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Iran Responds to Trump’s Threats: US Has 10 Bases and 50K Troops in Our Vicinity

Al-Manar | March 31, 2025

The director general for the Americas at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has issued an official warning to the United States Interests Section in Tehran to warn Washington against any hostile actions.

In the absence of the Swiss ambassador, Issa Kameli summoned the chargé d’affaires of the Swiss Embassy, which represents the U.S. in Tehran, to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and conveyed Iran’s firm resolve to respond decisively and immediately to any threat.

The Swiss charge d’affaires was summoned on Monday over recent threats against Iran made by U.S. President Donald Trump.

During the meeting, Kameli condemned and rejected the inflammatory remarks, calling them violations of international law and the principles outlined in the United Nations Charter.

The Iranian official presented an official note warning against any malicious activity, emphasizing the Islamic Republic of Iran’s unwavering resolve to counteract any aggression.

The chargé d’affaires assured Kameli that the matter would be promptly relayed to the U.S. government.

Commander of the IRGC Aerospace Forces Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh indicated that the United States has 10 bases and 50 thousand troops in our vicinity.

“Those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi stressed that Iran may never engage in direct talks with the US administration, adding that Washington received and reviewed Tehran’s response to Trump’s letter.

Trump has warned that he might order military strikes against Iran if Tehran fails to reach an agreement with Washington on its nuclear program. “If they don’t make a deal, there will be bombing,” Trump said in an interview with NBC News. However, he added that he could instead impose “secondary tariffs” on Iran if no deal is reached, as he did during his first term in office.

Earlier in the day, Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei warned that if Washington commits any hostile act against Iran, “it will certainly receive a heavy blow in return.”

March 31, 2025 Posted by | Wars for Israel | , , , | Leave a comment

The EU, the USSR, and the architecture of collective security in Eurasia

By Alexander Tuboltsev | Al Mayadeen | March 31, 2025

In July 1966, an important event took place in the Romanian city of Bucharest. The Warsaw Pact countries (USSR, GDR, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania) adopted a Declaration on Strengthening Peace and Security in Europe. This document, signed by the leaders of the listed countries, stipulated the following:

1. The Warsaw Pact participants officially declared that they have no territorial claims to any European state.

2. The signatories of the Declaration proposed the simultaneous dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and NATO in order to ease tensions.

3. The Declaration proposed the withdrawal of all foreign troops from European countries.

4. The Warsaw Pact countries proposed to develop mutually beneficial cooperation between all countries of the continent based on the principles of equality and non-interference in internal affairs.

And so, it was 1966. It had been less than five years since the Berlin crisis of 1961, when Soviet and American tanks faced each other in a standoff near the checkpoint (between West and East Berlin).

At the height of the Cold War, the Warsaw Pact countries proposed their own project for a collective, common, mutually beneficial security architecture in Europe.

10 years later, in November 1976, a new meeting of the Warsaw Pact Political Advisory Committee was held in Bucharest. As a result, a new Declaration was adopted. In my opinion, it can be called the prototype of the modern concept of a multipolar world. In the Declaration of 1976, the Warsaw Pact countries published the following program for the collective security system:

1. Ending the arms race.

2. Development of interstate relations with respect for the principles of sovereignty and mutual assistance.

3. Emphasis on the development of mutually beneficial trade and economic cooperation between different states.

4. Support the struggle against neocolonialism in Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

5. Support for the rights of the Palestinian people.

6. Restructuring of international economic relations based on the principles of justice and equality.

A few months later, in October 1976, the Soviet government sent a detailed Statement to the UN Secretary General on the topic of restructuring world economic relations. The Statement proposed to support the economic interests of Asian, Latin American, and African countries, to fight against neocolonial economic practices, and to limit the activities of global financial monopolies.

What do these historical facts tell us? In the 60s and 70s of the last century, the Warsaw Pact countries proposed to Europe to create a system of collective security and make a choice in favor of cooperation rather than confrontation. At the same time, they proposed to make world trade, economic ties, and political relations more pluralistic and more equal. These projects, outlined in the two Bucharest Declarations of 1966 and 1976, could once have significantly changed the geopolitical situation. But that didn’t happen, because there was one problem.

The military and political establishment of Western Europe and the United States had no intention of building a joint security architecture in Europe with the Warsaw Treaty Organization. The situation was quite the opposite: after 1991, NATO began its waves of expansion to the east. Since the Brussels summit in January 1994, an active process has begun to involve the countries of the former Warsaw Pact in NATO: in 1999 Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary joined the alliance. In the following years, the process of NATO expansion in Europe became continuous, spreading to the post-Soviet space (Baltic countries). The United States used this expansion as a tool to realize its hegemonic ambitions and to maintain the American unipolar dictatorship.

As the years passed, the EU countries continued to turn into a platform for NATO bases, which appeared closer to the borders of Russia. At the same time, the Russian Federation has always expressed its readiness for constructive dialogue, including on the architecture of collective security in Europe. Let’s recall 2008, when Russia took the initiative to create a Treaty on European security. In 2009, a draft of this agreement was presented, which mentioned, among other things, the following aspects:

1. Mutual cooperation between countries based on the principles of indivisible and equal security.

2. An agreement that the countries participating in the Treaty will not carry out actions affecting the security of other participants.

3. The openness of the Treaty for the accession of participants from all over the Eurasian and Euro-Atlantic area.

Western countries did not support this initiative. Moreover, they continued to expand the NATO military infrastructure in Europe, building new bases and accepting new countries into the alliance (Albania, Croatia).

The historical review I have given shows that for decades (since the 20th century), the EU countries have rejected all Soviet and Russian initiatives to create a European collective security architecture. The European Union did not want to enter into a dialogue on this topic and turned the idea of an equal security system into ruins.

Here is a typical example illustrated by Finland. Since 1948, when the Soviet-Finnish Friendship Treaty was signed, the USSR has been one of Helsinki’s most important economic partners. Finland actively bought oil from the Soviet Union at relatively low prices and then re-exported it to other European countries at a higher price. Due to its neutral position during the Cold War, Finland maintained political and economic relations with both the European Economic Community and the Warsaw Pact countries.

And what is happening now? In 2023, Finland joined NATO, becoming another springboard for the alliance’s military expansion. The country closed its border with Russia and began to massively reduce bilateral trade ties, which negatively affected the Finnish economy itself (especially the Finnish border settlements, many of which received most of their income through trade relations with the Russian Federation).

In the 2010s, many EU countries (Italy, Germany, and others that previously had active trade relations with Russia) began to break off bilateral contacts and impose sanctions, thereby undermining the very essence of the idea of free trade. What is the reason for this?

