4. The recent Supreme Court decision in the OSHA case and 5 other federal cases establish that federal agencies do not have the power to mandate a medical product.
Meanwhile, all that Team Pharma has going for it is the wrongly decided 1905 Jacobson v. Massachusetts case that is now completely discredited because it was used as a justification for forced sterilization in the Buck v. Bell case in 1927 that was struck down as unconstitutional in 1978 (see Holland, 2010, p. 42, footnote 300). Jacobson is a product of eugenic thinking and it must be repudiated as such and permanently relegated to the dustbin of history.
Were it not for that fact that Pharma pumps billions of dollars into our political and regulatory system every year we would not even be having this conversation because the courts have been clear at least since World War II that bodily autonomy is sacrosanct and that all medical decision reside with the individual — not the state, not doctors, and not the public health system.
The real story here is that progressives just cannot seem to quit eugenics. They loved eugenics in the 1900s when Jacobson was decided. They loved eugenics in the 1920s when Buck v. Bell was decided. And now progressives have once again embraced eugenics with their fanatical support for junk science mRNA shots that are killing and maiming hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. and around the world.
All decent and sane people must reject eugenics and reject Pharma junk science and return to the bedrock legal principles of individual autonomy and personal sovereignty.
March 20, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States |
Leave a comment
The book The Year the World Went Mad by SAGE-member Mark Woolhouse, has now been published as an audiobook and will be available in hard cover on April 12th. This is an important book, for here the author, a key player in the pandemic response in the UK, admits that more or less everything he and his colleagues suggested and the government did was wrong.
In this interview with Spiked-online, Woolhouse admits that focused protection, as suggested by the proponents of the Great Barrington Declaration, would have been the right approach, and that he and his associates knew it. He even claims they suggested it, but nobody listened. However, even if they did, why didn’t they speak up? The scientists who wrote and published the Great Barrington Declaration were denounced as pseudo-scientists – and by whom? Among others, by the very people who knew they were right all along.
In the author‘s own words:
“So how do you protect those people? First of all, since they have to have contact with certain people, you make it as Covid-safe as possible for them to have those interactions. Take all the precautions we know to take now, about wearing masks, ventilation and physical distancing. But that alone is not enough. You need to make sure that the contact themselves does not have an infection and is not going to pass it on to the vulnerable people they’re interacting with. We were talking about this in April and May 2020 to many people in government. But we never implemented it. It never took off. And yet it’s quite clear from our work that this would have had a very significant impact. It would not be enough by itself “You still need to suppress the virus to a degree, but you would not need lockdown.”
The lockdowns, travel bans, school closures and all the rest were useless and extremely harmful to society. But still the scientists in charge of the pandemic response, including Mark Woolhouse, promoted those methods and justified them. They derided those who criticised their methods, cancelled them, claimed they didn’t respect science. But it was the other way around. This, we must never forget.
This book is a good step. But I wonder if the author has apologised to those who were right all along, to Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta, Jay Bhattacharya and all the other honest, real scientists who had the courage and moral standard to tell the truth. If he hasn’t, I urge him to do so.
March 20, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Audio program, Book Review, Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Human rights, UK |
Leave a comment
Following our recent article highlighting isolation and neglect in care homes, we are appalled to report that the situation is only slowly improving. What is more, many NHS sites are still imposing draconian and vindictive policies. Children are being separated from parents and dying relatives are being abandoned to a lonely end.
It is beyond comprehension that this situation persists. Three weeks to flatten the curve? More like 24 months to bulldoze the social contract. Here is one quote from a UK hospital this week:
“We know that continuing to extend restrictions on visiting will be disappointing and it is not a decision we have taken lightly. We understand how important the support of family and friends can be for patients in their recovery while they are in hospital, however, our number one priority is to keep everyone safe”.
These silken, virtue-signalling words – keeping “everyone safe” – are not only utterly simplistic, they disguise blanket policies that encourage multiple Milgram-esque acts of cruel depravity. We are hearing horrific stories of desperate children being denied access to their dying parents.
“Everyone” is not safe when a nonagenarian, now in declining health, has to spend their remaining weeks – or even days – in soulless incarceration. These individuals spent their entire working lives rebuilding this country after WW2 and then brought up a subsequent generation of taxpayers. Surely we owe these bastions of society the dignity of choice in their final days.
