Iran Warns it Has Nine Types of Missiles Able to Strike Israeli Territory
Sputnik – 08.04.2024
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long urged military action against the self-avowed Islamic Republic, but the nation of 88 million people possesses significant defensive capabilities.
Iran has nine types of missiles with sufficient range to hit Israeli territory, Iranian news agency ISNA reported against the backdrop of concerns over possible armed conflict between the two countries.
An infographic presented by the news agency Sunday revealed multiple Iranian ballistic missiles – the Sejjil, Kheibar, Emad, Shahab-3, Ghadr, Paveh, Fattah-2, Kheibar Shekan, and Haj Qasem – the speed of which ranges from Mach 5 to Mach 14 (from 3,836 miles per hour to 10,741 miles per hour).
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long urged military action against the self-avowed Islamic Republic and regional critic of Israel, but the nation of 88 million people possesses significant defensive capabilities. A war on Iran also raises the prospect of potential involvement by Tehran’s ally Russia, while Netanyahu would presumably count on an assist from the United States.
On April 1, Israel carried out an airstrike on the consular annex of the Iranian Embassy in Damascus, destroying the building. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said seven of its members had been killed in the attack, including two commanders. On Tuesday the Syrian Health Ministry said the attack had also killed four Syrians and injured 13 more.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry said it “reserves the right” to respond to the Israeli attack and “punish the aggressor.” Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi also vowed Israel would pay a “heavy price” for the strike.
“None of the embassies of the (Israeli) regime are safe anymore,” said top Iranian military advisor Gen. Rahim Safavi Sunday, suggesting the country could mirror Israel’s consular strike.
Iran is a staunch defender of the Palestinian cause in the region – Palestinian solidarity was a founding principle of the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution which toppled the US backed Pahlavi royal family. The country’s foreign policy is rooted in strong opposition to US imperialism, which has left a lasting legacy in the Persian country.
World War II Didn’t End The Great Depression
Stark Realities with Brian McGlinchey | April 4, 2024
A principal goal of Stark Realities is to “expose fundamental myths across the political spectrum” — and few myths are as universally embraced as the notion that US participation in World War II (1941-1945) lifted the American economy out of the Great Depression.
This myth is dangerous not only because it leads citizens and politicians to see a bright side of war that doesn’t really exist, but also because it helps foster a belief that government spending is essential to countering economic downturns. That belief, in turn, has helped propel us to a point where the national debt now exceeds $34.6 trillion, with interest payments alone on pace to reach $1 trillion a year in 2026, inviting financial catastrophe.
In part, the wartime-prosperity myth springs from the fact that, during conflict on the scale of World War II, broad, macroeconomic measures like gross national product (GNP) and the unemployment rate are completely untethered from the economy’s most important facet: the standard of living enjoyed — or endured— by everyday people.
Between 1940 and 1944, real GNP rose at an unprecedented 13% annual clip. Using GNP alone, one would think the war delivered a major improvement in the standard of living, with Americans enjoying a greater abundance of goods, accompanied by a rise in quality, selection and affordability.
The reality was the exact opposite: Americans endured rationing, shortages, declining product quality, and the outright unavailability of many new goods, such as cars, trucks and stoves. This was the inevitable result of factories and raw materials being redirected from the creation of things consumers want to building things like tanks and fighter planes that do nothing whatsoever to improve people’s lives (setting aside the separate issue of the war’s justness).
In many respects, America experienced an outright economic devolution. In the preceding century, industrialization and the division of labor led to enormous increases in productivity. During World War II, however, shortages motivated people who’d contentedly relied on farmers to start growing their own food and canning it. The scarcity of new clothing led homemakers to redirect time and energy to sewing their own garments and resewing them to stretch as much use out them as possible.
“Those remaining on the home front were forced to produce for themselves what they had previously been able to purchase,” wrote Steven Horwitz and Michael J. McPhillips. “The household again became a center of production rather than consumption alone.”
GNP wasn’t the only measure falsely signaling wartime prosperity; employment numbers from the era were likewise misleading. The US unemployment rate plummeted from 17% in 1939 to 1.2% in 1944. Note, however, that military service members are not considered part of the labor force — which means that the draft extracted 11.5 million men from the denominator in the unemployment rate calculation.
Another 6.3 million volunteered, though many signed up because they preferred to secure a role they favored rather than face the chance of being drafted as an infantryman.
While it’s true that draftees and volunteers were “employed” by the armed forces, all these millions of men — no matter how noble their overseas missions may have been — weren’t doing anything to create prosperity at home.
Not a prosperous path to full employment: Soldiers under withering fire on D-Day’s Omaha Beach
That’s not to say the war machine didn’t demand laborers. With so many able men taken out of the economy, the slack was taken up by teenagers, women and retirees, many who’d have preferred to be doing other things.
In a growing economy, more people are producing goods and services, and elevating standards of living in the process. That was far from the case during World War II. Factories were humming, but they were making bayonets, bombs and battleships. “Four-tenths of the total labor force was not being used to produce consumer goods or capital capable of yielding consumer goods in the future,” noted Robert Higgs.
Defying conventional wisdom about “wartime prosperity,” Americans’ standard of living suffered tremendously from their government’s entry into World War II. In The Reality of the Wartime Economy, Horwitz and McPhillips tapped some interesting source material to bring the grim economic realities of American life during World War II into sharp focus.
For example, a series of newspaper ads placed by Canton Electric Light & Power Company — a local New York State utility — present a vivid, time-lapse portrayal of rapidly declining conditions following the December 1941 declaration of war:
- Foreshadowing anticipated shortages, a March 17, 1942 ad for appliances is headlined “You Can Still Buy Them.” The ad includes a qualifier that’s upbeat while still signaling creeping scarcity: “We have a fairly good supply.”
- Just two months later, Canton Electric’s ad says “Now Is The Time” to buy various appliances and equipment, warning that “production of most of these items has stopped and only the supply in your dealers’ stock is available.”
- Another two months later, a July 1942 ad indicates that some items that were briefly not available are back in inventory.
- In November of that first year of America’s World War II participation, Canton Electric switched to warning consumers that, “due to the war emergency, it is quite impossible to get replacement motors for civilian use,” and urging them to ensure they’re properly maintaining their “stokers and oil burners.”
- Later that same month, Canton Electric punted on advancing its retail business altogether, instead using its ad space to encourage readers to grow their own food, eat everything on their plates and comply with ration-stamp rules.
Horwitz and McPhillips also drew on letters written between 1942 and 1945 by Saidee Leach to her son serving in the Pacific. Contrary to the image of prosperity supposedly indicated by leaping GNP or plummeting unemployment, she tells him of:
- Conserving scarce home-heating fuel during the coldest days by wearing fur coats indoors and residing only in their kitchen
- Having her typewriter seized by the government, and now using a lesser model she acquired from a Howard Johnson “which had to close due to the ban on pleasure driving.”
- Making an Easter dinner centered on fried Spam, because she “could not get fresh meat of any kind,” and later noting that “potatoes have entirely disappeared”
- Local farmers refusing to sell their turkey flocks for Thanksgiving meals at the prices set by the Office of Price Administration — illustrating the folly of government price controls.
That is not the picture of an economy delivered from the Great Depression. Rather, “World War II institutionalized the falling standards of living of the depression through wage and price controls, and extensive rationing of consumer goods and services,” wrote Peter Ferrara. “The economic deprivation, and reduced standards of living, continued, although people perceived it was now for a good cause.”