First, the EU countries have been actively using Russia’s resources for decades, buying oil and natural gas at favorable prices. But at the same time, Western European countries showed disrespect for Russia’s national interests and ignored its constructive proposals on the subject of collective security architecture. Instead of an equal dialogue, the EU showed arrogance.

Secondly, since the 90s, the EU has considered the former Warsaw Pact countries and the post-Soviet space as a market for its products and businesses. The EU imposed strict requirements and interfered in the economic processes in the states of Eastern and Central Europe, which began to join it. For example, in Latvia in 2006-2007, due to the agrarian reforms of the EU, the sugar industry of the republic was actually disbanded. This was unprofitable for the Latvian economy, but it was in line with the interests of the larger European sugar producers. Similar reductions in the sugar industry occurred at that time in Bulgaria, the former socialist country. And this is just one example of such EU interference in the economy of former Warsaw Pact members.

Also, the EU, within the framework of the “Eastern Partnership”, began its active economic expansion in the countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in the 2000s. The EU’s political and economic interference in the affairs of the CIS countries, along with NATO’s eastward expansion, posed a direct threat to Russia’s security. In turn, Russia has responded to this threat by strengthening its security and sovereignty, including in the economic sphere.

Thirdly, back in the 1990s, the EU countries became one of the main springboards of the Western hegemonic unipolar dictatorship led by the United States. The so-called “Western world” tried in every way to prevent the emergence of multipolarity, combining sanctions threats with neocolonial practices in the Global South. The number of international political contradictions grew every year, and the EU constantly refused equal dialogue.

Now, the year is 2025, and the EU has become a clone of NATO in its essence and actions. Like the North Atlantic Alliance, the EU is a vestige of the Cold War era. Instead of solving internal problems (for example, the inequality of economic development in Northern and Southern Europe, rising unemployment, and the European energy crisis), EU leaders are using aggressive Russophobic rhetoric, provoking new escalation stages, and imposing new sanctions packages. They are increasing military spending, sponsoring the militarization of Poland, Finland, and the Baltic States, and continuing their neo-colonialist expansion in Africa. Berlin, Brussels, Paris, and Warsaw are now the instigators of conflicts that are pushing the whole of Europe into the abyss in the name of globalism and destructive neoliberalism.

This tendency of the EU establishment to escalate once again confirms that the situation on the continent is tense to the limit. The idea of a collective security architecture is once again becoming relevant to prevent larger and more numerous conflicts. However, this can no longer be a concept of European collective security. Similar projects are a thing of the past. The world has changed, and in recent decades, the role of Asian countries has increased significantly. Countries such as China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam are showing high rates of economic development, and their regional and international influence is growing. Therefore, in my opinion, the collective security architecture should be considered as a possible future project for the whole of Eurasia, built on the basis of equality and mutual respect. It is especially important to take into account the national interests of the countries of the Global South, which have suffered from Western European colonialism and interference for centuries.

To prevent further confrontation, it is necessary to eliminate the root causes that eventually led to the escalation. One of the main security problems in Europe is the expansion of NATO to the east and the concentration of NATO military bases near the borders of Russia and Belarus. Brussels, Paris, and Berlin should clearly understand that such actions (along with the bellicose rhetoric and policies of the current EU leadership) lead to an even more serious confrontation. Moscow and Minsk have repeatedly stressed that they will defend their territory and sovereignty in the event of a direct threat from the West.

It seems to me that, in the future, the most favorable option for reducing tensions in Europe and starting a dialogue on a new Eurasian collective security architecture could be the complete withdrawal of NATO troops from the EU countries bordering Russia (Finland, the Baltic states). If EU countries want to restore relations with Russia in the future, they should stop their hostile anti-Russian actions.

In the emerging multipolar world, there will be neither metropolises nor unipolar hegemonies. Europe is not the center of the world, but a political and geographical region like Africa, Asia, Oceania, and Latin America. Therefore, future global security can only be based on an equal and mutually respectful relationship between countries and continents, that is, between all poles of a multipolar world order. And there is no place in this system for such destructive practices as the neocolonial paradigm of thinking and Western arrogance towards other peoples.

March 31, 2025 Posted by | Economics, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Donald Trump is Looking Like a War President

By Adam Dick | Peace and Prosperity Blog | March 31, 2025

Donald Trump ran for president presenting himself as the peace candidate. A little over two months into his presidency, Trump, however, appears to be establishing himself as a war president.

Instead of quickly ending the US government’s support for war against Russia through Ukraine and against Palestinians, Lebanon, and beyond through Israel, Trump is keeping the money, weapons, and intelligence flowing to support the war efforts of these two so-called allies. It would have been simple for Trump to just declare “no more” and bow out of these wars, but he has chosen not to do so. He is also directing new major military action against Somalia and Yemen. Plus, Trump is threatening to bomb Iran, as well as attack any of Iran’s military that may be found around Yemen. Even Greenland is newly in the crosshairs of US military might during Trump’s presidency, with Trump declaring that the US will acquire the island territory of Denmark one way or another, up to through the use of military force.

A little over two months into the new Trump presidency, the death and destruction keeps coming from the US support for Ukraine and Israel in their wars. Further, the US military is directly engaging in newly expanded military attacks elsewhere, and new wars are being threatened in regard to Iran and — out of left field — Greenland.

Can Trump still become the peace president he suggested he would be? Time is running out. The way things are shaping up, it looks like there is a good chance the US will be more immersed in wars two months from now than it is so far in the new Trump administration.

March 31, 2025 Posted by | Militarism, Wars for Israel | | Leave a comment

Is AIPAC Getting What They Want in DC?

By Karen Kwiatkowski | LewRockwell | March 29, 2025

Pro-Israel lobbies and organizations got what they paid for in 2024. Hundreds of millions of dollars of pro-Zionist donations to the Trump campaign and Trump-aligned PACs helped elect Trump, and every important appointment, and some less important ones are vocal Israel-firsters. Pre-existing massive military and other aid from the US taxpayer to Israel has been expanded under Trump. Avid Zionists lead the State Department, the Pentagon, and direct national intelligence. Zionist Steve Witkoff serves as the President’s envoy and chief diplomat in the two major wars the US has been supporting for years, wars Trump wants to resolve in the first half of his last term.

Why, it should be almost perfect, from an AIPAC point of view: a completely controlled executive branch, and a 99% controlled US Congress! The only Republican member of Congress without an AIPAC handler is Kentucky’s Thomas Massie, and both parties have seen its Israel-questioning members successfully primaried or otherwise replaced.