If this situation was not depressing enough, HART has also been made aware of the most cruel of indignities: patients in their final days of life are being denied palliative care if they refuse a covid injection. It is hard to comprehend the wickedness of foisting this particular medical intervention – with all the known short-term adverse effects – on someone with a severely weakened immune system who is already in their final days. It is hard to see this as anything other than battery.
There is no doubt that the overwhelming majority of people involved in the healthcare services want the best for their patients, so how can these things still be happening? Two years into this depressing saga, perhaps it is too late for those who promote these injustices to take responsibility for the harm caused. However, those that have been ‘going with the flow’, perhaps hoping for an easy life, might want to reconsider whether their consciences can bear any more of this, and whether they want to align themselves with faceless and sadistic despotism.
After all, you cannot comply your way out of tyranny.
March 18, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Aletho News | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, UK |
Leave a comment
The Bundestag passes a new Infection Protection Act
As I wrote a few weeks ago, the legal basis for our current regime of unnecessary restrictions and interference in the everyday lives of German citizens expires after tomorrow, but Corona cannot be allowed to end in Germany. The past few weeks have seen fraught negotiations within the coalition government to draft a new Infection Protection Act and continue the circus.
Today, after acrimonious debate, the Bundestag voted in the new legislation. It provides two tiers of ongoing Corona regulation:
1) Automatically and at all times, “basic protection” measures will be available to the federal states. These allow the state governments to impose mask mandates upon local transit and healthcare facilities, and to impose testing requirements on healthcare facilities and schools. Of course, they will all do so. Mask mandates will also continue in long-distance trains and in aeroplanes.
2) State governments will be allowed to impose additional restrictions, including vaccination and testing requirements for restaurants and public events, in the case of so-called “hotspots.” Anytime you encounter English vocabulary in German law, it is a sign of bad things. A vote of the state parliament is necessary to declare a hotspot and these additional restrictions.
The federal states are allowed a transitional period to continue current rules, but this ends on 2 April.
The press is starting to fill with vile articles about the “freedoms” that will be returning to us. The thing is, that these are not freedoms anymore. They have become temporary, seasonal privileges, which can be removed anytime political pressure builds on the state parliaments. A softening of the rules makes things more comfortable in the shorter term, but it extends the political half-life of the Corona regime substantially.
Despite all the crazy discussion in the press and from individual politicians, vaccine mandates appear to be dead in Germany; only about a third of the Bundestag support a universal mandate for adults.
That’s not as good as it sounds: A lot of other members of parliament want mandate-adjacent requirements that are also bad. Andrew Ullmann, from the FDP, has gained some support for his scheme of mandatory vaccine information sessions rather than mandatory vaccination. I agree that forced lectures from ignorant low-level bureaucrats are preferable to forced medical procedures, but the whole scheme also makes me find Andrew Ullmann even more loathsome than I did before.
In case you thought Ullmann was just trying to reach a compromise to ward off the vaccinators, he’s also open to mandates for the 50+ crowd, so he’s not your friend.
Meanwhile, the CDU (and CSU), who are not in government, propose setting up a creepy “vaccination register” so the vaccinators know who to pressure. They want vaccine mandates maybe possibly for certain at-risk groups and for certain professions.
Of 736 Bundestag members, a mere 50 support a resolution against mandatory vaccination, primarily from the FDP and the AfD.
March 18, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Germany, Human rights |
Leave a comment
What the smallpox vaccine can teach us
With the reveal that the objectivity of the CDC (and US HHS) has become both politicized by the executive branch and compromised by the pharmaceutical industry, we have to come to terms with living in a world in which we can no longer take governmental public health pronouncements as gospel truth. Those of us who are thinking for ourselves (and our children) now need to make personal assessments and decisions about COVID-19 vaccines, and then booster vaccination, and then boosters again. As we all assess the advice of HHS, CDC, NIAID, Dr. Fauci, White House Advisor Dr. Francis Collins, the Surgeon General, the FDA, and of course Pfizer, let’s briefly revisit what many consider to be history’s most effective vaccine: the smallpox vaccine produced from variola.