America’s postwar experience presents another pointed contradiction of the myth of wartime prosperity.
As the war’s end grew closer, Keynesian economists unanimously predicted peace would bring economic disaster. For example, Paul Samuelson said America would experience “the greatest period of unemployment and dislocation any economy has ever faced.”
Alvin Hansen warned that the economy must be kept on a centrally-controlled wartime footing, even in peacetime: “When the war is over, the government cannot just disband the Army, close down munitions factories, stop building ships, and remove all economic control.”
Nobel Prize winner Paul Samuelson, who predicted peace would bring economic disaster, taught Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman, who predicted the internet’s impact would be akin to that of the fax machine
However, that’s pretty much what happened — and Hansen, Samuelson and their fellow economic flat-Earthers couldn’t have been more wrong about the consequences. “The year 1946, when civilian output increased by about 30 percent, was the most glorious single year in the entire history of the U.S. economy,” wrote Higgs.
This despite the fact that government purchases of goods and services collapsed by 68% between the second quarter of 1945 and the first quarter of 1946 — and upwards of a million civilian government employees were laid off and millions of service members discharged.
As war-fighting men poured back into civilian life, millions of women withdrew from the labor force, contentedly returning to duty as mothers and home managers. Rather than soaring as predicted by the “experts,” unemployment merely edged higher, from 1.9% in 1945 to 3.9% in 1947.
“Less than a year and a half after VJ-day,” crowed President Truman, “more than 10 million demobilized veterans and other millions of wartime workers have found employment in the swiftest and most gigantic change-over that any nation has ever made from war to peace.” (Note this happened despite — and in part because of — Truman’s failure to institute a higher minimum wage as the war ended.)
Having been proven enormously wrong about the economic implications of peace, Keynesians scrambled to credit the war with enabling the postwar boom, arguing that it was fueled by people drawing down savings accumulated while the supply of consumer goods was sharply restricted. However, as Higgs determined by studying the data of the time, “Holdings of liquid assets did not decline at all after the war. People financed their spending for consumer goods by reducing their saving rate.”
Once again an engine of real prosperity: In 1946, vehicles proceed along Ford’s first postwar assembly line
Contrary to the myth, it was only after World War II that — free from the government’s commandeering of factories, workers and resources, and saddled with fewer price controls and other federal market intrusions — America was finally able to emerge from the Great Depression.
You wouldn’t know that if you evaluated the economy’s health using Keynesians’ preferred measure. Just as the GNP gauge provided a 180-degree misreading of wartime economic realities, it failed in similarly spectacular fashion during the postwar boom: From 1945 to 1947, GNP plummeted 22%.
In addition to further illuminating the shortfalls of aggregate economic measures, America’s postwar economic experience delivered another broadside to the myth of World War II-fostered prosperity, and to the idea that government spending, central planning and market interventions are essential to economic achieving economic recovery.
Israel announces partial withdrawal of its troops from southern Gaza
Palestinians inspect destroyed residences in Khan Younis after Israeli military withdraws most of its ground troops from the southern Gaza Strip (Reuters)
Press TV – April 7, 2024
Israel says it has pulled most of its troops out of southern Gaza in what it said is a move to recuperate and prepare for future offensives.
Three Israeli brigades on Sunday left the southern city of Khan Yunis but another remained to prevent displaced Palestinians from returning to their homes in the north.
The Israeli military said a “significant force” will remain in the rest of the besieged Gaza Strip.
Israel’s military earlier announced it’s pulling thousands of soldiers out of the south, including Khan Younis city, after months of fierce combat.
The military wing of the Hamas resistance movement said Israel was forced to end its operations before achieving its goals.
The al-Qassam Brigades dismissed Israel’s claims that it had destroyed resistance forces in those areas from where it had withdrawn.
The Brigades added that resistance forces have always surprised Israel.
Khan Younis residents, who rushed back to their city after Israeli forces relocated from southern Gaza, found a wasteland of destruction and rubble.
Media reports quoting residents said much of Khan Younis had been destroyed, many buildings had been bombed, and there were overturned cars stuck in the mud near craters left by missiles.
Witnesses said that damaged hospital beds were seen on one street.
They have been saying the situation is completely indescribable and chaotic as a great deal of destruction has been done to the entire area
“It is a shock, a shock. What happened was not small … while coming on the way in the car, I saw things. The destruction is unbearable,” said Mohammed Abou Diab, who was among those who returned to his old neighborhood.
The Secretary-General and CEO of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), Jagan Chapagain, says the situation in Gaza is “desperate and worsening” as the war hits its six-month anniversary.
The city has come under intense Israeli bombardment in recent months.
Khan Younis has been destroyed, with the destruction of civil infrastructure, mosques, and residential houses, and people are saying that they have nothing left in the city.
After six months of relentless attacks on Gaza, Israel remains no closer to a victory than it has been at any point since October of last year.
US says Israeli military’s troop reduction in Gaza is to ‘rest and refit’
White House National Security spokesperson John Kirby said the Israeli army’s troop reduction in Gaza appears to be a “rest and refit” and not necessarily indicative of any new operations.
“As we understand it, and through their public announcements, it is really just about rest and refit for these troops.”
“[This is] not necessarily that we can tell indicative of some coming new operation for these troops,” Kirby said when asked about the step.
Palestinians face more deaths and destruction in Gaza as the US-Israeli onslaught in the besieged strip continues for a seventh month.
Since the beginning of the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza, nearly 33,200 people have been killed.
At least 7,000 people are also unaccounted for or presumed dead under the rubble.
Fauci’s Inquisition Against Safe and Effective Anti-COVID-19 Drugs
By Richard Gale and Dr. Gary Null | Global Research | April 6, 2024
A question needs to be asked. Were the novel experimental drug treatments for SARS-CoV-2 viral infections that Anthony Fauci, the CDC and FDA advocated for and funded responsible for worsening the contagion and countless deaths?
However, at that time there were plenty of studies confirming there were pre-existing safe, inexpensive medications known to have highly effective antiviral properties to treat Covid-19 patients. Among these were ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine (HCQ).
There were also specific nutrients such as vitamin D and zinc, known to strengthen the immune system against viral infection and yet there was no recommendation from the government about the benefits of proper nutrition. So why did Fauci along with other federal health officials choose to intentionally ignore the scientific evidence and rather condemn these repurposed drugs? In Fauci’s case, over a year and half into the pandemic, he continued to lie outright on CNN that “there is no clinical evidence whatsoever that [ivermectin] works.”[1] And could millions have been saved if these generic medications were prescribed rather than the feds doing nothing but recommending social isolation and quarantines as the world awaited an experimental Covid-19 vaccine to enter the market?
To date, between ivermectin and HCQ alone, there have been 670 published studies, analyses and papers involving over 9,800 scientists and over 682,000 patients supporting the use of these drugs over and beyond those the FDA has approved under Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) statutes. Despite this, four years later, the FDA continues to fiercely deny ivermectin’s and HCQ’s efficacy and safety under proper administration. Why this blatant cover-up?
