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The CDC Discovers Actual Public Health, Just in Time

BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | FEBRUARY 26, 2022

One day I’m reading an internal memo commissioned by the Democratic Party to provide advice to dealing with Covid policy. The next day I’m reading headlines about how the CDC has drastically altered its advice on how to deal with Covid.

Is there a relationship? At this point, only the hopelessly naive would think otherwise.

Let’s look at the memo produced by Impact Research. Some excerpts:

  • Democrats have a tremendous opportunity to claim an incredible, historic success – they vaccinated hundreds of millions of people, prevented the economy from going into freefall, kept small businesses from going under, and got people back to work safely. Because of President Biden and Democrats, we CAN safely return to life feeling much more normal – and they should claim that proudly.
  • Six in ten Americans describe themselves as “worn out” by the pandemic. The more we talk about the threat of COVID and onerously restrict people’s lives because of it, the more we turn them against us and show them we’re out of touch with their daily realities.
  • [I]t means recognizing that the threat of COVID is no longer what it was even a year ago and therefore should not be treated as such – shutdowns, masks, and lockdowns were meant to save lives when there was not yet a vaccine that could do that. Voters know we now have the tools in the toolkit to be responsible in combatting and living with COVID – vaccines and boosters to minimize illness, and masks and social distancing around vulnerable groups.
  • They think the virus is here to stay, and 83% say the pandemic will be over when it’s a mild illness like the flu rather than COVID being completely gone, and 55% prefer that COVID should be treated as an endemic disease. And that’s what most Americans are dealing with—a disease with fatality rates like the flu—because most of us took the personal responsibility to protect ourselves and our families by getting vaccinated.
  • Stop talking about restrictions and the unknown future ahead. If we focus on how bad things still are and how much worse they could get, we set Democrats up as failures unable to navigate us through this. When 99% of Americans can get vaccinated, we cause more harm than we prevent with voters by going into our third year talking about restrictions. And, if Democrats continue to hold a posture that prioritizes COVID precautions over learning how to live in a world where COVID exists, but does not dominate, they risk paying dearly for it in November.

A few points.

This memo is not epidemiology but politics, most strongly illustrated by the idea that polling should make the difference as to whether a pathogen is pandemic or endemic. The constant incantation of “vaccines” here has nothing to do with the known data: they have nowhere stopped infection or spread, a point which the memo obscures with the line about how they “minimize illness.” They minimize serious outcomes for some strains so long as they last.

From a policy point of view, there are two main features that stand out: Covid is here to stay and “most people in the US will eventually get COVID-19” (thereby hinting at the reality that vaccines are not effective in the way that Biden/Fauci/Walensky promised) and therefore the focus should be on protecting the vulnerable.

There is nothing new about this. It was always true! You can shout “Omicron” all day but it was also true with Alpha and Delta as well. The virus should have been treated rationally the entire time and policies that have wrecked public health should have been off the table from 2020. The memo writers did not cite the Great Barrington Declaration but they might as well have.

As for how the Democrats somehow prevented an economic freefall, the worst economic outcomes are very clearly in Democratic-controlled states that retained restrictions for nearly two years in some places, including keeping schools closed. There is a reason for the mass migration that this has inspired.

If we are looking for thriving economies, look to the states that never closed up or opened earliest: South Dakota, Florida, Texas, Georgia, and so on. So none of this is remotely true but, hey, this is politics, right?, so it doesn’t have to be true.

The real problem that the Democrats need to solve is revealed in this chart:

Now, let us consider the dramatic turnaround at the CDC that came out the very next day. The full PDF is embedded below.

Here are the talking points handed to the director. It’s not just about masking, which is being relaxed. The CDC says there needs to be a dramatic shift away from endless monitoring of cases that are overwhelmingly mild and instead focus only on actual sickness that lands people in the hospital and threatens life. We need to stop obsessing about cases and start looking mainly at “medically significant disease.” The focus should be on “protecting the most vulnerable.”

This makes all of us want to say, shout, scream: THANK YOU!

In order to justify this change, the CDC posts four sets of charts on Covid prevalence during episodes of the pandemic. The last chart illustrates the point that an exclusive focus on controlling the spread is utterly preposterous at this point. Under the old protocols, the whole country should be back in lockdown. It’s unimaginable what attempting this now would cause.

To be sure, all of this is enormously frustrating for those of us engaged in this battle for two years. Instead of focusing on getting sick people well, the CDC experimented with wild guidelines that imagined some kind of society-wide solution that seemed designed to crush the virus while vast amounts of social and economic activity were shut down by law. This necessitated a crushing of freedoms, including of travel, association, commerce, religion, and, eventually even speech.

The CDC nowhere admits this much less apologizes for it. Two years in, the CDC seems to have rediscovered the traditional practice of public health, and has justified this new wisdom based on changed conditions, while never even bothering to claim that its previous measures and guidelines achieved anything along the way.

We’ve seen a massive collapse in public health, economic vitality, and essential rights, while closing schools and wrecking education and so much more, all in the name of virus control, even as the evidence is now overwhelming that the entire enterprise was not only a distraction from what should have happened (therapeutics and protecting the vulnerable) but also an astonishing failure.

Why the change? It had to happen at some point. The entire machinery of lockdowns and mandates were destined to fail. As to the timing of the reversal, it’s hard to resist the speculation that it is entirely political. See the memo above.

Still, there is a worrisome aspect to the CDC’s announcement. They reserve the right to do it all over again. “We want to give people a break from things like mask-wearing, when these metrics are better, and then have the ability to reach for them again should things worsen,” she said.

No one should be satisfied with a politically motivated change in the messaging. We need fundamental regime change to make sure that nothing like this can ever happen again.

Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown. 

February 27, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Why does this influential, unelected globalist entity really exist?

By Rachel Marsden | RT | February 26, 2022

When Canadian parliamentarian, Colin Carrie, of the Conservative Party, asked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government this week how many Canadian ministers were actually “on board with the World Economic Forum agenda” — before his connection “broke up” in the videoconference — he and the Canadians he represents deserved an honest response rather than accusations of spreading “disinformation”, as left-leaning New Democratic Party MP Charlie Angus did.

The World Economic Forum (WEF), colloquially known as “Davos”, for those familiar with the annual pilgrimage by the international elite to the eponymous town in Switzerland, has been on the tips of many tongues over the past two years — notably within the context of the Covid-19 crisis. Just before the Covid pandemic, on October 15, 2019, the organization announced that it was holding a “live simulation exercise to prepare public and private leaders for pandemic response.” If that sounds oddly coincidental, buckle up, because it only gets weirder.

Speaking at a United Nations videoconference in the fall of 2020, Justin Trudeau raised eyebrows, with a hint of a potential link between the global pandemic and the Forum. “This pandemic has provided an opportunity for a reset,” Trudeau said. “This is our chance to accelerate our pre-pandemic efforts, to re-imagine economic systems that actually address global challenges like extreme poverty, inequality and climate change,” he added, evoking a “reset” concept much promoted by the WEF from the onset of the pandemic, that frames the crisis as an opportunity to fundamentally change the way that developed societies function.