We should be seeing celebrations in the lobby headquarters, and a kind of confidence that I saw way back in 2002 when Israeli generals owned the Pentagon, with full and on-demand access to Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.

But instead of celebrating, the lobby has huddled and mustered. It’s working over the lower level appointee process now, with its Senate investment Tom Cotton leading the charge against those they see as unreliable. Their unhinged reaction to the appointment of realist Ridge Colby as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy is telling.

Stefanik is now out as a potential US Ambassador to the UN – the reason?  Unlike AIPAC which draws mightily from both parties to get their initiatives, Trump needs more reliable Republican votes and a bigger margin. In other words, AIPAC has created a 99% pro-Israel Congress, yet, the Christian Zionist they needed in the UN has to be sent back to Congress because Trump needs her there.

Trump envoy Steve Witkoff is in trouble with the Republican Jewish Coalition now, based on his frank and open conversation with Tucker Carlson last week. Their complaint is addressed by a welcome tweet from JD Vance saying “The people sniping at him are mad that he is succeeding where they failed for 40 years. Turns out a lot of diplomacy boils down to a simple skill: don’t be an idiot.”

Witkoff is getting heat from the Jewish war lobby for being “fooled” by Putin and “fooled” by Hamas, and they want Rubio to conduct all the negotiations. Bless their hearts, of course they do!

The recent Signal chat kerfluffle is interesting. Signal is a commercial, open source, encrypted messenger app, and its security design and record is good. In 2022, there was a hack of an unrelated cloud server that created a short-lived ability to impersonate a Signal user. This particular breach could have been, and is, prevented by use of the Signal registration lock feature. The Pentagon has policies on Signal app usage, and obviously the inclusion of former IDF soldier and neocon journalist Jeffrey Goldberg in the Principals Small Group chat lies outside of those policies, as does the kind of information being chatted about – a Congressionally undeclared war against Yemen, US war-fighting for Israel, and the administration’s raw contempt for peace in the Middle East, and for Europe’s lack of gratitude for “all the US does” to secure Europe’s dwindling trade and security trade interests. Max Blumenthal’s take at The Gray Zone is clear, and he calls out Goldberg correctly, in a way that the bumbling SecDef tried to.

What we do know is that the Signal “leak” wasn’t a whistleblower attempt – Goldberg has few Constitutional principles and only opposes Trump’s foreign policy when it deviates from that of Netanyahu. We also know that a normal journalist who stumbles on government information important for taxpayers to know about, keeps the source open and protects it. He does not quickly remove himself (as Goldberg did) from that unique source of information.  What a goldmine for a Pulitzer, had Goldberg been interested in that kind of reward! We also know that in the time between the leaked chat and the subsequent attack on Yemen, days went by as several normally quiet and unknown Senators on the Intelligence Committee became extraordinarily well-prepared to attack DNI Gabbard and CIA Director Ratcliffe on the topic during the Trump’s first annual threat estimate presentation. Warner nearly flubbed his lines, but it was a remarkably good show from Senators we rarely hear from. It also served to de-emphasize and distract from whatever was in that Estimate – including Iran isn’t making the bomb, and is a NPT signatory, unlike Israel which makes plenty of them and refuses to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Furthermore, Gabbard and Ratcliffe were not the preferred candidates for Israel, so making them look incompetent, rogue, or otherwise needing to be replaced is part of a time- honored agenda for the Israel lobby. Gabbard is honest, and while exceedingly pro-Israel she prefers peace and diplomacy over fighting someone else’s war. Ratcliffe, while “good on Israel” is known as an America Firster, and more interested in a future conflict with China, something that would necessarily detract from fighting and subsidizing Israel’s endless wars.

Where was National Security Director Waltz – who would have thunk he’d miss the presentation of the National Threat Estimate? He had added Jeffrey Goldberg to the chat, he’s not sure how, and he was in Greenland when Gabbard and Ratcliffe were facing the orchestrated wrath of suddenly security-conscious Senators. Not surprisingly, AIPAC was Congressman Waltz’s top contributor between 2017 and 2024.

All is not well in Israel’s western capital.  Increasingly, AIPAC is dependent on Christian Zionists and lying politicians who will take their money but fail to completely deliver (although Waltz clearly did his part lately). Even Huckabee – a rare Christian Ambassador to Israel – is not trusted by the various Israel lobbies for reasons that demonstrate a small but growing schism between American and Israeli jews, and Zionism in general. AIPAC is finding it more difficult to recruit new generations of activists in the US. Increasing calls to publicly identify dual citizens in the US Congress, and to register AIPAC under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) are being heard.

Almost 20 years ago, John Mearshimer and Stephen Walt published a groundbreaking assessment of the influence of the Israeli lobby to jeers, condemnation and threats. Today, everyone in Washington is in general agreement with that paper, casually reveal that influence, occasionally even complaining about it. Today, Israel fights the BDS movement in the US through state and federal legislation. It demands major restrictions on American speech, expression and assembly for those who dare to consider the Zionist state a brutal colonizer, warmongering, genocidal or racist, undeserving of our military or political assistance and support.  Two years before the latest US-funded genocide in Gaza, 37% of American Jews between 18 and 29 believed US is too supportive of Israel, while only 16% of American Jews over age 65 felt that way. Trend lines like these are not good for organizations like AIPAC.

Trump thus far has refused to fire anyone over the Signal fiasco, despite the preparation and preference for this solution from the “lobby.” If Waltz is safe, no doubt Ratcliffe and Gabbard are as well. Trump’s sensitivities to spies in his midst, his concept of personal loyalty, and his simple and blessed inability to be bullied all work against AIPAC. Trump’s ending of war in Ukraine with a settlement and ceding of territory could be applied to Israel. Trump’s demand that Europe pull its own weight financially and defensively could be applied to Israel. His preference to protect America here, via border control, revitalizing US industry, and designing Golden Domes all speak to ideas of America First, a desire to reduce foreign influence/spying and a shift away from American imperialism toward realism. These ideas, if applied to US-Israel policy, would end the current lop-sided relationship, and raise the costs of Zionism far beyond what Israel could afford on its own.

No wonder the Israel lobby is cranky.

March 31, 2025 Posted by | Wars for Israel | , , | Leave a comment

“This Is Existential”: Billionaire Cancer Researcher Says Covid & Vaccine Likely Causing Surge In Aggressive Cancers

By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | March 28, 2025

Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong – a transplant surgeon-turned-biotech billionaire renowned for inventing the cancer drug Abraxane – has issued a startling warning in a new in-depth interview with Tucker Carlson.

