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In many states, minors may consent to receive COVID-19 shot even without parent’s knowledge

By Mordechai Sones | America’s Frontline Doctors | June 30, 2021

A District Administration survey conducted just before the FDA’s authorization for 12-15-year-olds to receive the COVID-19 shot found that only 3 in 10 parents said they would vaccinate their children right away, with most instead wanting to wait and see, or saying they would not get their child vaccinated at all or would do so only if required for school.

However, with the authorization of Pfizer’s shot for 12-15-year-olds, a group that totals almost 17 million, minors can consent to receive the COVID-19 shot even without the parent’s knowledge in many states.

The age at which a minor can consent to receive the experimental biological agent in Alabama is age 14; in San Francisco, 12; Philadelphia, 12; North Carolina, 11; South Carolina, 16. America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS) Legal Director Ali Schultz explained: “They can all consent, minors can consent, on their own, even if they live with their mom and dad who are married, they live with their parents, no issues, the child literally can consent at school to receive the vaccine, without the parents even knowing.”

She continued: “We’ve had so many people reach out, and they were just heartbroken, they cannot believe that their child was able to get this without them even knowing, because as parents they were personally against the vaccine, and no-one even ran it by them.

“And what’s even scarier: It’s up to the health care provider, in a multitude of states; Iowa, Idaho, Washington, Arkansas; so if a ‘health care provider’ deems that it is appropriate for a minor to get the vaccine, then they can do so without parental consent.”

According to District Administration, although most states still require parental consent, “the landscape may be shifting slightly as more jurisdictions seek to encourage vaccination of young people.” Their specific findings are as follows:

  • Most states (41) require parental consent for vaccination of minors below the age of 18, although one of these states (NE) requires consent below age 19. There are some exceptions to these requirements:
    • Many allow for certain minors, such as those who are emancipated, homeless or living apart from their parent or guardian, or married, to self-consent.
    • Cities in two states (San Francisco in CA and Philadelphia in PA), have moved to allow minors, ages 12 and older, to self-consent for COVID-19 vaccination.
    • In one state (AZ), if a parent refuses to consent for COVID-19 vaccination, but if a child or a doctor requests it, a court order can be obtained to allow for vaccination.
  • In 5 states, a minor’s ability to self-consent is based on a specific age as follows:
    • Two states where a minor must be at least 16 (RI and SC)
    • One state where a minor must be at least 15 (OR)
    • One state where a minor must be at least 14 (AL)
    • One state where a minor must be at least 11 (DC; in DC, each healthcare provider may institute additional requirements which could include requiring a parent or guardian to be present).
  • The remaining 5 states apply the “mature minor doctrine”, meaning that there is no specific age cut-off but providers have discretion to decide if a minor possesses the maturity to consent for themselves (AR, ID, NC, TN, WA).
  • This means that parental consent has already been required for 16-17 year-olds in most states (41) since the initial authorization of the Pfizer vaccine on December 11, 2020. Two additional states require consent for some subset of 12-15 year-olds, bringing the count to 43 states where most minors in this age group would need parental consent. Once the next group of children is eligible for vaccination, those below age 12, this number will grow to 45.

National Vaccine Information Center‘s Barbara Loe Fisher commented on the “shifting landscape”: “This past year, we have seen many lawmakers in the U.S. and other countries vote to eliminate or severely restrict civil liberties in the name of the public health.  One of the most outrageous legislative actions violating parental and human rights took place in Washington, D.C. in November 2020 when City Council officials gave doctors the power to vaccinate children as young as 11 years old and hide what they did from parents. The D.C. Mayor refused to veto the bill and, in January 2021, the U.S. Congress sat on its hands and gave tacit approval to enactment of the most dangerous child vaccination law in America.”

She continued: “In a breathtaking violation of medical ethics and several federal laws, the new vaccine concealment law in Washington, DC allows doctors to extract “informed consent” from young children too immature to know what informed consent means or what a vaccine reaction looks and feels like. The D.C. City Council majority, with only three members dissenting, cruelly disempowered parents by voting to make it illegal for a doctor, insurance company or school administrator to divulge a child’s vaccination history in records that can be seen by the child’s mother or father.

“An 11-year old child does not know or understand his or her personal health history but most parent do. If a child has experienced previous vaccine reactions, has severe allergies or other health conditions that could increase vaccine risks, parents kept in the dark will not have a way to protect their child from further harm.

“Parents who don’t know which vaccines their children have been given will not be able to monitor them for signs of a potentially life-threatening vaccine reaction that requires immediate medical treatment. If the child is injured or dies after vaccination, parents will not know they must apply to the federal Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) before the filing deadline expires.

“Parents will not know their insurance company has been billed for vaccines. Parents will not know that a school the child attends is in possession of their child’s secret vaccination records even when there is a vaccine exemption for religious belief reasons on file with the school.

“This blatant violation of a parent’s moral right and legal responsibility to make medical risk decisions on behalf of a minor child was endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics22 and pushed through by the DC City Council, while the Mayor and the US Congress looked the other way.”

She concluded: “The Universal Declaration of Bioethics and Human Rights states that:

“The interests and welfare of the individual should have priority over the sole interest of science or society;” and “For persons who are not capable of exercising autonomy, special measures are to be taken to protect their rights and interests;” and “Any preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic medical intervention is only to be carried out with the prior, free and informed consent of the person concerned, based on adequate information.”

“It is a profound betrayal of public trust for any city, state or federal government to strip parents of their God given right to protect their children from harm by allowing a doctor to give a child a pharmaceutical product without getting a parent’s permission. Science is not perfect, doctors are not infallible, and pharmaceutical products like vaccines come with risks that can be greater for some individuals than others, which is why parents must retain the human right to exercise informed consent to medical risk taking on behalf of their minor children.

“Will the vaccine concealment bill that is now law in Washington, DC be exported to your state next?”