Then in August 2021, Dutch MP Gideon van Meijeren asked Prime Minister Mark Rutte about a letter he wrote to WEF Founder Klaus Schwab in which he said that Schwab’s book, “Covid-19: The Great Reset,” published on July 9, 2020, within the first few months of the pandemic, “inspired him to build back better.” The phrase also happens to be the name of US President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda, which includes increased wealth transfer into the murky black hole of climate change and “social spending.”

It would be easy to chalk it all up to creepy rhetorical coincidence if there wasn’t an actual link between Schwab, Davos, and elected officials like Rutte and Trudeau. It’s a link about which even Schwab himself has bragged. In 2017, he told an audience at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government: “What we are very proud of is the young generation, like Prime Minister Trudeau… We penetrate the cabinets.”  

He’s not kidding. Current Canadian finance minister and deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland, is on the WEF’s board of trustees, alongside former Bank of Canada and Bank of England governor, Mark Carney. Freeland was last seen announcing asset freezes and crackdown measures against truckers and supporters in the streets of Canada demanding an end to heavy handed Covid mandates and restrictions. And Carney recently qualified the Freedom Convoy as “sedition” in a hysterical opinion piece published in the Globe and Mail newspaper.

It’s only logical that when citizens start seeing visible “World Economic Forum” branding on those taking – or publicly advocating for – drastic and unprecedented liberticidal measures against them, they start asking questions about the nature of the organization’s influence.

No citizen in any country actually voted to adopt the Davos agenda. And it’s debatable whether a sufficient number actually would. According to its own website, the WEF agenda includes increased digital integration and digitization, “urgent” climate change response, and a vision of a “Fourth Industrial Revolution” that is “characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies and industries, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human.” The organization is also exploring the notion of “human enhancement”.

And those are just the aspects that are public. It all sounds like it has the potential to give rise to a dystopian reality, particularly coupled with the previously unimaginable measures taken by democratic governments under a sanitary pretext over the past two years. And who, or what, influences the organization itself? A massive list of multinational entities with fiduciary obligations to increase shareholder wealth, according to the organization’s website. The WEF would like for the average citizen to believe that everything it does is for our own interests. But it’s difficult to imagine what the organization’s backers actually gain by empowering average citizens rather than maintaining control over them.

Nonetheless, what is glaringly obvious is that the WEF serves as a clearinghouse and consolidator for ideas that promote a one-size fits all global agenda that has become interchangeable with the Western establishment status quo. There is nothing more undemocratic than elected officials serving any other master than their people.

Much more light deserves to be shed on this supranational entity, its string-pullers, and the extent to which their agenda trickles down into our daily lives.

Rachel Marsden is a columnist, political strategist and host of an independently produced French-language program that airs on Sputnik France.

February 27, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Updated Homeland Security Bulletin Declares War on Critical Thinking

Health Freedom Defense | February 22, 2022

In many quarters, the hypothesis is now being formulated that we are experiencing the end of a world, that of bourgeois democracies founded on rights, parliaments, and the separation of powers, and that this is giving way to a new despotism that, as regards the pervasiveness of control and the cessation of political activity, will be worse than the totalitarianism that we have known before.

American political scientists call it the Security State, a state in which “for security reasons” (in this case, for the sake of “public health,” a term that suggests the notorious committees of public health during the Terror), any limit can be imposed upon individual liberties. – Giorgio Agamben, “New Reflections”

On February 7th, 2022 the Department of Homeland Security issued a new bulletin, defining what it considers to be the “primary terrorism-related threats” to the United States. This directive replaced their previous directive which was set to expire on February 8th.

Over the past decade as new directives were put in place they have, in their essence, been slight modifications of previous bulletins – all of them built upon the same theme. That theme, for a full decade and more, was the Security State’s declared “War on Terror” with the “threat of foreign enemies and foreign influence” regarded as the essential focal point and recurring theme of these memoranda.

While “domestic enemies” were nominally mentioned in past memoranda these references have been in passing and discussed within the context of potential influence from foreign actors. Without fail, the theme of these past seasonal DHS directives featured the constant drumbeat of “enemies from the outside” who sought to interfere with the internal affairs of the United States.

This most recent DHS bulletin issued February 7th changes course dramatically as illustrated through the opening sentence:

The United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories.

A paragraph later the bulletin states:

Key factors contributing to the current heightened threat environment include:

(1) The proliferation of false or misleading narratives, which sow discord or undermine public trust in U.S. government institutions:

For example, there is a widespread online proliferation of false or misleading narratives regarding unsubstantiated widespread election fraud and COVID-19.

These statements represent a radical departure from previous memos. We see a marked shift in the DHS narrative from battling the ill-defined outside influence of “extremist media branches of al-Qa’ida and its affiliates, as well as ISIS” to combating an amorphous terrorist threat from within which utilizes misleading narratives that “undermine trust in US Government institutions.”

This shift in the DHS narrative goes beyond just imagined domestic threats by suggesting that speech itself can now be seen as an act of terrorism. As is often the case, none of the terms are clearly defined or specific examples given, as to what might comprise “misleading narratives” or infractions that “undermine trust in government institutions.”

Further in the bulletin, we find this paragraph which references Covid-19 policies and the experimental Covid-19 injections:

Meanwhile, COVID-19 mitigation measures—particularly COVID-19 vaccine and mask mandates—have been used by domestic violent extremists to justify violence since 2020 and could continue to inspire these extremists to target government, healthcare, and academic institutions that they associate with those measures.

Again no specific examples are given in regards to these purported violent acts which arose from dissatisfaction with Covid-19 policies. The allegation is further mystified by the suggestion that these never-defined acts could inspire future acts of violence.

With such accusatory and suggestive language, this memo should be seen as not only an assault on free speech but also as opening up the door for pre-crime.

All of this must be placed within the context of how the Covid-19 “pandemic” was used as a rationale for locking down the country and suspending our civil liberties for the past two years, for vaporizing businesses by government-issued Covid policies, all resulting in soaring energy/housing/food costs as well as record-level inflationary pressure.

Further implications of this directive must also include an understanding that “our way out”, according to this government, has been a mandated injection (which financially benefits one of the most powerful industries in our nation) and which appears to be causing unprecedented harm.

When seen in total, this bulletin appears to be the government’s initial attempt to quell all discussion and debate on what has to be considered the most reckless and devastating public health policies enacted in this country’s history.

It now appears the long warned about “war on domestic terror” is here. This war involves a Kafkaesque criminalization of whatever the government deems “extremist views” or “disinformation.”