Every CDC effort to approve a novel drug treatment for SARS-CoV-2 infections has been a dismal failure. Aside from monoclonal antibody therapy, only three anti-Covid-19 drugs have been approved under an EUA in the United States. None met their promised expectations from either the manufacturer or our federal health agencies. With their poor efficacy rates, safety profiles and a black box warning slapped upon Pfizer’s anti-Covid-19 drug Paxlovid, the CDC is scrambling to find new viable alternatives in the pharmaceutical pipeline. Bloomberg amplifies the fake Covid-19 treatment crisis by lamenting that repurposed drugs such as ivermectin are gaining global popularity as “the world needs effective Covid drugs.”[2]
Shortly after the pandemic was formally announced, the FDA recommended the cheap over the counter anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine but then quickly reversed its decision after Fauci publicly announced the future arrival of Gilead Sciences’ novel intravenous drug Remdesivir. The FDA’s and European Union’s approvals of Remdesivir baffled many scientists, according to the journal Science, who questioned its therapeutic value and kept a close watch on the drug’s clinical reports about a “disproportionally high number of reports of liver and kidney problems.”[3] Even an earlier Chinese study published in The Lancet found that remdesivir had no impact on the coronavirus. The Science article notes that the “FDA never consulted a group of outside experts that it has at the ready to weigh in on complicated antiviral drug issues.”[4] Six months before remdesivir received EUA approval, Anthony Fauci had already hailed the drug as a major breakthrough that would establish a new “standard of care” in Covid-19 treatment.[5]
Today, remdesivir is being increasingly recognized as a debacle in antiviral therapeutic care. Even the WHO released a “conditional recommendation against the use of remdesivir in hospitalized patients, regardless of disease severity, as there is currently no evidence that remdesivir improves survival and other outcomes in these patients.” An Italian study observed a 416 percent increase in hepatocellular injuries among hospitalized Covid-19 patients treated with Remdesivir.[6] And a smaller Taiwanese study of hospitalized unvaccinated patients reported a 185 percent higher mortality during late remdesivir treatment.[7]
Earlier this year, Pfizer’s novel oral Covid-19 medication Paxlovid was given an FDA black box warning for clinically significant adverse reactions that can potentially be fatal. Because the company does not permit independent random-controlled trials to investigate its drug, other than retrospective studies, we only have Pfizer’s own data to rely upon. Nevertheless, The Lancet published a study by a team of Chinese scientists at Shanghai Jiao Tong School of Medicine that managed to look at Paxlovid’s use among critically ill patients hospitalized with Covid-19. The study reported a 27 percent higher risk of the infection progressing, a 67 percent increased risk in requiring ventilation, and 10 percent longer stays in ICU facilities.[8]
Paxlovid is a combination of a novel SARS-CoV-2 protease inhibitor and the HIV protease inhibitor ritonavir. The FDA approved Paxlovid under a EUA with the claim it was safe. However, on the government’s HIV.gov website for ritonavir it is clearly stated that the drug “can cause serious life-threatening side effects. These include inflammation of the pancreas (pancreatitis), heart rhythm problems, severe skin rash and allergic reactions, liver problems and drug interactions.”[9] Perhaps due to the drug’s serious side effects, it is no longer used solely against HIV, but rather is given in smaller doses as a booster for AZT-related drugs. Being highly toxic, ritonavir is also not recommended for pregnant women and has been shown to interfere with hormone-based birth control efficacy.
Paxlovid only received FDA EUA approval in May 2023. At that time, the agency claimed there was no evidence that patients who were treated with the drug rebounded and came down with Covid. However, shortly thereafter this was determined to be untrue.[10] A Harvard analysis found that 21 percent of Paxlovid recipients will remain contagious and likely succumb to a viral rebound compared to only 1.8 percent who did not take the drug.
Merck’s anti-Covid-19 drug molnupiravir (Lagevrio) also has an FDA black box warning for potential fetal harm when administered to pregnant women. Why the drug was ever approved under an EUA seems to be an enigma. The drug’s antiviral activity is based upon a metabolite known as NHC, which for many years has been known to create havoc in an enzyme crucial for viral replication by inserting errors into the virus’ genetic code. The theory is: produce enough errors and the virus kills itself off. However, molnupiravir can cause hundreds of mutations thereby “supercharging” the manufacturing of new Covid-19 viral strains. Moreover, according to a Forbes article, the drug’s mutagenic powers may also interfere with our own body’s enzymes and DNA.[11] Another Forbes article points out that Merck’s clinical trial only enrolled around 1,500 participants, which is far too “small to pick up on rare mutagenic events.”[12]
Molnupiravir has a poor efficacy rate across the board including viral clearance, recovery, and hospitalizations/death (68 percent).[13] One trial, funded by Merck, concluded the drug had no clinical benefit.[14] More worrisome, the drug also has life-threatening adverse effects including mutagenic risks to human DNA and mitochondria, carcinogenic activity and embryonic death.[15]
Each of these drugs have been outrageous cash cows for their manufacturers. Remdesivir is priced at $3,120 per treatment and earned Gilead $5.6 billion in sales for 2021.
Pfizer’s Paxlovid is priced at $1,390 per treatment. Last year, the company’s revenues for its Covid products—Paxlovid and the Comirnaty vaccine—came in at $12.5 billion, and, according to Fierce Pharma, Pfizer wrote off an additional $4.7 billion on its overstocked Paxlovid inventory.[16] Merck’s molnupiravir’s sales for 2022 cashed in almost $5.7 billion. Despite their profits, none of these drugs have been shown convincingly to have measurably lessened the pandemic nor the spread of SARS-CoV-2.
Despite all the attention and medical hype about novel experimental antiviral drugs to treat Covid-19, Anthony Fauci and other federal officials had full knowledge that other FDA-approved drugs existed that could have been quickly repurposed at minimal expense to effectively treat Covid-19 infections. Repurposing existing drugs to treat illness is a common occurrence. The antiparasitic and antiviral drug Ivermectin best stands out. Its effectiveness was observed to be so remarkable and multifaceted that researchers started to investigate its potential.
The mainstream media, including many liberal news sources who pride themselves on their independence, continue to channel the voices of Anthony Fauci, the CDC and FDA to demonize ivermectin and other generic drugs for treating Covid-19 and to reduce hospitalization and deaths. This propaganda campaign, however, has completely ignored the large body of medical literature that shows ivermectin’s statistically significant efficacy against symptomatic and asymptomatic SARS-2 infections.
Originally developed for veterinarian use, in 1987, the FDA approved ivermectin for treating two parasitic diseases, river blindness and stronglyoidiasis, in humans. Since then an enormous body of medical research has grown showing ivermectin’s effectiveness for treating other diseases. Its broad range of antiviral properties has shown efficacy against many RNA viruses such avian influenza, zika, dengue, HIV, West Nile, yellow fever, chikungunya and earlier severe respiratory coronaviruses. It has also been shown to be effective against DNA viruses such as herpes, polyomavirus, and circovirus-2.[17]
Unsurprisingly, ivermectin’s inventors Drs. William Campbell and Satoshi Omura were awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine.
It has been prescribed to hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Given its decades’ long record of in vitro efficacy, it should have been self-evident for Fauci’s NIAID, the CDC and the WHO to rapidly conduct in vivo trials to usher ivermectin as a first line of defense for early stage Covid-19 infections and for use as a safe prophylaxis.
