The Censorship of Mercola — A Timeline
By Dr. Joseph Mercola | January 30, 2023
While the drug and chemical industries have attacked and tried to discredit me for years, blatant censorship didn’t begin until 2020, after the outbreak of the COVID pandemic.
For legal and historical purposes, I am sharing a timeline of events with you that document a chain of coordinated events and attacks against me and this website. My first article about the pandemic came out February 4, 2020, in which I predicted that it was a grossly exaggerated threat that would enrich pandemic vaccine makers.
March 8, 2020, I published an interview with bioweapons expert Francis Boyle, Ph.D., in which he warned that SARS-CoV-2 had all the hallmarks of a genetically engineered bioweapon. Boyle was among the first, if not the first, to suspect the outbreak was the result of a lab leak.
While every health authority on the planet insisted there was no treatment, and that patients simply go to the hospital to be placed on mechanical ventilation and die, I interviewed medical experts working on early treatment options and published articles detailing the potential benefits of vitamin D, zinc, quercetin and other nutraceuticals that boost immune function, as well as decades-old drugs like hydroxychloroquine.
I also published the testimony of whistleblowers such as Erin Marie Olszewski, a frontline nurse, who warned that patients were being intentionally killed on ventilators as it quickly proved to be a deadly intervention for COVID-19.
Summer of 2020 — The Suppression of Vitamin D Begins
Early on, it became apparent that vitamin D levels and spending time outdoors played an important role in the risk of infection and the ultimate outcomes. This has been true for all respiratory infections, so it should come as no surprise it is also true for coronavirus infections. Despite that, health authorities insisted vitamin D was useless.
The only way out of the pandemic, they said, would be a vaccine — and this despite the fact that no previous attempts at creating a safe and effective coronavirus vaccine had ever succeeded because of its rapid ability to mutate.
In June 2020, I launched an information campaign, StopCovidCold, about vitamin D. I released a downloadable scientific report detailing how and why optimizing vitamin D levels among the general population could minimize the impact of the next wave of COVID. Optimizing vitamin D is a rational, safe and inexpensive measure that no sane health official would object to. And yet, they all did.
July 21, 2020, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) issued a press release1 calling on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) “to bring enforcement proceedings against Mercola and his companies for their unlawful disease claims that falsely and misleadingly claim to treat, cure or prevent COVID-19 infections.”
CSPI accused me of falsely claiming “that at least 22 vitamins, supplements and other products available for sale on his web site can prevent, treat, or cure COVID-19 infection.” This despite the fact that their Appendix of Illegal Claims2 clearly show I made no COVID-19-related claims to any specific products and only referenced published studies and mainstream media articles to support my opinions.
In an August 12, 2020, email, CSPI president Dr. Peter Lurie — a former FDA associate commissioner — also made the spurious claim that I was “profiting from the pandemic” through “anti-vaccine fearmongering:” 3
“Mercola brazenly has claimed that many of his products are coronavirus treatments or cures, including vitamin C, vitamin D, zinc, selenium, ‘molecular hydrogen,’ licorice, and other substances.
Besides profiting from the pandemic, Mercola has seemingly advised people to contract COVID-19 after taking supposedly ‘immunity boosting’ supplements (which of course he sells). Making matters worse, Mercola is a leading proponent of anti-vaccine conspiracy theories — and has been fearmongering against prospective COVID-19 vaccines even before such vaccines are available!”
By mid-August, a comprehensive campaign to put an end to Mercola.com had been launched, with Laurie asking CSPI members to flood the FDA and FTC with prewritten Tweets, urging them to take action against us. He also urged “state attorneys general to investigate how they may further protect consumers from Mercola’s illegal marketing.”4
Not surprisingly, CSPI is funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Rockefeller Family Fund, Bloomberg Philanthropies and other billionaire-owned foundations. It’s also partnered with Bill Gates’ agrichemical PR group, the Cornell Alliance for Science. Greg Jaffe, who heads up CSPI’s Biotechnology Project, is also the associate director of legal affairs at Alliance for Science.
Winter of 2020 — Vitamin D Attacks Heat Up
The attacks against me really heated up though after I published a peer-reviewed scientific paper5 on the benefits of vitamin D at the end of October 2020. With that, I established my medical and scientific merit and my right to a professional opinion, which is something the U.S. Constitution absolutely provides for.
The paper, “Evidence Regarding Vitamin D and Risk of COVID-19 and Its Severity,” published in the journal Nutrients, was coauthored by William Grant, Ph.D., and Dr. Carol Wagner, both of whom are part of the GrassrootsHealth expert vitamin D panel.
As noted in that paper, dark skin color, increased age, pre-existing chronic conditions and vitamin D deficiency are all features of severe COVID disease, and of these, vitamin D deficiency is the only factor that is modifiable. As such, it would be foolish to ignore, especially since vitamin D supplements are readily available and low cost.
Christmas Eve 2020, attorney general Letitia James sent us a cease and desist notice, demanding we stop sharing information about how immune-boosting nutritional supplements might lower your risk of COVID, including vitamin D, zinc, NAC and vitamin C.
February 2021, FDA Tries to Silence Protected Speech
After the new presidential administration took over, on February 18, 2021, the Rockefeller-funded CSPI and AG James got their wish, as the FDA sent us a warning letter for “Unapproved and Misbranded Products Related to Coronavirus Disease 2019.”6 Laurie even publicly bragged7 about his ability to influence the FDA to take action against us.
The FDA’s letter highlighted statements in articles on my website that were fully referenced and supported by published science, and none of the articles cited had any commercial advertising linking the information to my products, as per the law. We had done nothing illegal or irregular in that regard, and my professional opinions are protected under the U.S. Constitution.
Needless to say, we fully addressed both James’ cease and desist notice and the FDA’s warning letter, putting them both on notice that they cannot censor protected speech simply because they don’t like what’s being said.
On a side note, William Correll, the director of the Office of Compliance at the FDA who signed the warning letter, sadly “passed away suddenly” just two months later, on April 18 “after a short battle with COVID-19.”8
Gates-Funded Front Group Gets on the Bandwagon
The agrochemical front group Cornell Alliance for Science (CAS),9 the primary funding for which comes from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,10 also jumped on the bandwagon, falsely stating11 that “pages advertising vitamin C and quercetin as having ‘synergistic effects that make them useful in the prevention and early at-home treatment of COVID-19′” were still available on my website nearly a month after the FDA’s warning letter.
To be clear, we had fully referenced scientific news articles. News articles are NOT “advertising,” as they do not link to any specific products, nor do they refer to or recommend any specific brands. In the case of the warning for vitamin C, the article discussed hospitals utilizing IV vitamin C for the treatment of COVID-19 and sepsis.
Such coordinated attacks are to be expected, though, considering Gates’ influence over the operation, and seeing how CAS and CSPI work closely together — a fact CAS admitted in its hit piece.12
March 2021, Booksellers Urged to Ban My Book
Around that same time (February 11, 2021), my book “The Truth About COVID-19” also went up for presale, and by early March, booksellers in the U.S., U.K. and Australia were being pressured not to sell it, or to add some sort of misinformation warning label to it. As reported by Sky News March 5, 2021:13
“In the UK, more than 20 million vaccine doses have been administered as part of efforts to defeat COVID-19, but worries continue that misinformation is stopping some people from having the jab. Shadow health minister Alex Norris told Sky News:
‘Getting our population vaccinated is a massive priority and it is very sad to see these things so freely available. We would hope that retailers would act responsibly and have a look at whether they want to be associated with such products and whether they want to be seen to be profiting off such products.'”
Shady ‘Anti-Hate’ Outfit Publishes Hit List
March 3, 2021, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) — a shady U.K.-based organization with anonymous funding led by Imran Ahmed — also got in on the action, publishing a hit list14 of the “Top 10 anti-vaxxers” it wanted permanently silenced and eradicated from public forums. The list showed, by way of crossing out names, which had already been successfully deplatformed, and from which social media.
While precious little was (and still is) know about the CCDH, some digging revealed Ahmed had been appointed to the steering committee of the U.K. government’s Commission on Countering Extremism Pilot Task Force in April 2020, just as fearmongering about the COVID-19 pandemic was ramping up. The CCDH is also linked to a number of technocratic centers within the globalist network through its board members.15
More Fabrications and Lies From the CCDH
A couple of weeks later (March 15), Ahmed somehow managed to get an article titled “Dismantling the Anti-Vaxx Industry”16 published in the journal Nature Medicine. In it, Ahmed lied, claiming he’d “recorded a private, three-day meeting of the world’s most prominent anti-vaxxers,” when in fact it was a public, international conference given online, attended by thousands around the world, all of whom had access to the recordings.
He could have done the normal, ethical and truly journalistic thing and admitted he simply attended a public virtual conference, but instead he twisted it into some risky undercover agent mission where he secretly recorded private discussions that revealed the inner workings of “the opposition.”
Then, March 21, 2021, the CCDH published the fabricated “Disinformation Dozen” report,17,18,19 in which Ahmed falsely claimed 12 people and/or organizations, including yours truly, were responsible for 65% of all anti-vaccine content on social media.
March 24, 2021 — AGs Try to Censor Protected Speech
March 24, 2021, 12 attorneys general sent a letter20 to the CEOs of Twitter and Facebook, seeking their “cooperation in curtailing the dissemination” of COVID jab “misinformation” — all based on the fabrications of the CCDH. According to the AGs:
“The people and groups spreading falsehoods and misleading Americans about the safety of coronavirus vaccines are threatening the health of our communities, slowing progress in getting our residents protected from the virus, and undermining economic recovery in our states.
As safe and effective vaccines become available, the end of this pandemic is in sight. This end, however, depends on the widespread acceptance of these vaccines as safe and effective. Unfortunately, misinformation disseminated via your platforms has increased vaccine hesitancy …
According to a recent report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, so-called ‘anti-vaxxer’ accounts on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter reach more than 59 million followers … Given ‘anti-vaxxers’ reliance on your platforms, you are uniquely positioned to prevent the spread of misinformation about coronavirus vaccines …”
Facebook Set the Record Straight
August 18, 2021, after conducting an internal investigation, Monika Bickert, vice president of Facebook content policy, publicly called out the falsehoods in “The Disinformation Dozen” report, stating:21
“In recent weeks, there has been a debate about whether the global problem of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation can be solved simply by removing 12 people from social media platforms. People who have advanced this narrative contend that these 12 people are responsible for 73% of online vaccine misinformation on Facebook.
There isn’t any evidence to support this claim … In fact, these 12 people are responsible for about just 0.05% of all views of vaccine-related content on Facebook. This includes all vaccine-related posts they’ve shared, whether true or false, as well as URLs associated with these people.”
Bickert highlighted the fact that Ahmed had preselected the 12 individuals listed in the report, and that his “faulty narrative” was based on nothing more than “a narrow set of 483 pieces of content over six weeks from only 30 groups, some of which are as small as 2,500 users.”
“Further, there is no explanation for how the organization behind the report identified the content they describe as ‘anti-vax’ or how they chose the 30 groups they included in their analysis,” Bickert noted. “There is no justification for their claim that their data constitute a ‘representative sample’ of the content shared across our apps.”
Apparently, no one in government was smart enough to see the flaws in the CCDH’s report though, and a long list of officials cited the CCDH’s fabricated claims throughout the remainder of 2021, even long after Facebook denounced its claims. What’s more, even though Facebook admitted the CCDH’s claims were bogus, they still took action against accounts by applying penalties and/or bans.
April 8, 2021 — AGs Call on Social Media to Ban ‘the 12’
April 8, 2021, attorneys general James and William Tong published an op-ed in The Washington Post,22 again calling on social media companies to ban the “disinformation dozen” identified by the CCDH. The lack of acceptance of novel gene therapy technology, they claimed, was all because a small group of individuals with a social media presence — myself included — were successfully misleading the public with lies about nonexistent vaccine risks.
April 27, 2021 — Dr. Hotez Calls for Cyberwarfare
April 27, 2021, Dr. Peter Hotez, president of the Sabin Vaccine Institute23 — which has received tens of millions of dollars from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,24,25 — escalated the threat even further in an article published in the journal Nature.
Citing the CCDH’s findings, Hotez called for cyberwarfare experts to be enlisted in the war against vaccine safety advocates and people who are “vaccine hesitant.” He wrote:26
“Accurate, targeted counter-messaging from the global health community is important but insufficient, as is public pressure on social-media companies. The United Nations and the highest levels of government must … move to dismantle anti-vaccine groups in the United States.
Efforts must expand into the realm of cyber security, law enforcement, public education and international relations. A high-level inter-agency task force reporting to the UN secretary-general could assess the full impact of anti-vaccine aggression, and propose tough, balanced measures.
The task force should include experts who have tackled complex global threats such as terrorism, cyber attacks and nuclear armament, because anti-science is now approaching similar levels of peril. It is becoming increasingly clear that advancing immunization requires a counteroffensive.”
In short, Hotez called for the use of warfare tactics on law abiding American citizens, and the Nature journal actually published this blatant threat. One day later, April 28, the CCDH published a second report, “Disinformation Dozen: The Sequel,”27 which focused on Big Tech’s failure to get rid of us “despite bipartisan calls from Congress.”
To understand the massive reach the CCDH gained, despite no one having heard of them before COVID, consider this: By the end of August 2021, there were 84,700 Google search results for CCDH’s defamatory phrase “disinformation dozen,” including 16,000 news stories in the international press, nearly all of which parroted the CCDH’s defamatory statements verbatim and reported them as fact.
May 2021 — Financial Warfare Led to Removal of COVID Articles
Shortly after the op-ed by AGs James and Tong appeared, our business bank accounts were abruptly shut down and our credit cards canceled. Our business partners also had their PayPal accounts shut down.
This new threat, which I could not defend against in a court of law, led to my May 4 decision to remove all articles related to vitamin D, vitamin C, zinc and COVID-19 from my website.
July 2021 — The White House Publicly Calls for Censorship
In mid-July 2021, the White House stepped in to pressure Facebook to purge “anti-vaxxers” from its platform. Then-press secretary Jen Psaki regurgitated the CCDH’s false claims, saying:28
“There’s about 12 people who are producing 65% of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms. All of them remain active on Facebook, despite some even being banned on other platforms, including ones that Facebook owns.
Facebook needs to move more quickly to remove harmful, violative posts. Posts that would be within their policy for removal often remain up for days, and that’s too long. The information spreads too quickly.”
In another mid-July press conference, President Joe Biden himself demanded social media take action against “the disinformation dozen,” claiming our “misinformation” was “killing people.”29,30 None of these officials ever questioned the authority of the CCDH. Facebook spokesperson Dani Lever responded to the White House’s demands, saying:
“We will not be distracted by accusations which aren’t supported by the facts. The fact is that more than 2 billion people have viewed authoritative information about COVID-19 and vaccines on Facebook, which is more than any other place on the internet … The facts show that Facebook is helping save lives. Period.”
Summer of 2021 — A Parade of Hit Pieces
July 24, 2021, the New York Times named me the No. 1 superspreader of COVID misinformation online.31 According to the NYT itself, this was the most-read article of the year up to that point. Penned by Sheera Frenkel, it was so littered with blatant lies, my attorneys sent her a retraction demand.32
For example, she claimed the FDA has levied multimillion-dollar fines against me. This is a complete fabrication, as I’ve never been fined by the FDA. She also implied that I misrepresented myself as a published author of a paper on vitamin D for COVID-19, stating she was “unable to verify” my claim. This despite being given a direct link to the paper! My paper can also be located on PubMed.gov in seconds by searching my name.
Frenkel boldly claimed that I am the No.1 spreader of misinformation online, but she didn’t even qualify what “misinformation” actually is. Without qualifying what it is you’re looking for, how can you quantify it? She also provided no proof that I in fact had the greatest reach of all the individuals reporting on COVID injections. My name didn’t even show up in the Top 15 in a Crowdtangle search for anti-vax Facebook posts.
Frenkel’s hit piece was followed up by CNN, which August 4 aired a segment show CNN reporter Randi Kaye stalking me across central Florida. And, of course, Kaye’s primary citation for her accusations against me was the CCDH.
August 4, 2021 — Mercola Deletes Articles After 48 Hours
August 4, 2021, I also implemented yet another change on my website. I had already removed all articles relating to COVID-19 and vitamin D. At this point, I deleted over 15,000 articles from the past 20-plus years from my website as the business and personal threats grew out of hand.
After 48 hours, articles were instead migrated over to Substack, where only paid members through a private membership agreement have access to them. This was a painful but necessary workaround, as the paid subscription provides a layer of protection against these threats.
September 7, 2021 — Senator Warren’s Book Burning Campaign
September 7, 2021, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren sent a letter33 to Andy Jassy, chief executive officer of Amazon.com, demanding an “immediate review” of Amazon’s algorithms to weed out books peddling “COVID misinformation.”34,35,36
While she didn’t spell out what laws Amazon might be breaking, she warned Jassy that the company may be held legally responsible for wrongful death and homicide by selling books that “misinform” readers about COVID-19, and she specifically singled out “The Truth About COVID-19” as a prime example of the kinds of books she wanted banned.
Warren again relied on the fabrications of the CCDH, even though Facebook had refuted the CCDH report as baseless three weeks before she sent that letter.