Equally concerning to the attacks we are seeing on our First Amendment rights of free speech and freedom of association is how, through the rationale of the Covid-19 narrative, we are seeing in real-time the “War on Terror” being replaced by the “War on The Virus” as the raison d’être of the National Security State. The danger of such a directive and policy position, if allowed to stand unchallenged, lies in future “Covid-19 Pandemics” being used as rationales for creating more authoritarian forms of governance and serving as a template for how to manufacture perpetual states of emergency.

February 27, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

US TRUCKERS HIT THE HIGHWAY IN PROTEST OF MANDATES

The Highwire with Del Bigtree | February 24, 2022

Freedom Convoy USA 2022 Organizer, Kyle Sefcik, went viral this week with his video message to President Biden to end the mandates, and his plan for peaceful protest of the draconian measures.

Convoy updates.

#FreedomConvoyUSA #KyleSefcik #TruckerConvoy #FreedomConvoyUSA2022

See also:

CDC REFUSING TO PUBLISH DATA

And:

IS CLIMATE CHANGE THE NEW COVID?

February 27, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Solidarity and Activism, Video | , , | Leave a comment

The Glorious Flop of New Zealand Virus Control

BY IAN MILLER | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | FEBRUARY 26, 2022

An infuriatingly consistent aspect of the mainstream media’s COVID coverage was their determination to prematurely credit a country with a wildly successful set of policy interventions.

While there has been no track record of universally accurate predictions or expectations, the desire to claim victory as far back as spring 2020 has led to subsequent embarrassments as trends change.

Naturally, New Zealand is no stranger to such untimely praise, with the BBC in July 2020 doing an in-depth look at how New Zealand became “COVID free.”

Of course, it was because New Zealand “… locked down early and aimed for elimination” and achieved “effective communication and public compliance.”

This is really the whole problem in a nutshell, isn’t it?

Assuming that elimination was possible through effective communication, compliance and early lockdowns ignores the inevitably that COVID will eventually spread throughout the population, whenever you “open up.”

Elimination of COVID throughout the world is and always was impossible, and therefore Fauci’s assertion that COVID could be “eliminated in certain countries” was inane and virtually impossible.

So how successful has New Zealand been in eliminating COVID in the long term through effective communication, public compliance and early lockdowns?

Well. The numbers speak for themselves.

When the BBC wrote the article explaining New Zealand’s remarkable success in eliminating the virus, they were averaging 1.5 cases each day. It’s now 2,918 cases each day.

That’s an increase of nearly 195,000%.

Elimination is a pipe dream.

No matter what policy interventions they’ve added, no matter how many early lockdowns they’ve tried, COVID has not been eliminated.

Remember how New Zealand’s amazing tracking and tracing system allowed them to identify transmission that could have only occurred via aerosols? And recall how all of the pre-pandemic guidance on masking suggested that masks could not stop aerosols? Did that stop New Zealand from using mask mandates to try and continue their elimination goals?

Of course not!

The following are the currently enforced rules on face masks in New Zealand:

  • As a general rule, you should wear a face mask whenever you are indoors. The exceptions are at your home or your place of work if it is not public facing. Your employer may encourage you to wear a face mask even if your job is not public facing.
  • When it is hard to physically distance from people you do not know, we encourage you to wear a face mask.
  • Everyone must wear a mask that is attached to the face by loops around the ears or head. This means people can no longer use scarves, bandannas or t-shirts as face coverings.

We know New Zealanders are complying because the BBC assured us that their success was due to population compliance, but the survey data backs that up as well:

Mask wearing has been consistently high since the mandate came into effect in August, yet cases have exploded anyway.

None of it has mattered.

And this isn’t an insignificant increase. New Zealand’s now reporting more new cases adjusted for population than the United States, and identical numbers to the United Kingdom:

Working perfectly!

Elimination Through Vaccination

In the previously referenced interview, Fauci said that the most successful way to “eliminate” COVID was to reach extraordinary levels of vaccination uptake in the population.

While the Our World in Data download hasn’t been updated in the past week, over 88% of the population had received at least one vaccination dose in New Zealand by February 15th.

The numbers are even more impressive when considering only those over 12 years of age. 95% of everyone over in that demographic has been at least partially vaccinated or booked their appointment. 94% are fully vaccinated:

Nearly 2.3 million people over 12 have been given boosters, roughly 53% of that entire population.

Clearly those incredible rates of uptake must have been enough to maintain the “blanket of herd immunity” that Fauci claimed would be achievable with 75-85% of the population vaccinated.

Not exactly!

Whenever you reference the dramatic failure of Australia or New Zealand to maintain “zero COVID” lockdowns and “elimination” strategies, adherents to the cult of inaccurate expertise will respond by claiming their goal was only to eliminate cases until widespread vaccination.

By allowing for vaccines to blunt the impact of cases, these countries would prevent surges in hospitalizations. We already saw that this was wildly off in Australia:

But what about New Zealand? Maybe they’ve been able to successfully stave off any surge in severe cases due to their exceptional vaccination rate:

Well. Not exactly.

Hospitalizations have risen dramatically since January and continue to rise significantly each day.

News reports from New Zealand sound like those from any generic location in the US where local doctors report concerns of hospitals being overwhelmed:

Authorities anticipate Omicron will become the predominant Covid-19 variant in New Zealand within just two to four weeks of it being introduced into the community – and hospitals are bracing to be “swamped”.

Dr John Bonning, a frontline emergency department doctor and immediate past president of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine, said EDs were already under “enormous duress”.

So their elimination strategy did not prevent a dramatic increase in cases, nor a concerning, overwhelming surge of hospitalizations.

And deaths, while thankfully still low, have increased in recent months as well:

New Zealand’s supposed “elimination” through their zero COVID policy has completely collapsed.

Mask mandates, as their own research indicated, have not prevented surges. Elimination until vaccination has not prevented surges. Zero COVID has been an unmitigated failure, as any rational person would have known and suggested as far back as summer 2020.

They’ve maintained an unearned sense of superiority, exemplified in this quote from the BBC’s story:

He says it is “a bit of a puzzle for us at a distance to understand why” with the UK’s extensive scientific expertise and health care, “you haven’t looked at the evidence and worked out a pattern like New Zealand’s”.

The UK government has previously defended its coronavirus strategy, saying its approach was “being guided by the science.”

That undeserved attitude can no longer be maintained.

The policies that never had the slightest possibility of long term success, the policies that Fauci claimed could be successful in “certain countries,” have turned into yet another example of the delusions of hubris.

While many areas are lifting mandates, they’re doing so without acknowledging the underlying flaws in their strategy. Iceland’s health ministry summed up the inescapable reality of COVID while announcing an end to all restrictions:

“Widespread societal resistance to COVID-19 is the main route out of the epidemic,” the ministry said in a statement, citing infectious disease authorities.

“To achieve this, as many people as possible need to be infected with the virus as the vaccines are not enough, even though they provide good protection against serious illness,” it added.