For example, if funding were devoted for the rapid development of a micro-based pulmonary delivery system, mortality rates would have been miniscule and the pandemic would have been lessened greatly.[18] Repurposing ivermectin could have been achieved very quickly at a minor expense.[19] However, despite all the medical evidence confirming ivermectin’s strong antiviral properties and its impeccable safety record when administered properly, we instead witnessed a sophisticated government-orchestrated campaign to declare war against ivermectin and another antiviral drug, hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), in favor of far more expensive and EUA approved experimental drugs. Unlike the US, other nations were eager to find older drugs to repurpose against Covid-19 and protect their populations. A Johns Hopkins University analysis offered the theory that a reason why many African countries had very few to near zero Covid-19 fatalities was because of widespread deployment of ivermectin. In February 2020, the National Health Commission of China, for example, was the first to include hydroxychloroquine in its guidelines for treating mild, moderate and severe SARS-2 cases. Eight Latin American nations distribute home Covid-19 treatment kits that include ivermectin.[20] Why did the US and most European countries swayed by the US and the WHO fail to follow suit?
Early in the pandemic, physicians in other nations where treatment was less restricted, such as Spain and Italy, shared data with American physicians about effective treatments against the SARS-2 virus. In addition, there was a large corpus of medical research indicating that older antiviral drugs could be repurposed. Doctors who started to prescribe drugs such as ivermectin and HCQ, along with Vitamin D and zinc supplementation, observed remarkable results. Unlike the dismal recovery and high mortality rates reported in hospitals and large clinics that relied upon strict isolation, quarantine, and ventilator interventions, this small fringe group of physicians reported very few deaths among their large patient loads. Even reported deaths were more often than not compounded by patients’ comorbidities, poor medical facilities and other anomalies.
Very early into the pandemic, medical papers indicated ivermectin was a highly effective drug to treat SARS-2 infections.
In April 2020, less than a month after the WHO declared Covid-19 as a global pandemic, Australian researchers at the Peter Doherty Institute of Infection and Immunity published a paper demonstrating that a single ivermectin dose can control SARS-CoV-2 viral replication within 24-48 hours.[21] Monash University’s Biomedicine Discovery Institute in Australia had also published an early study that ivermectin destroyed SARS-2 infected cell cultures by 99.8 percent within 48 hours. But no American federal health official paid any attention.
As of March 2024, a database for all studies and trials investigating ivermectin against Covid-19 infections records a total of 248 studies, 195 peer-reviewed, and 102 involving controlled groups reporting an average 61 percent improvement for early infections, a 39 percent success rate in treating late infections, and an 85 percent average success rate for use as a preventative prophylaxis.[22] Moreover, prescribing ivermectin reduced mortality by 49 percent, compared to remdesivir’s 4 percent, Pfizer’s Paxlovid’s 31 percent, and molnupiravir’s 22 percent. Even hydroxychloroquine well outperforms these drugs mortality risk for early treatment at 66 percent.
A noteworthy study conducted in Brazil and published in the Cureus Journal of Medical Science prescribed ivermectin in a citywide prophylaxis program in a town of 223,000 residents. 133,000 took ivermectin. The results for a population of this size are indisputable in concluding that ivermectin is a safe first line of defense to confront the pandemic. Covid mortality was reduced 90 percent. There was also a 67 percent lower risk of hospitalization and a 44 percent decrease in Covid cases. Garcia-Aquilar et al reports a Mexican in vitro analysis showing a definitive interaction between ivermectin and the SAR-CoV-2 spike protein, which would account for its high efficacy in Covid-19 cases.[23]
The All India Institute for Medical Science (AIIMS) and the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), two of India’s most prestigious institutions, acted against the WHO and launched an ivermectin treatment campaign in several states. In Uttar Pradesh there was a 95 percent decrease in morality (a decline from 37,944 to 2,014). The Indian capital of New Delhi witnessed a 97 percent reduction. During the same time period, the state of Tamil Nadu, which followed the WHO’s ban on ivermectin, had a 173 percent increase in deaths (from 10,986 to 30,016 deaths).
There have been many concerted efforts to discredit ivermectin and other repurposed drugs’ effectiveness. Most notable is the large TOGETHER Trial Brazil study published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) that concluded both ivermectin and another repurposed drug fluvoxamine showed no beneficial signs for treating Covid-19 patients. The study was widely reported in the mainstream media. However, a Cato Institute analysis discovered the study in fact showed its benefits and the results were in agreement with 87 percent of other clinical trials investigating ivermectin. The Cato analysis identifies many odd anomalies in how the trial was conducted including an unspecified placebo—although it is suspected it was Vitamin C, which has itself been shown to be mildly effective against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and protocol changes as the study was underway including inclusion/exclusion criteria. By his own admission the TOGETHER Trial’s principal investigator Dr. Ed Mills at McMaster University in Ontario “designs clinical trials, predominantly for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.”[24] In a McMaster University press release, the Gates foundation is listed as a funder for the study to debunk ivermectin and fluvoxamine.[25] Oddly, Gates is nowhere listed among the several funders in the NEJM study’s disclosure. In addition, TOGETHER Trials is owned by the Canadian for profit startup Purpose Life Sciences, founded by Mills; legal documents showed Mills’ PLS is largely funded and controlled by Sam Bankman Fried’s FTX who invested $53 million into the project. Administrators of FTX’s bankruptcy are suing PLS for fraud.[26]
In short, the ivermectin/fluvoxamine TOGETHER Trial was a complete medical sham and intentionally designed for one single purpose: to fuel media disinformation in order to undermine ivermectin’s superior efficacy and safety profile to Big Pharma’s more profitable designer drugs.
In 2004, the US Congress passed an amendment to the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act known as Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). This piece of legislature legalized an anti-regulatory pathway to allow experimental medical interventions to be expedited and bypass standard FDA safety evaluations in the event of bioterrorist threats and national health emergencies such as pandemics. At the time, passage of the EUA amendment made sense because it was partially in response to the 2001 anthrax attacks and the US’s entry into an age of international terrorism. However, the amendment raises some serious considerations. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, EUAs had only been authorized on four occasions: the 2005 avian H5N1 and 2009 H1N1 swine flu threats, the 2014 Ebola and the 2016 Zikra viruses. Each of these pathogen scares proved to be false alarms that posed no threat of pandemic proportions to Americans. The fifth time EUAs were invoked was in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic, which at the time seemed far more plausible.
Before the government can authorize an EUA to deploy an experimental diagnostic product, drug or vaccine, certain requirements must be fulfilled. First, the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) must have sufficient proof that the nation is being confronted with a serious life-threatening health emergency. Second, the drug(s) and/or vaccine(s) under consideration must have sufficient scientific evidence to suggest they will likely be effective against the medical threat. The evidence must at least include preclinical and observational data showing the product targets the organism, disease or condition. Third, although the drug or vaccine does not undergo a rigorous evaluation, it must at least show that its potential and known benefits outweigh its potential and known risks. In addition, the product must be manufactured in complete accordance with standard quality control and safety assurances.
When we look back at the government’s many debacles during the Covid-19 pandemic, other EUA requirements warrant the spotlight. On the one hand, an EUA cannot be authorized for any product or intervention if there is an FDA alternative approved product already available, unless the experimental product is clearly proven to have a significant advantage. Moreover, and perhaps more important, EUAs demand informed consent. Every individual who receives the drug or vaccine must be thoroughly informed about its experimental status and its potential risks and benefits. Recipients must also be properly informed about the alternatives to the experimental product and nobody should be forced to take it.
Finally, an EUA requires robust safety monitoring and reporting of adverse events, injuries and deaths potentially due to the drug or vaccine. This is the responsibility not only of the private pharmaceutical manufacturers but also the FDA, physicians, hospitals, clinics and other healthcare professionals.