Smallpox kills, and it has been eradicated from the world by use of a highly effective vaccine (with the exception of samples stored in various freezers). It was (is?) a far more serious threat than SARS-CoV-2, in terms of death and disease. In order to understand the science behind vaccines, one must understand the strategies behind vaccination campaigns, and the smallpox vaccines provide a great case study.
Vaccinia (cowpox) virus is closely related to smallpox (variola) virus, and Jenner (in 1796) is often credited with discovering that milkmaids (exposed to cowpox) were resistant to Smallpox disease, and then actively vaccinating against variola using vaccinia virus. The historic smallpox vaccine product principally credited with eradicating Smallpox was labeled as Dryvax, (Wyeth Laboratories, Inc.- formally discontinued in 1982) and was prepared from calf lymph using the New York City Board of Health (NYCBOH) strain of vaccinia. What that means is that the skin of calves were infected with the NYCBOH vaccinia, resulting in widespread infection and a sort of weeping exudate on the skin of the calves as the virus replicates. The calves were loaded into a mechanical holder and the exudate (with the virus) was scraped off (using something that resembled a sweat scraper used for horses) and “processed”, placed into glass vials, freeze dried, and then sealed with a standard stopper. The quality control on the “processing” was pretty crude, and I have personally seen legacy vials of Dryvax that included calf hair in the final vialed product. The vials were shipped out, and then reconstituted with a diluent (saline) and a “bifurcated needle” was dipped into the solution and then repeatedly poked into the skin (typically over the deltoid muscle – the shoulder) of the vaccine recipient, resulting in the typical round smallpox vaccine scar.
The art and science of vaccinology teaches that vaccines can vary in both safety and effectiveness. That this is a sliding scale for which disease severity, pathogen infectiousness (transmissibility, or Ro) and safety of the vaccine product all must be simultaneously optimized, resulting in a three dimensional plot (or “response surface”). The teaching is that if a vaccine is to be given to the general population, it has to have a low adverse event profile (be very safe), particularly if the disease is generally thought to either have a lower risk profile or infection is a rare event. In general, a more “hot” vaccine, in other words one that typically has a more serious adverse event profile, will also be better at preventing infection. In the case of a highly infectious, highly pathogenic virus, the risk profile of the vaccine may be greater – in order to achieve disease people contracting the disease and with the ultimate hope of disease eradication. The licensed Merck Ebola vaccine is an example of a relatively “hot” (reactogenic) vaccine which is only deployed in populations at high risk during an Ebola (highly infectious and pathogenic virus) outbreak. Benefits versus risks. If the pathogen is particularly nasty, then it becomes more acceptable to deploy a vaccine that causes some degree of disease. Makes sense?
There is another important element in the national vaccine program, which is the requirement to keep the vaccine production facilities up and running. These facilities are producing a biological product; they must be kept in production or the process for re-licensure is onerous, if not impossible. In the case of seasonal flu, one of the justifications for the yearly vaccine is to keep the manufacturing plants running and ready for business in case of a truly severe strain of flu or some other, unknown pathogen become a threat. If those facilities are moth-balled, they can’t be brought back on line quickly. Bet you did not know that. One major reason for pushing annual influenza vaccines is to maintain influenza vaccine manufacturing capacity. The industry term used is “warm base manufacturing”. Of course, this results in a very nice annual “cash cow” for the vaccine industry, one which gets annually milked for a tidy guaranteed profit. The term “rent seeking behavior” applies. The same is true of the various “biodefense” vaccines and products which are maintained in the “strategic national stockpile”. In the context of Smallpox, these include ACAM2000. These products have half lives, which is to say that even though they are (hopefully) not used, they still have to be replaced every few years. Again, nice predictable profit. The corporation “Emergent Biololutions” has become particularly adept at exploiting this “market opportunity”, and has managed to monopolize many of the biodefense-related vaccines and products which the US Government purchases for the Strategic National Stockpile, including ACAM2000.