Soon-Shiong, founder of ImmunityBio ($IBRX) and owner of the Los Angeles Times, claims that the COVID-19 pandemic, and the very vaccines developed to fight it, may be contributing to a global surge in “terrifyingly aggressive” cancers. In the nearly two-hour conversation, the Los Angeles Times owner leveraged his decades of clinical and scientific experience to outline why he suspects an unprecedented cancer epidemic is unfolding. This report examines Dr. Soon-Shiong’s background and assertions, the scientific responses for and against his claims, new data on post-COVID health trends, and the far-reaching implications if his alarming hypothesis proves true.

Dr. Soon-Shiong’s Claims

Soon-Shiong is a veteran surgeon and immunologist who has spent a career studying the human immune system’s fight against cancer. He pioneered novel immunotherapies and even worked on a T-cell based COVID vaccine booster during the pandemic. In the interview, he draws on this background to voice deep concern over rising cancer cases, especially among younger people – something he describes as a “non-infectious pandemic” of cancer. He tells Carlson that in 50 years of medical practice, it was extraordinarily rare to see cancers like pancreatic tumors in children or young adults, yet recently such cases are appearing. For instance, Soon-Shiong was alarmed by seeing a 13-year-old with metastatic pancreatic cancer, a scenario virtually unheard of in his prior experience.

“I never saw pancreatic cancer in children… the greatest surprise to me was a 13-year-old with metastatic pancreatic cancer,” Soon-Shiong told Carlson, adding that he’s seen examples of very young patients (even children under 11 with colon cancer) and unusual surges in aggressive diseases like ovarian cancer in women in their 30s. These personal observations of more frequent, aggressive cancers in youth led him to probe what might have changed in recent years.

“We’re clearly seeing an increase in certain types of cancer, like pancreatic cancer, ovarian cancer… colon cancer… in younger people.”
— Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong

According Soon-Shiong, the COVID era is the obvious change – and suggests that both the SARS-CoV-2 virus infection and the widespread vaccination campaigns could be key drivers behind this cancer spike. He emphasizes the massive scale of human exposure to the virus and its spike protein (via infection or vaccination).

“I don’t know how to say that without saying it. It scares the pants off me because I think what we may be, I don’ think it’s virus versus man now, this is existential. I think when I talk about the largest non-infectious pandemic that we’re afraid of, this is it.”

“Billions of people – literally billions – had the COVID virus. Over a billion got the spike protein vaccine,” said Carlson, adding “So that’s like, we’re talking like a huge percentage of the Earth’s population, unless I’m missing something.”

“Now you understand what keeps you awake at night and kept me awake at night for two years, two and a half years,” Soon-Shiong replied, suggesting that exposure to both is silently undermining the immune system’s natural defenses against cancer on a global scale.

Soon-Shiong frames COVID-era cancers as potentially virally triggered or exacerbated. In the interview, he described cases of “virally induced cancers” in clinics during the pandemic – patients whose cancers may have been kicked into overdrive by the cascade of inflammation and immune stress associated with COVID-19 (Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong: You’re Being Lied to About Cancer, How It’s Caused, and How to Stop It). COVID infection causes a massive inflammatory response, and some cancers are known to exploit inflammation to grow.

TUCKER: “a lot people have pointed to both COVID, the virus, and to the mRNA COVID vaccines as potential causes. Do you think that they’re related?”

SOON-SHIONG: “The best way for me to answer that is to look at history. What we know about virally-induced cancers is well-established. We know that if you get hepatitis, you get liver cancer. Hepatitis is a virus infection. We know if you got human papillomavirus, HPV, you get cervical cancer.”

We know that certain viruses directly cause cancer (e.g. HPV, Epstein-Barr), so it’s not unprecedented for a virus to play a role in oncogenesis. While SARS-CoV-2 is not a known oncovirus, Soon-Shiong worries its indirect effects – chronic inflammation, immune exhaustion, or “suppressor cells” that emerge in the wake of infection/vaccination – could be accelerating tumor development. “The answer is to stop the inflammation… clear the virus from the body,” he argues, positing that until we eradicate lingering virus and restore immune balance, we may see mounting cancer cases.

In sum, Dr. Soon-Shiong’s claim is that the pandemic has set the stage for an explosion of aggressive cancers: the COVID virus itself (especially if it persists in survivors) might suppress immune surveillance, and the mRNA vaccines “that didn’t stop it” might inadvertently contribute to an immunosuppressive environment. These effects, in his theory, could be unleashing cancers that the immune system would ordinarily have kept in check.

Watch:

A number of clinicians and researchers have reported similar worrying observations, though these remain largely anecdotal at this stage. One prominent voice echoing Soon-Shiong’s concern is Dr. Angus Dalgleish, a veteran oncologist and professor at St. George’s, University of London. In late 2022, Dalgleish wrote to the BMJ’s editor after noticing that some cancer patients who had been stable for years experienced “rapid progression of their disease after a COVID-19 booster.” He cited cases of individuals who were doing well until shortly after vaccination – new leukemias, sudden appearance of Stage IV lymphomas, and explosive metastases in patients who had post-vaccine bouts of feeling unwell.

“I am experienced enough to know that these are not coincidental,” Dalgleish wrote, noting that colleagues in Germany, Australia and the U.S. were independently seeing the same pattern. This frontline testimony aligns with Soon-Shiong’s fear: something about the immune system post-vaccination might be removing restraints on latent cancers. Dalgleish specifically pointed to short-term innate immune suppression after mRNA vaccination (lasting for several weeks) as a plausible mechanism. Many of the cancers he saw were ones normally held in check by immune surveillance (melanomas and B-cell cancers), so a temporary post-vaccine drop in immune vigilance could allow a tumor growth spurt. He also alluded to “suppressor gene suppression by mRNA in laboratory experiments” – a reference to preliminary studies that found the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein might interfere with key DNA repair or tumor-suppressor proteins in cells. These lab findings (while not yet confirmed in living organisms) lend some biological plausibility to the idea that spike exposure could affect cancer-related pathways.

Beyond individual doctors, some research is probing links between COVID and cancer behavior. For example, a 2022 study in Frontiers in Oncology explored how SARS-CoV-2 proteins interact with cancer cells. It found that the virus’s membrane (M) protein can “induce the mobility, proliferation and in vivo metastasis” of triple-negative breast cancer cells in the lab (Frontiers | SARS-CoV-2 M Protein Facilitates Malignant Transformation of Breast Cancer Cells). In co-culture experiments, breast cancer cells exposed to the viral protein essentially became more aggressive and invasive. The researchers concluded that COVID-19 infection “might promote… aggressive [cancer] phenotypes” and warned that cancer patients who get COVID could face worse outcomes.