Until they understand and accept those sentiments, there will always be excuses for politicians and public health officials to bring back their prized, ineffectual interventions.

New Zealand is the latest in a long list of countries to be hailed as showing the world the “right” way to prevent surges; to keep COVID under control.

But as with masks, vaccine passports and “early” lockdowns, zero COVID never had a chance of working — despite the endless media and expert praise.

As always, Eric Feigl-Ding had absolutely no idea what he was talking about:

February 26, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , | Leave a comment

Public health needs restrictions

It is time for a taste of its own medicine

By Vinay Prasad MD MPH | February 26, 2022

Just yesterday, I read that NYC public schools will remove the OUTDOOR mask mandate starting Monday. How Brave!

Let’s reflect on this for a moment. NYC school district has been requiring children wear masks OUTSIDE all this time. Years after we knew the virus almost never spreads outside. During recess when kids play, forced to wear a mask while exerting themselves. Wow!

Whoever made the policy is an idiot. No way around it. They are not fit for policymaking. They abused the power of government to coerce children (at incredibly low risk of bad outcomes) to wear a mask in a setting where the virus simply does not spread. In other words, they participated in something done in the name of public health, which actually made human beings worse off. Worse, they used coercive force to do it.

Post-COVID we need to seriously talk about setting restrictions. But not on people. We need to place restrictions on public health and things done in the name of public health. We cannot allow individuals who are poor at weighing risk and benefit and uncertainty to coerce human beings, disproportionately the young and powerless (waiters/ servers) to participate in interventions that have no data supporting them, for years on end.

Public health be the subject of restrictions; a taste of its own medicine. Some of those restrictions should be placed on governments, but others on private actors who are appealing to public health. Here is what that might look like:

  1. In an emergency situation, if governments mandate or advise individual level behavioral interventions (e.g. masking), those entities should have to generate robust data in 3 months (cluster RCTs) to demonstrate efficacy, or the intervention is automatically revoked. Some may argue 3 months is too short, but if it is truly a crisis warranting emergency proclamations, then you should see a signal in 3 months, and governments can expand sample size to ensure prompt results.
  2. If a trial is positive that does not mean the policy continues forever, but must be debated (net benefit/ net harms/ tradeoffs) by the body politic.
  3. Private entities should be prohibited from mandating emergency drug products. Check out this tweet by my conversation partner— VPZD PODCAST— Zubin Daminia:

    Cal Academy is a museum in Golden Gate Park. Do they have any business nor ability to mandate boosters in adolescents? No, it is absurd. Two senior officials with the FDA— Gruber and Krause- resigned over this decision. Paul Offit and Luciano Boro and others have been publicly critical of boosters for young people, and Cal Academy mandates it? Cal Academy is not qualified to make this decision.

  4. The same is true for daycares and private schools that have already mandated kids vax 5 to 11. Should random private individuals be permitted to coerce vaccination under Emergency Use Authorization (EUA)? I believe restrictions must be put in place to prevent them from doing such a thing. Perhaps it should be explicit that it is illegal to coerce any medical product under EUA status. This would stop Cal Academy and private schools.
  5. The same is true for boosters. Colleges should be prohibited from mandating medical products under the auspices of EUA. What is going on right now on college campuses is astonishing foolishness.
  6. Hospital patients deserve a bill of rights. Prohibitions on visitation, particularly of children or older people; especially near the end of life were cruel and disgusting. Even long after PPE was adequate— into 2022— these rules continued. Patients need a bill of rights, and hospitals should face severe restrictions on their ability to banning visitors. To my knowledge the US has not— like Hong Kong— Separated a baby from her parents, but our rules are unjust.
  7. Do people have the right to return to the their home country? Read this excellent article about Australians trapped in India. This is an important issue.
  8. Who decides if schools should close? Schools are too important to permit local decision makers to close them for years on end. In the USA, this happened along partisan lines, with the most progressive cities punishing children the most. There has to be some bill of rights for kids to prevent this from happening. Schools might need to close in rare circumstances in the future, but this should be done only in extraordinary times, and no one can justify closing schools only in Democratic cities. Kids need a real champion, and it is not the AAP.

These are just a few examples of where governments or institutions have overreached in the name of public health, but there are many more. Post COVID, the group that needs to face the strongest restrictions is public health itself. We must careful remove the power we have granted public health, which has often been misused.

Vinay Prasad MD MPH is a hematologist-oncologist and Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California San Francisco. He runs the VKPrasad lab at UCSF, which studies cancer drugs, health policy, clinical trials and better decision making. He is author of over 300 academic articles, and the books Ending Medical Reversal (2015), and Malignant (2020).

February 26, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

WHO still pushing Global Vaccine Passports

The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | February 24, 2022

Whilst many countries have been making noises about removing Covid passes, they still remain for a lot of international travel. It has been obvious from the beginning, with the amount of money and effort spent on them, that vaccine passes wouldn’t disappear without a fight.

Today, this concern has been reinforced with the World Health Organization (WHO) signing a contract with T-Systems (a Deutsche Telecom subsidiary) for the production of a global QR system to make digital vaccination certificates easier to introduce in the future. The press release in TotalTelecom says that the WHO is setting up a gateway to enable QR codes on electronic vaccination certificates to be checked across national borders.

The head of WHO’s Digital Health and Innovation Department, Garrett Mehl said that they would be “supporting member states in building national and regional trust networks and verification technology. The WHO’s gateway service also serves as a bridge between regional systems. It can also be used as part of future vaccination campaigns and home-based records”.

T-Systems have already developed the EU’s Digital Covid Certificates which are used by more than 60 countries already. They also developed the German tracing app which had event check-ins and universal certificate storage. With WHO membership comprising of 194 Member States, this Covid certification scheme looks to be massively expanded.

Furthermore, even if Covid won’t allow them to roll-out their certification scheme, the WHO already states that it wants the system to serve as a standard procedure for other vaccinations such as polio or yellow fever.

Now is not the time to let one’s guard down. Freedoms are being returned with one hand whilst being further curtailed with the other. Instead of celebrating the return of freedoms that should never have been removed in the first place, a continued effort should remain to ensure all restrictions are gone and can never be reinstated in the future. This new global vaccination passport should be the next thing to be scrapped, how every much money it wastes.

February 24, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

CA Bill would punish Doctors over COVID ‘Misinformation,’ as other states move to protect Doctors’ rights

By David Charbonneau, Ph.D. | The Defender | February 23, 2022

Before the U.S. Supreme Court last month blocked the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates for large employers and allowed the mandate for healthcare workers to stand, all eyes were on the feds when it came to COVID-related policies.

But state lawmakers also have been busy drafting bills in an effort to shape COVID policies closer to home.

The California Assembly, for example, introduced over the past six months a flurry of bills designed to strengthen vaccination mandates and regulate treatment options for patients.

For example, Sen. Richard Pan (D-Sacramento) last month introduced legislation proposing COVID vaccine mandates for all K-12 students in California schools.