Mercury News provided the list of where parental or guardian consent is now generally required for COVID-19 vaccinations among people ages 12 to 15, based on a CNN query to health departments across all 50 states:

  • Alabama — Yes for younger than 14
  • Alaska — Yes
  • Arizona — Yes
  • Arkansas — Yes
  • California — Yes
  • Colorado — Yes
  • Connecticut — Yes
  • Delaware — Yes
  • Florida — Yes
  • Georgia — Yes
  • Hawaii — Yes
  • Idaho — Yes
  • Illinois — Yes
  • Indiana — Yes
  • Iowa — “It is up to each individual health care provider/health system”
  • Kansas — Yes
  • Kentucky – Yes
  • Louisiana — Yes
  • Maine — Yes
  • Maryland — Yes
  • Massachusetts — Yes
  • Michigan — Yes
  • Minnesota — Yes
  • Mississippi — Yes
  • Missouri — Yes
  • Montana — Yes
  • Nebraska — Yes
  • Nevada — Yes
  • New Hampshire — Yes
  • New Jersey — Yes
  • New Mexico — Yes
  • New York — Yes
  • North Carolina — No for teens
  • North Dakota — Yes
  • Ohio — Yes
  • Oklahoma — Yes
  • Oregon — Yes for younger than 15
  • Pennsylvania — Yes
  • Rhode Island — Yes
  • South Carolina — Yes
  • South Dakota — Yes
  • Tennessee — Yes for younger than 14
  • Texas — Yes
  • Utah — Yes
  • Vermont — Yes
  • Virginia — Yes
  • Washington — Yes
  • West Virginia — Yes
  • Wisconsin — Yes
  • Wyoming — Yes

Additionally, some private businesses or pharmacies have their own rules.

July 3, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Petition to Halt FDA Approval of COVID Vaccines

By Dr. Joel S. Hirschhorn | July 3, 2021

In the global COVID pandemic there has not been a more important action to protect public health than the current Citizen Petition to FDA to stop the full approval of COVID vaccines until many serious concerns and issues are genuinely addressed.

There has been no significant coverage of this historic petition by mainstream and corporate social media. This cancel action is itself as remarkable as the petition itself. This is a concerted effort to keep the public uninformed about the many problems with the COVID vaccines. Any person who spends the time to peruse the 20-page petition would most likely have a very negative view of the vaccines. For the unvaccinated this awareness would greatly increase vaccine hesitancy and rejection. For the vaccinated it would produce concern and regret.

The political system would literally go crazy if the petition was seriously covered by big media. Big drug companies would jump into action to suppress political and media attention to the petition. The goal of this article is to better inform the public and motivate people to take action.

CONTEXT

Before delving into the substance provided in the petition context is needed to fully understand the critical importance of the petition and make the case for individuals to officially express their support for it as part of the federal regulatory process.

One rational reaction to reading the very detailed, 20-page petition signed by 27 physicians and medical researchers from the US and other nations is this: Why not use all the detailed concerns about the COVID vaccines to demand FDA take the experimental vaccines off the market?

Indeed, the biggest name on the list of signatories is the esteemed Dr. Peter McCullough of Baylor University. He has been very outspoken and honest about many pandemic issues. He has said that, considering the high numbers of deaths and serious health impacts associated with taking the vaccines, FDA should do what it has done in the past when new medicines and vaccines had high negative impacts. Take them off the market.

Why not petition FDA to do this? Just imagine what stopping the whole COVID vaccine effort worldwide would cause. Political and public health systems would not know what to do. They would be totally stunned and flummoxed. So, though the current petition does not do this, it definitely took considerable courage to make the case to FDA to not move quickly from an emergency use authorization to full approval of the COVID vaccines.

People who have not fallen victim to the endless propaganda of the political, big media and public health systems promoting COVID vaccine jabs may not be willing to seriously examine the medical and scientific details of the petition. The problem is cognitive dissonance. Too many people will not easily resolve their propaganda induced positive views of the vaccines with the medical and science details in the petition. But that is what must happen. People must temper their fear of COVID infection with awareness that vaccines are now experimental and have not been sufficiently proved safe for all users.

The potential frustration and fear if the vaccines were deemed insufficiently safe could be mitigated by advocating for early home/outpatient treatment and preventive use of a number of cheap, safe and fully approved generic medicines. The government and public health system have blocked their wide use in favor of the wait-for-the-vaccine strategy that serves the financial interests of vaccine manufacturers. As presented in detail in Pandemic Blunder and this website, there are mountains of medical evidence to justify the treatment protocols. They are legitimate, proven alternatives to experimental and insufficiently tested vaccines that might be fully approved by FDA.

To achieve true protection of public health we need an avalanche of official public support for the petition. More details later on how people can do this.

WHAT THE PETITION EMPHASIZES

A week after the June 1 petition, lead authors of the petition published an editorial in the British Medical Journal with the title “Why we petitioned the FDA to refrain from fully approving any covid-19 vaccine this year.” Here are some key statements that use plain language to summarize key parts of the petition:

“The message of our petition is ‘slow down and get the science right—there is no legitimate reason to hurry to grant a license to a coronavirus vaccine.’ We believe the existing evidence base—both pre- and post-authorization—is simply not mature enough at this point to adequately judge whether clinical benefits outweigh the risks in all populations.”

“We focus on methods and processes, outlining the many remaining unknowns about safety and effectiveness—and suggest the kinds of studies needed to address the open questions.”

“Trials by vaccine manufacturers were designed to follow participants for two years, and should be completed before they are evaluated for full approval.”

“We also call on FDA to require a more thorough assessment of spike proteins produced in-situ by the body following vaccination—including studies on their full biodistribution, pharmacokinetics, and tissue-specific toxicities.”

“We all agree that there remain many open, unanswered questions surrounding the efficacy and safety of covid-19 vaccines that must be answered before the FDA gives serious consideration to granting full approval.”

“Some surveys suggest that vaccine hesitancy in the United States is due, in part, to lack of full FDA approval. While approval might lead to increased public confidence in covid-19 vaccines, as well as provide legal support for employer-instituted vaccine mandates, to approve a medical product for these reasons is outside FDA’s regulatory purview. Approval decisions must be driven by the safety and efficacy data. The potential unintended consequences of a rushed approval may contribute to growing mistrust of the US public health and regulatory institutions.”

“For each covid-19 vaccine, the benefits may ultimately outweigh the harms. Or not. Or we may end up in a more nuanced position, finding that benefits outweigh harms for some populations, but not others. Only time—and better evidence—will tell.”

Now, some key parts of the petition itself are presented to further illustrate what medical and science perspectives have been formulated to pressure FDA to better evaluate the COVID vaccines.

A most important point made in the petition is this. Work must be done to show that there is “substantial evidence of clinical effectiveness that outweighs harms in special populations such as: infants, children, and adolescents; those with past SARS-CoV-2 infection; immunocompromised; pregnant women; nursing women; frail older adults; and individuals with cancer, autoimmune disorders, and hematological conditions.” This is so important because so many of the deaths and harmful impacts have occurred in these groups.