While this is one specific context (breast cancer cells and one viral protein), it underpins Soon-Shiong’s general concern: the virus can directly alter the tumor microenvironment to the cancer’s advantage.

Another line of evidence involves latent viruses and inflammation. Doctors have documented unusual reactivations of viruses like Epstein-Barr (which is linked to lymphomas and other malignancies) during both COVID-19 and post-vaccine immune reactions. Such reactivations hint at a period of immune dysregulation that might also let nascent cancer cells slip past defenses.

Or course, fact-checkers and medical authorities argue that there is no credible evidence of vaccines causing meaningful immune suppression. “There isn’t evidence to date that COVID-19 vaccines cause cancer or lead to worsening cancer,” one infectious disease expert told FactCheck.org, though they do acknowledge rare side effects like myocarditis or blood clots were found, but not cancer.

Phinance Data Insights: Post-COVID Health Trends

While the scientific community debates mechanistic links between COVID and cancer, independent analysts have been parsing population-level data for unusual patterns. One notable effort is by Phinance Technologies, a research firm co-founded by former BlackRock portfolio manager Edward Dowd. Phinance has been analyzing excess mortality and disability data since the pandemic, looking for signals of broad health impacts in the aftermath of COVID and mass vaccination. Their findings reveal concerning trends, especially among younger, working-age populations, that lend some weight to Dr. Soon-Shiong’s general warning of a post-COVID health crisis (though not specific to cancer alone).

Phinance’s “Vaccine Damage Project” examined the U.S. population aged 16–64 (essentially the workforce) and stratified outcomes into four groups: no effect, mild injuries, severe injuries (disabilities), and death. Using official government databases (the CDC, Bureau of Labor Statistics, etc.), they estimated how each category changed starting in 2021 – when vaccines rolled out and COVID became widespread. The results are sobering. According to Phinance’s analysis, by the end of 2022 the U.S. had experienced approximately 310,000 excess deaths among adults aged 25-64 (a ~23% increase in mortality in that group over normal expectations). Notably, they argue that after mid-2021, with vaccines available and the virus itself becoming less deadly (due to immunity and milder variants), COVID-19 should not have been causing such high excess death rates. Therefore, those 310k “unexplained” deaths in 2021–2022 could represent an upper bound on vaccine-related fatalities or other pandemic collateral damage.

Even more striking is the data on new disabilities. Phinance found that from early 2021 through late 2022, about 1.36 million additional Americans (age 16–64) became disabled – a 24.6% rise in disability in that cohort, far above historical trend. This jump in disabilities among the workforce correlates in time with the vaccine rollout (and was disproportionately higher in the labor force than among those not working). The analysts note that the healthiest segment of the population (employed working-age adults) saw a greater relative increase in disabilities after Q1 2021 than the older or non-working groups. This is unusual, since typically health shocks hit the elderly hardest – but here something was impacting younger, healthy people to a significant degree. Phinance investigated further and found a tight relationship between the cumulative number of vaccine doses administered and the rise in disabilities in 2021-22. In fact, for the 16–64 population, they computed a ratio of about 4 new disabilities per excess death in that period, suggesting many survivors were left with lingering health issues even if they didn’t die.

March 30, 2025 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | , | Leave a comment

Is the FDA salvageable?

By Maryanne Demasi, PhD | March 26, 2025

Dr Marty Makary—now confirmed as FDA Commissioner—inherits an agency that routinely approves drugs with questionable benefits.

At Makary’s confirmation hearing on March 6th, senators repeatedly hailed the FDA as the “gold standard” of drug regulation—a phrase meant to reassure the public that approved drugs are significantly effective.

But this claim is an illusion.

In 2013, Jonathan J. Darrow, a Harvard legal scholar and expert in drug regulation, published a scathing analysis in the Washington and Lee Law Review, exposing the reality behind this phrase.

Darrow’s paper, Pharmaceutical Efficacy: The Illusory Legal Standard, meticulously details how the FDA’s approval process does not require drugs to be meaningfully effective—only that they show some effect, no matter how trivial.

Since then, the problem has only worsened.

Makary has spent years criticising medical waste and corporate influence in healthcare. But now, as the new FDA Commissioner, can he reform an institution this compromised?

The “gold standard” that fails the public

The phrase “gold standard” suggests uncompromising scientific scrutiny. However, under U.S. law, there is no specific level of efficacy required for a new drug to be approved.

The FDA’s legal framework, Title 21 of the U.S. Code, demands only “substantial evidence” of benefit, without defining what “substantial” actually means.

Darrow explains: “The standard is almost entirely illusory because it leaves to the drug sponsor the ability to specify any non-zero level of efficacy.”

This ambiguity explains why many widely prescribed drugs offer only marginal benefits.

Consider antidepressants like Prozac and Zoloft. Research indicates that the majority of patient improvement could be due to the placebo effect, not the drug itself.

Yet, because these medications show statistical improvement in clinical trials, they meet the FDA’s approval threshold and are marketed as transformative treatments.

Darrow reported in 2021 that most newly approved drugs (69%-98%) fail to provide substantial benefits over existing therapies.

Cherry-picking evidence

Another critical flaw in determining drug efficacy is selective trial reporting. Drug companies conduct numerous clinical trials, but the FDA only requires two successful trials for approval—regardless of how many have failed.

This means a company could run 10 trials, discard eight that show no benefit, and submit the two positive ones. This practice is precisely how some SSRI antidepressants were approved.

In a major exposé, researcher Irving Kirsch and his colleagues used the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to obtain unpublished clinical trial data on six widely prescribed antidepressants.

FDA approval had been granted based on twelve trials (two per drug). Yet, a FOIA request uncovered 47 trials—many of which showed no meaningful difference between the drug and a placebo.

The registration of trials on public registries like ClinicalTrials.gov was intended to improve transparency, but enforcement remains weak. Many trials that should have been disclosed are not, and financial penalties for non-compliance are rarely enforced.

The result? A regulatory loophole that allows ineffective drugs to be marketed as evidence-based solutions.

Misleading people with statistical tricks

Beyond cherry-picking trials, statistics can be manipulated to make drugs seem more effective than they are. One common tactic is presenting relative risk reduction instead of absolute risk reduction.