And this month, Assembly Member Evan Low (D-Campbell) introduced legislation (AB 2098) that, according to the Los Angeles Times, would “make it easier for the Medical Board of California to discipline doctors who promote COVID-19 misinformation by classifying it as unprofessional conduct.”

The bill defines “unprofessional conduct” as any action a physician or surgeon takes “to disseminate or promote misinformation or disinformation related to COVID-19, including false or misleading information regarding the nature and risks of the virus, its prevention and treatment; and the development, safety, and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines.”

Under the bill, disciplinary action could be brought against a physician for disseminating information that “resulted in an individual declining opportunities for COVID-19 treatment or prevention that was not justified by the individual’s medical history or condition.”

Additionally, doctors could be disciplined for “misinformation or disinformation” that is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus to an extent where its dissemination constitutes gross negligence” by the physician.

Commenting on the criteria, Dr. Meryl Nass, an expert in epidemiology and vaccine injury and member of the Children’s Health Defense scientific advisory committee, said:

“I think this is clearly an attempt to legislate that the government of California or the Medical Board of California will define what is truth and what is misinformation, and medical providers will have to follow lockstep with that definition.

“This, of course, is the same thing as the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s “1984,” and if the California legislature actually votes for this bill, the intent of the  action will be to enforce a one and only truth.

“Nowhere does this legislature define what is misinformation and disinformation. They do talk about contemporary scientific consensus but as we know in the last two years, the so-called scientific consensus — or the public health agency consensus — on masks, on vaccination, on boosters, etc. has flip-flopped all over the place. So we have adequate examples that the concept of “contemporary scientific consensus” is basically meaningless in this context.”

Contrary to typical board practice, under AB 2098, physicians could also be disciplined for public speech, including social media posts, unrelated to the actual treatment of patients.

Supporters of Low’s bill insist the legislation does not impinge on doctors’ freedom of speech.

“This isn’t a call for a policing of free speech,” Nick Sawyer, an emergency room doctor who founded a group called No License for Disinformation, told the LA Times. “This is a call for protecting the public against dangerous misinformation, which patients are parroting back to us in our emergency room departments every day.”

Nass disagreed:

“The result is removing options from doctors and patients. And the longer-term consequence is that doctors will become irrelevant if they are not needed to assess each individual’s personal risks and benefits from each type of medical care.

“The government and its partners in the healthcare industries can simply prescribe one-size-fits-all healthcare for everyone.”

Low’s bill, introduced as part of a larger effort by a group of Democratic state legislators to strengthen vaccination laws, set off a contentious debate over how far the state should go in pursuing COVID mandates.

Other COVID-related bills introduced in California include:

  • Assembly Bill 1993, authored by Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland), would require employees and independent contractors to be vaccinated against COVID as a condition of employment unless they have an exemption based on a medical condition, disability or religious beliefs.
  • Assembly Bill 1797, introduced by Akilah Weber (D-San Diego), allows California school officials to more easily check student vaccine records by expanding access to a statewide immunization database.
  • Senate Bill 866, introduced by Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) would let children 12 and older be vaccinated without parental consent.

Other states pursue efforts to support alternative treatments

In contrast to California, several state legislatures are moving to provide legal support for off-label prescriptions and alternative approaches supported by physicians.

In New Hampshire, legislators last month held public hearings on a bill that would allow for over-the-counter dissemination of ivermectin at pharmacies, provided certain treatment plan requirements were met.

New Hampshire HB 1022 would permit pharmacists to dispense the ivermectin by means of a standing order entered into by licensed healthcare professionals.

Sponsors of the bill argued many healthcare workers are unable to prescribe ivermectin, either because of hospital politics or outside professional pressures.

The bill has support from Dr. Paul Marik, who traveled from Virginia to testify at the public hearing.

A former professor of medicine and chief of pulmonary and critical care medicine at Eastern Virginia Medical School, Marik sued the hospital he worked for after it banned physicians from prescribing ivermectin for COVID patients.

Marik resigned late last year in protest of the ban.

During his testimony in New Hampshire, Marik described ivermectin as “cheap, exceedingly safe and exceedingly effective.”

“If ivermectin had been promoted at the beginning of this pandemic, we would not be sitting here today,” Marik said.

Kansas lawmakers last month advanced a bill supporting the prescribing of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. The model legislation, also introduced in Tennessee, would require pharmacists to fill prescriptions for the off-label use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.

In direct contrast to the California legislation, the Kansas bill also would mandate that doctors not be subject to disciplinary action for any “recommendation, prescription, use or opinion … related to a treatment for COVID-19, including a treatment that is not recommended or regulated by the licensing board,” Kansas Department of Health and Environment or the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

“Such actions,” the bill states, “could not be considered unprofessional conduct.”

Kansas lawmaker Sen. Mark Steffen (R-Hutchinson) supports the bill. Steffen, an anesthesiologist, said he’s under investigation by the University of Kansas Health System with which he is affiliated for prescribing ivermectin to COVID patients.

Dr. Festus Krebs III, a physician representing the Catholic Medical Association of Kansas City, also spoke in favor of the bill:

“With ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, we now have 76 ivermectin COVID-19 controlled studies which show 66 percent overall improvement and 57 percent decreased mortality.”

Meanwhile, in Florida, legislation that would extend protection for hospitals against patient lawsuits over COVID care sits on the desk of Gov. Ron DeSantis, awaiting signature or a veto.

And in New York, the state’s comptroller — citing the investment of the state’s public pension plan in Spotify — sent a letter to the company asking it to increase its screening of “misinformation” on their platform.

© 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.

February 24, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , | Leave a comment

Follow the Data, They Said, and Then Hid It

By Jeffrey A. Tucker | Brownstone Institute | February 24, 2022

Never before has the public had access to so much data on a virus and its effects. For two years, data festooned the daily papers. Dozens of websites assembled it. We were all invited to follow the data, follow the science, and observe as scientists became our new overlords, instructing us how to feel, think, and behave in order to “flatten the curve,” “drive down cases,” “preserve capacity,” “stay safe,” and otherwise deploy all the powers of human will to respond to and manipulate disease outcomes.

We could watch it all in real time. How beautiful were the waves, the curves, the bar charts, the sheer power of the technology. We can look at all the variations and the trajectories, assemble them by country, click here and click there to compare, see new cases, total cases, unvaccinated and vaccinations, infections and hospitalizations, deaths in total or death per capita, and we could even make a game out of it: which country is doing better at the great task, which group is better at complying, which region has the best outcomes.

It was all quite dazzling, the power of the personal computer combined with data collection techniques, universal testing, instant transmission, and the democratization of science. We were all invited to participate from our laptops to bone up on statistics, download and look, assemble and draw, manipulate and observe, and be in awe of the masters of the numbers and their capacity for responding to every trend as it was captured and chronicled in real time.