“Dr. Mercola has been described as ‘the most influential spreader of coronavirus misinformation online,'” Warren wrote, adding: “Not only was this book the top result when searching either ‘COVID-19’ or ‘vaccine’ in the categories of ‘All Departments’ and ‘Books’; it was tagged as a ‘Best Seller’ by Amazon and the ‘#1 Best Seller’ in the ‘Political Freedom’ category.
The book perpetuates dangerous conspiracies about COVID-19 and false and misleading information about vaccines. It asserts that vitamin C, vitamin D and quercetin … can prevent COVID-19 infection … And the book contends that vaccines cannot be trusted, when study after study has demonstrated the overwhelming effectiveness and safety of COVID-19 vaccines.
It should come as no surprise that the book is rife with misinformation. One of the authors, Dr. Mercola, is one of the ‘Disinformation Dozen,’ a group responsible for 65% of anti-vaccine content on Facebook and Twitter …”
YouTube Deplatforms Mercola in Breach of Contract
Warren’s attempt at getting Amazon to ban my book was swiftly followed up by YouTube, which deleted my account September 29, 2021, allegedly for violating community guidelines. The problem was, they’d published and implemented those new guidelines that very morning.
While I disagreed with YouTube’s censorship, when its “COVID-19 misinformation” policy was implemented back in April 2021, I carefully avoided posting any content on YouTube that might violate that guideline. At no point had I ever received a violation notice from YouTube.
On the morning of September 29, 2022, at 9 a.m. EDT, The Washington Post published an article titled “YouTube Is Banning Joseph Mercola and a Handful of Other Anti-Vaccine Activists.” According to the WaPo :37
“YouTube is taking down several video channels associated with high-profile anti-vaccine activists including Joseph Mercola … As part of a new set of policies aimed at cutting down on anti-vaccine content on the Google-owned site, YouTube will ban any videos that claim that commonly used vaccines approved by health authorities are ineffective or dangerous.
The company previously blocked videos that made those claims about coronavirus vaccines, but not ones for other vaccines like those for measles or chickenpox.”
In short, as of September 29, 2021, you could no longer post any video discussing or stating that any vaccine is dangerous or ineffective. Six minutes after the publication of that WaPo article, I received an email from YouTube informing me that my entire channel had been deplatformed, having been found in violation of this new policy.
October 2021 — CNN’s Second Hit Piece
October 4, 2021, two months to the day after their first attempted hit piece against my book, “The Truth About COVID-19,” CNN aired a follow-up in which they echoed Warren’s call for Amazon to ban the sale of my book.
Like something straight out of George Orwell’s “1984” newsspeak dictionary, CNN host Anderson Cooper said my book is loaded with “mistruths” about COVID. Yet he failed to present a single piece of evidence to back up that claim.
This is one of the oldest propaganda trick in the book. If you just spew out enough derogatory terms about your opponent, people will forget the fact that you provided zero proof to back up your position.
November 2021 — Mercola Sues Sen. Warren
November 7, 2021, two months after Warren tried to get my best-selling book “The Truth About COVID-19” banned from Amazon, I, my coauthor Ronnie Cummins, my publisher and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who wrote our foreword, sued Warren,38 both in her official and personal capacities, for violating our First Amendment rights and scaring book sellers into pulling and/or suppressing sales.
As a government official, it is illegal for her violate the U.S. Constitution, and pressuring private businesses to do it for her is not a legal workaround.
February 2022 — NIH Director Blames Mercola For Pandemic Continuation
In February 2022, former National Institutes of Health director Dr. Francis Collins blamed me personally for the government’s inability to bring the COVID pandemic to a close. This despite the fact that I was by then heavily censored just about everywhere. The only people, really, who could see my information were those who subscribed to my newsletter and received it by email.
August 2022 — NYT Airs Hit Piece Documentary
Fast-forward to August 2022, The New York Times published the documentary “Superspreader,” featuring yours truly, on FX and Hulu (both of which are owned by Disney). They clearly went through a lot of trouble, trying to dig up dirt from anyone they could find from my past — some going back 40 years, to my medical school days — who would be able to share some tidbit with which they could discredit me with.
But it seems they came up empty handed: After a year of investigation, they couldn’t come up with anything. Surprisingly, they even showed two people who claimed I’d saved their lives. All the other interviews were with people who don’t actually know me. One was with a Chicago journalist who interviewed me once — 13 years ago. Two classmates from med school, whom I haven’t seen in over 40 years, also described their impressions.
Ironically, yet again, just one week before the “Superspreader” program aired, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reversed all of its COVID-19 guidelines, thereby proving my position on COVID was correct all along. Of course, this was never mentioned in their program though.
September 23, 2022 — Mercola Website Taken Down in Cyberattack
Next up was a cyberattack that took down my entire website and destroyed our servers. Cyberattacks have been ongoing for the past six years, but the one that took place September 23, 2022, finally got through our defenses. By that time, my reach on social media had been throttled back to next to nothing, and my website was about the only place you could find my articles (with the exception of republications, which I allowed).
September 28, 2022 — Mercola Sues Google and YouTube
Warren isn’t the only one I’ve had to sue to protect my First Amendment right. In September 28, 2022, I also filed a lawsuit39 against Google, YouTube and Alphabet Inc. for breach of contract.40
As detailed in my complaint, YouTube unilaterally amended the contract without notice, which is a violation of its own terms of service, and then used this last-minute amendment to justify removing my content, which went back to 2005, the same year YouTube was founded. At the time YouTube deleted my content, I had more than 300,000 subscribers, and my videos had collectively garnered more than 50 million views.
The WaPo article was embargoed until the morning of September 29 in order to prevent me (and anyone else affected by this change) from reviewing the new policy, take steps to bring my channel into compliance, or move my content to another platform. Instead, they simply deleted 16 years’ worth of intellectual property, without warning.
This is a clear violation of its own terms of service, which state that YouTube “will provide reasonable advance notice” of any changes to the terms of service, and that users will have “the opportunity to review them” and to remove content if they do not agree to the new terms.
YouTube’s terms of service also include a “three strikes” policy, where users are given three warnings and opportunities to remove content that violates the guidelines before being banned. I had no “strikes” against my channel on the day I was deplatformed and deleted.
I’m also suing YouTube for unjust enrichment, as for the last 16 years, my video content, having generated in excess of 50 million views, has been of great financial benefit to YouTube, allowing them to increase advertising revenue on the site. Additionally, they’ve refused to allow me to retrieve any of this content, which they still have in their possession. So, YouTube has unjustly benefited at my expense.
January 2023 — Third Lawsuit Filed to Protect Free Speech
January 10, 2023, I, along with several other plaintiffs, also filed a lawsuit41 against The Washington Post, the BBC, the Associated Press and Reuters — also known as the Trusted News Initiative (TNI),42 a self-appointed Pharma and Big Tech industry partner that has spent the past couple years playing judge and jury of news.
It has been doing everything it can to censor what it doesn’t want the public to hear. As noted in the complaint, the TNI has not only censored free speech, it has also engaged in antitrust activity. Specifically, “Federal antitrust law has its own name for this kind of ‘industry partnership’: it’s called a ‘group boycott’ and is a per se violation of the Sherman Act.”
As evidence of this allegation, our complaint references multiple public statements by TNI partners, including a March 2022 statement by Jamie Angus, then-senior news controller for BBC News, who explained TNI’s “strategy to beat disinformation.”
The Fight for Truth and Freedom Continues
The globalist cabal is extremely coordinated, as you can see. What’s more, they play dirty. But we will not give up, nor give in. Our freedom is far too precious for that, and freedom depends on getting the truth out. So, I will continue doing my part. You can help by sharing articles you think are important with family and friends, in whatever ways are available.
Sources and References
- 1 CSPI July 21, 2020
- 2 Illegal Claims Pertaining to Mercola Group Products (PDF)
- 3 CSPI July 19, 2017
- 4, 7 SCPInet.org March 4, 2021
- 5 Nutrients October 31, 2020;12, 3361; doi:10.3390/nu12113361
- 6 FDA Mercola Warning Letter February 18, 2021
- 8 Sun Gazette April 24, 2021
- 9 USRTK September 23, 2020
- 10 Cornell Alliance for Science Our Funders
- 11, 12 Cornell Alliance for Science, March 2021, FDA Warns Mercola
- 13 Sky News March 5, 2021
- 14 Twitter CCDH March 3, 2021
- 15 In-this-together.com, CCDH The Center for Cancel Culture and Digital Hypocrisy Part 2
- 16 Nature Medicine March 15, 2021
- 17 Counterhate.com Disinformation Dozen March 21, 2021
- 18 The Disinformation Dozen
- 19 PR Newswwire March 24, 2021
- 20 Letter to Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg March 24, 2021
- 21 Facebook August 18, 2021
- 22 Washington Post April 8, 2021
- 23 Texas Children’s Hospital Peter Hotez
- 24 PND July 1, 2011
- 25 Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
- 26 Nature April 27, 2021
- 27 CCHD Disinformation Dozen: The Sequel April 28, 2021
- 28 Reason July 15, 2021
- 29 CNN July 16, 2021
- 30 AP July 16, 2021
- 31 New York Times July 24, 2021 (Archived)
- 32 Twitter Dr. Joseph Mercola July 26, 2021
- 33 Warren’s letter to Andy Jassy September 7, 2021
- 34 National Interest September 12, 2021
- 35 The Guardian September 13, 2021
- 36 New York Times September 8, 2021
- 37 Washington Post September 29, 2021
- 38 US District Court Western District of Washington Case: 2:21-cv-01508
- 39 Complaint for Contract Breach Mercola vs Google, YouTube, Alphabet Inc. September 28, 2022
- 40 Reuters September 29, 2022
- 41 US District Court Northern District of Texas Case: 2:23-cv-00004-Z
- 42 The Defender January 10, 2023
The ‘Great Food Reset’: Who’s Behind Plan to Reengineer the Global Food Supply?
By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | January 25, 2023
The world’s food supply is being reengineered under the guise of a fake food crisis, according to journalist James Corbett.
“From cricket powder dumplings and bug burgers to GMOs and glyphosate to bioreactors and designer microbes to nutrigenomics and 3D printed material, the future of ‘food’ is shaping up to be radically different from anything you’ve eaten before,” the author of the “The Corbett Report” said.
Food, Corbett noted a week earlier on his Substack, has been leveraged throughout human history as a “powerful tool of control.”
But it’s not too late to “start formulating our own plans for counteracting this agenda” of control, Corbett said.
What’s the first step? Look closely at who’s behind the agenda.
According to Corbett:
“In order to truly do something to derail the runaway train that is the Great Food Reset, we must first understand it. And in order to understand it, we have to know something about the people behind this agenda.”
Corbett provided an information-packed rundown of the groups and individuals he believes are the drivers — historically and today — of the Great Food Reset.
The Rockefeller Foundation
According to Corbett, the Rockefellers and their namesake foundation — who “are in many ways the progenitors and the architects of the Great Food Reset” — are pushing for further centralization of control over the food supply, including “a new, integrated nutrition security system.”
“From the beginning of the so-called ‘Green Revolution’ to the so-called ‘Gene Revolution,’ the Rockefellers have been there,” Corbett said, “helping to move things along with their ‘philanthropic’ donations.”
Corbett cited the Rockefellers’ recent work in Africa, which operates under the name Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. The alliance’s stated goal — to “elevate the single African voice” — “sounds nice and fuzzy, until you learn that 200 organizations have come together to denounce the alliance and its activities,” Corbett said.
Corbett said the 200 critics of the alliance “claim that the group has not only ‘unequivocally failed in its mission,’ but has actually ‘harmed broader efforts to support African farmers.’”
Bill Gates
Corbett pointed out that Bill Gates, Sr., in 2009, admitted he had looked to the Rockefeller Foundation as an example to follow when he helped his son set up the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — so it comes as “no surprise” that Bill Gates is heavily invested in the Great Food Reset.
Gates is “literally invested” in the food reset through his financing of the fake meat industry, Corbett said.
“Gates was, infamously, an important early backer of ‘Impossible Burger’ and its lab-grown synthetic biology food substitute,” Corbett said. “He also provided capital to Impossible rival Beyond Meat . . . until Beyond’s stock began to crumble.”
“Miraculously, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust was able to divest itself of its Beyond Meat stock right before the shares tanked in 2019,” Corbett said, adding, “The Gateses must be super-shrewd investors!”
Corbett also noted that Gates invested millions into “hacking your microbiome” to reengineer humans’ gut bacteria.
Gates became the biggest owner of U.S. farmland in 2021.
“Gee, I wonder why someone who’s so obsessed with completely reengineering the food supply and making us dependent on the lab-grown synthetic food substitutes he funds would be buying up farmland?” Corbett said.
World Economic Forum
The World Economic Forum (WEF) is behind many different aspects of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution, including “Great Reset” food initiatives, Corbett said.
Among other goals, the WEF wants more people to eat more insects.
“[Klaus] Schwab’s desire to get humans off of traditional sources of protein and nutrients is very much a part of that Great Reset plan,” Corbett said.
Corbett told readers that a quick search of the word “insects” on the WEF website reveals the organization has been regularly spouting ideas such as, “5 reasons why eating insects could reduce climate change,” and “Insects could soon be appearing on restaurant menus in Europe.”
“The fat cats are now unwinding after their hard week at Davos,” Corbett said. “You can bet they’re not snacking down on cricket croquette or mealmoth flambé . . . though they may expect you to.”
The EAT Forum (Davos for Food)
Describing itself as the “Davos for food,” an organization called the EAT Forum — cofounded by the Wellcome Trust — says it is a “science-based global platform for food system transformation.”
Corbett pointed out that according to a Feb. 17, 2022, analysis by Dr. Joseph Mercola, the EAT Forum’s largest initiative — FReSH — aims to transform the food system as a whole and features project partners including Bayer, Cargill, Syngenta, Unilever and Google.
Moreover, the EAT Forum, he said, also works with “nearly 40 city governments in Europe, Africa, Asia, North America, South America and Australia, and helps the Gates-funded United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) create updated dietary guidelines.”
USAID
Corbett discussed a working paper — “Systemic Solutions for Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation in Agriculture, Nutrition, and Food Systems” — released in 2022, by the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Board for International Food and Agricultural Development in conjunction with “Feed the Future,” the U.S. government’s global hunger and food security initiative.
“The whole document is couched in the bland bureaucratic doublespeak of ‘equity,’ ‘inclusion’ and ‘sustainability,’” Corbett said. “But, if you know how to read between the lines, it isn’t hard to understand what the report is really saying.”
“USAID’s ‘leverage’ over developing countries — specifically referenced no less than 125 times — gives an insight into the Kissingerian food-as-a-weapon mentality that is the very basis of USAID and its mission,” Corbett said.
He added:
“The entire enterprise reeks of a neocolonial landgrab masquerading as ‘philanthropy’ — the kind of territorial taking that people in Africa and elsewhere have been warning about for decades.”
Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.
his article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
WHO Proposals Could Strip Nations of Their Sovereignty, Create Worldwide Totalitarian State, Expert Warns
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | January 13, 2023
Secretive negotiations took place this week in Geneva, Switzerland, to discuss proposed amendments to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) International Health Regulations (IHR), considered a binding instrument of international law.
Similar negotiations took place last month for drafting a new WHO pandemic treaty.
While the two are often conflated, the proposed IHR amendments and the proposed pandemic treaty represent two separate but related sets of proposals that would fundamentally alter the WHO’s ability to respond to “public health emergencies” throughout the world — and, critics warn, significantly strip nations of their sovereignty.
According to author and researcher James Roguski, these two proposals would transform the WHO from an advisory organization to a global governing body whose policies would be legally binding.
They also would greatly expand the scope and reach of the IHR, institute a system of global health certificates and “passports” and allow the WHO to mandate medical examinations, quarantine and treatment.
Roguski said the proposed documents would give the WHO power over the means of production during a declared pandemic, call for the development of IHR infrastructure at “points of entry” (such as national borders), redirect billions of dollars to the “Pharmaceutical Hospital Emergency Industrial Complex” and remove mention of “respect for dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms of people.”
Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., professor of international law at the University of Illinois, said the proposed documents may also contravene international law.
Boyle, author of several international law textbooks and a bioweapons expert who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, recently spoke with The Defender about the dangers — and potential illegality — of these two proposed documents
Other prominent analysts also sounded the alarm.
Proposals would create ‘worldwide totalitarian medical and scientific police state’
Meeting in Geneva between Jan. 9-13, the WHO’s IHR Review Committee worked to develop “technical recommendations to the [WHO’s] Director-General on amendments proposed by State Parties to the IHR,” according to a WHO document.
The IHR was first enacted in 2005, in the aftermath of SARS-CoV-1, and took effect in 2007. They constitute one of only two legally binding treaties the WHO has achieved since its inception in 1948 — the other being the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.
As previously reported by The Defender, the IHR framework already allows the WHO director-general to declare a public health emergency in any country, without the consent of that country’s government, though the framework requires the two sides to first attempt to reach an agreement.
According to the same WHO document, the recommendations of the IHR Review Committee and the member states’ Working Group on Amendments to the International Health Regulations (2005) (WGIHR) will be reported to WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus by mid-January, in the leadup to the WHO’s 76th World Health Assembly in late May.