Obviously important cautions must be considered after approving a medical intervention under the EUA requirements. Foremost are the inherent health risks of any rapid response of experimental medical interventions, especially novel drugs and vaccines. As we observed during the FDA approval process and roll out of Pfizer’s and Moderna’s mRNA Covid-19 jabs, no long-term human trials were conducted to even estimate a reliable baseline of their relative efficacy and safety. The American public has blindly placed its trust in our federal health authorities decision-making. It is expected that under a national health emergency, the authorities would be completely transparent and act only by the highest ethical standards. However our institutions betrayed public trust and either ignored or transgressed cautions underlying EUA approved medical interventions in every conceivable way. Moreover, conflicts of interests have been discovered to have plagued the entire EUA review process.
Although the EUA amendment provides some protections to authorized drug and vaccine manufacturers, it was the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP) in 2005 that expanded liability protections. In addition to protecting private corporations, PREP also shields company executives and employees from claims of personal injury or death resulting from the administration of authorized countermeasures. The only exceptions for liability are if the company or its executive offices are proven to have engaged in intentional and/or criminal misconduct with conscious disregard for the rights and safety of those taking their drugs and vaccines.
During the pandemic, the FDA issued widespread EUAs with liability immunity for the PCR diagnostic kits for SARS-2, the mRNA vaccines and the anti-Covid-19 drugs. Curiously, the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services invoked the PREP Act on February 4, 2020 giving liability protections; this was over a month before the pandemic was officially announced, which raises serious questions about prior-planning before the viral outbreak in Wuhan, China.
From the pandemic’s outset, Fauci embarked on the media circuit to promise Americans that federal health agencies were doing everything within their means to get a vaccine on the market because there was no available drug to clear the SARS-2 virus. As we have seen with respect to ivermectin alone, this was patently false. Rather the government placed an overriding emphasis on vaccination with a near total disregard for implementing very simple preventative measures to inhibit viral progression. Once mass vaccinations were underway, we were promised that the SARS-2 virus would be defeated and life would return to normal. In retrospect, we can look back and state with a degree of certainty that American health authorities and these products’ corporate manufacturers may have violated almost every EUA requirement. Everything that went wrong with the PCR kits, the experimental mRNA vaccines and novel drugs could have been avoided if the government had diligently repurposed effective and safe measures as pandemic countermeasures. Very likely, hundreds of thousands of lives, perhaps millions, would have been saved.
Similarly the FDA issued a warning statement against the use of ivermectin. Even ivermectin’s manufacturer Merck discredited its own product. Shortly after ridiculing its drug, the Alliance for Natural Health reported, “Merck announced positive results from a clinical trial on a new drug called molnupiravir in eliminating the virus in infected patients.”[27]
And still the FDA considers these novel patented drugs to be superior to ivermectin. Favoring a vaccine regime and government-controlled surveillance measures to track every American’s movements, American health officials blatantly neglected their own pandemic policies’ severe health consequences. Ineffective lockdowns, masks, social isolation, unsound critical care interventions such as relying upon ventilators, and the sole EUA approvals of the costly and insufficiently effective drugs brought about nightmares for tens of millions of adults and children. This was all undertaken under Fauci’s watch and the heads of the US health agencies in direct violation of the EUA requirements to only authorize drugs and medical interventions when no other safe and effective alternative is available. Alternatives were available.
The 4-year history of the pandemic highlights a sharp distinction between dependable medical research and pseudoscientific fraud. The CDC adopted a common Soviet era practice to redefine the very definition of a vaccine and the parameters of vaccine efficacy in order to fit economic and ideological agendas. This explains Washington’s aggressive public relations endeavors to silence medical opponents. According to cardiologist Dr. Michael Goodkin’s private investigations, several of the most cited studies discrediting ivermectin’s antiviral benefits were intentionally manipulated in order to produce “fake” results.[28] These studies were then widely distributed to the AMA, American College of Physicians and across mainstream media to author “hit pieces” to demonize ivermectin and other repurposed drugs. The government’s belligerent and reactive diatribes, brazenly or casually advocating for censorship, were direct violations of scientific and medical integrity and contributed nothing towards developing constructive policies for handling a pandemic with a minimal cost to life. The consequence has been a less informed and grossly naïve public, which was gaslighted into believing lies.
The FDA’s EUAs for the Covid-19 vaccines and novel experimental drugs were in fact an attack on the amendments and PREP directives. Neither the vaccines nor drugs warranted emergency authorization because effective and safe alternatives were readily available. No doubt a Congressional investigation would uncover criminal misconduct and conscious fraud. Moreover, these violations of the PREP Act may have the potential to lead directly into medical crimes against humanity as outlined in the Nuremberg Code.
Although the Nuremberg Code has not been officially adopted in its entirety as law by any nation or major medical association, other international treaties, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki (which is not legally binding), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical Research on Human Subjects incorporate some of Nuremberg’s main principles that aim to protect people from unethical and forced medical research. Although the US signed the ICCPR as an intentional party, the US Senate never ratified it. The ICCPR’s Article 7 clearly states, “No one shall be subject to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” which can legally be interpreted to include forced medical experimentation implied as cruel, inhuman treatment. Other ICCPR articles, 6 and 17, are also applicable to medical experimentation to ensure ethical conduct, obtaining proper informed consent and the right to life and privacy. For a moment, consider the numerous senior citizens in nursing homes and hospitals who were simply administered experimental Covid-19 vaccines without full knowledge about what they were receiving. And now how many children are being coerced by the pseudoscience of health officials’ lies to be vaccinated without any knowledge of these mRNA products’ risk-benefit ratio?
The US is also a signatory to the Helsinki Declaration, which, although not directly aligned with Nuremberg, shares much in common. The Declaration shares some common features with the EUA amendment and PREP Act. These include voluntary informed consent—which is universally accepted, adequate risk and benefit information about medical interventions, and an emphasis on the principle of medical beneficence (promoting well-being and the Hippocratic rule of doing no harm). It also guarantees protections for vulnerable groups, especially pregnant women and children, which the US government and vaccine makers directly violated by conducting trials on these groups with full knowledge about these vaccines’ adverse events in adults. In addition, weighing the scientific evidence to assess the risk-benefit ratios between prescribing ivermectin and HCQ over the new generation of novel experimental drugs conclusively favors the former. This alone directly violates the ethical medical principles noted above.
However, the failure to repurpose life-saving drugs is less criminal than the questionable unethical motivations to usher a new generation of genetically engineered vaccines that have never before been adequately researched in human trials for long term safety. This mass experimentation, which continues to threaten the health and well-being of millions of people, is global and can legally be interpreted as a genocidal attack on humanity.
If the emerging data for increasing injuries and deaths due to the Covid-19 vaccines is reliable—and we believe it is—the handling of the pandemic can be regarded as the largest medical crime in human history. In time, and with shifting political allegiances and public demands to hold our leaders in government and private industry accountable, the architects of this medical war against civilization will be brought to justice.
*
Richard Gale is the Executive Producer of the Progressive Radio Network and a former Senior Research Analyst in the biotechnology and genomic industries.
Dr. Gary Null is host of the nation’s longest running public radio program on alternative and nutritional health and a multi-award-winning documentary film director, including his recent Last Call to Tomorrow.