Then one day, writing at the New York Times, reporter Apoorva Mandavilli revealed the following:

For more than a year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has collected data on hospitalizations for Covid-19 in the United States and broken it down by age, race and vaccination status. But it has not made most of the information public…. Two full years into the pandemic, the agency leading the country’s response to the public health emergency has published only a tiny fraction of the data it has collected, several people familiar with the data said.

Kristen Nordlund, a spokeswoman for the C.D.C., said the agency has been slow to release the different streams of data “because basically, at the end of the day, it’s not yet ready for prime time.” She said the agency’s “priority when gathering any data is to ensure that it’s accurate and actionable.”

Another reason is fear that the information might be misinterpreted, Ms. Nordlund said.

At the appearance of this story, my data science friends who have been digging through the databases for nearly two years all let a collective: argh! They knew something was very wrong and had been complaining about it for more than a year. These are sophisticated people at Rational Ground who keep their own charts and host data programs of their own. They have been curious all along about the exaggerations, the poor communication regarding the gradients of risk, the lags and holes in the demographic data on hospitalization and death, to say nothing of the strange way in which the CDC has been manipulating presentations on everything from masking to vaccination status and much more.

It’s been a strange experience for them, especially since other countries in the world have been absolutely scrupulous about collecting and distributing data, even when the results do not comport with policy priorities. There can be little doubt, for example, that the missing data bears on the issue of vaccine effectiveness and very likely demonstrates that the claim that this was a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” is completely unsustainable, even from the time when it was first made.

In the New York Times story, many top epidemiologists were quoted expressing everything from frustration to outrage.

“We have been begging for that sort of granularity of data for two years,” said Jessica Malaty Rivera, an epidemiologist and part of the team that ran Covid Tracking Project, an independent effort that compiled data on the pandemic till March 2021. A detailed analysis, she said, “builds public trust, and it paints a much clearer picture of what’s actually going on.”

Well, if public trust is the goal, it’s not going so well. In addition to the failings revealed here, there are many other questions concerning cases and whether and to what extent the PCR testing can really tell us what we need to know, to what degree did the misclassification problem affect death attribution, and so much more. It seems that with each month that has gone by, what seemed to be these beautiful pictures of reality have faded into a murky data quagmire in which we don’t know what is real and what is not. And ever more, the CDC itself has urged us to ignore what we do see (VAERS data, for example).

Dr. Robert Malone makes an interesting point. If a scientist at a university or a lab is found to have deliberately buried relevant data because they contradict a preset conclusion, the results are professional ruin. The CDC, however, has legal privileges that allows it to get away with actions that would otherwise be considered fraud in academia.

There are many analogies between economics and epidemiology, as many have noticed over the last two years. The attempt to plan the economy in the past has suffered from many of the same failures as the attempt to plan a pandemic. There are collection problems, unintended consequences, knowledge problems, issues of mission creep, uncertainties over causal inference, a presumption that all agents obey the plan when in fact they do not, and a wild pretense that planners have the necessary knowledge, skill, and coordination required to presume to replace the decentralized and dispersed knowledge base that makes society work.

Murray Rothbard called statistics the Achilles heel of economic planning. Without the data, economists and bureaucrats couldn’t even begin to believe they could achieve their far-flung dreams, much less put them into practice. For this reason, he favored leaving all economic data collection to the private sector so that it is actually useful for enterprise rather than abused by government. In addition, there is simply no way that data alone can provide a genuine full picture of reality. There will always be holes. It will always be late. There will always be mistakes. There will always be uncertainties over causality. Moreover, all data represents a snapshot in time and can prove extremely misleading with changes over time. And these can be fatal for decision making.

We are seeing this play itself out in epidemiological planning too. The endless streams of data over two years have created what Sunetra Gupta calls “the illusion of control” when in fact the world of pathogens and its interaction with the human experience is infinitely complex. That illusion also creates dangerous habits on the part of planners, which we’ve seen.

There was never a reason to close schools, lock people in their homes, block travel, shut businesses, mask kids, mandate vaccines, and so on. It’s almost as if they wanted human beings to behave in ways that better fit their own modeling techniques rather than allow their knowledge base to defer to the complexity of the human experience.

And now we know that we’ve been denied information that the CDC has kept in hiding for the better part of a year, undoubtedly to serve the purpose of forcing the appearance of reality to more closely conform to a political narrative. We only have a fraction of what has been accumulated. What we thought we knew was only a glimpse of what was actually known on the inside.

There is no shortage of scandals associated with pandemic policy over two years. For those who are interested in finding out precisely what caused the lights to be dimmed or even turned out on modern civilization, we can add another scandal to the list.

Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown.

February 24, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

You can’t claim vaccine is the only Covid life saver when treatments are banned!

By Kathy Gyngell | TCW Defending Freedom | February 23, 2022

EACH week, members of the UK’s watchdog Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency publish their Yellow Card update on adverse reactions to the Covid vaccine.

Every time they do so, they repeat this claim: ‘Vaccination is the single most effective way to reduce deaths and severe illness from Covid-19.’

But how do they know?

The fact is as long as treatments such hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin continue to be banned in the UK, we are prevented from knowing whether treatment could be more effective than vaccines in preventing deaths and reducing severe illness. Published research indicates it could be.

Furthermore without a proper investigation into the thousands of hospital Covid fatalities, how can we know whether the chosen treatment protocols have not been as responsible a cause of death as the disease itself?

In the US, the National Institutes of Health treatment protocol guidance for Covid is based on two drugs, dexamethasone and remdesivir. 

Yet at least one major study has called remdesivir into question. Published almost exactly a year ago, it found kidney disorders to be a serious adverse reaction of the drug in coronavirus disease.

It reported that compared with the use of chloroquine, dexamethasone, sarilumab, or tocilizumab, the use of remdesivir was associated with an increased reporting of kidney disorders.

The research states that ‘in the vast majority of cases (316 – 96.6 per cent), no other drug was suspected in the onset of kidney disorders. Reactions were serious in 301 cases (92 per cent) cases, with a fatal outcome for 15 patients (4.6 per cent).

The NHS  ‘guidance pathways’ for severe Covid cases – which cover respiratory support to end of life support – are set out here. Other guidance states that ‘treatment with remdesivir may be considered in certain hospitalised patients with Covid‑19 pneumonia’.

Clinicians can also ‘offer dexamethasone to patients with Covid‑19 who need supplemental oxygen, or who have a level of hypoxia (lack of oxygen) that requires supplemental oxygen but are unable to have or tolerate it. If dexamethasone is unsuitable or unavailable, either hydrocortisone or prednisolone can be used.’

An Oxford Recovery Trial for hospitalised Covid patients found ‘the use of dexamethasone resulted in lower 28-day mortality among those who were receiving either invasive mechanical ventilation or oxygen alone at randomisation but not among those receiving no respiratory support.’