Boyle said he questioned the legality of the above documents, citing for instance the fact that “the proposed WHO treaty violates the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties,” which was ratified in 1969, and which Boyle described as “the international law of treaties for every state in the world.”
Boyle explained the difference between the latest pandemic treaty and IHR proposals. “The WHO treaty would set up a separate international organization, whereas the proposed regulations would work within the context of the WHO we have today.”
However, he said, “Having read through both of them, it’s a distinction without a difference.” He explained:
“Either one or both will set up a worldwide totalitarian medical and scientific police state under the control of Tedros and the WHO, which are basically a front organization for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Tony Fauci, Bill Gates, Big Pharma, the biowarfare industry and the Chinese Communist government that pays a good chunk of their bills.
“Either they’ll get the regulations or they’ll get the treaty, but both are existentially dangerous. These are truly dangerous, existentially dangerous and insidious documents.”
Boyle, who has written extensively on international law and argued cases on behalf of Palestine and Bosnia in the International Court of Justice, told The Defender he has “never read treaties and draft international organizations that are so completely totalitarian as the IHR regulations and the WHO treaty,” adding:
“Both the IHR regulations and the WHO treaty, as far as I can tell from reading them, are specifically designed to circumvent national, state and local government authorities when it comes to pandemics, the treatment for pandemics and also including in there, vaccines.”
Talks for both the proposed pandemic treaty and the proposed IHR amendments appear to follow a similar timeline, in order to be submitted for consideration during the WHO’s World Health Assembly May 21-30.
“It’s clear to me they are preparing both the regulations and the treaty for adoption by the World Health Assembly in May of 2023,” Boyle said. “That’s where we stand right now as I see it.”
According to the WHO, the International Negotiating Body (INB) working on the Pandemic Treaty will present a “progress report” at the May meeting, with a view toward presenting its “final outcome” to the 77th World Health Assembly in May 2024.
Boyle: proposed legally-binding pandemic treaty violates international law
Commenting on the pandemic treaty, Tedros said, “The lessons of the pandemic must not go unlearned.” He described the current “conceptual zero draft” of the treaty as “a true reflection of the aspirations for a different paradigm for strengthening pandemic prevention, preparedness, response and recovery.”
Roguski, in his analysis of the “Pandemic Treaty,” warned that it will create a “legally binding framework convention that would hand over enormous additional, legally binding authority to the WHO.”
The WHO’s 194 member states would, in other words, “agree to hand over their national sovereignty to the WHO.” This would “dramatically expand the role of the WHO,” by including an “entirely new bureaucracy,” the “Conference of the Parties,” which would include not just member states but “relevant stakeholders.”
This new bureaucracy, according to Roguski, would “be empowered to analyze social media to identify misinformation and disinformation in order to counter it with their own propaganda.”
The WHO currently partners with numerous such organizations, such as “fact-checking” firm NewsGuard, for these purposes.
Roguski said the pandemic treaty also would speed up the approval process for drugs and injectables, provide support for gain-of-function research, develop a “Global Review Mechanism” to oversee national health systems, implement the concept of “One Health,” and increase funding for so-called “tabletop exercises” or “simulations.”
“One Health,” a brainchild of the WHO, is described as “an integrated, unifying approach to balance and optimize the health of people, animals and the environment” that “mobilizes multiple sectors, disciplines and communities” and “is particularly important to prevent, predict, detect, and respond to global health threats such as the COVID-19 pandemic.”
In turn, “tabletop exercises” and “simulations” such as “Event 201,” were remarkably prescient in “predicting” the COVID-19 and monkeypox outbreaks before they actually occurred.
Roguski said the pandemic treaty would provide a structure to redirect massive amounts of money “via crony capitalism to corporations that profit from the declarations of Public Health Emergencies of International Concern” (‘pandemics’) and “the fear-mongering that naturally follows such emergency declarations.”
Boyle warned that the treaty and proposed IHR regulations go even further. “The WHO, which is a rotten, corrupt, criminal, despicable organization, will be able to issue orders going down the pike to your primary care physician on how you should be treated in the event they proclaim a pandemic.”
Moreover, Boyle said, the pandemic treaty would be unlike many other international agreements in that it would come into immediate effect. He told The Defender :
“If you read the WHO Treaty, at the very end, it says quite clearly that it will come into effect immediately upon signature.
“That violates the normal processes for ratification of treaties internationally under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, and also under the United States Constitution, requiring the United States Senate to give its advice and consent to the terms of the treaty by two-thirds vote.”
Indeed, Article 32 of the proposed treaty regarding its “Provisional application” states:
“The [treaty] may be applied provisionally by a Party that consents to its provisional application by so notifying the Depository in writing at the time of signature or deposit of its instrument of ratification, acceptance, approval, formal confirmation or accession.
“Such provisional application shall become effective from the date of receipt of the notification by the Secretary-General of the United Nations.”
“Whoever drafted that knew exactly what they were doing to bring it into force immediately upon signature,” said Boyle. “Assuming the World Health Assembly adopts the treaty in May, Biden can just order Fauci or whoever his representative is there to sign the treaty, and it will immediately come into effect on a provisional basis,” he added.
“I don’t know, in any of my extensive studies of international treaties, let alone treaties setting up international organizations, of any that has a provision like that in it,” said Boyle. “It’s completely insidious.”
Proposed amendments to IHR described as a WHO ‘power grab’
According to Roguski, who said the WHO is “attempting a power grab,” the proposed amendments to the IHR may be even more concerning than the pandemic treaty.
Roguski wrote that while he believes the pandemic treaty is “an important issue,” he also thinks it is “functioning as a decoy that is designed to distract people from the much larger and more immediate threat to our rights and freedoms, which are the proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations.”
The IHR Review Committee working on the proposed amendments “began its work on 6 October 2022,” according to a WHO document, and has convened five times since then, including this week’s meetings in Geneva. Access to the meetings was prohibited for the unvaccinated.
The final proposals of the IHR Review Committee and the WGIHR will be presented to Tedros in mid-January and to the World Health Assembly in May. According to Roguski, “If the proposed amendments are presented to the 76th World Health Assembly, they could be adopted by a simple majority of the 194 member nations.”
As a result, Roguski said, compared to the proposed pandemic treaty, “The amendments to the International Health Regulations are a much more immediate and direct threat to the sovereignty of every nation and the rights and freedoms of every person on earth.”
According to Roguski, “The proposed amendments would seek to remove 3 very important aspects of the existing regulations,” including “removing respect for dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms” from the text of the IHR, changing the IHR from “non-binding” to “legally binding” and obligating nations to “assist” other nations.
“Essentially, the WHO’s Emergency Committee would be given the power to overrule actions taken by sovereign nations,” Roguski said.
According to Boyle, similarly to the pandemic treaty, “again, Biden can instruct his representative in May, assuming they adopt the regulations, to sign the regulations. And then, the Biden administration will treat that as a binding international agreement, just like they did with the 2005 regulations,” referring to the original IHR ratified that year.
He added:
“Those [the 2005 IHR] were signed and the U.S. State Department at that time considered them to be a legally binding international executive agreement that they list in the official State Department publication, ‘Treaties in Force.’
“In other words, they treat the 2005 regulations as if they were a treaty that never received the advice and consent of the United States Senate, and therefore the supreme law of the land under Article 6 of the United States Constitution that would be binding upon all state and local governments here in the United States, even if they are resisting, the IHR regulations or the WHO treaty.”
According to Roguski, “The proposed amendments would implement a great number of changes that everyone should absolutely disagree with.”
These changes include “dramatically expand[ing] the scope of the International Health Regulations from dealing with actual risks to dealing with anything that had the potential to be a risk to public health,” which Roguski said “would open up the doors wide to massive abuse beyond anything we have seen over the past three years.”
The proposed amendments also would shift the WHO’s focus “away from the health of real people” to “place primary preference upon the resilience of health care systems,” and would establish a “National Competent Authority” that “would be given great power to implement the obligations under these regulations,” Roguski said.
If the amendments come to pass, Roguski said, “The WHO will no longer need to consult any sovereign nation in which an event may or may not be occurring within that nation before declaring that there is a Public Health Emergency of International Concern within the borders of that nation.”
“Intermediate Public Health Alert[s],” “Public Health Emergenc[ies] of Regional Concern” and “World Alert and Response Notice[s]” could also be declared by the WHO’s director general, while the WHO would be recognized “as the guidance and coordinating authority during international emergencies.”
During such real or “potential” emergencies, the amendments would empower the WHO to mandate a variety of policies globally, which would be legally binding on member nations.
These policies could include requiring medical examinations or proof of such exams, requiring proof of vaccination, refusing travel, implementing quarantine and contact tracing or requiring travelers to furnish health declarations, to fill out passenger locator forms and to carry digital global health certificates.
“Competent health authorities” would also be empowered to commandeer aircraft and ships, while surveillance networks to “quickly detect public health events” within member nations would also be set up, as per the proposed amendments.
The WHO would also be empowered to be involved in the drafting of national health legislation.
The proposed amendments would give the WHO the power to develop an “Allocation Plan,” allowing it to commandeer the means of production of pharmaceuticals and other items during an “emergency,” and would oblige developed nations to provide “assistance” to developing nations.
“The proposed amendments … would facilitate digital access to everyone’s private health records,” Roguski said, and similar to the proposals in the pandemic treaty, would “also facilitate the censorship of any differing opinions under the guise of mis-information or dis-information.”
Roguski said the proposals are being made despite a “lack of input from the general public” by “unknown and unaccountable delegates” using vague and “undefined terminology” and vague criteria “by which to measure preparedness.”
He said the proposals would “trample our rights and restrict our freedoms,” including the right to privacy, to choose or refuse treatment, to express one’s opinions, to protect one’s children, to be with family and friends and to be free from discrimination, including discrimination on the basis of one’s vaccination status.
“The finality of decisions made by the Emergency Committee” foreseen by the amendments “would be a direct attack on national sovereignty,” Roguski said.
How did we get here?
According to the WHO, the members of the INB — during a meeting in Geneva July 18-21, 2022 — reached a “consensus,” agreeing that any new “convention, agreement or other international instrument on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response” would be “legally binding” on member states.
For Boyle, this is the WHO’s response to the “enormous opposition” to the COVID-19-related restrictions of the past three years. He told The Defender :
“As far as I can figure out what happened here was this: As you know, there has been enormous opposition here in the United States [against] these totalitarian edicts coming out, and this was under both Trump and Biden.
“These totalitarian edicts coming out of the federal government, the White House, the CDC, everyone else on this pandemic and also the vaccine mandates, there’s enormous grassroots opposition. And so, as far as I can tell what happened, this culminated in Trump pulling us out of the WHO, which I think was a correct decision.
“So you know, I’m a political independent. I’m just looking at this subjectively. Now, what happened was then, when Biden came to power, his top scientific advisor was Tony Fauci. So Biden put us back into the WHO and then appointed Fauci as the U.S. representative on the Executive Committee of the WHO.
“That’s where both the IHR regulations and the WHO treaty come from: to circumvent the enormous grassroots opposition to the handling of the edicts coming out of the federal government with respect to the pandemic and the vaccine mandates.”
Boyle explained what “legally binding” would mean in this context, if either set of proposals comes to pass:
“What will happen is the WHO will come up with an order, this new organization will come up with an order that they will then send to Washington, D.C., whereupon the Biden administration will enforce it as a binding international obligation of the United States of America under Article 6 of the United States Constitution, and it will usurp the state and local health authorities, who generally have constitutional authority to deal with public health under the 10th Amendment to the United States Constitution.
“The Biden administration will then argue that either the regulations or the treaty will usurp the 10th Amendment to the United States Constitution and state and local health authorities, governors, attorney generals, public health authorities will have to obey [any] order coming out of the WHO.”
Referring to his remarks about the illegality of the two proposals under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, Boyle clarified that under Article 18 of the convention, “a treaty does not come into force when signed. When the state has signed the treaty, it is only obligated to act in a manner that does not defeat the object and purpose of the treaty.”
Article 18 states:
“A State is obliged to refrain from acts which would defeat the object and purpose of a treaty when: (a) it has signed the treaty or has exchanged instruments constituting the treaty subject to ratification, acceptance or approval, until it shall have made its intention clear not to become a party to the treaty.”
According to Boyle a state’s signature “does not provisionally bring the treaty into force.”
Boyle also described the proposals as “a massive power grab by Fauci, the CDC, the WHO, Bill Gates, Big Pharma, the biowarfare industry and Tedros.”
He added:
“I’ve never seen anything like this in any of my research, writing, teaching, litigating international organizations going back to the First Hague Peace Conference of 1899, up until today.”
Roguski and Boyle argued that the U.S. — and other countries — should exit the WHO. Boyle told The Defender :
“I’m not a supporter of President Trump, but I think we have to go back to pulling out of the WHO right away. In the last session of Congress, there was legislation introduced pulling us out of the WHO. We need that legislation reintroduced immediately, in this new session of Congress.
“I think the House of Representatives has to make it clear that they object, that there’s no way they are going to go along with any orders coming out of the WHO, the World Health Assembly [WHA] or this new international pandemic organization, and that they have the power of the purse and that they will defund anything related to the WHO.”
However, for Boyle, this is not just a matter for federal lawmakers. “We need, certainly, the state governments here in the United States to take the position that they will not comply with any decisions coming out of the WHO, the WHA or this new international pandemic organization,” adding that he recently made such recommendations to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
“We need that replicated all over the United States, on a state-by-state basis,” said Boyle, “and I think we need it right away because they’re trying to rush through these WHO regulations and the [pandemic] treaty for the WHO assembly in May.”
Close cooperation with Gates Foundation, others
According to the WHO, the INB discussions are taking place not just among all member states, but also with “relevant stakeholders” listed in document A/INB/2/4.
Who are these stakeholders? One example is GAVI, The Vaccine Alliance, listed as an “Observer” alongside the Holy See (Vatican), Palestine and the Red Cross.
As previously reported by The Defender, GAVI proclaims a mission to “save lives and protect people’s health,” and states it “helps vaccinate almost half the world’s children against deadly and debilitating infectious diseases.”
GAVI describes its core partnership with various international organizations, including names that are by now familiar: the WHO, UNICEF, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Bank, and with the ID2020 Alliance, which supports the implementation of “vaccine passports.”
ID2020’s founding members include the Gates Foundation, Microsoft and the Rockefeller Foundation.
In turn, the Gates Foundation, alongside Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Clinton Health Access Initiative, the Rockefeller Foundation, the International Air Transport Association (IATA — think “vaccine passports”) and the Population Council — founded by John D. Rockefeller and known for its “population control” initiatives — are listed in the same WHO document under Annex C as “non-state actors in official relations with WHO.”
“Other stakeholders, as decided by the INB, invited to attend [and] speak at open sessions of meetings of the INB [and] provide inputs to the INB” include IATA, the International Civil Aviation Organization and the World Bank Group.
“Open Philanthropy” and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, and “nonprofit consumer advocacy organization” Public Citizen, are among the groups listed in the WHO document as “other stakeholders” that can “provide inputs to the INB,” alongside two Russian state-affiliated health organizations.
Lead U.S. negotiator for the pandemic treaty, Pamela Hamamoto — previously an investment banker with Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch — “helped coordinate early responses to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2015 … and a strengthened WHO response.”
Hamamoto also was “instrumental in the 2014 launch of the Global Health Security Agenda” (GHSA), a “global effort … focused on strengthening the world’s ability to prevent, detect, and respond to infectious disease threats,” spearheaded by the CDC and founded with the purpose of accelerating the IHR passed in 2005.
The World Bank, the Global Health Security Consortium, the Private Sector Roundtable and the WHO are part of the GHSA’s steering group. AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, manufacturers of COVID-19 vaccines, are members of the Private Sector Roundtable.
Advising the GHSA is the “GHSA Consortium,” which includes within its steering committee the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (which hosted Event 201) and the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI).
As previously reported by The Defender, the NTI organized a “tabletop exercise” that predicted a “fictional” May 2022 monkeypox outbreak with remarkable accuracy. “Open Philanthropy” funded the final report for this exercise.
General members of the GHSA Consortium include the Gates Foundation, Amazon Web Services (which maintained COVID-19 immunization databases for the CDC), Boston University and the institution’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL), and Emergent BioSolutions.
As previously reported by The Defender, NEIDL is where “a new strain of COVID-19 that killed 80% of the mice infected with the virus” was recently developed.
Emergent BioSolutions, which produced the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and attained infamy for losing a $600 million federal contract after millions of vaccine doses were ruined, is connected to the 2001 Dark Winter anthrax simulation.
In June 2022, with the support of the U.S., Italy (current chair of the GHSA) and then-G20 president Indonesia, the World Bank announced the launch of a $1 billion “pandemic fund.”
In November 2022, Indonesian Minister of Health Budi Gunadi Sadikin, at the G20 meeting held in Bali, pushed for an international “digital health certificate acknowledged by the WHO” to enable the public to “move around.” Indonesia is also a permanent member of the GHSA’s steering group.