So, there is more than one reason to vaccinate the entire population on a regular basis, and the government basically props up the entire vaccine industry with what are functionally major annual subsidies. Once a policy decision is made to acquire a vaccine product or establish a “standard of care” involving a vaccine, it is never re-evaluated. Any politician or government administrator that even considers rethinking whether a vaccine policy makes good sense is confronted by the specter of being blamed for any outbreak or cases of that disease that may arise – regardless of how (in)effective or risky that vaccine product may be. So, a combination of public policy realities and regulatory barriers to entry (very, very difficult and expensive to demonstrate improved effectiveness or safety for an improved vaccine when there is already an accepted vaccine on the market) make the vaccine business particularly lucrative and predictable for the large manufacturers that produce licensed vaccines.
What is Smallpox?
Before smallpox was eradicated, it was a serious infectious disease caused by the variola virus. It was contagious—meaning, it spread from one person to another. People who had smallpox had a fever and a distinctive, progressive skin rash.
Most people with smallpox recovered, but about 3 out of every 10 people with the disease died. Many smallpox survivors have permanent scars over large areas of their body, especially their faces. Some are left blind.
Thanks to the success of vaccination, smallpox was eradicated, and no cases of naturally occurring smallpox have happened since 1977. The last natural outbreak of smallpox in the United States occurred in 1949.
First, note that the modern smallpox vaccine is not the same as the inoculation that has been throughout history.
The earliest smallpox prevention efforts date back to at least the 10th century in China, when physicians found that nasal inoculation of susceptible persons with material from smallpox lesions would sometimes provide immunity. The practice of inoculation appears to have arisen independently in several other regions prior to the 17th century, including Africa and India, but the practice did not gain popularity in western Europe until the 18th century. The wife of an English ambassador, Lady Montagu, observed inoculation in Turkey, and later had her own child successfully inoculated during a smallpox epidemic in England. In this procedure a lancet or needle was used to deliver a subcutaneous dose of smallpox material to a susceptible person. The procedure, also known as variolation, was controversial. It generated immunity in many cases, but it also killed some people and contributed to smallpox outbreaks.
In other words, smallpox is deadly. Historically, 30% of the people who contract the virus die. Many people were maimed and disabled permanently.
That said, the designers of this vaccine wanted it work to not only stop disease, but eradicate it completely. So, the smallpox vaccine was designed to be “hot.” The adverse event profile is much greater than than say, that of the influenza vaccine. It is designed to stop infection and as much as possible, transmission. With flu, the vaccine is only partially effective, because otherwise the cure would be worse than the disease for most healthy people.
The CDC knows this. But they have a mission to stop vaccine hesitancy. To do this, they promote vaccines and the vaccine enterprise as safe and effective. Full stop. No exceptions or questioning tolerated.
The smallpox vaccine is old enough that its risks are well known, and those data can be used to help us better understand how the CDC assesses vaccine safety. It is naive to think that all vaccines are “safe” – no matter what and no matter which vaccine. Unfortunately, officials at the CDC appear to have a belief system that all vaccines are “safe and effective”, which belief has become more a view of a world, a sort of object of faith (catechism) rather than objective science.
Frankly, positioning this as a statement of faith, a sort of ritual endorsed by annoited high priests of public health, gives these officials benefit by removing any reason to doubt or question. The determination and public statements that most vaccines are “safe and effective” is a promotional tool. And this propaganda is not holding up to scrutiny. People are becoming more and more distrustful of the whole vaccine enterprise, and for good reason. It is time that public health be honest and transparent. Vaccines carry risk, some vaccines carry a lot more risk than others. In the case of the vaccines for children program, the cumulative risk of the entire expanding vaccine schedule on our children has never been rigorously assessed.
So, let’s get back to assessing the benefits and risks of the smallpox vaccine as a case study.
From the CDC website, today:
“The smallpox vaccine is safe, and it is effective at preventing smallpox disease.”