Take statins, the cholesterol-lowering drugs prescribed to millions. Clinical trials often claim statins reduce heart attack risk by 30%. However, this figure refers to relative risk—not absolute risk.

In reality, the absolute risk reduction is often less than 2%. This means that out of 100 people taking statins, 98 see no benefit at all. Yet, because the effect meets “statistical significance,” statins are approved and aggressively marketed as essential for heart disease prevention.

Another example is the diabetes drug saxagliptin (Onglyza), approved by the FDA in 2009. Marketed as a breakthrough for blood sugar control, later studies showed the absolute reduction of HbA1c—a key measure of blood sugar—was negligible (0.4% to 0.9%).

Worse, in 2013, a large-scale trial revealed a possible increased risk of heart failure. Yet, the drug remains on the market, illustrating how weak efficacy standards allow ineffective (or even harmful) drugs to persist.

The cost of an ineffective system

Weak efficacy standards don’t just mislead patients—they can also lead to financial strain. This issue is particularly egregious in oncology.

New cancer drugs routinely cost over $100,000 per year, yet many extend life by only weeks or months, if any. Families may drain their savings, hoping for a meaningful survival benefit, only to later learn that the drug offered little more than a statistical blip.

In 2016, the FDA granted accelerated approval to olaratumab, which was hailed as a breakthrough for soft tissue sarcoma. However, it was withdrawn in 2019 after further research failed to show any survival benefit.

The FDA had granted approval based on early-stage trials that created the illusion of efficacy.

This isn’t just a regulatory failure—it’s a moral one.

Why we need clearer drug labelling

Darrow argues that drug labelling is a major part of the problem. “There’s no requirement for pharmaceutical companies to offer any scale of benefit, in a manner that patients can understand,” he wrote.

“Knowing how well a drug might perform relative to an alternative—through clearly presented data—allows doctors and patients to decide whether it’s worth [it].”

He draws a parallel with sunscreen labelling. “A consumer easily understands that SPF30 will give greater protection than SPF10. So why don’t we have better drug labelling?”

Alternatively, he has suggested that drug labels could adopt a similar approach to food labels, “with data presented in columns that show key information and allow for side-by-side comparison.”

Or, the labelling for sleeping pills could “indicate the number of minutes it took those who had used them in clinical trials to fall asleep compared with a placebo.”

The lack of transparency only benefits the pharmaceutical industry from increased drug sales.

Can Makary fix the FDA?

Marty Makary has been a relentless critic of medical waste, unnecessary treatments, and corporate influence in healthcare. However, reforming an agency so deeply entrenched in industry influence is an extraordinary challenge.

Drug companies pay billions in user fees to the FDA, and in return, they influence regulatory decisions. Laws governing drug approval have remained largely unchanged for decades, ensuring that the FDA prioritises speed over scientific rigour and drug safety.

The FDA continues to approve drugs with minimal benefit, it allows companies to cherry-pick positive trials while ignoring negative ones and misleads doctors into believing that weak drugs are more effective than they are.

The public assumes that FDA approval means a drug is significantly effective.

It does not.

If Makary is serious about reform, he must push Congress for sweeping legislative changes to dismantle the pharmaceutical industry’s stranglehold on drug regulation.

The FDA was created to protect the public—not to serve as a rubber stamp for Big Pharma. Right now, the FDA is failing in its mission.

The question is no longer whether the FDA is the “gold standard” of drug regulation. It’s whether the agency is salvageable at all.

March 30, 2025 Posted by | Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Judge Dismisses Defamation Lawsuit Against NewsGuard

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | March 27, 2025

A federal judge has thrown out a $13.6 million defamation lawsuit brought by Consortium News against the media ratings firm NewsGuard, delivering a blow to the independent outlet’s fight against what it views as reputational sabotage masked as media accountability. The suit, filed in 2023, centered on NewsGuard’s characterization of Consortium’s journalism, particularly its coverage of Russia’s war on Ukraine, as misleading and unreliable.

We obtained a copy of the ruling for you here.

NewsGuard, a for-profit company that partners with government agencies and private firms, and “misinformation,” had assigned Consortium News a failing trust score of 47.5 out of 100.

It accused the outlet of falling short in three categories: avoiding falsehoods, reporting responsibly, and issuing timely corrections. A “proceed with caution” warning label — first red, later changed to blue — was attached to the site, branding it as a publication that “generally fails to maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability.”

Consortium News responded with a forceful legal challenge, arguing that the flag was defamatory and that the firm’s sweeping judgments were based on a cursory review of just five opinion pieces out of more than 20,000 articles and videos published on its platform. The complaint accused NewsGuard of misrepresenting its entire body of work.

On Wednesday, US District Judge Katherine Failla granted NewsGuard’s motion to dismiss the suit, ruling that Consortium News had failed to show the kind of “actual malice” required to sustain a defamation claim. In her opinion, Failla wrote that the plaintiffs didn’t offer concrete allegations that NewsGuard knowingly made false statements.

“Indeed, far from alleging that NewsGuard knew its statements to be false, Consortium News effectively concedes the truth of the ‘anti-U.S. perspective’ label, and acknowledges that ‘reasonable people’ could differ as to the truth or falsity of its reporting, undercutting any suggestion that NewsGuard knew its criticisms to be false and published those criticisms despite knowing them to be false,” Failla wrote.

NewsGuard, which has secured contracts with the US government and other institutional clients, argued in court that its evaluations are protected expressions of opinion and that its partnership with federal agencies does not convert it into a government actor. In its defense, it called its scoring framework “inherently subjective.”

March 30, 2025 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Iran will admit students expelled from US as part of Trump’s crackdown on pro-Palestine protests

Press TV – March 30, 2025

Iran’s academic officials have declared the Islamic Republic’s unwavering support for students and academics who have been targeted by the Trump administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters on university campuses.

Officials from Iran’s academic institutions said in a joint statement on Sunday that the country’s universities “take pride in extending their support” to students protesting “the crimes of the Zionist regime” in the US.

“The acts of global arrogance in suppressing justice-seeking students and expelling them from American universities after their peaceful protests against the atrocities committed by the Zionist regime against the oppressed people of Palestine have further unveiled the true nature of those who claim to advocate for human rights,” the statement read.

Iran’s universities, it said, are ready to accept students who are being expelled by US immigration officials for showing sympathy for the Palestinian cause.

Iran’s Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution (SCCR), in collaboration with the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Medical Sciences, will facilitate the admission of expelled students into Iranian universities.

President Donald Trump has begun following through on a threat to deport all non-citizen university activists with ties to the pro-Palestine protests, which rocked the US last spring, with students staging daily protests in college campuses across the country for weeks.