Most importantly: “The widespread use of a COVID-19 vaccine under EUA, particularly for a limited amount of time, also is not a valid reason to approve a product.”

And here is a critical point that many critics of the vaccines have focused on: “In-situ production of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is the target mechanism of action of all COVID-19 vaccines with an EUA at present. Therefore, the safety profile of spike protein itself (i.e., in the absence of virus) must be thoroughly understood [in all populations]. Recently, evidence of systemic circulation of spike protein or its components in subjects post-immunization was reported. All studies we are aware of to date raise concerns about the safety of spike protein, and the concentration of circulatory spikes was correlated to the disease severity in COVID-19 patients.”

WHAT PEOPLE CAN DO

Though FDA cannot ignore the petition, there is no assurance that it will genuinely address all of the issues and concerns in it. Or that it will postpone approval of the vaccines until there is sufficient research and analysis into all the points in the petition.

It must be appreciated that the petition is authorized by federal law. The FDA citizen petition process, described in Title 21 of the Code of Federal Regulations (21 CFR Part 10), allows individuals and community organizations to request the agency make changes to health policy. Any “interested person” can request the FDA “issue, amend or revoke a regulation or order,” or “take or refrain from taking any other form of administrative action.” Granting full approval of the COVID vaccines is a major FDA administrative action with both national and global significance.

What is needed is a massive number of people officially registering their support of the petition on the proper FDA website. This can be done anonymously. Here are important links for the petition:

Dr. Joel S. Hirschhorn, author of Pandemic Blunder and many articles on the pandemic, worked on health issues for decades. As a full professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, he directed a medical research program between the colleges of engineering and medicine. As a senior official at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the National Governors Association, he directed major studies on health-related subjects; he testified at over 50 US Senate and House hearings and authored hundreds of articles and op-ed articles in major newspapers. He has served as an executive volunteer at a major hospital for more than 10 years. He is a member of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, and America’s Frontline Doctors.

July 3, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Solidarity and Activism | , , | Leave a comment

FINALLY AN RCT ON FACEMASKS IN CHILDREN – PARENTS TAKE NOTE!

Ivor Cummins | July 1, 2021

NON-CENSORABLE as this is a simple summary of study * just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association – JAMA *

ALL Parents should be aware of the emerging science – their kids are THEIR responsibility.

Download the vid here: https://we.tl/t-nPkQHzkh5T

NOTE: My extensive research and interviewing / video/sound editing and much more does require support – please consider helping if you can with monthly donation to support me directly, or one-off payment: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_…
– alternatively join up with my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/IvorCummins

July 3, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

The pandemic lies, according to Piers Corbyn

By Daniel Miller | The Conservative Woman | July 2, 2021

PIERS Corbyn is a well-known committed campaigner in the fight to stop the New Normal / New World Order / World Economic Forum being imposed on us all. He’s also a physicist, astro-physicist, long-range weather forecaster and former councillor.

Daniel Miller: You’ve been campaigning against the lockdowns and related matters since the very beginning. When did you first realise the pandemic narrative was a deliberate lie?

Piers Corbyn: About a week. I was always wary of these things because of the climate issue and I looked into what was happening and I understood these lockdowns were about control. I organised a few demonstrations in Glastonbury town centre and got back to London and met others (around May 9, 2020) who were attempting to do things in London. But things developed quite slowly at first, before we had a big breakthrough in August, getting 50,000 people to Trafalgar Square.

DM: The launch of the pandemic narrative was obviously very shocking and confusing . . .

PC: It was cleverly done. They had all corners covered.

DM: Do you feel you have a good theoretical understanding of the forces driving it forward?

PC: I think so. There are different interest groups coming together to make this and there could be splits between them. The Chinese want to carry on building their economy, and world domination in due course. Wall Street and the mega corporations want to defend their rate of profit. And at the same time, there’s the depopulation agenda of Bill Gates and others. I don’t think the big pharmaceutical companies want to simply depopulate everybody, they want to sell more vaccines. But Gates and others do want to reduce world population. They openly talk about that.

DM: There seems to be a strong connection with the green agenda with what used to be calling global warming and now is called climate change.

PC: Yes, that is their underlying religion, if you like . . . it’s an ideology that justifies anything that they want to do.

DM: This ideology is focused specifically on carbon emissions. It isn’t a holistic concern with the environment but only with this metric. In fact the green revolution is going to lead to massive environmental destruction, because they going to need to mine huge quantities of raw materials to create the new green infrastructure. But as you say, the climate change narrative is clearly useful from the point of view of centralising power. It means that governments can regulate in a way that will enable them to expand their control over society and the economy, in partnership with corporations. And this is also the point of the pandemic narrative.

PC: All governments love a crisis, and this one is a fantastic crisis for the governments of the world. And countries in Africa which have stood out against of course have found their Presidents murdered, in Tanzania and Burundi.

DM: One wonders who is handling that side of the operation.

PC: Yes, who is it? I haven’t seen any attempt to determine that.

DM: There are parts of America now which are much more clearly opposed, in particular in Florida. For whatever reason DeSantis was able to take that position, at least for now. In Britain on the other hand they seem very firmly in control, not only of the government, but also the parliamentary opposition led officially by Sir Keir  Starmer, who seems to have been been ordered to support the government in whatever they decide to do.

PC: That’s right, and they even call for stronger measures. What is Starmer all about? I think he’s a hyper-globalist and has been supporting this agenda for a long time. I first met him years ago in a Red-Green alliance meeting in Camden, and he just waffled, he made no sense at all.

DM: Beyond Starmer, the wider Left hasn’t offered any opposition. It seems to me they’ve been co-opted. You see this in the United States where ‘Leftism’ became the ideology of the professional managerial class. It evacuated the worker dimension, and shifted to policing cultural issues.

PC: Hate speech and identity politics have destroyed the Left, and I think it’s deliberate. Because class analysis is now completely absent, which is why American workers were supporting Trump. When that began to happen I was quite bemused. But it makes sense because the Democratic Party is now just serving Wall Street interests . . .

DM: And Silicon Valley interests, and military industrial  interests . . .

PC: And anything goes. The idea that a Leftist party can support the indiscriminate bombing and destruction of a country like Libya is just unbelievable, but that’s what they did.