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
The Dark Origins of the Davos Great Reset
By F. William Engdahl | Global Research | October 25, 2022
Important to understand is that there is not one single new or original idea in Klaus Schwab’s so-called Great Reset agenda for the world. Nor is his Fourth Industrial Revolution agenda his or his claim to having invented the notion of Stakeholder Capitalism a product of Schwab.
Klaus Schwab is little more than a slick PR agent for a global technocratic agenda, a corporatist unity of corporate power with government, including the UN, an agenda whose origins go back to the beginning of the 1970s, and even earlier. The Davos Great reset is merely an updated blueprint for a global dystopian dictatorship under UN control that has been decades in development. The key actors were David Rockefeller and his protégé, Maurice Strong.
In the beginning of the 1970s, there was arguably no one person more influential in world politics than the late David Rockefeller, then largely known as chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank.
Creating the new paradigm
At the end of the 1960s and into the early 1970s, the international circles directly tied to David Rockefeller launched a dazzling array of elite organizations and think tanks. These included The Club of Rome; the 1001: A Nature Trust, tied to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF); the Stockholm United Nations Earth Day conference; the MIT-authored study, Limits to Growth; and David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission.
Club of Rome
In 1968 David Rockefeller founded a neo-Malthusian think tank, The Club of Rome, along with Aurelio Peccei and Alexander King. Aurelio Peccei, was a senior manager of the Fiat car company, owned by the powerful Italian Agnelli family. Fiat’s Gianni Agnelli was an intimate friend of David Rockefeller and a member of the International Advisory Committee of Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank. Agnelli and David Rockefeller had been close friends since 1957. Agnelli became a founding member of David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission in 1973. Alexander King, head of the OECD Science Program was also a consultant to NATO. [i] That was the beginning of what would become the neo-Malthusian “people pollute” movement.
In 1971 the Club of Rome published a deeply-flawed report, Limits to Growth, which predicted an end to civilization as we knew it because of rapid population growth, combined with fixed resources such as oil. The report concluded that without substantial changes in resource consumption, “the most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.”
It was based on bogus computer simulations by a group of MIT computer scientists. It stated the bold prediction, “If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years.” That was 1971. In 1973 Klaus Schwab in his third annual Davos business leader meeting invited Peccei to Davos to present Limits to Growth to assembled corporate CEOs. [ii]
In 1974, the Club of Rome declared boldly, “The Earth has cancer and the cancer is Man.” Then: “the world is facing an unprecedented set of interlocking global problems, such as, over-population, food shortages, non-renewable resource [oil-w.e.] depletion, environmental degradation and poor governance.” [iii] They argued that,
‘horizontal’ restructuring of the world system is needed… drastic changes in the norm stratum – that is, in the value system and the goals of man – are necessary in order to solve energy, food, and other crises, i.e., social changes and changes in individual attitudes are needed if the transition to organic growth is to take place. [iv]
In their 1974 report, Mankind at the Turning Point, The Club of Rome further argued:
Increasing interdependence between nations and regions must then translate as a decrease in independence. Nations cannot be interdependent without each of them giving up some of, or at least acknowledging limits to, its own independence. Now is the time to draw up a master plan for organic sustainable growth and world development based on global allocation of all finite resources and a new global economic system. [v]
That was the early formulation of the UN Agenda 21, Agenda2030 and the 2020 Davos Great Reset.
David Rockefeller and Maurice Strong
By far the most influential organizer of Rockefeller’s ‘zero growth’ agenda in the early 1970s was David Rockefeller’s longtime friend, a billionaire oilman named Maurice Strong.
Canadian Maurice Strong was one of the key early propagators of the scientifically flawed theory that man-made CO2 emissions from transportation vehicles, coal plants and agriculture caused a dramatic and accelerating global temperature rise which threatens “the planet”, so-called Global Warming.
As chairman of the 1972 Earth Day UN Stockholm Conference, Strong promoted an agenda of population reduction and lowering of living standards around the world to “save the environment.”
Strong stated his radical ecologist agenda:
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” [vi]
This is what is now taking place under cover of a hyped global pandemic.
Strong was a curious choice to head a major UN initiative to mobilize action on the environment, as his career and his considerable fortune had been built on exploitation of oil, like an unusual number of the new advocates of ‘ecological purity,’ such as David Rockefeller or Robert O. Anderson of Aspen Institute or Shell’s John Loudon.
Strong had met David Rockefeller in 1947 as a young Canadian eighteen and from that point, his career became tied to the network of the Rockefeller family.[vii] Through his new friendship with David Rockefeller, Strong, at age 18, was given a key UN position under UN Treasurer, Noah Monod. The UN’s funds were conveniently enough handled by Rockefeller’s Chase Bank. This was typical of the model of “public-private partnership” to be deployed by Strong—private gain from public government. [viii]
In the 1960s Strong had become president of the huge Montreal energy conglomerate and oil company known as Power Corporation, then owned by the influential Paul Desmarais. Power Corporation was reportedly also used as a political slush fund to finance campaigns of select Canadian politicians such as Pierre Trudeau, father of Davos protégé Justin Trudeau, according to Canadian investigative researcher, Elaine Dewar. [ix]
Earth Summit I and Rio Earth Summit
By 1971 Strong was named Undersecretary of the United Nations in New York and Secretary General of the upcoming Earth Day conference, United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (Earth Summit I) in Stockholm, Sweden. He was also named that year as a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation – which financed his launch of the Stockholm Earth Day project.[x] In Stockholm the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) was created with Strong as its head.
By 1989 Strong was named by the UN Secretary General to head the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development or UNCED (“Rio Earth Summit II”). He oversaw the drafting of the UN “Sustainable Environment” goals there, the Agenda 21 for Sustainable Development that forms the basis of Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset, as well as creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the UN. Strong, who was also a board member of Davos WEF, had arranged for Schwab to serve as a key adviser to the Rio Earth Summit.
As Secretary General of the UN Rio Conference, Strong also commissioned a report from the Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution, authored by Alexander King which admitted that the CO2 global warming claim was merely an invented ruse to force change:
“The common enemy of humanity is man.In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome.The real enemy then, is humanity itself.” [xi]
President Clinton’s delegate to Rio, Tim Wirth, admitted the same, stating,
“We have got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.” [xii]
At Rio Strong first introduced the manipulative idea of “sustainable society” defined in relation this arbitrary goal of eliminating CO2 and other so-called Greenhouse Gases. Agenda 21 became Agenda 2030 in Sept 2015 in Rome, with the Pope’s blessing, with 17 “sustainable” goals. It declared among other items,
“Land, because of its unique nature and the crucial role it plays in human settlement, cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market. Private land ownership also is a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth and therefore contributes to social injustice… Social justice, urban renewal, and development, the provision of decent dwellings and healthy conditions for the people can only ‘be achieved if land is used in the interests of society as a whole.”
In short private land ownership must become socialized for “society as a whole,” an idea well-known in Soviet Union days, and a key part of the Davos Great Reset.
At Rio in 1992 where he was chairman and General Secretary, Strong declared:
“It is clear that current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class— involving high meat intake, consumption of large amounts frozen and convenience foods, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and work place air-conditioning, and suburban housing — are not sustainable.” [xiii] (emphasis added)
By that time Strong was at the very center of the transformation of the UN into the vehicle for imposing a new global technocratic “paradigm” by stealth, using dire warnings of planet extinction and global warming, merging government agencies with corporate power in an unelected control of pretty much everything, under the cover of “sustainability.” In 1997 Strong oversaw creation of the action plan following the Earth Summit, The Global Diversity Assessment, a blueprint for the roll out of a Fourth Industrial Revolution, an inventory of every resource on the planet, how it would be controlled , and how this revolution would be achieved.[xiv]
At this time Strong was co-chairman of Klaus Schwab’s Davos World Economic Forum. In 2015 on Strong’s death, Davos founder Klaus Schwab wrote,
“He was my mentor since the creation of the Forum: a great friend; an indispensable advisor; and, for many years, a member of our Foundation Board.” [xv]
Before he was left UN over an Iraq Food-for-Oil corruption scandal, Strong was member of the Club of Rome, Trustee of the Aspen Institute, Trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation and Rothschild Foundation. Strong was also a director of the Temple of Understanding of the Lucifer Trust (aka Lucis Trust) housed at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City,
“where pagan rituals include escorting sheep and cattle to the alter for blessing. Here, Vice President Al Gore delivered a sermon, as worshippers marched to the altar with bowls of compost and worms…” [xvi]
This is the dark origin of Schwab’s Great Reset agenda where we should eat worms and have no private property in order to “save the planet.” The agenda is dark, dystopian and meant to eliminate billions of us “ordinary humans.”
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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
Notes
[i] Biographies of 1001 Nature Trust members, Gianni Agnelli, accessed in http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/sociopol_1001club02.htm
[ii] Klaus Schwab, The World Economic Forum: A Partner in Shaping History–The First 40 Years: 1971 – 2010, 2009, World Economic Forum, p. 15, https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_First40Years_Book_2010.pdf
[iii] Quoted from Club of Rome Report, Mankind at the Turning Point, 1974, cited in http://www.greenagenda.com/turningpoint.html
[iv] Ibid.
[v] The Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point, 1974, quoted in Brent Jessop, Mankind at the Turning Point – Part 2 – Creating A One World Consciousness, accessed in http://www.wiseupjournal.com/?p=154
[vi] Maurice Strong, Opening Speech to UN Rio Earth Summit, Rio de Janeiro, 1992, accessed in http://www.infowars.com/maurice-strong-in-1972-isnt-it-our-responsibility-to-collapse-industrial-societies/
[vii] Elaine Dewar, Cloak of Green: The Links between key environmental groups, government and big business, Toronto, James Lorimer & Co., 1995, pp. 259-265.
[viii] Brian Akira, LUCIFER’S UNITED NATIONS, http://www.fourwinds10.com/siterun_data/religion_cults/news.php?q=1249755048
[ix] Elaine Dewar, op cit. p. 269-271.
[x] Ibid., p. 277.
[xi] What is Agenda 21/2030 Who’s behind it ? Introduction, https://sandiadams.net/what-is-agenda-21-introduction-history/
[xii] Larry Bell, Agenda 21: The U.N.’s Earth Summit Has Its Head In The Clouds, Forbes, June 14, 2011, https://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2011/06/14/the-u-n-s-earth-summit-has-its-head-in-the-clouds/?sh=5af856a687ca
[xiii] John Izzard, Maurice Strong , Climate Crook, 2 December, 2015, https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2015/12/discovering-maurice-strong/
[xiv] What is Agenda 21/2030 Who’s behind it ? Introduction, https://sandiadams.net/what-is-agenda-21-introduction-history/
[xv] Maurice Strong An Appreciation by Klaus Schwab, 2015, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/11/maurice-strong-an-appreciation
[xvi] Dr. Eric T. Karlstrom, The UN, Maurice Strong, Crestone/Baca, CO, and the “New World Religion”, September 2017, https://naturalclimatechange.org/new-world-religion/part-i/
Sustainable Debt Slavery
BY IAIN DAVIS AND WHITNEY WEBB |
UNLIMITED HANGOUT| SEPTEMBER 13, 2022
In this first instalment of a new series, Iain Davis and Whitney Webb explore how the UN’s “sustainable development” policies, the SDGs, do not promote “sustainability” as most conceive of it and instead utilise the same debt imperialism long used by the Anglo-American Empire to entrap nations in a new, equally predatory system of global financial governance.
The UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is pitched as a “shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future.” At the heart of this agenda are the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs.
Many of these goals sound nice in theory and paint a picture of an emergent global utopia – such as no poverty, no world hunger and reduced inequality. Yet, as is true with so much, the reality behind most – if not all – of the SDGs are policies cloaked in the language of utopia that – in practice – will only benefit the economic elite and entrench their power.
This can clearly be seen in fine print of the SDGs, as there is considerable emphasis on debt and on entrapping nation states (especially developing states) in debt as a means of forcing adoption of SDG-related policies. It is then little coincidence that many of the driving forces behind SDG-related policies, at the UN and elsewhere, are career bankers. Former executives at some of the most predatory financial institutions in the history of the world, from Goldman Sachs to Bank of America to Deutsche Bank, are among the top proponents and developers of SDG-related policies.
Are their interests truly aligned with “sustainable development” and improving the state of the world for regular people, as they now claim? Or do their interests lie where they always have, in a profit-driven economic model based on debt slavery and outright theft?
In this Unlimited Hangout investigative series, we will be exploring these questions and interrogating – not only the power structures behind the SDGs and related policies – but also their practical impacts.
In this first instalment, we will explore what actually underpins the majority of the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs, cutting through the flowery language to deliver the full picture of what the implementation of these policies means for the average person. Subsequent instalments will focus on case studies based on specific SDGs and their sector-specific impacts.
Overall, this series will offer a fact-based and objective look at how the motivation behind the SDGs and Agenda 2030 is about retooling the same economic imperialism used by the Anglo-American Empire in the post-World War II era for the purposes of the coming “multipolar world order” and efforts to enact a global neo-feudal model, perhaps best summarized as a model for “sustainable slavery.”
The SDG Word Salad
The UN educates young people in developing nations to welcome “Sustainable Development” without disclosing the impact it will have on their lives or national economy, Source: UNICEF
Most people are aware of the concept of “Sustainable Development” but, it is fair to say that the majority believe that SDGs are related to tackling problems allegedly wrought by climate disaster. However, the Agenda 2030 SDGs encompass every facet of our lives and only one, SDG 13, deals explicitly with climate.
From economic and food security to education, employment and all business activity; name any sphere of human activity, including the most personal, and there is an associated SDG designed to “transform” it. Yet, it is the SDG 17—Partnerships for Goals—through which we can start to identify who the beneficiaries of this system really are.
The stated UN SDG 17 aim is, in part, to:
Enhance global macroeconomic stability, including through policy coordination and policy coherence. [. . .] Enhance the global partnership for sustainable development, complemented by multi-stakeholder partnerships [. . .] to support the achievement of the sustainable development goals in all countries. [. . .] Encourage and promote effective public, public-private and civil society partnerships, building on the experience and resourcing strategies of partnerships.
From this, we can deduce that “multi-stakeholder partnerships” are supposed to work together to achieve “macroeconomic stability” in “all countries.” This will be accomplished by enforcing “policy coordination and policy coherence” constructed from the “knowledge” of “public, public-private and civil society partnerships.” These “partnerships” will deliver the SDGs.
This word-salad requires some untangling, because this is the framework that enables the implementation of every SDG “in all countries.”
Before we do, it is worth noting that the UN often refers to itself and its decisions using grandiose language. Even the most trivial of deliberations are treated as “historic” or “ground breaking,” etc. There is also a lot of fluff to wade through about transparency, accountability, sustainability and so on.
These are just words which require corresponding action in order to have contextual meaning. “Transparency” doesn’t mean much if crucial information is buried in endless reams of impenetrable bureaucratic waffle that isn’t reported to the public by anyone. “Accountability” is an anathema if even national governments lack the authority to exercise oversight over the UN; and when “sustainable” is used to mean “transformative,” it becomes an oxymoron.
Untangling the UN-G3P SDG Word Salad
The UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) commissioned a paper which defines “multi-stakeholder partnerships” as:
[P]artnerships between business, NGOs, Governments, the United Nations and other actors.
These “multi-stakeholder partnerships” are supposedly working to create global “macroeconomic stability” as a prerequisite for the implementation of the SDGs. But, just like the term “intergovernmental organisation,” the meaning of “macroeconomic stability” has also been transformed by the UN and its specialised agencies.
While macroeconomic stability used to mean “full employment and stable economic growth, accompanied by low inflation,” the UN have announced that isn’t what it means today. Economic growth now has to be “smart” in order to meet SDG requirements.
Crucially, fiscal balance—the difference between a government’s revenue and expenditure—must accommodate “sustainable development” by creating “fiscal space.” This effectively disassociates the term “macroeconomic stability” from “real economic activity.”
Climate change is seen, not just as an environmental problem, but as a “serious financial, economic and social problem.” Therefore “fiscal space” must be engineered to finance the “policy coordination and policy coherence” needed to avert the prophesied disaster.
The UN Department for Economic and Social Affairs (UN-DESA) notes that “fiscal space” lacks a precise definition. While some economists define it simply as “the availability of budgetary room that allows a government to provide resources for a desired purpose,” others express “budgetary room” as a calculation based upon a countries debt-to-GDP ratio and “projected” growth.
UN-DESA suggests that “fiscal space” boils down to the estimated—or projected—“debt sustainability gap.” This is defined as “the difference between a country’s current debt level and its estimated sustainable debt level.”
No one knows what events may impact future economic growth. A pandemic or another war in Europe could severely restrict it, or cause a recession. The “debt sustainability gap” is a theoretical concept based upon little more than wishful thinking.
As such, this allows policy makers to adopt a malleable, and relatively arbitrary, interpretation of “fiscal space.” They can borrow to finance sustainable development spending, irrespective of real economic conditions.
The primary objective of fiscal policy used to be to maintain employment and price stability and encourage economic growth through the equitable distribution of wealth and resources. It has been transformed by sustainable development. Now it aims to achieve “sustainable trajectories for revenues, expenditures, and deficits” that emphasise “fiscal space.”
If this necessitates increased taxation and/or borrowing, so be it. Regardless of the impact this has on real economic activity, it’s all fine because, according to the World Bank:
Debt is a critical form of financing for the sustainable development goals.