The crackdown intensified since US immigration agents arrested Mahmoud Kahlil, a graduate of Columbia University, on March 8. Kahlil, who is being held in an immigration detention center in Louisiana, faces deportation for his role in pro-Palestinian campus protests.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who personally signed off on his arrest, said on Thursday that Washington has revoked at least 300 foreign students’ visas.

“Maybe more than 300 at this point,” he said. “We do it every day, every time I find one of these lunatics.”

Trump officials have accused these students of being “adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests” of the US.

March 30, 2025 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Solidarity and Activism | , , , , , | Leave a comment

What is the US Institute of Peace, the Latest USAID-Style Soft Power Tool Dismantled by DOGE?

By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – March 30, 2025

Most of the US Institute of Peace’s 300 staff got pink slip emails Friday night following the drama earlier this month involving DOGE and FBI agents and police storming the think tank’s extravagant $111M DC headquarters after the White House accused “rogue bureaucrats” of trying to “hold agencies hostage.” Here’s what to know about its activities.

Haven for Neocons and Regime Change Operators

Set up in 1984 and lavished with a $55M taxpayer-funded annual budget, USIP has been a haven for neocons since its inception, with figures from War on Terror and Iraq architects Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle to Elliott Abrams and Robert Kagan joining its board or actively collaborating with its activities.

After the 2018 death of Gene Sharp, who collaborated with the USIP, senior institute officials praised the veteran regime change operator – whose work helped destabilize entire regions, as “a pioneer of people power.”

Meddling in Russia and Eastern Europe

In the 90s, USIP funded “training and capacity building” for political actors, media, NGOs and ‘civil society leaders’ in Russia, Ukraine and across Eastern Europe, and offered “policy guidance” to US diplomats in these countries.

Forced to curtail its activities in Russia in the 2000s, USIP focused its work and resources on Ukraine in the runup to the 2005 and 2014 coups.

Once the conflict in the Donbass got underway in 2014, then-USIP chief Stephen Hadley urged the US to ramp up arms deliveries to Ukraine and send Russian troops home in “body bags.”

Soft Power Ops Worldwide and Post-Invasion Nationbuilding

Besides Eastern Europe, USIP has run its soft power programs in war-torn countries and regions across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East following the Arab Spring (Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen and Syria).

In countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, the USIP’s activities have included nationbuilding in the wake of the US invasions, from civil society grants to training of the US-backed puppet governments’ officials, and top-down implementation of US-style electoral and governance systems, which rapidly collapsed once US occupation forces were gone.

In other words, like other soft power agencies recently targeted by Trump (USAID, NED), USIP is yet another example of a taxpayer-funded instrument for co-option and subversion disguised as a tool for “conflict resolution” and “democracy promotion.”

March 30, 2025 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | Leave a comment

Anti-genocide activists exposed by pro-Israel groups using facial recognition tech

The Cradle | March 30, 2025

Foreign activists who took part in widespread campus protests against US support for the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza are being exposed by pro-Israel groups using facial recognition technology and tip lines, according to an investigation by AP.

Zionist organization Betar US has reportedly submitted a list of identified protesters to US federal officials. The list was compiled with the help of Eliyahu Hawila, a New York-based software engineer who built a facial recognition tool called NesherAI designed to identify masked protesters.

“It’s a very concerning practice,” said Abed Ayoub, National Executive Director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. “Essentially, the administration is outsourcing surveillance.”

Since the return of US President Donald Trump to power, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have detained or deported at least nine foreign university students for their activism in support of Palestine and against the US-Israeli genocide.

“Now they’re using tools of the state to actually go after people,” a Columbia graduate student from South Asia who has been active in protests told AP. “We suddenly feel like we’re being forced to think about our survival.”

“It might be more than 300 at this point. We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa,” State Secretary Marco Rubio said earlier this week when asked about the ongoing crackdown on pro-Palestinian students and academics.

“Please tell everyone you know who is at a university to file complaints about foreign students and faculty who support Hamas,” Elizabeth Rand, president of a group called Mothers Against Campus Antisemitism, said in a 21 January post to more than 60,000 followers on Facebook. It included a link to an ICE tip line.

In early February, messages from a chat group frequented by Israelis living in New York were published online. “Do you know students at Columbia or any other university who are here on a study visa and participated in demonstrations against Israel?” one message said in Hebrew. “If so, now is our time!” the message adds, accompanied by a link to the ICE hotline.

Earlier this week, Axios reported that the White House is threatening to block certain colleges from having any foreign students if it decides too many are involved in protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

March 30, 2025 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Solidarity and Activism | , , , , | Leave a comment

DR. SUZANNE HUMPHRIES ON MEASLES MYTHS AND MANIPULATED DATA

The HighWire with Del Bigtree | March 27, 2025

Internist and Co-Author of “Dissolving Illusions”, Suzanne Humphries, MD discusses her awakening to the catastrophic dangers of vaccination and walks Del through the data of how severe illness and death from disease declined rapidly across the board years before the introduction of vaccines. Hear how data continues to be manipulated and cherry picked even today to strike public fear in outbreaks from diseases that were once commonplace. She joins The HighWire on the heels of her interview with Joe Rogan, and dispels the myth that measles can erase your immune system’s memory.

 

March 30, 2025 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | | Leave a comment

Science Magazine Unfairly Attacks the Journal of the Academy of Public Health

By Peter C. Gøtzsche | RealClear Science | March 25, 2025

Only two days after the Journal of the Academy of Public Health‘s official launch, Science Magazine criticised it in a news item. A scientist I had recommended as a member of our Academy wrote to me that the fact that Science feared our new journal suggested that we were on the right track.

Indeed. Science scored an own goal by illustrating so clearly what is wrong with the legacy media and traditional scientific journals. It started out with denigrating remarks about the journal being the brainchild of President Donald Trump’s pick to direct the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Jay Bhattacharya, and Martin Kulldorff “who became known for his opposition to lockdowns, child vaccination, and other public health measures during the Covid-19 pandemic. Its editorial board also includes Trump’s pick to lead the Food and Drug Administration, Johns Hopkins University surgeon Marty [wrongly spelled as Martin] Makary, who also opposed vaccine mandates.”

Why did Science mention that Trump picked Jay and Marty? This is irrelevant for any scientific judgments about these people. And what was wrong with their positions during the pandemic? Nothing.