Let’s see what safe means to the CDC, from their own website:
Serious Side Effects of Smallpox Vaccine
· Heart problems
· Swelling of the brain or spinal cord
· Severe skin diseases
· Spreading the virus to other parts of the body or to another person
· Severe allergic reaction after vaccination
· Accidental infection of the eye (which may cause swelling of the cornea causing watery painful eyes and blurred vision, scarring of the cornea, and blindness)
The CDC then lists the types of people who might have reason to not take the smallpox vaccine…
The risks for serious smallpox vaccine side effects are greater for:
· People with any three of the following risk factors for heart disease: high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, high blood sugar, a family history of heart problems, or smoking
Let’s take a break here and look at just the first four items, the people described as being at greater risk of serious smallpox vaccine side effects:
People with diabetes – that’s 34 million Americans; people with high blood pressure (108 million Americans); people with high cholesterol (76 million Americans); people with heart disease (96 million Americans)
And there’s more:
· People with heart or blood vessel problems, including angina, previous heart attack, artery disease, congestive heart failure, stroke, or other cardiac problems
· People with skin problems, such as eczema [31 million Americans], atopic dermatitis, burns, impetigo, contact dermatitis, chickenpox [more than 95% of American adults have had chicken pox], shingles, psoriasis, or uncontrolled acne
· Infants less than 1 year of age
· Women who are pregnant or breastfeeding
· People who are taking steroid eye drops or ointment
So, while the CDC definitively states that “The smallpox vaccine is safe,” they then exclude huge segments of the population, leaving very few people for whom it might be safe. The list of people at greater risk also includes people with a “family history of heart problems.” Do any of us know even a single person who doesn’t fit that into that category?
The CDC writes that “for every 1,000 people vaccinated, 1 person experienced a serious but not life-threatening reactions. These reactions may require medical attention” The CDC estimates that “1 to 2 people out of every 1 million people vaccinated could die as a result of life-threatening reactions to the vaccine”
However, other researchers place the risks as higher.
A 2021 study assessing vaccine risks in the military population who have received the more modern, smallpox vaccines reported the following.
897,227 SM who received ACAM2000 smallpox vaccine and 450,000 SM who received Dryvax smallpox vaccine were included in the surveillance population. The rate of adjudicated (proven) myopericarditis among ACAM2000 smallpox vaccine recipients was 20.06/100,000 and was significantly higher for males (21.8/100,000) than females (8.5/100,000) and for those < 40 years of age (21.1/100,000) than for those 40 years or older (6.3/100,000). Overall rates for any cardiovascular event (Group 1 plus Group 2) were 113.5/100,000 for ACAM2000 vaccine and 439.3/100,000 for Dryvax vaccine; rate ratio, 0.26 (95% CI, 0.24-0.28). The rates of subjects with one or more defined neurological events were 2.12/100,000 and 1.11/100,000 for ACAM2000 and Dryvax vaccines respectively; rate ratio, 1.91 (95% CI, 0.71-5.10).
The study above is based off of a passive data reporting system, not a clinical trial – so the actual numbers of adverse events are much higher than reported here.
So, cardiac events associated with the smallpox vaccines were at least 1 in every 885 people for the ACAM2000 vaccine and one in every 228 people for Dryvax vaccine in a healthy population. These risks seem highly significant to me, given that the risk of small pox is nil at this time (unless the military knows something that we don’t). Which is why the push to vaccinate all first responders against Smallpox during the Cheney administration (otherwise known as POTUS #43 George W. Bush) was halted – because of too many cases of myopericarditis and no circulating Smallpox. Sound familiar?
The term safe obviously means different things to different scientists and differing cohorts of people.
Note: The Mayo Clinic disagrees with the CDC on the risk and benefits of the smallpox vaccine:
“No cure or treatment for smallpox exists. A vaccine can prevent smallpox, but the risk of the vaccine’s side effects is too high to justify routine vaccination for people at low risk of exposure to the smallpox virus.”
Too high for patients of the Mayo Clinic – but not too high for Americans advised by the CDC. Although a note about the above quote, as 70% of people survive smallpox, it sure seems like they are “cured.” As for treatments, we no longer live in the middle ages – supportive care for infectious diseases work and are highly effective. Words matter – fearporn is not helpful.
To bring this topic home: Is avoiding COVID-19/Omicron worth taking the known and unknown risks of serious adverse events? In some age categories, it might be. In most age categories, it is not worth much risk. For young people, it is not worth any risk, and for children, the risks of the Covid vaccine far outweigh the risks of Covid.
The US Government had relentlessly promoted that “The vaccines are safe and effective,” the same words used for the modern smallpox vaccine. In both cases, safety is a matter of opinion and semantics – not science. Clearly, safety is relative, such as the precautions one might take when skydiving or riding a motorcycle (e.g., having a second parachute, wearing a helmet) – in order to reach the point that an activity is acceptably safe, all the while knowing it’s safer to just skip the activity.