Spending deficits and increasing debt are not a problem because “failure to achieve sustainable development goals” would be far more unacceptable and would increase debt even further. Any amount of sovereign debt can be heaped upon the taxpayer in order to protect us from the much more dangerous economic disaster that would allegedly befall us if the SDGs aren’t quickly implemented.
In other words, economic, financial and monetary crises will hardly be absent in the world of “sustainable development.” The rationale outlined above will likely be used to justify such crises. This is the model envisioned by the UN and its “multi-stakeholder partners.” For those behind the SDGs, the ends justify the means. Any travesty can be justified as long as it is committed in the name of “sustainability.”
We are faced with a global policy initiative, affecting every corner of our lives, based upon the logical fallacy of circular reasoning. The effective destruction of society is necessary in order to protect us from something that we are told is to be much worse.
Obedience is a virtue because, unless we adhere to the policy demands imposed upon us, and accept the costs, the climate disaster might come to pass.
Armed with this knowledge, it becomes much easier to translate the convoluted UN-G3P word-salad and figure out what the UN actually means by the term “Sustainable Development”:
Governments will tax their populations, increasing deficits and national debt where necessary, to create financial slush funds that private multinational corporations, philanthropic foundations and NGOs can access in order to distribute their SDG compliance-based products, services and policy agendas. The new SDG markets will be protected by government sustainability legislation, which is designed by the same “partners” who profit from and control the new global SDG-based economy.
“Green” Debt Traps
Debt is specifically identified as a key component of SDG implementation, particularly in the developing world. In a 2018 paper written by a joint World Bank-IMF team, it was noted on several occasions that “debt vulnerabilities” in developing economies are being addressed by those financial institutions “within the context of the global development agenda (e.g., SDGs).”
That same year, the World Bank and IMF’s Debt Sustainability Framework (DSF) became operational. Per the World Bank, the DSF “allows creditors to tailor their financing terms in anticipation of future risks and helps countries balance the need for funds with the ability to repay their debts.” It also “guides countries in supporting the SDGs, when their ability to service debt is limited.”
Expressed differently, if countries cannot pay the debt they incur through IMF loans and World Bank (and associated Multilateral Development Bank) financing, they will be offered options to “repay” their debt through implementing SDG-related policies. However, as future instalments of this series will show, many of these options supposedly tailored to SDG implementation actually follow the “debt for land swap” model (now re-tooled as “debt for conservation swaps” or “debt for climate swaps”) that precede the SDGs and Agenda 2030 by a number of years. This model essentially enables land grabs and land/natural resource theft on a scale never before seen in human history.
Since their creation in the aftermath of World War II, both the World Bank and IMF have historically used debt to force countries, mostly in the developing world, to adopt policies that favour the global power structure. This was made explicit in a leaked US Army document written in 2008, which states that these institutions are used as unconventional, financial “weapons in times of conflict up to and including large-scale general war” and as “weapons” in terms of influencing “the policies and cooperation of state governments.” The document notes that these institutions in particular have a “long history of conducting economic warfare valuable to any ARSOF [Army Special Operations Forces] UW [Unconventional Warfare] campaign.”
The document further notes that these “financial weapons” can be used by the US military to create “financial incentives or disincentives to persuade adversaries, allies and surrogates to modify their behavior at the theater strategic, operational, and tactical levels.” Further, these unconventional warfare campaigns are highly coordinated with the State Department and the Intelligence Community in determining “which elements of the human terrain in UWOA [Unconventional Warfare Operations Area] are most susceptible to financial engagement.”
Notably, the World Bank and the IMF are listed as both Financial Instruments and Diplomatic Instruments of US National Power as well as integral parts of what the manual calls the “current global governance system.”
While they were once “financial weapons” to be wielded by the Anglo-American Empire, the current shifts in the “global governance system” also herald a shift in who is able to weaponize the World Bank and IMF for their explicit benefit. As the sun sets on the imperial, “unipolar” model and the dawn of a “multipolar” world order is upon us. The World Bank and IMF have already been brought under the control of a new international power structure following the creation of the UN-backed Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) in 2021.
At the COP26 conference that same year, GFANZ announced plans to overhaul the role of the World Bank and IMF specifically as part of a broader plan aimed at “transforming” the global financial system. This was made explicit by GFANZ principal and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink during a COP26 panel, where he specified the plan to overhaul these institutions, saying:
If we’re going to be serious about climate change in the emerging world, we’re going to have to really focus on the reimagination of the World Bank and the IMF.
GFANZ’s plans to “reimagine” these international financial institutions involve merging them with the private-banking interests that compose GFANZ; creating a new system of “global financial governance”; and eroding national sovereignty (particularly in the developing world) by forcing them to establish business environments deemed friendly to the interests of GFANZ members.
As noted in a previous Unlimited Hangout report, GFANZ seeks to use the World Bank and related institutions “to globally impose massive and extensive deregulation on developing countries by using the decarbonization push as justification. No longer must MDBs [multilateral development banks] entrap developing nations in debt to force policies that benefit foreign and multinational private-sector entities, as climate change-related justification can now be used for the same ends.”
Debt remains the main weapon in the arsenal of the World Bank and IMF, and will be used for the same “imperial” ends, only now with different benefactors and a different array of policies to impose on their prey – the SDGs.
The UN’s Quiet Revolution
GFANZ is a significant driver of “sustainable development.” It is, nonetheless, just one of many SDG related “public-private partnerships.” The GFANZ website states:
GFANZ provides a forum for leading financial institutions to accelerate the transition to a net-zero global economy. Our members currently include more than 450 member firms from across the global financial sector, representing more than $130 trillion in assets under management.
GFANZ is formed from a number of “alliances.” The banks, asset managers, asset owners, insurers, financial service providers and investment consultancies each have their own global partnership networks that collectively contribute to the GFANZ forum.
For example, the UN’s Net Zero Banking Alliance affords Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan, HSBC and others the opportunity to pursue their ideas through the GFANZ forum. They are among the key “stakeholders” in the SDG transformation.
In order to “accelerate the transition,” the GFANZ forum’s “Call to Action” empowers these multinational corporations to stipulate specific policy requests. They have decided that governments should adopt “economy-wide net-zero targets.” Governments also need to:
[R]eform [. . . ] financial regulations to support the net zero transition; phase-out of fossil fuel subsidies; pric[e] carbon emissions; mandat[e] net zero transition plans and [set] climate reporting for public and private enterprises by 2024
All of this is necessary, we are told, to avert the “climate disaster” that might happen one day. Therefore, this “global financial governance” policy agenda is simply unavoidable and we should allow private (and historically predatory) financial institutions to create policy aimed at de-regulating the very markets in which they operate. After all, the “race to Net Zero” must happen at break-neck speed and, per GFANZ, the only way to “win” involves scaling “private capital flows to emerging and developing economies” like never before. Were the flow of this “private capital” to be impeded by existing regulations or other obstacles, it would surely spell planetary destruction.
King Charles III, explained the new global SDG economy that will relegate elected governments to “enabling partners.” Then titled Prince Charles, speaking at COP26, in preparation for the GFANZ announcement, he said:
My plea today is for countries to come together to create the environment that enables every sector of industry to take the action required. We know this will take trillions, not billions of dollars. We also know that countries, many of whom are burdened by growing levels of debt, simply cannot afford to go green. Here we need a vast military style campaign to marshal the strength of the global private sector, with trillions at its disposal far beyond global GDP, [. . .] beyond even the governments of the world’s leaders. It offers the only real prospect of achieving fundamental economic transition.
Just as the alleged urgency to implement the SDGs exonerates public policy makers, it also lets the private sector, that drives the antecedent policy agendas, off the hook. The fact that the debt they collectively create primarily benefits private capital is just a coincidence; an allegedly inescapable, consequence of creating the “fiscal space” needed to deliver “sustainable development.”
The UN’s increasing reliance upon these “multi-stakeholder partnerships” is the result of the “quiet revolution” that occurred in the UN during the 1990s. In 1998, then UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, told the World Economic Forum’s Davos symposium:
The business of the United Nations involves the businesses of the world. [. . .] We also promote private sector development and foreign direct investment. We help countries to join the international trading system and enact business-friendly legislation.
Kofi Annan, Secretary-General, United Nations (1997 – 2006) is a member of the Foundation Board of the World Economic Forum and Co-Chair of the World Economic Forum on Africa. Here, he speaks at the Opening Plenary on Africa and the New Global Economy at the World Economic Forum on Africa 2009 in Cape Town, South Africa, Source: WEF
The 2017 UN General Assembly Resolution 70/224 (A/Res/70/224) decreed that the UN would work “tirelessly for the full implementation of this Agenda [Agenda 2030]” through the global dissemination of “concrete policies and actions.”
In keeping with Annan’s admission, these enacted policies and actions are designed, via “global financial governance,” to be “business-friendly.”
A/Res/70/224 added that the UN would maintain:
The strong political commitment to address the challenge of financing and creating an enabling environment at all levels for sustainable development. [. . .] [P]articularly with regard to developing partnerships through the provision of greater opportunities to the private sector, non-governmental organizations and civil society in general [. . .], in particular in the pursuit of sustainable development [SDGs].
This “enabling environment” is synonymous with the “fiscal space” demanded by the World Bank and other UN specialised agencies. The term also makes an appearance in the GFANZ progress report, which states that the World Bank and Multilateral Development Banks should be used to prompt developing nations “to create the right high-level, cross-cutting enabling environments” for alliance members’ investments in those nations.
This concept was firmly established in 2015 at the Adis Ababa Action Agenda conference on “financing for development.” The gathered delegates from 193 UN nation states committed their respective populations to an ambitious financial investment programme to pay for sustainable development.
They collectively agreed to create:
… an enabling environment at all levels for sustainable development; [. . .] to further strengthen the framework to finance sustainable development.
The “enabling environment” is a government, and therefore taxpayer-funded commitment to SDGs. Annan’s successor and the 9th Secretary General of the UN, António Guterres, authorised a 2017 report on A/Res/70/224 which read:
The United Nations must urgently rise to the challenge of unlocking the full potential of collaboration with the private sector and other partners. [. . .] [T]he United Nations system recognizes the need to further pivot towards partnerships that more effectively leverage private sector resources and expertise. The United Nations is also seeking to play a stronger catalytic role in sparking a new wave of financing and innovation needed to achieve the Goals [SDGs].
While called an intergovernmental organisation, the UN is not just a collaboration between governments. Some might reasonably argue that it never was.
The UN was created, in no small measure, thanks to the efforts of the private sector and the “philanthropic” arms of oligarchs. For instance, the Rockefeller Foundation’s (RF’s) comprehensive financial and operational support for the Economic, Financial and Transit Department (EFTD) of the League of Nations (LoN), and its considerable influence upon the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), arguably made the RF the key player in the transition of the LoN into the UN.
In addition, the Rockefeller family, which has long promoted “internationalist” policies that expand and entrench global governance, donated the land on which the UN’s headquarters in New York sits, among other sizeable donations to the UN over the years. It should come as little surprise that the UN is particularly fond of one of their main donors and has long partnered with the RF and praised the organisation as a model for “global philanthropy.”
The UN was essentially founded upon a public-private partnership model. In 2000, the Executive Committee of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) published Private Sector Involvement and Cooperation with the United Nations System:
The United Nations and the private sector have always had extensive commercial links through the procurement activities of the former. [. . .] The United Nations market provides a springboard for a company to introduce its goods and services to other countries and regions. [. . .] The private sector has also long participated, directly or indirectly, in the normative and standard-setting work of the United Nations.
Being able to influence, not only government procurement, but also the development of new global markets and the regulation of the same is, obviously, an extremely attractive proposition for multinational corporations and investors. Unsurprisingly, UN projects that utilise the “public-private” model are the favoured approach of the world’s leading capitalists. For instance, it has long been the favoured model of the Rockefeller family, who often finance such projects through their respective philanthropic foundations.
In the years since its inception, public-private partnerships have expanded to become dominant within the UN system, particularly with regard to “sustainable development.” Successive Secretary Generals have overseen the UN’s formal transition into the United Nations’ Global Public-Private Partnership (UN-G3P).
As a result of this transformation, the role of nation state governments at the UN has also changed dramatically. For instance, in 2005, the World Health Organisation (WHO), another specialised agency of the UN, published a report on the use of information and communication technology (ICT) in healthcare titled Connecting for Health. Speaking about how “stakeholders” could introduce ICT healthcare solutions globally, the WHO noted:
Governments can create an enabling environment, and invest in equity, access and innovation.
As King Charles III noted last year in Glasgow, governments of “democratic” nation have been given the role of “enabling” partners. Their job is to create the fiscal environment in which their private sector partners operate. Sustainability policies are developed by a global network comprised of governments, multinational corporations, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), civil society organisations and “other actors.”
The “other actors” are predominantly the philanthropic foundations of individual billionaires and immensely wealthy family dynasties, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates (BMGF) or the Rockefeller Foundations. Collectively, these “actors” constitute the “multi-stakeholder partnership.”
During the pseudopandemic, many came to acknowledge the influence of the BMGF over the WHO, but they are just one of many other private foundations that are also valued UN “stakeholders.”
The UN is, itself, a global collaboration between governments and a multinational infra-governmental network of private “stakeholders.” The foundations, NGOs, civil society organisations and global corporations represent an infra-governmental network of stakeholders, just as powerful, if not more so, than any power block of nation states.
Public-Private Partnership: An Ideology
In 2016, UN-DESA published a working paper investigating the value of public-private partnerships (G3Ps) for achieving the SDGs. The lead author, Jomo KS, was the Assistant Secretary General in the United Nations system responsible for economic research (2005-2015).
UN-DESA broadly found that G3Ps, in their current form, were not fit for purpose:
[C]laims of reduced cost and efficient delivery of services through [G3Ps] to save tax payers money and benefit consumers were mostly empty and [. . .] ideological assertions. [. . ] [G3P] projects were more costly to build and finance, provided poorer quality services and were less accessible [. . .] Moreover, many essential services were less accountable to citizens when private corporations were involved. [. . .] Investors in [G3Ps] face a relatively benign risk [. . .] penalty clauses for non-delivery by private partners are less than rigorous, the study questioned whether risk was really being transferred to the private partners in these projects. [. . .] [T]he evidence suggests that [G3Ps] have often tended to be more expensive than the alternative of public procurement while in a number of instances they have failed to deliver the envisaged gains in quality of service provision.
Citing the work of Whitfield (2010), which examined G3Ps in Europe, North America, Australia, Russia, China, India and Brazil, UN-DESA noted that these led to “the buying and selling schools and hospitals like commodities in a global supermarket.”
The UN-DESA reports also reminded the UN’s G3P enthusiasts that numerous intergovernmental organisations had found G3Ps wanting:
Evaluations done by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and European Investment Bank (EIB) – the organizations normally promoting [G3Ps] – have found a number of cases where [G3Ps] did not yield the expected outcome and resulted in a significant rise in government fiscal liabilities.
Little has changed since 2016 and yet the UN-G3P insist that public-private partnership is the only way to achieve SDGs. Ignoring the assessment from its own investigators, In General Assembly Resolution 74/2 (A/Res/74/2) the UN declared:
[UN member states] Recognize the need for strong global, regional and national partnerships for Sustainable Development Goals, which engage all relevant stakeholders to collaboratively support the efforts of Member States to achieve health-related Sustainable Development Goals, including universal health coverage [UHC2030] [. . .] the inclusion of all relevant stakeholders is one of the core components of health system governance. [. . . ] [We] Reaffirm General Assembly resolution 69/313 [. . .] to address the challenge of financing and creating an enabling environment at all levels for sustainable development. [We will] provide [. . .] sustainable finances, while improving their effectiveness [. . .] through domestic, bilateral, regional and multilateral channels, including partnerships with the private sector and other relevant stakeholders.
This UN commitment to global public-private partnership is an “ideological assertion” and is not based upon the available evidence. In order for G3Ps to actually function as claimed, UN-DESA stipulated that a number of structural changes would need to be put in place first.
These included careful identification of where a G3P could work. UN-DESA found that G3Ps may be suited to some infrastructure projects but were damaging to projects dealing with public health, education or the environment.
The UN researchers stated that diligent oversight and regulation of pricing and the alleged transfer of risk would be required; comprehensive and transparent fiscal accounting systems were needed; better reporting standards should be developed and rigorous legal and regulatory safeguards were necessary.
None of the required structural or policy changes recommended in the UN-DESA 2016 report have been implemented.
Sustainability for whom?
Agenda 2030 marks the waypoint along the path to Agenda 21. Publicly launched at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, Section 8 explained how “sustainable development” would be integrated into decision making:
The primary need is to integrate environmental and developmental decision-making processes. [. . .] Countries will develop their own priorities in accordance with their national plans, policies and programmes.
Sustainable development has been integrated with every policy decision. Not only does every country have a national sustainability plan, these have devolved to local government.
It is a global strategy to extend the reach of global financial institutions into every corner of the economy and society. Policy will be controlled by the bankers and the think-tanks that infiltrated the environmental movement decades ago.
No community is free of “global financial governance.”
Simply put, sustainable development supplants decision making at the national and local level with global governance. It is an ongoing, and thus far successful, global coup.