DM: Some see the current political climate as an expression of the triumph of Leftism, or some form of Marxism. On the other hand, the Marxism now taught in universities or advanced in Leftist media appears to have been modified to support Democratic Party interests, and the people still committed to a more classical Marxist analysis are sidelined and repressed. This occurs from the Left, which is concerned with disciplining activism and channeling it into directions that create divisions and antagonism.

PC: The question must be, with respect to the Left, what percentage of activity is actually instigated by infiltrators and police agents.

DM: There almost seems to be a natural law of infiltration where eventually you reach a point where the Chief of Police is also the Head of the Anarchists . . .

PC: Yes!

DM: I want to ask you about your own background. Many people know you as Jeremy Corbyn’s brother, but your training is in meteorology, and you’ve been an activist for a long time. 

PC: Yes, I’m a physicist, a theoretical physicist and astrophysicist, and I run a long range weather forecasting operation which sells forecasts to farmers, commodity traders, the energy industry and others, and has been quite successful. As for my brother, I’m older than him for a start. And I was better known around the world than he was until he started to attempt to be the leader of the Labour Party. He was always a member of the Labour Party, whereas I was in groups more involved in direct action. He was always more involved with the trade unions. But we worked together in the miners’ strike for example, where there was a lot of direct action, and he was coming from a trade union point of view. But at the start of his leadership campaign I said to him, you should make it clear that the other candidates are ‘Tory light’ and you’re different. And he said, that’s right, and that’s what he did, and that succeeded. And it’s true, because he does have a different perspective from the others. But he failed at the last hurdle because he was forced into a complete muddle over Brexit. And that was really the end of his great story at the upper levels of the Labour Party, although he still has a very important following.

DM: Your brother’s silence in the last eighteen months has been quite noticeable.

PC: No, he’s acquiesced basically and made minor comments . . . A lot of people in the anti-lockdown movement were, and some of them still are, supporters of Jeremy, and they come up to me in demonstrations and say, Piers, we supported your brother, where is he? Does he believe in all this? And I tell them, well, he’s a prisoner of the trade unions. And you’ve seen what’s happened. The authorities have been very clever. They thought about it a long time ahead, how to control the Labour movement, and because the Labour movement in Britain, all Labour movements, but especially Britain, is what I would call ‘economistic’. They don’t think very politically, they just think, where’s the money coming from? Anybody’s who has done any analysis, and Jeremy should have done this too, should have realised that this is the slow death of British industry, and those jobs will be destroyed.  But they are just not facing up to it.

DM: The future of public services in Britain looks bleak. It seems that the government’s plan is to destroy them, and then package the market to corporations like Microsoft. And this is how the post-automation underclass is going to be managed in the future, with digital communications, UBI [universal basic income] and pharmaceutical interventions to ensure compliance.

PC: Yes, total privatisation. You can see that people are going to be asked to defend the NHS by people like Starmer and my brother, and they are going to reply, ‘What are we defending? The NHS has been failing to help people with cancer, injecting people with a lethal vaccine, there’s been a suppression of treatment, what are we defending?’

DM: From a Machiavellian perspective I suppose you have to hand it to them, because the government has in effect destroyed the NHS while repeating all the time we have to save it. Meanwhile they are making it as difficult as possible to have a good experience in schools. Here at least there is a possible path which might actually be quite positive, from the point of view of a more decentralised education system. But only for some.

PC: A lot of parents are actually taking their children out. And that’s interesting because if you get a high percentage of parents who take their children out and home-school I wonder where that will go, because you have private enterprises that will pop up and say we can look after your kids and have a private independent schools then the whole thing will become privatised.

DM: What do you think is politically the path forward for people who want to resist what’s happening?

PC: The main way to stop this is not begging the government; we do actually have to break their impositions and if we don’t break them we’re going to lose. People have to go to work when they’re not supposed to, they’ve got to rip down all the signs. If people defy in sufficient numbers the whole agenda of the other side becomes irrelevant because people will be working, and will be having an economy, and so forth. What happens then, I don’t know. Formally the main decisions are made in Parliament even if Johnson and others are being told what to do. So we’re building a party in order to compete on the level but of course we’re tiny compared to existing forces. Politically the key issues now are accountability and democracy versus globalist diktats, and the Left and Right issues are really a diversion. The way forward has to be massive grassroots resistance, physical, legal resistance, and stopping the implementation of the New World Order. This also requires political organisation which is why we set up Let London Live. The primary thing is that we have to be a movement and build a movement and that’s what we’re doing.

DM: The vaccine passports is now clearly the aim that they’re trying to pursue.

PC: Yes, the vaccine seems to be at the centre of their strategy. Now what is the vaccine programme about? It’s not about public health. It is about control, mental control, ideological control, and they do want to kill people, I have no doubt about that. I think a lot of people will die. The powers that be are desperate now to rush out more vaccines, and to vaccinate children, before people realise what’s going on.

DM: Already the casualties from the new experimental vaccines are unprecedented compared with other vaccination programmes.

PC: Yes, in America more people have died from this vaccine than have died from all of the other vaccines in the USA in the past.

DM: Probably one should be generous to their position intellectually, as it’s unusual for people to self-consciously pursue evil. People want to believe that what they’re doing is necessary. What they seem to believe in is the rational, scientific management of global populations. You see this already with the formation of the Fabian Society in the nineteenth century, which is still very active, and later with people like Julian Huxley, H G Wells and others. A lot of this seems to have been in the works for a long time and suddenly switched on. Evidently not everybody knows all the steps, but only some.

PC: That’s right.

DM: It is very difficult to speak to many of our contemporaries about this matter. It seems like there is a kind of mental block . . .

PC: Exactly, it’s difficult to believe they want to kill us. But I’ve come to the conclusion that actually they do, they really are trying to kill a lot of the population. We need to have a principled united front against all these measures. And the vaccines have to be stopped altogether.

July 2, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

DC AG subpoenas Facebook for data on ALL users that have spread “COVID-19 misinformation”

Unmasking people for wrongthink

By Tom Parke | Reclaim the Net | July 2, 2021

The District of Columbia (DC) Attorney General (AG) Karl Racine, a Democrat, has subpoenaed Facebook for a wide range of records related to “COVID-19 misinformation” on the platform.

The subpoena was filed on June 21 and demands that Facebook identify all groups, pages, and accounts that have violated the platform’s far-reaching COVID-19 misinformation rules.

It also calls for Facebook to release an internal study that looked at vaccine hesitancy among its users. Media reports on this study in March claimed that it showed that non-rule breaking Facebook content may be causing “substantial” harm.