Notes
[1] https://www.cnn.com/videos/health/2021/08/29/dr-anthony-fauci-ivermectin-covid-19-sotu-vpx.cnn
[4] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31022-9/fulltext
[6] https://www.dldjournalonline.com/article/S1590-8658(21)00923-3/fulltext
[8] https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S2666-6065%25252823%25252900012-3
[9] https://clinicalinfo.hiv.gov/en/drugs/ritonavir/patient
[10] https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/13-things-to-know-paxlovid-covid-19
[13] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.01.20.23284849v1.full.pdf
[14] https://evidence.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/EVIDoa2100044
[15] https://c19early.org/waters.html
[17] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7290143/
[18] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7539925/
[19] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7564151/
[21] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7129059/
[22] https://c19ivermectin.com
[23] https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/24/22/16392
[25] https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/855535
[26] https://c19ivm.org/tallaksen.html
[27] https://anh-usa.org/fda-ensures-pharma-profits-on-covid/
[28] https://www.trialsitenews.com/a/are-major-ivermectin-studies-designed-for-failure
Disinformation “Expert” Tells People To Only Use “Trusted Sources,” Avoid “Doing Your Own Research”
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | April 6, 2024
Brianna Lyman, elections correspondent at The Federalist, recently reported on a panel discussion featuring Al Schmidt, Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth, and Beth Schwanke, Executive Director of the Pitt Disinformation Lab. Schmidt and Schwanke, speaking at a forum organized by Spotlight PA, voiced their stance on “misinformation” and “disinformation” surrounding elections. Strikingly, Schwanke recommended that rather than conducting self-led investigations, Pennsylvanians should place their confidence in so-called “trusted” sources. These include certain institutions and media outlets that have unfortunately been tied in the past to acts of censorship.
“One thing everyone can do to make sure they are seeing accurate information is to use trusted sources. So in elections that means using the Department of State, that means using your county elections office, it means using media organizations that follow, that adhere, to professional journalism standards like … your local NPR affiliate,” Schwanke said. “And it doesn’t mean you know, ‘doing your own research’ and just asking questions and sharing, you know, posts from – I don’t know, in my case, it’s Uncle Joe, right? It means being thoughtful about where your sources are coming from.”
Schwanke’s advice, interestingly, seemed to discourage individual research, questioning, and sharing of ideas. Instead, she advocated the use of sources like the Department of State, county elections offices, and, strikingly, media organizations such as local NPR affiliates, which she implied upheld superior journalistic standards.
Despite what Schwanke says, the importance of being vigilant about our sources of information cannot be overstated. This was vividly demonstrated in the lead-up to the 2020 election when a significant story on Hunter Biden’s laptop by the New York Post was unjustly labeled “disinformation,” and subsequently suppressed across several tech platforms.
As The Federalist reported, what made matters worse, in an incident hinting at bias, NPR blatantly refused to report on the story, with its Managing Editor Terence Samuels declaring it as unworthy of coverage.
The Pennsylvania State Department presented a similar cause for alarm. It announced its collaboration with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to monitor and control online talks deemed a “threat” related to the election process. Despite its claimed intention to offer voters accurate, trustworthy election-related data and to counter threats such as so-called “misinformation,” there is good reason to question the impartiality of its activities. Case in point, CISA had previously facilitated the silencing of Americans expressing valid concerns on social media, as if they were spreading “disinformation,” and even had a post from President Donald Trump flagged under these pretenses.
Related:
Pennsylvania Collaborates With DHS and CISA To Monitor Online Election-Related Speech
New Challenges to the First Amendment from the Biden Administration
By Peter van Buren | We Meant Well | April 3, 2024
The great irony is despite all the fear mongering spewed out about Donald Trump ending democracy, it is mostly the Democrats who are taking shots at its most sacred freedoms, those of the First Amendment.
The House recently passed a bill, HR 7521, seeking to “ban” the popular app Tik Tok from America’s smartphones. The logic works like this: Tik Tok is owned by a Chinese company. Chinese companies are under the control of the Chinese Communists. Therefore, Tik Tok is brainwashing American youth while at the same time gathering their personal data for some undefined yet assumed nefarious use. Tik Tok thus should be banned.
No evidence has been presented for any of the assertions listed — no evidence the Chinese government exerts control over Tik Tok, whose contents are 100 percent user-created, no evidence the app has any purpose other than to make money, and no evidence the app collects data and uses it in some way, nefarious or not. It just feels scary bad, like any other Red Scare, and so the House moved to ban it. The Senate votes soon, and Joe Biden says he will sign the bill if it reaches him.
This is not the first time the government has tried to ban Tik Tok. In 2021, President Donald Trump issued an executive order against Tik Tok that was halted in federal court when a judge found it was “arbitrary and capricious.” Another judge found that the national security threat posted by Tik Tok was “phrased in the hypothetical.” When the state of Montana tried to ban the app in 2023, a federal judge found it “oversteps state power and infringes on the constitutional rights of users,” with a “pervasive undertone of anti-Chinese sentiment.” Candidate Trump now opposes the Tik Tok ban.
You’d think that was enough for Tik Tok. Yet note the ban is just on some Chinese company owning the app and the bill allows for an American company or ally to buy Tik Tok and go on its merry way. It’s not a ban, it’s a hijacking. And don’t think the Chinese won’t find an American app to retaliate against. Listening Apple and Android?
But that is not where the true First Amendment challenge lies, though “banning” the app can itself be seen as restricting speech. The real challenge lies in the details of the actual bill, another Patriot Act in hiding.
Section 2(a)(1) of the bill prohibits “foreign adversary controlled applications” (FACA) from operating in the U.S. The prohibition applies not just to the app itself but to app stores and Internet hosting providers. There’s even a provision for a penalty of $5,000 per user fine; Tik Tok has 170 million users. Effectively, the bill creates a Federal government kill switch preventing distribution of “prohibited” apps or websites at the hosting level, clear top-down central government censorship of speech and absolutely unconstitutional under the First Amendment. Unless of course the weasel excuse is used that the actual killing of the imported app is carried out by Apple and Google as proxies without being touched by the Feds, the same trick currently used to gather American citizen data, in addition to direct hoovering up of material by the NSA on a scale the Chinese could only dream of.
What is a “foreign adversary controlled application” under Section 2(g)(3) of the new bill? Any social/content-sharing website, desktop app, mobile app, or VR app that has more than a million monthly active users creating content is a FACA when two conditions are met: First, if it is “controlled by a foreign adversary” or a subsidiary of or a successor to an entity controlled by a foreign adversary. Second, if the President determines it “presents a significant threat to the national security of the United States.” The term “controlled by a foreign adversary” means that the company (a) is domiciled in, headquartered in, or organized under the laws of a foreign adversary country; or (b) has a 20 percent ownership group from one of those countries; or (c) is “subject to the direction or control of a foreign person or entity” from one of those countries (Section 2(g)(1). “Adversary” is currently defined elsewhere in the U.S. Code as Russia, China, North Korea or Iran, but can be changed to someday be, say, France (remember “Freedom Fries“?)
There in the details lies the real challenge to the First Amendment, a set of vague criteria that allow the president to ban websites and apps based on his own finding of threat. No appeals, no due process. Censorship.
Americans have a right to speak freely, and to listen/read/watch freely and make up their own minds. The Supreme Court in Lamont v. Postmaster General already ruled in 1964 that this right even extends to foreign propaganda (the case involved Soviet propaganda materials passing through the U.S. Mail.) In addition, the irony of the U.S. government showing concern for what a foreign company might do with user data when in the U.S. such data is openly for sale, including to the government itself, cannot be dismissed. The Tik Tok ban is bad law, likely unconstitutional, and generally unconscionable.