But more than this, it is a system for global control. Those of us who live in developed nations will have our behaviour changed as a psychological and economic war is waged against us to force our compliance.
Developing nations will be kept in penury as the fruits of modern industrial and technological development are denied to them. Instead they will be burdened with the debt foisted upon them by the global centres of financial power, their resources pillaged, their land stolen and their assets seized – all in the name of “sustainability.”
Yet it is perhaps the financialisation of nature, inherent to sustainable development, that is the greatest danger of all. The creation of natural asset classes, converting forests into carbon sequestration initiatives and water sources into human settlement services. As subsequent instalments of this series will show, several SDGs have financialising nature at their core.
As openly stated by the UN, “sustainable development” is all about transformation, not necessarily “sustainability” as most people conceive of it. It aims to transform the Earth and everything on it, including us, into commodities – the trading of which will form the basis of a new global economy. Though it is being sold to us as “sustainable,” the only thing this new global financial system will “sustain” is the power of a predatory financial elite.
Iain Davis is an independent investigative journalist, author and blogger from the UK. His focus is upon widening readers awareness of evidence that the so-called mainstream media won’t report. A frequent contributor to UK Column, Iain’s work has been featured by the OffGuardian, the Corbett Report, Technocracy News, Lew-Rockwell and other independent news outlets. You can read more of his work on his blog: – https://iaindavis.com
Whitney Webb has been a professional writer, researcher and journalist since 2016. She has written for several websites and, from 2017 to 2020, was a staff writer and senior investigative reporter for Mint Press News. She currently writes for The Last American Vagabond.
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Rockefeller Foundation, Nonprofits Spending Millions on Behavioral Psychology Research to ‘Nudge’ More People to Get COVID Vaccines
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 13, 2022
The Rockefeller Foundation, the National Science Foundation (an “independent” agency of the U.S. government) and other nonprofits are pouring millions of dollars into a research initiative “to increase uptake of COVID-19 vaccines and other recommended public health measures by countering mis- and disinformation.”
In conjunction with the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the Rockefeller Foundation last month announced $7.2 million in funding for the Mercury Project, initially launched in November 2021, under the slogan, “Together, we can build a healthier information environment.”
The funds will support 12 teams of researchers in 17 countries who will conduct studies on “ambitious, applied social and behavioral science to combat the growing global threat posed by low COVID-19 vaccination rates and public health mis- and disinformation,” the Rockefeller Foundation said.
The Rockefeller Foundation and the SSRC claim the aim of the Mercury Project, whose name is derived from the ancient Roman god of messages and communication, is to bolster public health and safety.
However, some critics described the project as one based on “propaganda” aimed at “nudging” the unvaccinated to get vaccinated.
Creating ‘behavioral change’ by targeting schoolchildren and specific socio-economic groups
Behavioral change lies at the heart of the Mercury Project, which will issue three-year research grants to estimate “the causal impacts of mis- and disinformation on online and offline outcomes in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic,” including “differential impacts across socio-demographic groups.”
The research will include “interventions that target the producers or the consumers of mis- and disinformation, or that increase confidence in reliable information.”
Some of the “interventions” proffered by the Rockefeller Foundation include “literacy training for secondary school students” to “help students identify COVID-19 vaccine misinformation,” “equipping trusted messengers with communication strategies to increase COVID-19 vaccination demand” and “using social networks to share tailored, community-developed messaging to increase COVID-19 vaccination demand.”
This information will, according to the Rockefeller Foundation, “provide evidence about what works — and doesn’t — in specific places and for specific groups to increase COVID-19 vaccination take-up.”
But according to ZeroHedge, the research groups funded by the Mercury Project “are operating with the intent to tailor vaccination narratives to fit different ethnic and political backgrounds, looking for the key to the gates of each cultural kingdom and convincing them to take the jab.”
The project uses “ambiguous language and mission statements” to at least partially conceal the project’s main purpose of “using behavioral psychology and mass psychology elements to understand the global resistance to the recent COVID compliance efforts,” ZeroHedge reported.
‘Fabricating effective COVID propaganda’ a ‘money train’ for behavioral researchers and psychologists
In November 2021, the Mercury Project received an initial $7.5 million in seed funding from entities including the Rockefeller Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to apply “the principles of large-scale, team-based science to the problem of vaccination demand” over a three-year period.
As of August 2022, these entities have funded the Mercury Project to the tune of $10.25 million.
In June, the project received $20 million from the National Science Foundation to study “interventions to increase COVID-19 vaccination demand and other positive health behaviors.”
The SSRC’s latest call for proposals, under the aegis of the Mercury Project, received nearly 200 submissions.
The accepted proposals come from researchers in countries including the U.S., Canada, Côte d’Ivoire, England, France, Ghana, Haiti, Kenya, India, Malawi, Mexico, Sierra Leone, Spain, Rwanda and Tanzania.
U.S.-based researchers represent institutions including Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, Duke, Harvard, MIT, New York University, Rutgers, St. Augustine University, Stanford, UC Berkeley, University of Southern California, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, Vanderbilt and Yale.
The titles of some of the projects most recently funded by the Mercury Project include:
- “A tough call: Impacts of mobile technology on Covid-19 (mis)information and protective behavior decision-making.”
- “Boosting boosters at scale: A megastudy to increase vaccination at scale.”
- “Building a better toolkit (for fighting misinformation): Large collaborative project to compare misinformation interventions.”
- “Harnessing influencers to counter misinformation: Scalable solutions in the Global South.”
- “Targeting health misinformation networks: Network-transforming interventions for reducing the spread of health misinformation online.”
Arguing in favor of the importance of the project’s research, Anna Harvey, president of the SSRC, stated:
“With COVID-19 prevalent and rapidly evolving everywhere, there is a pressing need to identify interventions with the potential to increase vaccination take-up.
“Vaccines are only effective if they become vaccinations; vaccines are a scientific marvel but their potential is unfulfilled if they are left on the shelf.”
Describing the Mercury Project’s grantees, Dr. Bruce Gellin, the Rockefeller Foundation’s chief of global public health strategy, said:
“This initial cohort’s ideas exemplify the creativity and vision behind the Mercury Project. They go far beyond quick fixes, with the goal of identifying robust, cost-effective, and meaningful solutions that can be widely adopted and scaled.
“We hope that more, better, and science-based knowledge about what we need to do will lead to increased uptake of reliable information — and serve as a powerful counter to the effects of misinformation and disinformation on vaccine demand.”
Heather Lanthorn, the Mercury Project’s program director, highlighted the importance of leveraging communication toward achieving public health objectives:
“The viral, vaccine, and information environments are all rapidly evolving–but that doesn’t mean it is impossible to make progress towards more effective and equitable responses.
“By funding projects on the ground around the world, this work will help us understand what works where, and why, and identify new ways to harness the power of connection and communication to advance public health goals.”
ZeroHedge, however, countered that behind all the rhetoric, the focus of the Mercury Project, is “propaganda, propaganda and propaganda,” and “the very basis of the existence of the Mercury Project presupposes that individuals cannot be trusted to make up their own minds about the information they are exposed to.”
The expectation is that individuals “must be molded to accept the mainstream narrative,” ZeroHedge said, while presupposing that “mainstream or establishment information is always trustworthy and unbiased.”
“Fabricating effective COVID propaganda is becoming a money train for the small groups of behavioral researchers and psychologists that jump onboard,” ZeroHedge added.
GAVI: 200 global ‘nudge units’ specialize in applying behavioral science to everyday life
The field of behavioral science — and a concept known as “nudging” — figured prominently during the years of the COVID-19 pandemic and were heavily utilized by governments and public health officials throughout the world to justify often stringent restrictions and countermeasures.
Nudging was defined in a bestselling 2008 book by economist Richard H. Thaler and legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein — “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness” — as something that “alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives.”
Thaler and Sunstein presented nudging as a technocratic solution for tricky policy issues involving a perceived need to encourage, in a “voluntary manner,” policies or measures that would otherwise be unpopular.
Their work drew from a 1974 paper by two Israeli psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, which, as explained by an article published by GAVI-The Vaccine Alliance, “pioneered the study of mental shortcuts that humans rely on to make decisions, known as heuristics.”
As previously reported by The Defender, the Rockefeller Foundation is also a partner and board member and donor to GAVI, alongside the WEF, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, which hosted Event 201, which simulated the spread of a coronavirus just prior to the actual COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2010, the U.K. government established the Behavioural Insights Team, initially within the government’s Cabinet Office, before it was spun off as a private company in 2014. A year later, U.S. President Barack Obama issued an executive order to promote the utilization of behavioral science in federal policymaking.
According to GAVI, “globally, there are now more than 200 teams, or nudge units, that specialize in applying behavioral science to everyday life.”
COVID-19, and the response to it, was no exception. HRW Healthcare’s Tony Jiang described nudges as “a set of policy tools which utilize psychological insights to attempt to motivate people to adopt certain desired actions/behaviours, without having to enforce strict laws, bans, or punishments,” and as a means to “motivate people into making responsible decisions, while preserving individual liberty.”
According to Jiang, “at the beginning of the pandemic, to encourage COVID-safe behaviours, behavioural nudges were the preferred policy by governments in the UK, USA, and Australia.”
According to Jay Van Bavel, associate professor of psychology at New York University, “as COVID-19 infections grew exponentially in 2020, behavioral scientists wanted to help. Nudges presented a possible route to controlling the virus, particularly in the absence of vaccines and evidence-based treatments.”
Van Bavel, along with Sunstein and 40 other researchers, in 2020 published a paper in Nature presenting ways in which behavioral science and nudging could contribute to efforts to combat COVID-19, including through fostering increased trust in government and fighting “conspiracy theories.”
As explained by GAVI, “as scientists learned more about how the coronavirus spread … governments knew what they wanted their citizens to do, but they still had to think carefully about how to encourage people to change their behavior. That’s where nudges could help.”
This was evidenced, for instance, in a March 14, 2020, U.K. government document published approximately two weeks before the U.K. government imposed a nationwide lockdown.
The document presented the role that would be played by the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies in advising the U.K. government’s response.
The document referenced the 2009-10 swine flu pandemic and the advice the advisory group received at the time from a subgroup known as the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour and Communications. This group was reconvened on Feb. 13, 2020, with an exclusive focus on behavioral psychology.
According to the document, the group was “asked to provide advice aimed at anticipating and helping people adhere to interventions that are recommended by medical or epidemiological experts,” concluding that the U.K. government should “provide clear and transparent reasons for the different strategies that might be taken.”
The group advised the U.K. government that “in order to increase confidence in, and adherence to, the interventions should provide clear and transparent reasons for the strategies that have and have not been selected … and conduct rapid research into how best to help people adhere to the recommendations” whilst suggesting “behaviours that reduce risk.”
Other studies in the 2020-2021 period also highlighted the potential role nudging and behavioral psychology could play in relation to COVID-19.
For instance, a 2021 study showed that sending text messages to patients before scheduled primary care visits increased flu vaccinations by 5%, while another 2021 study found that the same strategy boosted COVID-19 vaccination appointments by 6% and actual vaccinations by 3.6%.
Still another 2021 study, also published in Nature, found that “behavioural nudges increase COVID-19 vaccinations,” arguing that “overcoming vaccine hesitancy … requires effective communication strategies” and finding that “inducing feelings of ownership over vaccines” can help bring about an increase in vaccine uptake.
The National Science Foundation offered grants of $200,000 for research in this field, while the SSRC also issued a call for proposals, receiving 1,300 applications even though it had sufficient funding for only 62.
However, as the pandemic progressed and as vaccination figures eventually plateaued, the strategy of nudging began to be called into question.
Dena Gromet, executive director of the Behavior Change for Good Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania, said nudging is effective only if individuals are already inclined to perform the action that they are being reminded or encouraged to perform.
Nudging, as a result, was supplanted by vaccine mandates.
Indeed, such “sterner measures” were advocated by Richard Thaler, one of the creators of the concept of nudging. In an August 2021 New York Times op-ed, Thaler called for stricter measures for the unvaccinated, including vaccine passports and isolation — measures which he described as “pushes and shoves” instead of nudges.
Two studies performed by researchers at King’s College London also cast doubt on the effectiveness of nudging to change behaviors and attitudes in relation to COVID-19.
Notably, the dedicated COVID-19 page on the website of the Behavioral Insights Team, which had played such a key role in advising the U.K. government on its COVID-19-related countermeasures early in the pandemic, has not featured a new posting since April 28, 2021.
However, some believe there still remains a role for nudging as the world enters a “new phase” of the COVID-19 pandemic. Tony Jiang argued that “as mandates relax, a greater reliance on individual compliance is required if we are to prevent mass-outbreaks in the future.”
“This makes the role of nudges and behavioural science ever more crucial,” he said, suggesting that going forward, nudges can be utilized to encourage mask-wearing, vaccinations and boosters.
Jiang proffered suggestions such as personalized masks that “can be more fashionable,” and for vaccinations, the potential role of “defaults,” where “people are automatically enrolled to receive a booster and must deliberately cancel the scheduled appointment if they do not wish to receive it.”
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., is an independent journalist and researcher based in Athens, Greece.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
WHO’S DRIVING THE PANDEMIC EXPRESS?
By Dr David Bell and Emma McArthur | PANDA | September 4, 2022
Sceptics of the growing ‘pandemic prevention, preparedness and response’ (PPR) agenda celebrated recently, heralding a perceived ‘defeat’ of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) controversial amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR). Although the proposed amendments would have undoubtedly expanded the WHO’s powers, this focus on the WHO reflects a narrow view of global health and the pandemic industry. The WHO is almost a bit-player in a much larger game of public-private partnerships and financial incentives that are driving the pandemic gravy train forward.
While the WHO works in the spotlight, the pandemic industry has been growing for over a decade and its expansion accelerates unabated. Other major players such as the World Bank, coalitions of wealthy nations at the G7 and G20 and their corporate partners work in a world less subject to transparency; a world where the rules are more relaxed, and a conflict of interest receives less scrutiny.
If the global health community is to preserve public health, it must urgently understand the wider process that is underway and take action to stop it. The pandemic express must be halted by the weight of evidence and basic principles of public health.
Funding a global pandemic bureaucracy
“The FIF could be a cornerstone in the construction of a truly global PPR system in the context of the International Treaty on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response, sponsored by the World Health Assembly.” (WHO, 19 April 2022)
The world is being told to fear pandemics. Ballooning socio-economic costs of the COVID-19 crisis are touted as justification for increased focus on PPR funding.
Calls for ‘urgent’ collective action to avert the ‘next’ pandemic are predicated on systemic ‘weaknesses’ supposedly exposed by COVID-19. As the WHO steamed ahead with its push for a new pandemic ‘treaty’ during 2021, G20 members agreed to establish a Joint Finance & Health Task Force (JFHTF) to ‘enhance the collaboration and global cooperation on issues relating to pandemic prevention, preparedness and response’.
A World Bank-WHO report prepared for the G20 joint task force estimates that US$ 31.1 billion will be required annually for future PPR, including US $ 10.5 billion per year in new international financing to support perceived funding gaps in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Surveillance-related activities comprise almost half of this, with US $4.1 billion in new funding required to address perceived gaps in the system.
In public health terms, the funding proposed to expand the global PPR infrastructure is enormous. By contrast, the WHO’s approved biennium programme budget for 2022-2023 averages US $3.4 billion per year. The Global Fund, the main international funder of malaria, tuberculosis and AIDS – which have a combined annual mortality of over 2.5 million – currently dispenses just US $ 4 billion annually for the three diseases combined. Unlike COVID-19, these diseases cause significant mortality in lower income countries and in younger age groups, year in, year out.
In April 2022, the G20 agreed to establish a new ‘financial intermediary fund’ (FIF) housed at the World Bank, to address the US $10.5 billion PPR financing gap. The FIF is intended to build upon existing pandemic funding to ‘strengthen health systems and PPR capacities in low-income and middle-income countries and regions’. The WHO is predicted to be the technical lead, landing them with an assured role irrespective of the outcome of current ‘treaty’ discussions.
The establishment of the fund has proceeded with breathtaking speed, and it was approved on June 30 by the World Bank Board of Executive Directors. A short period of consultation precedes an expected launch in September 2022. To date, donations totalling US $1.3 billion dollars have been pledged by governments, the European Commission and various private and non-government interests, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and the Wellcome Trust. The initial areas for the fund are somewhat all-encompassing, including country-level ‘disease surveillance; laboratory systems; emergency communication, coordination and management; critical health workforce capacities; and community engagement’.
In scope, the fund has the appearance of a new ‘World Health Organization’ for pandemics – to add to the existing (and ever-expanding) network of global health organisations such as the WHO; Gavi; the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI); and the Global Fund. But is this increased expenditure on PPR justified? Are the escalating socio-economic costs of COVID-19 due to a failure to act by the global health community, as is widely claimed; or are they due to negligent acts of failure by the WHO and global governments, when they discarded previous evidenced-based pandemic guidelines?
COVID-19: failure to act or acts of failure?
In the debate surrounding the growing pandemic industry, much attention is being directed towards the central role of the WHO. This attention is understandable given the WHO’s position as the agency responsible for global public health and its push for a new international pandemic agreement.