If Facebook were to comply with this subpoena, it would likely impact millions of users. Facebook has removed more than 18 million pieces of content from Facebook and Instagram for violating its COVID-19 misinformation rules and applied warning labels to more than 167 million pieces of COVID-19 content.

The subpoena is part of a previously undisclosed investigation into whether Facebook is violating consumer protection laws.

Racine’s director of communications, Abbie McDonough, told Politico that the investigation is part of an effort to ensure that Facebook cracks down on “vaccine misinformation.”

“Facebook has said it’s taking action to address the proliferation of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on its site,” McDonough said. “But then when pressed to show its work, Facebook refused. AG Racine’s investigation aims to make sure Facebook is truly taking all steps possible to minimize vaccine misinformation on its site and support public health.”

The move follows previous reports of Democrats working with Big Tech to censor content that they deem to be misinformation.

Most notably, a recent lawsuit showed evidence of Democrats flagging alleged misinformation to Twitter via a “partner portal” and Twitter responding by removing the flagged tweets.

Another example of this is Democrats demanding that Facebook and Twitter “address” 12 prominent vaccine skeptics in April. Since they made their demands, four of these vaccine skeptics have had their social media accounts shut down.

Lawmakers have also suggested that the federal government may have “induced Facebook to censor certain speech in violation of the First Amendment” and demanded that the tech giant explain why it censored lab leak theories.

This attempt from the DC AG to identify Facebook users for posting COVID-19 misinformation comes as the tech giant is using increasingly aggressive measures to target people based on the content they share and interact with.

Yesterday, it started asking users whether they’re concerned about their friends “becoming an extremist” and warned users that they “may have been exposed to harmful extremist content.”

And in May, a whistleblower revealed that Facebook is using a secret internal filter to flag “liberty-based” and “religious-based” vaccine skepticism and using a secret algorithm to suppress negative vaccine experiences.

July 2, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , | Leave a comment

Face Masks Cause Children to Inhale Dangerous Levels of Carbon Dioxide at SIX TIMES the Safe Limit, Study Finds

By Will Jones • Lockdown Sceptics • July 1, 2021

New research published in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) has found that wearing a face mask causes children to inhale dangerous levels of carbon dioxide that becomes trapped behind the mask.

The peer-reviewed research letter from Dr Harald Walach and colleagues found that the air masked children inhaled contained more than six times the legal safe limit set down for closed rooms by the German Federal Environmental Office. The safe limit is 0.2% while the air the masked children inhaled was over 1.3% carbon dioxide.

The effect was worse for younger children, with one seven year-old child inhaling air with 2.5% carbon dioxide, over 12 times the safe limit.

The study looked at two types of mask, FFP2 masks and surgical masks, and found no significant difference between the two.

The authors explained that this alarming result likely explains the complaints from children who wear face masks for long periods.

Most of the complaints reported by children can be understood as consequences of elevated carbon dioxide levels in inhaled air. This is because of the dead-space volume of the masks, which collects exhaled carbon dioxide quickly after a short time. This carbon dioxide mixes with fresh air and elevates the carbon dioxide content of inhaled air under the mask, and this was more pronounced in this study for younger children.

This leads in turn to impairments attributable to hypercapnia. A recent review concluded that there was ample evidence for adverse effects of wearing such masks. We suggest that decision-makers weigh the hard evidence produced by these experimental measurements accordingly, which suggest that children should not be forced to wear face masks.

With face masks shown to have little to no impact in reducing infection or transmission, this suggests the policy is all pain and no gain and should be abandoned without delay.

Read the study in full here.

July 1, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

UN chief sounds alarm over abuses against Kashmiri children by India

Press TV – June 30, 2021

United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has voiced grave concerns about human rights violations against children in the Indian-administered Kashmir.

“I call upon the [Indian] government to take preventive measures to protect children, including by ending the use of pellets against children, ensuring that children are not associated in any way to security forces, and endorsing the Safe Schools Declaration and the Vancouver Principles,” Guterres said in the UN Report on Children 2021 released on Tuesday.

The UN report cited numerous violations involving Indian forces attacking Kashmiri children in the Indian-administered Kashmir.

“A total of 39 children (33 boys, 6 girls) were killed (9) and maimed (30) by pellet guns (11) and torture (2) by unidentified perpetrators (13) (including resulting from explosive remnants of war (7), crossfire between unidentified armed groups and Indian security forces (3), crossfire between unidentified armed groups, and grenade attacks (3)), Indian security forces (13), and crossfire and shelling across the line of control (13),” it said.

The UN secretary-general also condemned the military occupation of several schools in the Indian-administered Kashmir by the New Delhi forces.

“The United Nations verified the use of seven schools by Indian security forces for four months. Schools were vacated by the end of 2020,” it said.

Guterres expressed “alarm” over “detention and torture” by the Indian troops and their overall use of force against Kashmiri children in the Muslim-majority region.

“I am alarmed at the detention and torture of children and concerned by the military use of schools,” he said.

The UN chief called on Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government to ensure that children were kept out of way of “all forms of ill-treatment” when taken into detention in prisons in the Indian-administrated Kashmir.

The disputed Muslim-majority Kashmir, located in the Himalaya region, is mainly divided between India and Pakistan, while a third strip of land in northern Kashmir is held by China.

The people in Kashmir have been fighting New Delhi for independence or unification with neighboring Pakistan since the two countries were partitioned in 1947.

June 30, 2021 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture | , , | Leave a comment

The assassination of Nizar Banat means there’s only one solution for the Palestinians

By Feras Abu-Helal – Arabi21 – June 28, 2021

The assassination of political activist Nizar Banat during his arrest by Palestinian Authority security services is a turning point in occupied Palestine. It is no less important and dangerous than the shift represented by the recent Jerusalem uprising, which covered Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza and the territory occupied since 1948.

The occupied West Bank has not witnessed events like this before, and the PA has never appeared as strategically and morally stripped as it is now, because its failure in terms of managing internal affairs and human rights has also been exposed alongside its flawed approach to national affairs and resistance against the occupation. The only people who can’t see this are those who benefit from the status quo.

What made Banat’s killing different from all of the PA’s previous crimes, both on the national and internal level, is that all of its flaws were condensed into one operation. The first was the silencing of the anti-occupation voice, as the difference between the latter and the PA is not based on personal interest, or even to the management of domestic affairs, but is essentially a dispute over the PA’s performance and the way it deals with Israel and its occupation. His killing followed Banat’s criticism of the shameful vaccine deal, according to which the PA would hand over new vaccines to the Israelis in exchange for vaccines that expire soon. This showed clearly that the PA favours Israelis over its own people.