The perceived limitations of the data are set out here. But for all the glowing testimonials, the survival of the patients in the trial groups – a 22.9 per cent death rate – was not a huge improvement on that in the usual care group, 25.7 per cent

‘Overall, 482 patients (22.9 per cent) in the dexamethasone group and 1,110 patients (25.7 per cent) in the usual care group died within 28 days after randomisation (age-adjusted rate ratio, 0.83; 95 per cent confidence interval [CI], 0.75 to 0.93; P<0.001).’

What this drug treatment was not compared with was the efficacy of either hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, two successful early intervention treatments that perversely remain banned here.

Sadly we will never know how many lives would have been saved had these drugs been introduced into community and hospital protocols a year ago? I rest my case.

Isn’t it high time the MHRA revised its claim to say: ‘Vaccine is the single most effective way to reduce deaths and severe illness from Covid-19 in the absence of potentially effective treatments which are banned in the UK.’

Below is the latest full Yellow Card adverse reaction breakdown. It follows a week marked by another seven deaths and a further 82 adverse reactions reported for children, all of which continue to go unremarked by the mainstream media.

MHRA Yellow Card reporting summary up to February 9, 2022 (Data published  February 17, 2022)

Adult – primary and booster/third dose, child administration. 

* Pfizer: 25.9million people, 49million doses. Yellow Card reporting rate, one in 157 people impacted.

* Astrazeneca: 24.9million people, 49.1million doses. Yellow Card reporting rate, one in 102 people impacted.

* Moderna: 1.6million people, three million doses. Yellow Card reporting rate, one in 45 people impacted.

Overall, one in 118 people injected experienced a Yellow Card adverse event, which may be less than ten per cent of actual figures, according to the MHRA.

The MHRA states that:

* Vaccination is the single most effective way to reduce deaths and severe illness from Covid-19.

* The expected benefits of the vaccines in preventing Covid-19 and serious complications associated with Covid-19 far outweigh any currently known side-effects in the majority of patients.

Adult booster or third doses given = 37,650,239.

Booster Yellow Card reports: 28,941 (Pfizer) + 466 (AZ) + 15,870 (Moderna) + 151 (Unknown) = 45,428.

Reactions: 472,956 (Pfizer) + 862,394 (AZ) + 118,425 (Moderna) + 4653 (Unknown) = 1,458,428.

Reports: 164,679 (Pfizer) + 243,491 (AZ) + 35,566 (Moderna) + 1520 (Unknown) = 445,256 people impacted.

Fatal: 718 (Pfizer) + 1,221 (AZ) + 38 (Moderna) + 40 (Unknown) = 2,017.

Blood disorders: 16,759 (Pfizer) + 7793 (AZ) + 2428 (Moderna) + 62 (Unknown) = 27,042.

Anaphylaxis: 649 (Pfizer) + 871 (AZ) + 87 (Moderna) + 2 (Unknown) = 1,609.

Pulmonary embolism and deep vein thrombosis: 875 (Pfizer) + 3,029 (AZ) + 106 (Moderna) + 25 (Unknown) = 4,035.

Acute cardiac: 12,273 (Pfizer) + 11,147 (AZ) + 3,009 (Moderna) + 90 (Unknown) = 26,519.

Eye disorders: 7,772 (Pfizer) + 14,797 (AZ) + 1,460 (Moderna) + 83 (Unknown) = 24,112

Blindness: 155 (Pfizer) + 317 (AZ) + 31 (Moderna) + 4 (Unknown) = 507.

Deafness: 288 (Pfizer) + 424 (AZ) + 50 (Moderna) + 5 (Unknown) = 767.

Spontaneous abortions: 471 + 1 premature baby death / 15 stillbirth/foetal deaths (11 recorded as fatal) (Pfizer) + 229 + 5 stillbirth (AZ) + 60 + 1 stillbirth (Moderna) + 5 (Unknown) = 765 miscarriages

Nervous system disorders: 78,872 (Pfizer) + 182,030 (AZ) + 19,215 (Moderna) + 839 (Unknown) = 280,956.

Seizures: 1,068 (Pfizer) + 2,050 (AZ) + 250 (Moderna) + 17 (Unknown) = 3,385.

Paralysis: 495 (Pfizer) + 871 (AZ) + 98 (Moderna) + 8 (Unknown) = 1,472.

Tremor: 2,117 (Pfizer) + 9,925 (AZ) + 637 (Moderna) + 50 (Unknown) = 12,729.

Vertigo and tinnitus: 4,078 (Pfizer) + 6,897 (AZ) + 684 (Moderna) + 39 (Unknown) = 11,698

Transverse myelitis: 34 (Pfizer) + 116 (AZ) + 2 (Moderna) = 152

BCG scar reactivation: 67 (Pfizer) + 38 (AZ) + 51 (Moderna) = 156

Headaches and migraines: 35,041 (Pfizer) + 93,844 (AZ) + 9,112 (Moderna) + 331 (Unknown) = 138,328

Vomiting: 5,134 (Pfizer) + 11,631 (AZ) + 1,727 (Moderna) + 59 (Unknown) = 18,551

Infections: 11,611 (Pfizer) + 20,089 (AZ) + 2,160 (Moderna) + 150 (Unknown) = 34,010.

Herpes: 2,149 (Pfizer) + 2,676 (AZ) + 240 (Moderna) + 23 (Unknown) = 5,088.

Immune system disorders: 2,369 (Pfizer) + 3,274 (AZ) + 593 (Moderna) + 21 (Unknown) = 6,257.

Skin disorders: 33,094 (Pfizer) + 53,154 (AZ) + 12,637 (Moderna) + 330 (Unknown) = 99,215.

Respiratory disorders: 20,950 (Pfizer) + 29,585 (AZ) + 4,015 (Moderna) + 196 (Unknown) = 54,746.

Epistaxis (nosebleeds): 1,063 (Pfizer) + 2302 (AZ) + 188 (Moderna) + 11 (Unknown) = 3,564.

Psychiatric disorders: 9,876 (Pfizer) + 18,289 (AZ) + 2,339 (Moderna) + 108 (Unknown) = 30,612.

Reproductive/breast disorders: 30,236 (Pfizer) + 20,649 (AZ) + 4,905 (Moderna) + 199 (Unknown) = 55,989

Children and young people special report – suspected side-effects reported in under-18s:

* Pfizer: 3,200,000 children (first doses) plus 1,500,000 second doses, resulting in 3,044 Yellow Cards.

* AZ: 12,400 children (first doses) resulting in 254 Yellow Cards. Reporting rate one in 49.

* Moderna: 2,000 children (first doses) resulting in 18 Yellow Cards.

* Brand unspecified: 18 Yellow Cards.

Total = 3,214,400 children injected

Total Yellow Cards for under-18s = 3,334

The MHRA states that all children aged five to 11 will be eligible for vaccination in the coming weeks.

For full reports, including 347 pages of specific reaction listings, see here. 