However, the WHO’s handling of the response to COVID-19 creates serious doubts about the competency of its leadership and raises questions about whose needs the organisation is serving.
The WHO’s failure to follow its own pre-existing pandemic guidelines by supporting lockdowns, mass-testing, border closures and the multi-billion-dollar COVAX mass-vaccination program, has generated vast revenue for vaccine manufacturers and the biotech industry, whose corporations and investors are major contributors to the WHO. This approach has crippled economies, damaged existing health programs and further entrenched poverty in low-income countries. Decades of progress in children’s health are likely to be undone, together with the destruction of the long-term prospects of tens of millions of children, through loss of education, forced child marriage and malnutrition. In abandoning its principles of equality and community-driven healthcare, the WHO appears to have become a mere pawn in the PPR game, beholden to those with the real power; the entities who are providing its income and who control the resources now being directed to this area.
Corporatizing global public health
Recently established health agencies devoted to vaccination and pandemics, such as Gavi and CEPI, appear to have been highly influential from the beginning. CEPI, is the brainchild of Bill Gates, Jeremy Farrar (director of the Wellcome Trust), and others at the pro-lockdown World Economic Forum. Launched at Davos in 2017, CEPI was created to help drive the market for epidemic vaccines. It is no secret that Bill Gates has major private financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry, in addition to those of his foundation. This clearly places a question mark over the philanthropic nature of his investments.
CEPI appears to be a forerunner of what the WHO is increasingly becoming – an instrument where individuals and corporations can exert influence and improve returns by hijacking key areas of public health. CEPI’s business model, which involves taxpayers taking most of the financial risk for vaccine research and development whilst big pharma gets all the profits, is notably replicated in the World Bank-WHO report.
Gavi, itself a significant WHO donor that exists solely to increase access to vaccination, is also under direct influence of Bill Gates, via the Bill and Melinda Gate Foundation. Gavi’s involvement (alongside CEPI) with the WHO’s COVAX program, which diverted vast resources into COVID-19 mass-vaccination in countries where COVID-19 is a relatively small disease burden, suggests the organisation is tied more strongly to vaccine sales than genuine public health outcomes.
Pandemic funding – ignoring the big picture?
At first glance, increased PPR funding to LMICs may seem a public good. The World Bank-WHO report claims that ‘the frequency and impact of pandemic-prone pathogens are increasing.’ However, this is belied by reality, as the WHO lists only 5 ‘pandemics’ in the past 120 years, with the highest mortality occurring in the 1918-19 H1N1 (‘Spanish’) influenza pandemic, before antibiotics and modern medicine. Apart from COVID-19, the ‘Swine Flu’ outbreak in 2009-10, which killed less people than a normal flu year, is the only ‘pandemic’ in the past 50 years.
Such a myopic focus on pandemic risk will do little to address the most serious causes of illness and death, and it can be expected to make matters worse for people experiencing the most extreme forms of socio-economic disadvantage.
Governments of low-income countries will be ‘incentivised’ to divert resources to PPR related programs, further increasing the growing debt crisis. A more centralised, top-down public health system will lack the flexibility to meet local and regional needs. Transferring support from higher burden diseases, and drivers of economic growth, has a direct impact on mortality in these countries, particularly for children.
The WHO-World Bank report states that the pillars of the global PPR architecture must be built on the ‘foundational principles of equity, inclusion and solidarity’. As severe pandemics occur less than once per generation, increased spending on PPR in LMICs clearly violates these basic principles as it diverts scarce resources away from areas of regional need, to address the perceived health priorities of wealthier populations. As demonstrated by the damage caused by the COVID-19 response, in both high and low-income countries, the overall harm of resource diversion from areas of greater need is likely to be universal. In failing to address such ‘opportunity costs’, recommendations by the WHO, the World Bank, and other PPR partners cannot be validly based in public health; nor are they a basis for overall societal benefit. .
One thing is certain. Those who will gain from this expanding pandemic gravy train will be those who gained from the response to COVID-19.
The pandemic gravy train – following the money
The new World Bank fund risks compounding existing problems in the global public health system and further compromising the WHO’s autonomy; although it is stated that the WHO will have a central ‘strategic role’, funds will be channelled through the World Bank. In essence, it financially side-steps the accountability measures at the WHO, where questions of relative worth can be raised more easily.
The proposed structure of the FIF will pave the way for organisations with strong ties to pharmaceutical and other biotech industries, such as CEPI and Gavi, to gain even greater influence over global PPR, particularly if they are appointed ‘implementing entities’ – the operational arms that will carry out the FIF’s work program at country, regional and global level.
Although the initial implementing entities for the FIF will be UN agencies, multilateral development banks and the IMF, plans are already underway to accredit these other international health entities. Investments are likely to be heavily skewed towards biotechnological solutions, such as disease surveillance and vaccine development, at the cost of other, more pressing, public health interventions.
Protecting public health rather than private wealth
If the world truly wants to address the systemic weakness exposed by COVID-19, it must first understand that this pandemic gravy train is not new; the foundations for the destruction of community- and country-based global public health began long before COVID-19.
It is unarguable that COVID-19 has proved to be a lucrative cash cow for vaccine manufacturers and the biotech industry. The public-private partnership model that now dominates global health enabled vast resources to be channelled into the pockets of corporate giants, through programs they directly influence, or even run. CEPI’s ‘100 days Mission’ to make ‘safe and effective’ vaccines against ‘viral threats’ within 100 days – to ‘give the world a fighting chance of containing a future outbreak before it spreads to become a global pandemic’ – is a permit for pharmaceutical companies to appropriate public money on an unprecedented scale, based on their own assessments of risk.
The self-fulfilment of the ‘increasing frequency of pandemic’ prophecy will be ensured by the push for increased disease surveillance – a priority area for the FIF. To quote the World Bank-WHO report:
“COVID-19 highlighted the need to connect surveillance and alert systems into a regional and global network to detect zoonotic transmission events, raise the alarm early to enable a swift public health response, and accelerate the development of medical countermeasures.”
Like many claims being made about COVID-19, this claim has no evidence base – the origins of COVID-19 remain highly controversial and the WHO’s data demonstrate that pandemics are uncommon, whatever their origin. None of the ‘countermeasures’ have been shown to significantly reduce the spread of COVID-19, which is now globally endemic.
Increased surveillance will naturally identify more ‘potentially dangerous pathogens’, as variants of viruses arise constantly in nature. Consequently, the world faces a never-ending game of seek and ye shall find, with never-ending profits for industry. Formerly once per generation, this industry will make ‘pandemics’ a routine part of life, where rapid fire vaccines are mandated for every new disease or variant that arrives.
Ultimately, this new pandemic fund will help to hook low- and middle-income countries into the growing global pandemic bureaucracy. Greater centralisation of public health will do little to address the genuine health needs of people in these countries. If the pandemic gravy train is allowed to keep growing, the poor will get poorer, and people will die in increasing numbers from more prevalent, preventable diseases. The rich will continue to profit, while fuelling the main driver of ill-health in lower income countries – poverty.
Dr. David Bell is a clinical and public health physician with a PhD in population health and background in internal medicine, modelling and epidemiology of infectious disease. Previously, he was Director of the Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in the USA, Programme Head for Malaria and Acute Febrile Disease at FIND in Geneva, and coordinating malaria diagnostics strategy with the World Health Organisation. He is a member of the Executive Committee of PANDA.
Rockefeller Foundation Wants Behavioral Scientists To Come Up With More Convincing COVID Vaxx Narratives
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | August 28, 2022
In yet another sign that the covid vaccination agenda of globalist institutions did not do quite as well as they had originally hoped, the Rockefeller Foundation has revealed that it (along with other non-profits) has been pumping millions of dollars into a behavioral science project meant to figure out why large groups of people around the world refuse to take the jab.
The “Mercury Project” is a collective of behavioral scientists formed by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), a non-profit group which receives considerable funding from globalist organizations and governments. The stated goals of the project are rather non-specific, using ambiguous language and mission statements. However, the root intentions appear to be focused on using behavioral psychology and mass psychology elements to understand the global resistance to the recent covid compliance efforts.
Mercury groups will be deployed in multiple nations and regions and will study vaccine refusal and the medical “disinformation” that leads to it. They are operating with the intent to tailor vaccination narratives to fit different ethnic and political backgrounds, looking for the key to the gates of each cultural kingdom and convincing them to take the jab.
The Rockefeller Foundation and the SSRC note:
“Following the characterization of inaccurate health information by the U.S. Surgeon General as an “urgent threat,” and by the World Health Organization as an “infodemic,” the SSRC issued a call for proposals to counter the growing global threats posed by public health mis- and disinformation and low Covid-19 vaccination rates, and received nearly 200 submissions from around the world.
… With Covid-19 prevalent and rapidly evolving everywhere, there is a pressing need to identify interventions with the potential to increase vaccination take-up.”
The SSRC and the Mercury Project are not only receiving funding from foundations, but also government based institutions. In June of 2022 the Mercury Project received another $20 million from the National Science Foundation, which claims to be an “independent” agency of the United States government. Meaning, fabricating effective covid propaganda is becoming a money train for the small groups of behavioral researchers and psychologists that jump onboard.
The purpose of the NSF partnership with the Mercury Project is outlined on the SSRC website:
“This innovative partnership will support research teams seeking to evaluate online or offline interventions to increase Covid-19 vaccination demand and other positive health behaviors, including by targeting the producers and/or consumers of inaccurate health information and/or by increasing confidence in reliable health information.”
The Mercury Project lists these bullet points as their focus:
“Funded projects will provide evidence about what works – and doesn’t – in specific places and for specific groups to increase Covid-19 vaccination take-up, including what is feasible on the ground and has the potential to be cost-effective at scale. Each of the 12 teams will have access to findings from the other teams while exploring interventions including, but not limited to:
Conducting literacy training for secondary school students in partnership with local authorities to help students identify Covid-19 vaccine misinformation.
Equipping trusted messengers with communication strategies to increase Covid-19 vaccination demand.
Using social networks to share tailored, community-developed messaging to increase Covid-19 vaccination demand.”
In other words, their focus is propaganda, propaganda and propaganda. The very basis of the existence of the Mercury Project presupposes that individuals cannot be trusted to make up their own minds about the information they are exposed to, and that they must be molded to accept the mainstream narrative. It also presupposes that mainstream or establishment information is always trustworthy and unbiased.
The widespread non-compliance against covid vaccination mandates despite extensive government pressure is perhaps one of the most underappreciated events of the past century. It is likely the reason why political elites and the corporate media went from a non-stop fear campaign against the public to almost no mention of covid within a matter of weeks. It was as if the populace was being put through two years of waterboarding and then one day the torture simply stopped without explanation.
If vaccine passport laws had been implemented through western nations on the scale that governments and globalists were demanding, then the last vestiges of personal freedom would now be erased permanently. All individual rights would become privileges granted by authorities and contingent on your submission to whatever covid booster shots or medical procedures happen to be in vogue at the time. Think about it: If they had gotten what they wanted, the west would look exactly like China does right now, or worse, with no economic participation without an up-to-date covid pass.
And, the threat still lingers. Why the Mercury Project feels the need to compose vaccine propaganda for a virus with a mere 0.23% median Infection Fatality Rate is not explained. And, if vaccination numbers from agencies like the CDC are accurate, then the population has already achieved herd immunity anyway (perhaps their numbers are not accurate?). Why are globalist groups so obsessed with 100% vaccination for covid? This is never explained.
They will say it’s all about saving lives, but if only 0.23% of people on average are at risk regardless of whether they are vaccinated or not, then public health is not really a believable explanation. It would seem that the Mercury Project’s purpose is more about influencing people to vaccinate despite the science rather than in the name of science.
WHO Renews Push for Global Pandemic Treaty, as World Bank Creates $1 Billion Fund for Vaccine Passports
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | August 9, 2022
The World Health Organization (WHO) is moving ahead with plans to enact a new or revised international pandemic preparedness treaty, despite encountering setbacks earlier this summer after dozens of countries, primarily outside the Western world, objected to the plan.
A majority of WHO member states on July 21, during a meeting of WHO’s Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB), agreed to pursue a legally binding pandemic instrument that will contain “both legally binding as well as non-legally binding elements.”
STAT News described the agreement, which would create a new global framework for responding to pandemics, as “the most transformative global health call to action since [the] WHO itself was formed as the first specialized United Nations agency in 1948.”
Meanwhile, the World Economic Forum, African Union and World Bank — which created a $1 billion fund for “disease surveillance” and “support against the current as well as future pandemics” — are developing their own pandemic response mechanisms, including new cross-country vaccine passport frameworks.
WHO’s ‘pandemic treaty’: what’s been proposed and what would it mean?
Ongoing talks to formulate a new or revised “pandemic treaty” are building on the existing international framework for global pandemic response, the WHO’s International Health Regulations (IHR), considered a binding instrument of international law.
On Dec. 1, 2021, in response to calls from various governments for a “strengthened global pandemic strategy” and signaling the urgency with which these entities are acting, the WHO formally launched the process of creating a new treaty or amending the IHR, during Special Session — only the second in the organization’s history.
During the meeting, held May 10-11, WHO’s 194 member countries unanimously agreed to launch the process, which previously had been discussed only informally.
The member countries agreed to:
“Kickstart a global process to draft and negotiate a convention, agreement or other international instrument under the Constitution of the World Health Organization to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.”
The IHR, a relatively recent development, were first enacted in 2005, in the aftermath of SARS-CoV-1.
The IHR legal framework is one of only two binding treaties the WHO has achieved since its inception, the other being the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.
The IHR framework already allows the WHO director-general to declare a public health emergency in any country, without the consent of that country’s government, though the framework requires the two sides to first attempt to reach an agreement.
The proposals for a new or revised pandemic treaty, put forth at the special ministerial session of the WHO in May, would “somewhat” strengthen the WHO’s pandemic-related powers, including establishing a “Compliance Committee” that would issue advisory recommendations for states.
However, according to the Daily Sceptic, while the IHR is already legally binding, the amendments proposed in May would not strengthen existing legal obligations or requirements:
“The existing treaty regulations, like all (or most) international law, do not actually compel states to do anything other than talk to the WHO and listen to it, and neither do they specify sanctions for non-compliance; almost all their output is advice.
“The proposed amendments don’t alter that. They don’t allow the WHO unilaterally to impose legally binding measures on or within countries.”
The Daily Sceptic noted one of the risks stemming from the negotiations for a new or updated treaty include the potential codification of “the new lockdown orthodoxy for future pandemics,” which would “replace the sound, science-based, pre-COVID recommendations” previously in place.
According to Dr. Joseph Mercola, such a treaty would grant the WHO “absolute power over global biosecurity, such as the power to implement digital identities/vaccine passports, mandatory vaccinations, travel restrictions, standardized medical care and more.”
Mercola also questioned a “one-size-fits-all approach to pandemic response,” pointing out that “pandemic threats are not identical in all parts of the world. In his view, he said, “the WHO is not qualified to make global health decisions.”
Similar concerns contributed at least in part to opposition against the proposals presented at the special ministerial session, during which a bloc of mostly non-Western countries, including China, India, Russia and 47 African nations, prevented an agreement from being finalized.
Will opposition fade away?
Although no final agreement was achieved at the May meeting, consensus was reached to organize a new special ministerial session of the WHO later this year, possibly after the WHO’s World Health Assembly, scheduled for Nov. 29 through Dec. 1, Reuters reported.
Mxolisi Nkosi, South Africa’s ambassador to the UN, told the WHO’s annual ministerial assembly the new special session would “consider the benefits for such a convention, agreement or other international instrument.”
Nkosi added:
“Probably the most important lesson COVID-19 has taught us is the need for stronger and more agile collective defences against health threats as well as for building resilience to address future potential pandemics.
“A new pandemic treaty is central to this.”
At the time, the U.K.’s ambassador to the UN, Simon Manley, addressing the lack of an immediate agreement and the consensus to hold a new meeting, tweeted “negotiations may take time, but this is a historic step towards global health security.”
The INB, at its meeting held in Geneva July 18-21, also agreed with this view, reaching a consensus that its members will work on finalizing a new legally binding international pandemic agreement by May 2024.
As part of this process, the INB will meet again in December and will deliver a progress report to the 76th World Health Assembly of the WHO in 2023.
According to the WHO, “Any new agreement, if any when agreed by Member States, is drafted and negotiated by governments themselves, [which] will take any action in line with their sovereignty.”
The WHO further claims that “governments themselves will determine actions under the accord while considering their own national laws and regulations.”
The Biden administration expressed broad support for a new or updated pandemic treaty, with the U.S. heading previous negotiations on this issue, along with the European Commission, via its president Ursula von der Leyen, who, as previously reported by The Defender, is also a strong proponent of vaccine passports and mandatory COVID-19 vaccination.
An analysis by the Alliance for Natural Health International speculated that any final agreement may simply strengthen the existing IHR or, alternatively, may involve an amendment to the WHO’s constitution — or both.
Just two days after the July 21 INB agreement, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s director-general, tweeted:
“I’m pleased that alongside the process of negotiating a new [international] accord on pandemic preparedness & response, WHO’s Member States are also considering targeted amendments to the [IHR], incl. ways to improve the process for declaring a [public health emergency of international concern, or PHEIC].”