Another national paradox for the Palestinian people is that the same PA security forces that melt into the background when their Israeli counterparts are on the scene — not least during the recent events in Jerusalem — and never, ever, confront soldiers or armed settlers when they attack Palestinians and their land, are the same “security forces” which beat Nizar Banat to death after entering his home like thieves in the night and dragging him from his bed. This paradox confirmed to every Palestinian that the PA security forces exist solely to protect the occupation state and oppress the people of Palestine under occupation.

Banat’s assassination also revealed the PA’s indifference to human rights, and its intolerance of criticism. It behaved like every other repressive Arab regime that kills its opponents because of their opinions. Although repression and human rights violations must always be condemned, they are even more shocking and criminal when they come from a self-rule organisation against its own people struggling under a military occupation. The people face a double cycle of repression, at the hands of the Israeli occupation — which is inherently repressive — and the PA, which is supposed to represent their interests. The Palestinians can resist the occupation but are helpless in front of the PA’s repressive security forces, because they know that the occupation is the main issue. Hence, the PA not only adds to the repression of the people, but also distorts the national compass.

After the killing of Banat, the PA behaved like a typical Arab regime. The theory proposed by the late Yasser Arafat and applied to a large extent was dropped; the so-called democracy of the forest of guns, which had little to do with democracy, but was a slogan that allowed criticism and internal conflicts without resorting to weapons, within the framework of the Palestinian national movement. Arafat bore all criticism, accusations and even splits, even though he had national legitimacy to represent all groups of the Palestinian people at the time. The PA today not only coordinates its security repression with Israel, but also lacks any national or electoral legitimacy, and is incapable of accepting criticism. So it simply kills its political opponents.

The PA resorted to its base instincts which are a disgrace for a national liberation movement. It was in denial when it claimed initially that Banat’s was a natural death due to a pre-existing condition. Then it issued contemptable statements about the investigation after the uproar at the murder. It then sent in its security thugs in plain clothes to attack protesters, and issued tribal statements in support of the president, especially from Hebron, where Nizar Banat was from. All of this exposed the PA like never before, as nothing but a primitive authority that identifies with other repressive Arab regimes, with a leadership that is supposed to represent a “national liberation movement”.

Under normal circumstances, there is no “single” solution to any political crisis, as politics is the result of the interaction of several complex factors and profit and loss calculations. However, the killing of Nizar Banat and the events that preceded and followed it have made matters clear to every Palestinian. The national impasse has only one solution: delegitimise and close down this authority.

The Palestinian factions, especially Hamas, must bear their responsibility for this delegitimisation; they should refuse any dialogue with Fatah under the Oslo umbrella. Dialogue must be established on a national basis to agree on the way to resist the occupation, not on how to relieve Israel of its responsibility and grant it an occupation that carries no political, economic and security cost.

Ever since 2006, the Palestinian dialogue has been based on the wrong foundations, and was thus unable to break away from Oslo. If Hamas and the other factions are trying to end the division in this way, then they are making a big mistake. Fatah, meanwhile, must choose between being part of the people and their resistance, or standing with the occupier in an authority that has failed nationally, legally and in managing internal affairs.

This choice was clear in 2006, and many Palestinian writers and elites demanded that it be made. Now, though, it has become clearer after the Jerusalem Intifada and the victory of the resistance, as well as the assassination of Nizar Banat.

June 30, 2021 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

Government Says Vaccine Passports Won’t Be Mandatory – They’re Lying

By Richie Allen | June 30, 2021

The Daily Mail is reporting this morning that the government has shelved plans to use vaccine passports after July 19th, the so-called Freedom Day.

The Mail claims that it has been told that covid certification will not be required at mass gatherings when restrictions are lifted.

Government sources have revealed that those attending festivals, concerts or sporting events will not be required to show proof of vaccination or proof of immunity. That sounds good right?

Wrong. The Mail also reports that:

Organisers will, however, be permitted to run their own schemes, with the Premier League among those expected to introduce some form of certification to prove those attending football grounds do not pose a Covid risk.

There’s the kicker. Organisers will be permitted to run their own schemes. The government is simply passing the buck to the private sector. Here’s what I think will happen in the coming months. It’s all so predictable.

Shortly, the government will confirm that it will not be imposing mandatory covid certification. There will be lots of virtue signalling. Ministers will wax lyrical about civil liberties. “The UK is not that sort of country,” they will claim.

The government will say that it has listened to the hospitality industry and understands the concerns of pub and restaurant owners who do not want to be chasing customers for proof of vaccination.

From late July, through August and September, life will feel more normal. It’ll be a false dawn. We’ll hit October. Covid case numbers will rise steadily. Many of those who took the mRNA jabs will become seriously ill and die. This will be blamed on the mythical variants.

Testing will be ramped up. The redundant and thoroughly discredited PCR test will find Covid in nearly everyone who is screened. The government will say that there is a danger that the NHS will be overwhelmed. They’ll say that flu is back too. Of course it’ll be a very virulent strain of flu. The government will tell us that regretfully, restrictions must be reimposed.

There will be real panic in the hospitality and entertainment industries. Fearing for their businesses, owners will scream bloody murder. At the 11th hour a compromise will be reached. That compromise will be the introduction of vaccine passports.

Landlords and restaurateurs who were previously critical of the scheme, will rush to embrace it. People who had a covid booster jab and a flu jab (meaning they will have had four jabs in 2021), will demand the introduction of the passport to allow them to socialise.

Enormous pressure will be brought to bear on people like me who haven’t had a jab and never will. This was never about a virus. It was always about conditioning us to take gene altering vaccines and lots of them. It’s unimaginably evil, but it is happening.

June 30, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | , , , | Leave a comment

Canada’s government is seeking to silence Canadian journalists at home and abroad with a draconian censorship bill

By Eva Bartlett | RT | June 30, 2021

As a Canadian journalist, I could be subject to a censorship bill which, if passed in Senate, means the government in Canada can effectively shadow-ban and censor my voice into oblivion, along with other dissenting voices.

After seeing his tweet on the issue of Bill C-10, recently passed in the House of Commons, I spoke with Canadian journalist Dan Dicks about this. He explained that the bill is being presented as being about Canada bringing Big Tech companies under the regulation of the CRTC (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission), to have them display more Canadian content.