February 23, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Leading law firm issues Facebook letter of complaint over ‘anti-Palestinian bias’

MEMO | February 23, 2022

Leading law firm Bindmans LLP has sent a formal letter of complaint to Facebook over its “anti-Palestinian bias.” Instructed by the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP), the London based firm demanded explanation for the “systematic” and “far-reaching” censorship of content and accounts related to Palestine.

The complaint was also sent to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of freedom of opinion and expression. It requests an urgent review of, and explanation for, the decisions made by Facebook, which was rebranded last October as Meta Inc, to suspend accounts and posts which are affiliated to Palestinian news agencies, commentators and journalists.

Monday’s letter of complaint to Facebook is the second in nine months sent by Bindmans LLP to the social media giant. A previous communication submitted in May 2021 was made on behalf of five journalists and news agencies in Palestine. Facebook is said to have interfered with their accounts and/or posts and was accused of breaching their fundamental right to freedom of expression as well as its own Corporate Human Rights Policy.

In the May 2021 complaint, the main questions posed by Bindmans LLP included whether the censorship decisions were carried out by an algorithm or by a person exercising their discretion, and details regarding Facebook’s policy in justifying their censorship decisions, in addition to steps taken by the company to resolve unfair censorship.

In its response to the letter, a month later, Facebook said that it had investigated the accounts referenced in the letter and, after further review, has restored content and/or accounts where applicable. Notably, no substantial answers were provided to any of the main questions cited in the original communication.

Despite the commitments made by Facebook in their letter sent in June 2021, the censorship remained, said ICJP in its press release detailing the content of the complaint. The centre is an independent organisation of lawyers, academics and politicians that work to promote and support Palestinian rights.

Monitoring group, Sada Social, which has been documenting the suspension of Palestinian content and accounts on Facebook, recorded in 2021 alone, hundreds of instances of inappropriate censorship of social media content in support of the rights of Palestinians. This censorship was exacerbated significantly during the last Israeli offensive on Gaza in May 2021.

The complaint reinstates the request that Meta/Facebook discloses and reviews its decision-making process, and explains why the accounts were closed, suspended or posts taken down, and whether in doing so an algorithm or human discretion was used.

February 23, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | Leave a comment

The Evil of Sanctions

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | February 23, 2022

After maneuvering Russia into choosing either (1) to permit the U.S. to install its missiles, bases, troops, tanks, and weaponry along Russia’s border in Ukraine or (2) to invade Ukraine to prevent that from happening, President Biden, the Pentagon, and the CIA are now responding to Russia’s choice of (2) by imposing brutal sanctions on the Russian people.

Oh sure, they are making out like the sanctions are targeting Russian President Putin and the Russian “elites” in the government that are supporting the invasion. But that’s just another lie. In fact, the sanctions are designed to do the same thing as the sanctions against Iran, Cuba (i.e., the embargo), North Korea, China, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. They are designed to squeeze the Russian people with impoverishment and even death in the hope that they will protest and cause Russian President Vladimir Putin to change course or even violently revolt against Putin’s regime.

Of course, never mind that some protestors are likely to get killed or that a revolution would mean thousands of deaths. That never matters to U.S. officials. What matters is the political goal they are striving to achieve with their sanctions. Any number of foreigners who get killed in the process of trying to achieve that goal is entirely acceptable. That’s why, for example, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright exclaimed that the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children from the sanctions on Iraq were “worth it.”

The first thing that must be recognized is the fundamental evil of targeting innocent people with death and impoverishment as a way to achieve a political goal. Isn’t that why we condemn terrorism? Where is the moral justification for targeting the Russian people with death and impoverishment simply because their government is doing something that is illegal or unjustifiable?

The problem is that the American people have become so accustomed to sanctions and embargoes as a foreign policy tool that they unable to recognize the evil on which they are based. But the fact is that sanctions and embargoes are no different in principle from terrorism, in that they both target innocent people with death and suffering as a way to achieve a political goal.

The second thing that must be recognized: Sanctions don’t achieve their political goal, which means that the death and suffering they inflict is useless.

Consider the 60-year embargo on Cuba. It was intended to oust Fidel Castro from power and, after he died, to oust Cuba’s communist regime from power and replace it with another pro-U.S. dictatorship. It still hasn’t achieved its goal, notwithstanding the death and suffering it has inflicted on the Cuban people for six decades.

Consider the brutal system of sanctions on Iraq. It contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children — yes, children! — and it still did not succeed in ousting the Pentagon’s longtime partner and ally, Saddam Hussein, from power.

Consider the brutal sanctions against Iran. U.S. officials have targeted the Iranian people with death and suffering in the hope that they will rise up and oust Iran’s anti-U.S. regime and replace it with with another pro-U.S. dictatorship, similar to that of the Shah of Iran, who the CIA installed into power with a coup in 1953. Despite the death and suffering among the Iranian people, Iran’s theoretic ‘dictatorship’ remains in power.

Third is a point that Biden’s, the Pentagon’s, and the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird assets in the mainstream press just don’t get or don’t care about: U.S. sanctions imposed on Russia and other countries constitute a direct infringement on the liberty of the American people.

Under principles of liberty, people have the right to trade with whomever they want and to travel wherever they want. Those are fundamental, natural, God-given rights that no government, not even the U.S. government, can legitimately infringe.

Yet, that is precisely what U.S. sanctions do. They contribute to the destruction of our own rights and liberties at the hands of our own government.

Thus, we have the spectacle of the U.S. national-security establishment, through its NATO machinations, making Russia one of its official enemies, then cornering Russia into invading Ukraine (versus permitting U.S. missiles, bases, tanks, and troops to be established on Russia’s border), and then using this manufactured crisis to further destroy the rights and liberties of the American citizenry.

Our ancestors warned us about this type of thing. That’s why they called into existence a limited-government republic and rejected the national-security state form of governmental structure under which we now live. That’s why there was no Pentagon, military-industrial complex, CIA, or NSA for the first 150 years of American history. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson warned us against “entangling alliances,” such as NATO. John Quincy Adams, in his 1821 speech “In Search of Monsters to Destroy,” explained the reasons for America’s founding foreign policy of non-interventionism into the affairs and crises of foreign nations.

An updated warning came in President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address where he pointed out that the “military-industrial complex” posed a grave threat to the freedom and democratic processes of the American people. His warning was followed by that of President Kennedy, the last president who was wiling to stand up against the overwhelming power of the national-security establishment. Kennedy’s warning was followed by that of former President Truman, who, thirty days after JFK was killed, pointed out that the CIA had become a sinister force in American life.

It’s time for Americans to do some serious soul-searching. The question should not be what to do about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The big question to be discussed and debated shoud instead be: Should America restore its founding systems of a limited-government republic and a non-interventionist foreign policy and get America back on the road toward liberty, peace, prosperity, and harmony with the people of the world?

February 23, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

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