In the same Twitter thread, he also declared the ongoing monkeypox outbreak “a public health emergency of international concern,” one “that is concentrated among men who have sex with men, especially those with multiple sexual partners.”
Notably, the WHO director-general overruled an expert panel that was divided over whether to classify the outbreak as a global public health emergency.
With this declaration, three “global health emergencies” are now in place, as determined by the WHO: COVID-19, monkeypox and polio.
Busy summer for vaccine passport proposals
While the WHO and global governments weigh plans for an updated or new pandemic treaty, other organizations are moving forward on vaccine passport technologies and partnerships.
On July 8, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), composed of many of the world’s industrialized nations, announced it would promote the unification of the different vaccine passport systems currently in use around the world.
Thirty-six countries and international organizations participated in a July meeting with the goal of “creating a multilateral framework for establishing a global vaccine passport regime,” according to Nick Corbishley of Naked Capitalism.
The development is a continuation of efforts involving the WHO to harmonize global vaccine passport regimes.
In February, the WHO selected Germany’s T-Systems as an “industry partner to develop the vaccination validation service,” which would enable “vaccination certificates to be checked across national borders.”
T-Systems, an arm of Deutsche Telekom, was previously instrumental in developing the interoperability of vaccine passport systems in Europe.
Also in July, 21 African governments “quietly embraced” a vaccine passport system, which in turn would also be interlinked with other such systems globally.
On July 8, which is also Africa Integration Day, the African Union and the Africa Centers for Disease Control launched a digital vaccine passport valid throughout the African Union, describing it as “the e-health backbone” of Africa’s “new health order.”
This follows the development in 2021, of the Trusted Travel platform, now required by several African countries, including Ethiopia, Kenya, Togo and Zimbabwe, and air carriers such as EgyptAir, Ethiopian Airlines and Kenya Airways, for both inbound and outbound travel.
Beyond Africa, Indonesia, which currently holds the rotating presidency of the G20, is conducting “pilot projects” that would bring about the interoperability of the various digital vaccine passport systems currently in use globally. The project is expected to be completed by November, in time for the G20 Leaders’ Summit.
Naked Capitalism highlighted the role of South African company Cassava Fintech in the efforts to develop an interoperable vaccine passport for all of Africa.
A subsidiary of African telecommunication company Econet, Cassava initially developed the “Sasail” app, which the company described as Africa’s first “global super app” that combines “social payments” with the ability to send and receive money and pay bills, chat with others and play games.
Cassava and Econet entered into a strategic partnership with Mastercard, “to advance digital inclusion across Africa and collaborate on a range of initiatives, including expansion of the Africa CDC TravelPass.”
As previously reported by The Defender, Mastercard supports the Good Health Pass vaccine passport initiative that is also backed by the ID2020 alliance and endorsed by embattled former U.K. prime minister Tony Blair.
Mastercard has also promoted technology that can be embedded into the DO Card, a credit/debit card that keeps track of one’s “personal carbon allowance.”
ID2020, founded in 2016, claims to support “ethical, privacy-protecting approaches to digital ID.” Its founding partners include Microsoft, the Rockefeller Foundation, Accenture, GAVI-The Vaccine Alliance (itself a core partner of the WHO), UNICEF, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Bank.
Mastercard’s top two stockholders are Vanguard and BlackRock, which hold significant stakes in dozens of companies that supported the development of vaccine passports or implemented vaccine mandates for their employees. The two investment firms also hold large stakes in vaccine manufacturers, including Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson.
Mastercard provides funding for the World Bank’s Identity for Development (ID4D) Program, which “focuses on promoting digital identification systems to improve development outcomes while maintaining trust and privacy.”
The Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at the New York School of Law recently described the ID4D program, which touts its alignment with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) , as one which could pave the way to a “digital road to hell.”
According to the center, this would occur through the prioritization of “economic identity” and the use of an infrastructure that has “been linked to severe and large-scale human rights violations” in several countries.
Mastercard is also active in Africa through its joint initiative with another fintech (financial technology) company, Paycode, to “increase access to financial services and government assistance for remote communities across Africa” via a biometric identity system containing the data of 30 million individuals.
World Bank, WHO promote ‘pandemic preparedness’ and vaccine passports
The World Bank in late June announced the creation of a fund that will “finance investments in strengthening the fight against pandemics” and “support prevention, preparedness and response … with a focus on low- and middle-income countries.”
The fund was developed under the lead of the U.S., Italy and current G20 president Indonesia, “with broad support from the G20,” and will be active later this year.
It will provide more than $1 billion in funding for areas such as “disease surveillance” and “support against the current as well as future pandemics.”
The WHO is also a “stakeholder” in the project and will provide “technical expertise,” according to WHO’s director-general.
The agreement follows a 2019 strategic partnership between the UN and the World Economic Forum, to “accelerate” the implementation of the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its SDGs.
Although the agreement has recently circulated on social media, it was announced in June 2019, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. It encompasses six areas of focus, including “health” and “digital cooperation.”
In terms of health, the agreement purports that it will “support countries [sic] achieve good health and well-being for all, within the context of the 2030 Agenda, focusing on key emerging global health threats that require stronger multistakeholder partnership and action.”
In turn, the “digital cooperation” promoted by the agreement will purportedly “meet the needs of the Fourth Industrial Revolution while seeking to advance global analysis, dialogue and standards for digital governance and digital inclusiveness.”
However, despite rhetoric preaching “inclusiveness,” individuals and entities that have refused to go along with applications such as vaccine passports have faced repercussions in their personal and professional lives.
Such was the example of a Canadian doctor who was fined $6,255 in June over her refusal to use the country’s ArriveCAN health information app — which is being investigated over privacy concerns — to enter the country.
Dr. Ann Gillies said she was fined when re-entering Canada after attending a conference in the U.S.
Andrew Bud, the CEO of biometric ID company iProove, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security contractor, described vaccine certificates as driving “the whole field of digital ID in the future,” adding they are “not just about COVID [but] about something even bigger” and that “once adopted for COVID [they] will be rapidly used for everything else.”
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., is an independent journalist and researcher based in Athens, Greece.
© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.
Rockefeller Foundation ‘Reset the Table’ Report Predicted COVID-Related Food Crisis — 2 Years Before It Happened
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | June 30, 2022
Just a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic — and almost two years before global health officials warned of a food shortage crisis — the Rockefeller Foundation issued a report predicting the crisis and offering up solutions, including “shifts to online enrollment, online purchasing of food.”
In a report published July 28, 2020, “Reset the Table: Meeting the Moment to Transform the U.S. Food System,” the foundation described “a hunger and nutrition crisis … unlike any this country has seen in generations.”
The authors blamed the crisis on COVID-19.
The report concluded the crisis would have to be addressed not by strengthening food security for the most vulnerable, but by revamping the entire food system and associated supply chain — in other words, we would need to “reset the table.”
The Rockefeller Foundation called for this food system “reset” less than two months after the World Economic Forum (WEF), on June 3, 2020, revealed its vision for the “Great Reset.”
Some of the contributors to the Rockefeller Foundation report are WEF members; a few of which, along with other proponents of “resetting the table,” also have ties to entities pushing vaccine passports and digital ID schemes.
Rockefeller Foundation: ‘changes to policies, practices, and norms’ are needed
The WEF describes the Rockefeller Foundation as a “science-driven” philanthropic organization that “seeks to inspire and foster large-scale human impact that promotes the well-being of humanity around the world” and which “advances the new frontiers of science, data, policy and innovation to solve global challenges related to health, food, power and economic mobility.”
In the foreword to its 2020 “Reset the Table” report, foundation President Dr. Rajiv J. Shah, who is a former administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), states:
“America faces a hunger and nutrition crisis unlike any this country has seen in generations.
“In many ways, Covid-19 has boiled over long-simmering problems plaguing America’s food system. What began as a public health crisis fueled an economic crisis, leaving 33 percent of families unable to afford the amount or quality of food they want.
“School closures put 30 million students at risk of losing the meals they need to learn and thrive.”
The report did not explain how the Rockefeller Foundation was able to know about this food crisis mere months after the pandemic took hold — especially as the report states it was developed out of “video-conference discussions in May and June 2020.”
The report also didn’t provide any insight into the role pandemic countermeasures such as lockdowns — which the foundation championed along with the WEF — played in contributing to the food crisis.
In its report, the Rockefeller Foundation proposes a series of solutions, derived from “dialogues with over 100 experts and practitioners.”
One recommendation calls for moving away from a “focus on maximizing shareholder returns” to “a more equitable system focused on fair returns and benefits to all stakeholders — building more equitable prosperity throughout the supply chain.”
This may sound like a good idea, until one considers “stakeholders” in this case refers to “stakeholder capitalism” — a concept heavily promoted by the very same large corporations that have been beneficiaries of the shareholder capitalist system.
The WEF also heavily promotes “stakeholder capitalism,” defining it as “a form of capitalism in which companies seek long-term value creation by taking into account the needs of all their stakeholders, and society at large.”
For some context, economic fascism, as personified by the regimes of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, encompassed government-mandated “partnerships” between business, government and unions organized by a system of regional “economic chambers,” and a philosophy where “the common good comes before the private good.”
It is, of course, unclear how the “needs [of] society at large” are determined — or by who.
The Rockefeller Foundation report declares, “Success will require numerous changes to policies, practices, and norms.”
What does such “success” entail? The report names three main objectives:
- Data collection and digitization: The report calls for “shifts to online enrollment, online purchasing of food, direct farm-to-consumer purchasing, telemedicine, teleconsultations, as well as [broadband access that is essential to] education, finance, and employment.”
The report describes the lack of universal broadband access in this context as “a fundamental resiliency and equity gap.”
- “Stakeholders” working together with the goal of forming a “collaborative advocacy movement.”
- “Changes to policies, practices and norms,” which the report says would be “numerous.”
These objectives, dressed up in “inclusive” language, are further described in the report as being beneficial to human health, ensuring “healthy and protective diets” that “will allow Americans to thrive and bring down our nation’s suffocating health care costs.”
The report goes as far as to describe this as a “legacy” of COVID-19, even predicting that doctors will “prescribe” produce for patients.
According to the report:
“One of Covid-19’s legacies should be that it was the moment Americans realized the need to treat nutritious food as a part of health care, both for its role in prevention and in the treatment of diseases.
“By integrating healthy food into the health care system, doctors could prescribe produce as easily as pharmaceuticals and reduce utilization of expensive health services that are often required because of nutrition insecurity.”
But as Dr. Joseph Mercola pointed out, despite this purported emphasis on healthy, nutritious food, the words “organic,” “natural” and “grass fed” do not appear in the report.
What does appear is the phrase “alternative proteins,” in this case referring to proteins derived from the consumption of insects — another concept promoted by the WEF.
In 2021, for instance, the WEF published a report titled “Why we need to give insects the role they deserve in our food systems,” suggesting that “insect farming for food and animal feed could offer an environmentally friendly solution to the impending food crisis.”
Yet again, an “impending food crisis” is forecast, which may lead some to ask how entities such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the WEF even knew what was coming.
As stated by Mercola:
“COVID was declared a pandemic March 11, 2020, so by the time this Rockefeller report was published, the pandemic had only existed for four months, and while certain high-risk groups did experience food insecurity, such as children whose primary meal is a school lunch, widespread food shortages, in terms of empty shelves, were not widely prevalent or particularly severe in the U.S.
“It seems nothing escapes the prophetic minds of the self-proclaimed designers of the future. They accurately foresee ‘natural disasters’ and foretell coincidental ‘acts of God’. They know everything before it happens.
“Perhaps they truly are prophets. Or, perhaps they’re simply describing the inevitable outcomes of their own actions.”
Mercola suggests such crises are inevitable because they are part of “an intentional plan” by the very same actors.
The Rockefeller Foundation’s amazing ‘predictions’ of future crises, and its ties with Big Tech and Big Pharma
Lending credence to Mercola’s view, and as recently reported by The Defender, the Rockefeller Foundation, WEF and other entities accurately predicted a remarkable number of crises that then came to pass.
For instance, Event 201, held in October 2019 and co-organized by the Rockefeller Foundation, accurately “predicted” the global outbreak of a coronavirus.
Similarly, the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), which co-organized a “tabletop simulation” predicting the global outbreak of monkeypox in March 2021, with an imaginary start date of May 2022, has received $1.25 million in grants from the Rockefeller Foundation since January 2021.
In turn, the other co-organizer of the monkeypox “tabletop simulation,” the Munich Security Conference, in May 2022 held a roundtable with the Rockefeller Foundation on “Transatlantic cooperation on food security.”
Among the suggestions arising from this roundtable include a “focus on transforming the global food system and making it more resilient to future shocks, with steps taken now and over the long term.”
The Rockefeller Foundation is also a partner and board member and donor to GAVI: The Vaccine Alliance — alongside the WEF, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, which hosted Event 201.
As previously reported by The Defender, the GAVI Alliance proclaims a mission to “save lives and protect people’s health,” and states it “helps vaccinate almost half the world’s children against deadly and debilitating infectious diseases.”
GAVI is also a core partner of the World Health Organization (WHO).
The GAVI Alliance — and the Rockefeller Foundation — also work closely with the ID2020 Alliance. Founded in 2016, ID2020 claims to advocate in favor of “ethical, privacy-protecting approaches to digital ID,” adding that “doing digital ID right means protecting civil liberties.”
As reported previously by The Defender, ID2020’s founding partners include the Rockefeller Foundation, GAVI, UNICEF, Microsoft, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Bank, while general partners of ID2020 include Facebook and Mastercard.
For the past two years, the Rockefeller Foundation and entities such as ID2020 and the WEF have been closely involved with the push for digital “vaccine passports.”
For instance, on July 9, 2020, the Commons Project, itself founded by the Rockefeller Foundation, launched “a global effort to build a secure and verifiable way for travelers to share their COVID-19 status” — that is, a vaccine passport.
The Commons Project also was behind the development of the CommonPass, another vaccine passport initiative, developed in tandem with the WEF.
In turn, the Good Health Pass was launched by ID2020, as part of a collaboration between Mastercard, the International Chamber of Commerce and the WEF. It was endorsed by embattled former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, now executive chairman of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.
Other members of the Good Health Pass Collaborative include Accenture, Deloitte and IBM — which developed New York’s “Excelsior Pass” vaccine passport system.
The Rockefeller Foundation, along with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, also funded an August 27, 2021 document issued by the WHO titled, “Digital documentation of COVID-19 certificates: Vaccination status.”
The document is described as follows:
“This is a guidance document for countries and implementing partners on the technical requirements for developing digital information systems for issuing standards-based interoperable digital certificates for COVID-19 vaccination status, and considerations for implementation of such systems, for the purposes of continuity of care, and proof of vaccination.”
And in another remarkably prescient “prediction,” the Rockefeller Foundation, in 2010, published a report — “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development” — which presented four future scenarios.
One of these hypothetical scenarios was “Lock Step” — described as “[a] world of tighter top-down government control and more authoritarian leadership, with limited innovation and growing citizen pushback.”
The description of this “Lock Step” scenario goes on to state:
“Technological innovation in ‘Lock Step’ is largely driven by government and is focused on issues of national security and health and safety.
“Most technological improvements are created by and for developed countries, shaped by governments’ dual desire to control and to monitor their citizens.”
This scenario also predicted “smarter” food packaging:
“In the aftermath of pandemic scares, smarter packaging for food and beverages is applied first by big companies and producers in a business-to-business environment, and then adopted for individual products and consumers.”
Moreover, the “Lock Step” scenario remarkably predicted China would fare better than most countries in a hypothetical pandemic, due to the heavy-handed measures it would implement:
“However, a few countries did fare better — China in particular.
“The Chinese government’s quick imposition and enforcement of mandatory quarantine for all citizens, as well as its instant and near-hermetic sealing off of all borders, saved millions of lives, stopping the spread of the virus far earlier than in other countries and enabling a swifter post-pandemic recovery.”
The Rockefeller Foundation’s involvement in public health is not new.
Going back more than a century, the foundation heavily promoted “scientific medicine” and formalized medical practice based on the European model on a global scale, at the expense of homeopathy and other traditional and natural remedies.
The foundation’s “philanthropic” activities have been described as “de facto colonialism in countries including China and the Philippines.”
Moreover, the foundation helped give rise to the first global public health entities, the International Health Commission (1913-16) and the International Health Board (1916-1927).
It also helped finance the earliest public health programs at universities such as Harvard and Johns Hopkins — today home to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., is an independent journalist and researcher based in Athens, Greece.
© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.
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Nine Covid Facts: A Pandemic of Fearmongering and Ignorance
By Jeff Harris | Ron Paul Institute | October 28, 2020
Ever since the alleged pandemic erupted this past March the mainstream media has spewed a non-stop stream of misinformation that appears to be laser focused on generating maximum fear among the citizenry. But the facts and the science simply don’t support the grave picture painted of a deadly virus sweeping the land.
Yes we do have a pandemic, but it’ a pandemic of ginned up pseudo-science masquerading as unbiased fact. Here are nine facts backed up with data, in many cases from the CDC itself that paints a very different picture from the fear and dread being relentlessly drummed into the brains of unsuspecting citizens. … continue
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