“But what people are missing,” he cautioned, “is that there were clauses put into this bill, protections for certain publishers and content creators that would protect people like myself and yourself.”

Those clauses, he said, were recently removed from the bill, leading many content-creating Canadians aware of the bill to worry they will be treated the same as a broadcaster or a programmer, subject to the regulations of the CRTC.

The bottom line is that, beyond the mumbo jumbo of the government, this is the latest attack on freedom of expression, and on dissent.

“It really appears that it’s a backdoor to be able to control the free flow of information online, and to begin to silence voices that go against the status quo,” Dicks said, warning that fines for violators could follow.

“It’s not looking good for individual content creators. Anybody who has any kind of a voice or a significant audience, where they have the ability to affect the minds of the masses, to reach millions of people, they are going to be the ones who are on the chopping block moving forward.”

Names like James Corbett come to mind. Although based in Japan, as a Canadian he would be subject to the bill. And with his very harsh criticisms of many issues pertaining to the Canadian government, he is a thorn they would surely be happy to remove under the pretext of this bill.

Or Dicks, who likewise creates videos often critiquing Canadian government actions.

Or researcher Cory Morningstar, authors Maximilian Forte, Mark Taliano, Yves Engler, or outspoken physicist Denis Rancourt, to name a handful of dissenting voices. Agree or not with their opinions, they have the right to voice them.

Or myself. I’ve been very critical of Canada’s Covid policies and hypocrisy, as well as Canada’s whitewashing of terrorism in Syria, support to neo-Nazis in Ukraine, and unwavering support for Israel which is systematically murdering, starving, and imprisoning Palestinian civilians–including children.

An article on the Law & Liberty website, which describes itself as focussing on “the classical liberal tradition of law and how it shapes a society of free and responsible persons,” notes the bill enables “ample discretion to filter out content made by Canadians that doesn’t carry a desirable ideological posture and [to] prioritize content that does.”

The article emphasizes that the bill violates Canadians’ right to free expression, as well as “the right to express oneself through artistic and political creations, and the right to not be unfairly suppressed by a nebulous government algorithm.”

It noted that Canadians with large followings, like Jordan Peterson, Gad Saad and Steven Crowder, “each enjoy audiences which far exceed any cable television program.”

As with my examples above, these prominent Canadian voices likewise risk shadow-banning under this bill.

But, worse, there is another bill, C-36, that also portends heavy censorship: the “Reducing Online Harms” bill. This one not only involves censorship, but hefty fines and house arrests for violators

The same  Law & Liberty article notes, “Canada is also expected to follow the template of Germany’s NetzDG law, which mandates that platforms take down posts that are determined to constitute hate speech—which requires no actual demonstrated discrimination or potential harm, and is thus mostly subjective—within 24 hours or to face hefty fines. This obviously will incentivize platforms to remove content liberally and avoid paying up.”

The Canadian Constitution Foundation (CCF), rightly, contests this bill, noting, “the proposed definition of hate speech as speech that is ‘likely’ to foment detestation or vilification is vague and subjective.”

Maxime Bernier, leader of the People’s Party of Canada, is likewise extremely critical of the bills.

The CCF points out the potential complete loss of Canadians’ fundamental rights with these bills.

It should be common sense that these bills are extremely dangerous to Canadians, however cloaked in talk of levelling playing fields and of combating hate speech they may be.

Eva Bartlett is a Canadian independent journalist and activist. She has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Palestine (where she lived for nearly four years).

June 30, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Singaporean Ministers Announce That Country Must Learn to Live With COVID-19

By Noah Carl • Lockdown Sceptics • June 29, 2021

Singapore has recorded fewer deaths from COVID-19 than almost any other country with reliable data: only 36 to date, which equates to a rate of just six per million. (The U.K.’s official COVID-19 death rate is 1,890 per million.)

And according to the World Mortality Dataset, Singapore has had zero excess mortality since the pandemic began. On the other hand, the country did take a sizeable economic hit last year – with GDP falling by 5.4% (compared to only 2.8% in Sweden).

What’s more, Singapore has not recorded more than 100 cases in a day since August of last year. If any advanced country has come close to “Zero Covid”, it’s Singapore.

Despite that record, three Singaporean ministers have announced that “COVID-19 may never go away” and “it is possible to live normally with it in our midst”.

Writing in The Straits Times, Gan Kim Yong, Lawrence Wong and Ong Ye Kung (the ministers for trade, finance and health) say that “COVID-19 will very likely become endemic”. This means that “the virus will continue to mutate, and thereby survive in our community”.

In other words, the Singaporean Government is under no illusion that it will be possible to eliminate COVID-19, contrary to the claims of the “Zero COVID” movement. Indeed, a survey by Nature of 119 experts found that 89% believe it is “likely” or “very likely” that SARS-CoV-2 will become an endemic virus.

“We can’t eradicate it”, the ministers write, “but we can turn the pandemic into something much less threatening, like influenza.” How do they propose to deal with the virus going forward?

First, they intend to proceed with their vaccination program, which aims to have two thirds of people vaccinated by August 9th. Second, they intend to continue testing, but “the focus will be different”. For example, the country will cease “monitoring COVID-19 infection numbers every day”. Third, they intend to keep using and developing effective treatments for COVID-19.

As Yong, Wong and Kung conclude, “History has shown that every pandemic will run its course.” Though one might object that even the few remaining measures are no longer necessary, the ministers seem to understand what they’re talking about. Their article is worth reading in full.

June 30, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Economics | , , | Leave a comment

Covid’s dark winter: How bio war-gaming robbed us of our liberty

By Neville Hodgkinson | The Conservative Woman | June 30, 2021

MANY have asked themselves how policies so ineffective and yet damaging to so many people’s lives and liberties could have been put in place so quickly, and seemingly almost on a global basis, in response to the Covid crisis.

Part of the answer has been provided by an investigation by German journalist and author Paul Schreyer. In an hour-long video, he tracks a series of pandemic simulation exercises conducted at the highest level over many years among the most influential industrial nations of the West.

Top officials were ‘primed’ to respond as they did, once the World Health Organisation declared the pandemic spread of a new coronavirus, SARS-COV-2, almost regardless of the nature of the virus or the degree of harm it was likely to cause.

This weakness can be seen as a huge obstacle to rational decision-making. It helps to explain how the views of thousands of doctors, scientists and others who have challenged the official, fear-based approach to the pandemic came to be ignored.