The Tik Tok bill is not the only current challenge to the First Amendment. As exposed by the Twitter Files and elsewhere, for years the Biden administration worked hand-in-glove with the big tech social media companies, @jack’s old Twitter in particular, to censor speech. Various agencies, including those responsible for Covid-19 policy, would contact the media companies to demand wrongthink posts be taken down. Particularly offensive were conservative posts questioning the efficiency and safety of the Covid vaccine, and those dealing with election fraud.
The question of whether or not the government can do that — demanding specific online speech be killed — reached the Supreme Court, and oral arguments were held earlier this month in the case of Murthy v. Missouri. The Court seemed skeptical of the idea that such action by the government was unconstitutional on its face, as the states claimed. Instead, the justices’ questions seemed to lean toward how the censorship was done. The government was free to persuade social media carriers, cajole them, argue with them but as long as the government did not force them to take something down, it was likely legal. The states contend the looming power of the federal government made each request, however bland and polite, into a threat. Same as when the mafia thug in the movies says “Nice home you have here, hate to see anything happen to it if you’re late paying us.” In one interaction a government watchdog seeking to deep six some posts stated “the White House is considering its options” if the take down effort fails.
There was room for debate. Justice Alito stated “When I see the White House and Federal officials repeatedly saying that Facebook and the Federal government should be partners… regular meetings, constant pestering… Wow, I cannot imagine Federal officials taking that approach to print media.” Alito also thought the barrage of emails from the White House and others to the social media companies may have met the legal standard for coercion. The states agreed, saying “Pressuring platforms in back rooms, shielded from public view, is not using a bully pulpit. That’s just being a bully… We don’t need coercion as a theory. The government ‘cannot induce, encourage or promote’ to get private actors to do what government cannot: censor Americans’ speech.”
Justice Kentaji Brown Jackson came back with “Whether or not the government can do this… depends on the application of our First Amendment jurisprudence. There may be circumstances in which the government could prohibit certain speech on the internet or otherwise. My biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways.”
Justice Barrett seemed uncomfortable with the lower courts’ conclusion that the Biden administration could be banned not only from “coercion,” but also from any action that “significantly encourages” platforms to take down protected speech. “Encouragement would sweep in an awful lot,” she said.
Interactions between administration officials and news outlets are part of a valuable dialogue that is not prohibited by the First Amendment, said Justices Kavanaugh and Kagan. The Justices suggested instead there is a role for vigorous efforts by the government to combat bad speech, for example discouraging posts harmful to children or conveying anti-Semitic or Islamophobic messages.
Brown’s, et al, remarks are frightening from a constitutional point of view, basically saying when the government is ineffective in creating dominant content of its own to address public messaging (i.e., “Vaccines are safe”) it justifies proxy censorship to eliminate counter information.
A Supreme Court decision is expected in June.
US using Nordic countries’ NATO membership to advance Arctic militarization
By Lucas Leiroz | April 6, 2024
The US plans to use the NATO access of Nordic countries to increase its military presence in the Arctic. In a recent statement, an American official announced Washington’s plan to build a large weapons warehouse in the region, with Finnish and Swedish support. The measure will significantly increase the militarization of the Arctic and aims to help the US overcome Russian military superiority in the region.
The plan was announced by US Materiel Commander Christopher Mohan during an interview with the newspaper Breaking Defense. According to him, Finland and Sweden could help the US with the project, considering their strategic geography. He did not give any details about the possible location of the depot, but stated that NATO is jointly analyzing all possibilities. He also stated that the US and allies are discussing what would be the most appropriate equipment to deploy in the region.
“The addition of the NATO partners changes the security landscape and our responsibilities as part of NATO (…) [This project will] embrace and integrate Finland and Sweden into the NATO enterprise, and that’s going to drive some changes on the ground,” he said.
The measure is just one of several policies adopted by Washington and its allies in recent years to try to reverse Russian military superiority in the Arctic. For decades, the US has not had any special focus on the Arctic in its defense strategies. The main objective of American strategic plans has always been to “encircle” and “isolate” Russia. The US has focused for many years on achieving this goal through the militarization of Europe and the destabilization of Central Asia and the Middle East, but Americans have paid little attention to the Arctic – a region where the Russians have become very strong over the decades.
Now, however, the US is concerned about this weakness in the region. With the escalation of tensions with Russia, Washington is trying to improve its positions in the Arctic in order to reverse the current scenario of Russian advantage. In recent years, several escalatory policies have been promoted by the US – some of them even openly provocative and targeted at Russia.
For example, in 2022, Lawrence Melnicoff, commander of the European Special Operations Command, stated that the US should actually “provoke” Russia in the Arctic. According to him, Washington should seek joint strategies with Norway to increase its presence in the Arctic Circle and thus deter Russia in the region. He states that Russia has expansionist plans that will be prevented only through direct deterrence, which is why NATO should maintain strategic positions that allow it to neutralize Russian forces in the Arctic in a possible conflict scenario.
“We are intentionally trying to be provocative without being escalatory (…) We’re trying to deter Russian aggression, expansionist behavior, by showing enhanced capabilities of the allies (…) It complicates Russian decision-making because we know that they’re targeting very, very large specific aggregations of allied power, [such as] Ramstein Air Base, RAF Lakenheath, things like that (…) If worse comes to worst and somebody takes out these power hubs, we can forward-project precision artillery fire across the alliance with our partners”, he said at the time.
Obviously, this is a fallacious US narrative. The Arctic is a region traditionally occupied by the countries that have access to it. Russia has the Arctic as a vital point in its strategic environment and naturally seeks to maintain a strong military presence in the region to guarantee its national security. The US and NATO countries, however, do not use access to the Arctic to develop a defensive strategy. On the contrary, they are looking for the Arctic as a possible point of attack against Russia. The Western objective in the Arctic is simply to harm Russia, not to protect itself. If the West adopted a policy of diplomacy and peaceful dialogue with Moscow, there would be no military race in the Arctic, but clearly NATO’s intention is to hurt Russia as much as possible.
To achieve these provocative objectives, the US will use the strategic location of NATO’s new members as a tool of war. The Nordic countries will be induced to actively participate in the Arctic militarization process, co-leading with Washington an escalation of tensions with Russia. And this will be extremely harmful for them, because, if the crisis escalates into an open conflict in the future, these countries will be priority targets and will be in a much greater risk zone for Russian attacks than the US.
Once again, access to NATO appears to be a trap for Finland and Sweden, which are being used as mere war tools by the US.
Lucas Leiroz is a member of the BRICS Journalists Association, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, military expert.
You can follow Lucas on X (former Twitter) and Telegram.
THE CANADIAN GOVERNMENT’S WAR ON SUPPLEMENTS
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | April 4, 2024
Constitutional Attorney & President of the Natural Health Products Protection Association, Shawn Buckley, LLB, warns Del of the Canadian government’s war on vitamins and supplements via the introduction of extreme regulations designed to restrict access and raise the cost of natural products.
Does the Hepatitis B Vaccine Used in the U.S. Stop Infection and Transmission of Hepatitis B in a School Setting?
Your bite-size dose of immunity against vaccine misinformation. Spread the truth.
Injecting Freedom by Aaron Siri | March 29, 2024
Does the Hepatitis B (HepB) vaccine used in the United States stop infection and transmission of Hepatitis B in a school setting?
“Yes” or “No”?