Sweden did not lock down and yet had one of the lowest mortalities in the world. To vaccinate children against Covid-19 down to 6 months of age as in the US is highly likely harmful, and we have not recommended this in Europe. Many people, me included, have argued against vaccine mandates and it was never a requirement in Denmark to become vaccinated against Covid-19. Such mandates are ethically and scientifically indefensible and can increase vaccine hesitancy for vaccines in general.

Science’s denigration continued: “The journal, which has already published eight articles on topics including COVID-19 vaccine trials and mask mandates, eschews several aspects of traditional publishing. It lacks a subscription paywall.”

“Lacks” a paywall? This is a negative statement, although it is positive not to have a paywall like Science has. And mask mandates? There is no need to mandate whole populations to dress as bank robbers given masking’s tenuous – and potentially nonexistent – benefits on a population level.

Since only members of the Academy of Public Health can submit articles, Science is worried that the journal will be used “to sow doubt about scientific consensus on matters such as vaccine efficacy and safety.”

Scientific consensus is rare, and even when it exists, it has often been proven wrong by later research. Science is the opposite of consensus. The status quo should be challenged, and free scientific debate – that so many traditional journals have suppressed – moves science forward. There are many good reasons why some top scientists have abandoned publishing in top scientific journals, and they include censorship, and financial and other conflicts of interest among anonymous peer reviewers, editors, and journal owners.

All my life, I have produced numerous scientific results that went against the so-called scientific consensus, and when my opponents had no valid counterarguments, they called me controversial. I realised that this denigrating term always meant that my results threatened financial or other conflicts of interest, not least guild interests. When my statistician and I demonstrated in 1999 that mammography screening might do more harm than good, which I have confirmed many times ever since, a journalist wrote that there is nothing that hurts like the truth about healthcare.

It is not enough for Science to cast doubt about our new journal by referring to Trump: “JAPH is a nonprofit subsidiary of the Real Clear Foundation, itself a donor-financed nonprofit that has attracted support from major funders of conservative causes, according to The New York Times. Kulldorff and many other members of the 21-person editorial board have attracted criticism for their views and research during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Ah well, I am one of these 21 people and I know many of the others. We are anything but conservative. We try to keep an open mind and are not easily fooled by fraudsters. In 2023, I explained that the origin of Covid-19 is the biggest coverup in medical history. And on 31 January 2025, I tweeted: “The CIA said Saturday that it’s more likely a lab leak caused the Covid-19 pandemic than an infected animal that spread the virus to people. They are very slow at the CIA. I have known this for five years and have written a lot about it incl a whole book.”

Science lamented that Jay, Martin, and Sunetra Gupta, also an editorial board member, authored the Great Barrington Declaration that opposed lockdowns. But yet again, they were right and Science and most other journals were wrong.

Science said that Jay and John Ioannidis, the most cited medical scientist, and another board member, “drew fire in 2020 for a study that claimed SARS-CoV-2 had infected far more people than currently thought, and was therefore far less dangerous than assumed.” This was totally misleading. Jay has explained how they were exposed to inappropriate attacks and censorship from Stanford where they worked. Their initial results, that the infection fatality rate was only 0.2%, were reproduced in other studies.

They first published their results as a preprint, in April 2020. If their results had been accepted at the time, instead of being roundly condemned, also in the media, the draconian lockdowns could have been avoided, as they showed that the virus spread very rapidly.

Science and the Covid-19 Pandemic

Since Science criticised us so heavily for our Covid research and views, even though we were correct, we should look at what Science’s own role has been. It claimed that the Covid-19 vaccines are 100% effective against severe disease, which wasn’t even correct when Science made the claim because we knew that respiratory viruses mutate fast.

I wrote in my book, The Chinese Virus, that Beijing’s useful idiots included Science, which was overly friendly with Peter Daszak – whose EcoHealth Alliance channelled an NIH grant to Wuhan to fund the highly dangerous gain-of-function research, which he denied.

In February 2020, Science reported that scientists “strongly condemn” rumours and conspiracy theories about the origin of the pandemic. If you have no arguments, you raise your voice. This sentence does not belong in a scientific journal but in a tabloid, and it cannot be a conspiracy theory to suggest that the virus escaped from a lab and was likely manufactured there. In the same article, Daszak said that “We’re in the midst of the social media misinformation age,” but forgot to say he was the main driver of it.

In 2020, researchers sent a modelling study to Science arguing that herd immunity would be achieved earlier than the usual estimates of an infection rate of 60-80% of the population. Science admitted that the paper was rejected for political reasons: “Given the implications for public health, it is appropriate to hold claims around the herd immunity threshold to a very high evidence bar, as these would be interpreted to justify relaxation of interventions, potentially placing people at risk.” Science was concerned that opponents of lockdown would use the paper to undermine the policy. The lead author said she might leave the field because every paper she had written on this issue had been rejected with the claim that it was not useful or new.

In November 2021, Science published an almost 5,000-word article about Daszak that told nothing new. A reporter had spent seven hours with Daszak to put a nice gloss on him. A photo of Daszak appeared on Science’s front page with the title of the article: Prophet in purgatory: Peter Daszak is fighting accusations that his work on the pandemic prevention helped spark Covid-19.

Science published this when the death toll was about 6 million and depicted Daszak as a hero who works on preventing pandemics when it is extremely likely that he and “the bat lady,” Shi Zhengli in Wuhan, created one, which he had covered up for in two years.

Science didn’t care much about conflicts of interest either. When NIH’s David Morens praised Daszak, they didn’t tell the readers that he was Daszak’s funder, colleague, and co-author. Science mentioned that Freedom of Information Act requests by the US Right to Know and others had uncovered inconvenient truths, but it used Angela Rasmussen to dismiss this as “weaponized FOIA requests.” She was the one who, in Nature Medicine, called it a worldwide conspiracy when people discussed a possible lab leak. It is still the case that there is not a thread of good evidence that the virus has a natural origin but a lot that tells us it was produced in a laboratory in Wuhan.

Wait and See

In the Science article, Kulldorff said that people had a right to be worried about what might happen and added that our journal should be judged on its output a year or more from now, once it’s more established. I agree. I am very enthusiastic about the journal. And this is not because I cannot publish in traditional journals. I am the only Dane who has over 100 publications in “the big five” (BMJ, the Lancet, JAMA, New England Journal of Medicine, and Annals of Internal Medicine).

Disclosures, Funding & Conflicts of Interest

None. 

Affiliations:

Peter C Gøtzsche, Professor emeritus, Institute for Scientific Freedom, Copenhagen, DK 

Correspondence:

pcg@scientificfreedom.dk 

March 29, 2025 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

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