If I proposed a person drink some potion, and said “This potion is safe, unless you are from a family with a history of heart problems,” few people would want the drink. If I added “Oh yeah, and the Mayo Clinic says the risk of side effects from this potion are too high to justify you drinking it, I’d have even fewer takers.
Mandates, which are rigid by definition, seem a bad match for assessments of personal safety, which are, by our nature, flexible and variable. Since the word safe and the idea of safety means different things to different people, such decisions are best left to those who would be most affected by, in this case, vaccination.
The smallpox vaccine shows us what the CDC means when they say something is “safe,” and it isn’t what most people using the word would mean. With risk must come choice. This is the bedrock foundation of modern bioethics and medicine.
After all that we have been through over the last two years, and the admission the the CDC has been withholding data from all of us for political reasons and to avoid “vaccine hesitancy” (which is another way of saying if you knew what the data really show you would not accept the product), who are you going to trust? Your own lying eyes and brain, or what the CDC, HHS, legacy media and the “factchecking” industry tell you?
March 17, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | CDC, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States |
Leave a comment
Thailand’s National Health Security Office (NHSO) as of March 8 has paid 1.509 billion baht (the equivalent of $45.65 million) to settle COVID-19 vaccine injury compensation claims.
The payouts were made to 12,714 people, including family members of some people who died as a result of the vaccine.
An additional 891 claims are pending. A total of 15,933 claims have been filed since the start of the compensation program on May 19, 2021. Of the 2,328 complaints that were rejected, 875 are being appealed.
The figures released on March 9 represent a continued increase in claims approved by Thailand’s NHSO. As of Dec. 26, 2021, only 8,470 claims had been approved for compensation.
The vaccines being administered in Thailand are primarily the British-Swedish AstraZeneca vaccine, and the Chinese-made Sinovac vaccine.
Thailand’s vaccine injury compensation program is an example of a “no-fault compensation program.”
As reported by The Defender in December 2021, “no-fault” refers to a measure put in place by public health authorities, private insurance companies, manufacturers and/or other stakeholders to compensate individuals harmed by vaccines.
Such programs allow a person who has sustained a vaccine injury to be compensated financially, without having to attribute fault or error to a specific manufacturer or individual.
No-fault compensation schemes are one of three options used by various countries to handle vaccine injury claims.
The other two options include allowing vaccine-injured people to sue private-sector actors, such as vaccine manufacturers or their insurers, or to place the full financial burden on the patient.
In the case of Thailand, the compensation scheme sets forth the following payout categories:
- For cases of death or permanent disability, each family receives 400,000 baht ($11,928).
- Those who sustained a disability that affects their livelihood or who lost a limb receive 240,000 baht ($7,157).
- For other injuries or illnesses sustained as a result of COVID vaccination, a maximum of 100,000 baht ($2,982) is paid out.
For the third category of claims, the specific amount awarded is contingent on the level of damages found to have been caused by the vaccine, as well as the financial state of the patient.
When the compensation fund was set up in 2021, Dr. Jadej Thammatacharee, the NHSO’s secretary-general, stated the available funds would total 100 million baht ($2.98 million), but that initial budget already has been exceeded many times over.
Thailand’s “no-fault” system makes it easy to secure compensation, at least when compared to similar schemes in the U.S. and other western countries.
Claims can be submitted by the individuals in question, or their families, at the hospital where they were vaccinated, at provincial health offices, or at NHSO regional offices. Moreover, claims can be entered up to two years after the adverse effects first occur.
Any individual claiming injury or side effects can file a claim for initial financial aid to provide an unspecified amount to claimants prior to confirmation that the injuries resulted from the vaccine.
If it is later determined the adverse effects were not a result of the vaccine, the claimants are entitled to keep this initial financial payout.
The turnaround time on claims also appears to be quick, when compared to the U.S. and several other countries.
The Bangkok Post reported that 13 panels across Thailand meet on a weekly basis to consider compensation claims. Those that are approved are paid within five days. Rejected claims can be appealed directly to the NHSO secretary-general within 30 days.