Schreyer maintains that political decisions during the crisis did not come out of the blue, but stemmed from a ‘war on viruses’ begun back in the 1990s, alongside the ‘war on terror’.

It was as though a fresh enemy had to be brought into being, following the end of the Cold War era in which the superpowers Russia and America confronted each other with immense and potentially suicidal armaments and military budgets.

‘I am running out of villains.  I am running out of demons,’ said General Colin Powell in a 1991 newspaper interview. ‘I’m down to Castro and Kim Il-Sung.’ At the time he was the highest-ranking military official in the USA.

That was the context in which the fight against terror, including preparations to fight biological weaponry, began. A 1993 bomb attack on the World Trade Centre in New York City, attributed to Islamist terrorists, boosted demands for continued use of American military abroad, and a similar attack, though with mysterious origins, on a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 reinforced fears of a ‘shadow enemy’ within.

At the same time, dangerous biological research was being conducted at US facilities, said to be aimed at better understanding the threat that could be posed by a state or terrorist with a biological arsenal.

Colonel Dr Robert Kadlec, Biodefence Programmes Director at the Department of Homeland Security, wrote in a 1998 Pentagon strategy paper: ‘Using biological weapons under the cover of an endemic or natural disease occurrence provides an attacker the potential for plausible denial.  Biological warfare’s potential to create significant economic loss and subsequent political instability, coupled with plausible denial, exceeds the possibilities of any other human weapon.’

That same year saw the founding of the Johns Hopkins Centre for Civilian Biodefence Strategies, later renamed the Centre for Health Security. This institution has played a major role in the Covid pandemic, compiling, displaying and analysing data on a global dashboard used by media – for the most part, unquestioningly – all over the world.

And it was this centre that organised several important simulation exercises in the field of disaster response strategies.

The first, the National Symposium on Medical and Public Health Response to Bioterrorism, was held at Arlington, home to the Pentagon, in February 1999. Hundreds of delegates from ten countries took part.  Smallpox was the supposed bioweapon, and delegates were taken through a series of sessions simulating how an attack might be handled and problems that might arise.

How far could the police go to detain patients? How to proceed with vaccination?  Should martial law be implemented? How to control the message going to the public? Public health issues were for the first time being treated as military problems, with the Department of Health becoming part of the US national security apparatus.

A similar exercise took place in November 2000 in Washington DC, this time using plague as the simulated pandemic. Scenarios enacted in front of the high-level officials attending included: ‘The sight of an armed military presence in US cities has provoked protests about the curtailment of civil liberties … the question is, how do we enforce it, and to what degree? How much force do we use to keep people in their homes?’

A third exercise, called Dark Winter, held at a military base a few miles outside Washington in June 2001, simulated a full-scale smallpox emergency. It brought in journalists from well-known media, including the BBC, to question the politicians and top-level officials so that they could learn the kind of issues that would arise.

Among the conclusions:

  • We are ill-equipped to prevent the dire consequences of a bioweapon attack.
  • America lacks the resource stockpiles required for appropriate responses, including vaccines, antibiotics, and means of effective distribution.
  • Forcible constraints on citizens may likely be the only tools available when vaccine stocks are depleted.
  • Americans can no longer take basic civil liberties such as freedom of assembly or travel for granted.

On a fictional news channel created as part of the exercise, Kadlec announced: ‘The problem is, we do not have enough vaccine … it means this could be a very dark winter in America.’

When the real Covid-19 struck, Kadlec became the top emergency preparedness official co-ordinating the response from both the US Department of Health and Human Services, and the federal government.

Days after Joe Biden was declared winner of the presidential election, he warned of a ‘dark winter’ ahead, urging continued mask-wearing. ‘You might call it a coincidence, although you could also suspect that his choice of words was related to the exercise,’ Schreyer says.

The September 11, 2001 attacks brought home the terrorist threat to everybody in the global community. Proposed legal changes to extend state powers of surveillance met resistance in the US, but that disappeared following the so-called anthrax attacks in October the same year. Letters containing anthrax spores were sent to several news media offices, and to two senators who had opposed the changes.

‘To this day it is not clear who was responsible for those attacks,’ says Schreyer, who interprets them as ‘a signal that a certain red line should not be crossed’.

A month later, in November 2001, on the initiative of the US Government, a new international organisation was founded called Global Health Security Initiative (GHSI).

It was emphasised that every government was in danger of receiving a deadly pathogen, and there was a need to unite and jointly take action. The participating countries were Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Britain, and the USA. The European Union also signed up to the initiative and the WHO was involved as technical adviser.  Health ministers and senior officials came together regularly to discuss bioterrorism and how best to co-ordinate a response.

In 2002 a further crucial step was taken: The group declared that the threat need not only be man-made, but might also come from nature, such as with a flu pandemic.  Emergency preparation was needed for both scenarios, on a global scale.

From then on, exercises were co-ordinated internationally. The first, called Global Mercury, convened in 2003, depicted an attack by fictitious self-inoculated terrorists to spread smallpox internationally to target countries.   A planning group for the exercise was led by Canada and comprised ‘trusted agents’ from all participating nations or organisations. Hundreds of people participated.

Another important exercise, convened in 2005, was called Atlantic Storm. Many of the country representatives were either current or former individuals with governmental responsibility.  The real-life Madeleine Albright, for example, former US Secretary of State, played the US President.

Key questions highlighted in the post-exercise report included:

  • How should national leaders determine measures such as border closures or quarantine?
  • If actions are taken that restrict the movement of people, for how long should they be maintained? How would they be coordinated internationally, and how would the decision be made to lift them?

The basic premise of all the scenarios, Schreyer says, was to highlight decision-making processes and competencies in a public health emergency. ‘But they also involved declaring a state of emergency, implementing authoritarian leadership, bypassing parliament and investing certain federal officials with augmented decision-making power while also suspending fundamental civil rights and effecting plans to vaccinate the population.

‘What strikes me as particularly noteworthy is the ready suspension of basic human rights when responding to a pandemic or bioterror attack; because that is not necessarily a logical consequence.

‘Observing all this, the question arises: Maybe such exercises might have served as a cover and testing ground for a state of emergency and checking out how such a political situation could be handled.’

One lesson we might draw from the handling of the Covid crisis is that while politicians understandably feel a need to prepare for global disasters, they risk causing far more harm than good by following tramlines of action rigidly predetermined to be ‘the science’ of the situation, but which actually obstruct rational responses.

June 30, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

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