When picking an answer, keep in mind that HepB is mandated in every state except a handful to attend grades K-12 in the United States, and the justification for these rights-crushing mandates is to prevent transmission of Hepatitis B in the school setting.
The above is a great question and so the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) sent a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the CDC asking for “documentation sufficient to reflect any case(s) of transmission of Hepatitis B in an elementary, middle, or high school setting.”
In response, the CDC explained that: “A search of our [CDC] records failed to reveal any documents” of “transmission of Hepatitis B in an elementary, middle or high school setting.” This is because Hepatitis B is a bloodborne illness, typically transmitted by sex workers or drug users sharing needles — not activities that occur in a classroom setting.
And of course, at the risk of stating the obvious, just because someone hasn’t gotten a HepB vaccine doesn’t mean they have Hepatitis B! It is also noteworthy that, as the CDC explains, “almost all children 6 years and older and adults infected with the hepatitis B virus recover completely and do not develop chronic infection.”
Screenshots of the relevant portions of the websites linked above (in case they change):
Rogues’ Gallery
Never forget that they’re a bunch of liars
By John Leake | Courageous Discourse™ | April 5, 2024
Maddow, Walensky, and Biden may plead ignorance, as they apparently don’t understand anything, but Fauci, Gates, and Bourla certainly knew they were lying. As Fauci himself noted in a November 2022 paper:
… non-systemic respiratory viruses such as influenza viruses, SARS-CoV-2, and RSV tend to have significantly shorter incubation periods (Table 1) and rapid courses of viral replication. They replicate predominantly in local mucosal tissue, without causing viremia, and do not significantly encounter the systemic immune system or the full force of adaptive immune responses, which take at least 5–7 days to mature, usually well after the peak of viral replication and onward transmission to others. …
Taking all of these factors into account, it is not surprising that none of the predominantly mucosal respiratory viruses have ever been effectively controlled by vaccines.
Fauci already knew this about influenza and coronaviruses before 2020, and it quickly became apparent that SARS-CoV-2 was no different in this respect.
Never forget this Rogues’ Gallery of liars and the lies they told the world in order to justify tyranny based on fraudulent assertions.
In New Bird Flu Scare Comes Tacit Admission Coronavirus Was Not a Big Deal
By Adam Dick | Peace and Prosperity Blog | April 5, 2024
“Bird flu pandemic could be ‘100 times worse’ than COVID, scientists warn.” That is the headline at the New York Post for one of many media reports out Thursday spreading the latest pandemic scare.
Note the “100 times worse” comparison. Why not “nearly as bad,” “as bad,” or even “twice as bad” as coronavirus? The answer is that the fearmongers know that most people are on to the coronavirus hoax whereby a run-of-the-mill health threat was exaggerated to justify tyrannical measures including forcing termination of a vast amount of in-person interaction, mandating mask wearing, and even pushing and mandating experimental “vaccine” shots marketed as safe and effective despite being both dangerous and ineffective. All the while, good early treatment options were suppressed, resulting in greater sickness and death as well as expansive use of dangerous medical procedures and pharmaceuticals for people whose serious illness could have been prevented.
The world could be turned upside down over coronavirus because of a concerted effort of government and media to paint coronavirus as both extremely dangerous to everyone and something for which there were not already available good medical countermeasures. Both of those assertions were false. But, at the time, many people bought into the charade and trusted that “the science” propounded by the government and media selected “experts” required radical changes in human behavior, widespread participation on novel medical experimentation, and extreme restraints on liberty.
But now it is a new day. Looking back on the coronavirus scare, increasingly people realize, including some who are ashamed to discuss the matter, that they were duped. And they don’t want to be duped again. “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me,” the saying goes.
Yet, trickery is a go-to tactic for expanding power. The government and its business allies in medical and other fields aren’t about to give up on that tactic that reaped such huge gains during the coronavirus scare. Thus the ploy of tacitly admitting what has become common knowledge — that coronavirus was way overblown — so that the repression and profit process can be repeated anew to deal with a threat that, trust us, is this time really, really, really bad.
And what scientist does the New York Post article quote to support the claim that scientists say the bird flu is “100 times worse than COVID” declared in the article’s title? His name is John Fulton, described in the article as “a pharmaceutical industry consultant for vaccines.”
Oh brother: Here we go again. Or do we? If enough people stand up and say “no you don’t this time,” this new dangerous charade can be stopped in its tracks.
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Book Review
Shattered Dreams: The HPV Vaccine Exposed (2019)
By Christina England – 30 Q&As – Book Review & Summary
Lies are Unbekoming | September 4, 2026
… Gardasil received FDA fast-track approval in 2006, Cervarix followed in 2009, and Gardasil 9 was approved in December 2014 with more than double the aluminium adjuvant content of the original. The commercial context is specific. Merck was about to lose patent protection on Zocor and faced $18 billion in Vioxx injury claims from a cardiovascular drug the company had marketed while suppressing its own data showing a five-times increase in heart attacks. Analysts projected the global HPV vaccine market at $4 billion by 2011, contingent on government-funded national programs for teenage girls. The 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act had already granted manufacturers complete liability immunity. By 2013, Japan had withdrawn its HPV vaccine recommendation after cataloguing severe adverse reactions in hundreds of girls. No Western government followed. The establishment position across the UK, US, Australia, and most of Europe held, and still holds, that the vaccines are safe and effective, that reported injuries are coincidental, and that cervical cancer prevention justifies the program. The book was published into this position, not against a vacuum.
Shattered Dreams sits alongside Mary Holland’s The HPV Vaccine On Trial and Viera Scheibner’s foundational vaccination work as part of the documented record on what has been done to a generation of teenage girls under the banner of cancer prevention. The full summary unpacks three specific findings: that Merck used the aluminium adjuvant itself as the “placebo” control in 92.5% of trial subjects, making it structurally impossible to detect excess reactions from the adjuvant; that Dr. Sin Hang Lee found HPV DNA fragments bound to aluminium in every one of sixteen Gardasil samples tested, and in the blood and spleen of a New Zealand girl six months after her third dose; and that in every country with high vaccination coverage, including Australia, the UK, Norway, and Sweden, cervical cancer rates have stopped declining and started rising specifically in the vaccinated cohort. Martínez-Lavín’s 2017 calculation puts the number needed to seriously harm with Gardasil 9 at 140, and the number needed to vaccinate to prevent one case at 1,757. Thirteen young women are seriously harmed for every one who benefits. The vaccine was approved on the basis of trials that could not detect what the trials were supposed to detect, and it is still being given to twelve-year-olds today. … Read full review
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- Jewish supremacy, anti-Palestinian bigotry on display in Israel – Daily Update
- No Tricks Zone
- Latest European Green Energy Debacle; Portugal’s Largest Flagship Solar Park Insolvent!
- Green Energy Debacle: German Expert Professor Fritz Vahrenholt Warns Of Severe Economic And Social Consequences
- Two More Paleo Reconstructions Affirm Meters-Higher Sea Levels Across Ireland, Brazil 7000-6000 Years Ago
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
- Economic Masterminds: German Socialists Suggest Taxing Productivity Gains Stemming From Using AI
- The South China Sea Has Not Been Cooperating With The Climate Change Narrative
- Energy Crisis: Germany Enters Heating Season With Historically Low Gas Reserve Fill Levels
- New Study: The Antarctic Ice Sheet Gained Mass From 2020-2024 Due To Staggering Snow And Ice Accumulation