Available figures from the Thai authorities do not break down the number awarded claims for deaths, serious injuries and disabilities, or other injuries and adverse effects.
However, according to information provided by Thailand’s Department of Disease Control (DDC), as of Oct. 24, 2021, three deaths were linked to COVID vaccination.
According to Chawetsan Namwat, the DDC’s director for emergency health hazard and disease control, two of these deaths were a result of thrombosis. The other death came after the onset of a severe allergic reaction and shock following the administration of the vaccine.
Of the 842 deaths that were investigated up until that date, 541 were found to be “coincidental events,” including cardiovascular disease, stroke, pulmonary embolism, blood infections, lung inflammation, lung cancer and breast cancer.
For an additional 66 deaths, it was inconclusive whether the vaccine led to the fatalities — with 47 of these individuals also having been diagnosed with cardiovascular disease.
A further 41 deaths were categorized as “unclassified,” as there was not enough information available to make a determination regarding whether the deaths were linked to the vaccines.
According to a Feb. 18 briefing from healthdata.org, COVID-19 was the 13th most common cause of death in the country for the preceding week, behind such causes as chronic kidney disease, liver cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes mellitus and road injuries.
Ischemic heart disease and stroke were recorded as the top two causes of death in Thailand during the same period.
U.S. remains ‘stuck’ at one approved vaccine injury claim since November 2021
As previously reported by The Defender, as of Nov. 1, 2021, only one COVID vaccine injury claim had been approved for compensation by the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP).
As of today, the figure remains at one — a claim which has not yet been paid. No new claims were compensated in the interim.
As reported by the CICP:
“As of March 1, 2022, the CICP has not compensated any COVID-19 countermeasures claims.
“Six COVID-19 countermeasure claims have been denied compensation because the standard of proof for causation was not met and/or a covered injury was not sustained.
“One COVID-19 countermeasure claim, a COVID-19 vaccine claim due to an anaphylactic reaction, has been determined eligible for compensation and is pending a review of eligible expenses.”
Last week, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) introduced the Countermeasure Injury Compensation Amendment Act to help expedite claims by those injured by COVID vaccines.
The bill would amend the CICP to improve responsiveness, create a commission to examine the injuries directly caused as a result of COVID countermeasures and allow those whose claims have been previously rejected to resubmit claims for new consideration.
With only one claim approved for compensation and six claims denied, the CICP has a backlog of approximately 7,050 claims, with 4,097 claims alleging injuries or death from COVID vaccines, and an additional 2,959 claims alleging injuries or death from other COVID countermeasures.
Since 2010, a total of 7,547 compensation claims have been filed with the CICP. Only 41 were deemed eligible for compensation; still fewer (30) were actually compensated.
Notably, as of the March 4 release of Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) data, a total of 1,168,894 adverse effects following COVID vaccination have been reported, including 25,158 deaths and 46,515 cases of permanent disability.
Historically, VAERS has been shown to report only 1% of actual vaccine adverse events.
CICP was established under the aegis of the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act of 2005. The PREP act was developed to coordinate the response to a “public health emergency.”
The law is scheduled to remain in place until 2024.
CICP differs from another U.S. federal vaccine compensation program, the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), which was established after the passage of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986.
VICP, however, covers only those vaccines routinely administered to children and to pregnant women. To help fund the program, those vaccines are subject to a federal 75-cent excise tax.
To date, more than 8,400 VICP claims have been settled, out of more than 24,000 petitions, with a total of $4.6 billion issued in settlements.
The small number of approved compensation claims and the slow review process has recently led to calls for the modernization of vaccine compensation programs in the U.S.
Other western countries appear to have developed similarly cumbersome compensation procedures.
For instance, Australia’s newly established no-fault vaccine compensation system was described as “intentionally complex and narrowly targeted.”
Canada, which also only recently established a no-fault compensation program, as of Dec. 16, 2021, had approved fewer than five of 400 claims filed. More recent data from Canada’s Vaccine Injury Support Program is unavailable as of this writing.
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., is an independent journalist and researcher based in Athens, Greece.
© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.
March 17, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Aletho News | Australia, Canada, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, Thailand, United States |
Leave a comment
This morning, the UK government will publish the revised Online Safety Bill. It’s a landmark piece of legislation that has been in the works for five years. The government claims that the bill will protect people from being exposed to harmful content on the internet.
Critics have called it the biggest threat to free speech in modern times. According to SKY News:
The Online Safety Bill has been in the works for about five years and will see communications regulator Ofcom get the power to issue fines or block sites that break the rules.
Additions to the bill include the power to hold executives criminally liable if they don’t comply with Ofcom information requests two months after the law begins, rather than the two years previously proposed.
Managers will also now be criminally liable for destroying evidence, failing to attend Ofcom interviews – or giving false information, or for obstructing the regulator if it enters their offices.
The biggest social media firms must also address “legal but harmful” content under the updated proposals.
They will have to do risk assessments on the type of harms that could appear and state in their terms of service how they plan to tackle them.
What constitutes “legal but harmful” material will be set out by the government in secondary legislation.
Have you ever read anything as chilling as “social media firms must address legal but harmful content?”
That’s what the Online Safety Bill is really all about. The government couldn’t give a damn about child safety. Just look at what they’ve done to children over the past two years.
No, they couldn’t care less if kids are targeted by paedophiles on the internet, or if they’re exposed to images of suicide and self-harming. I’m also pretty sure that the government doesn’t give a rats arse about racist abuse.
The Online Safety Bill is a censors charter, plain and simple.
Labour’s Lucy Powell compared alleged “disinformation” spread by the “Russian regime” to covid conspiracy theories. This is from the BBC news website this morning:
Labour’s shadow culture secretary Lucy Powell said the bill’s delays “allowed the Russian regime’s disinformation to spread like wildfire online”.
She added: “Other groups have watched and learned their tactics, with Covid conspiracy theories undermining public health and climate deniers putting our future at risk.”
Conspiracy theories undermining public health? Really? Is she referring to the thousands of doctors and scientists who warned us that lockdowns were far more devastating for public health than viruses?
Does she mean the legions of epidemiologists and virologists who say that the vaccines are unsafe, untested and are causing widespread harm? Given the chance, would she jail a GP for advising a patient to swerve the jabs?
My God, the bill actually proposes that “knowingly spreading medical misinformation” should carry a penalty of two years in prison. Does Powell think that scientists should be jailed for dissenting from the opinions of politicians?
“Climate deniers are putting our future at risk,” she said. What the hell? What a glorious example of Orwell’s newspeak. Climate denier. What is that? Who ever denied that there’s a climate? Powell is insane.
The Great Reset agenda is real. It will become more obvious to people in the coming months and years as they tighten the screws and interfere more and more in people’s lives.
The Online Safety Bill is a pre-emptive strike on the independent media. It really is as simple as that. They plan to make life unbearable for all of us. They want rid of the independent media in time for when the shit really hits the fan.
The bill will pass. The clock is now ticking on The Richie Allen Show and every other independent news outlet.
March 17, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Human rights, UK |
Leave a comment
The New York State Health Department “misled the public” regarding Covid-19 deaths in nursing homes and failed to account for over 4,000 deaths, according to a report from the New York state comptroller.
The report, released on Tuesday, claimed that “instead of providing accurate and reliable information during a public health emergency, the Department conformed its presentation to the Executive’s narrative” and presented data in a way which “misled the public.”
In a footnote, the report clarified that “the Executive” referred to, among others, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and his staff. Cuomo resigned as governor in August 2021 due to sexual misconduct allegations. Before his resignation, critics repeatedly accused Cuomo of covering up Covid-19 deaths in nursing homes.
Deaths in New York nursing homes weren’t accurately reported, according to Tuesday’s release, and the Health Department allegedly “understated the number of deaths” by “as much as 50%.” Whether this was an error or “a deliberate decision” is uncertain, the comptroller declared.
One way in which the New York State Health Department allegedly misled the public was by changing the criteria to only report deaths which occurred in-home, excluding the many deaths of nursing home residents which occurred in hospitals and elsewhere.
“All told, for the nearly 10-month period from April 2020 to February 2021, the Department failed to account for almost 4,100 lives lost due to COVID-19,” the report said.
March 16, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception | Covid-19, Human rights |
Leave a comment
Aletho News 