There are plenty of reasons to boo Lindsey Graham off a stage
Let us count the ways
By Kelley Beaucar Vlahos | Responsible Statecraft | July 3, 2023
There are plenty of reasons to boo Senator Lindsey Graham.
The longtime South Carolina Republican was booed so spectacularly by a Donald Trump rally audience in his own home state on Saturday that he had to leave six minutes into his speech. He just couldn’t get a word out in a display that one CNN commentator called “far worse than I ever personally witnessed. In a word, it was a bloodbath.”
It would seem that Graham is a pariah with Trump supporters for his on-again-off-again support of the former president. He was against him before he supported his 2016 campaign (Graham was a short-lived 2016 contender himself), and has been critical of Trump’s taking of classified documents, while defending him on other charges and accusations, including the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol.
It would be encouraging to hear that Graham, who has represented his state as senator since 2003 and previously as a member of the House from 1995, was excoriated, too, for his unreconstructed voracious appetite for war. That’s doubtful, but maybe, just maybe, it’s part of the browbeating he got on Saturday. But it is worth revisiting his litany of abuses in this realm anyway.
RS contributor Jack Hunter has done a lot to bring it all together over the years, but here is a taste:
In March 2022, he called for a Julius Caesar killing of Russian President Vladimir Putin. “The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out. You would be doing your country — and the world — a great service,” Graham tweeted.
More recently during the debt ceiling crisis, he said that holding the defense spending budget to its current $850 billion would be a “gift to China” and suggested any future supplemental Ukraine aid bill could go towards filling in spending gaps.
In March, Graham suggested the U.S. should follow the foreign policy of “Reagan” and shoot down any Russian plane that got near American aircraft in international airspace. “(President Reagan) would start shooting Russian planes down if they were threatening our assets.” Hunter noted why this is not only a stupid idea but a gross historical misnomer.
But as many have been quick to point out, Graham has never seen a war that he wasn’t in favor of waging.
Also in March, Graham told an interviewer that an Israeli air strike might be the only way to knock out Iran’s nuclear program, which would all but commit the U.S. to a war with Iran, too.
In 2013 he bucked members of his own party by supporting a military strike on Syria. “I believe that if we get Syria wrong, within six months — and you can quote me on this— there will be a war between Iran and Israel over their nuclear program,” Graham told an audience at the time.
“It won’t come to America on top of a missile, it’ll come in the belly of a ship in the Charleston or New York harbor,” he added. Two years later in 2015 he and comrade Sen. John McCain were pushing to send 10,000 troops back into Iraq and another 10,000 into Syria to battle ISIS.
Four years later, Graham said Trump’s failure to hit Iran hard after it downed a U.S. surveillance drone could be interpreted as a “sign of weakness.”
And who could forget all of the senator’s salivating comments about war with North Korea during the Trump administration?
Graham said we would be “hurtling toward war” with Pyongyang if we didn’t “stop” their nuclear program. “If we have to go to war to stop this, we will,” he said in November 2017. “And if there’s a war with North Korea, it’ll be because North Korea brought it on itself.”
This wasn’t the first time he said that war in Korea was inevitable. Two months earlier, reportedly recounting a conversation with the president, he said in an interview: “There is a military option: to destroy North Korea’s nuclear program and North Korea itself. He’s not going to allow — President Trump — the ability of this madman (Kim Jong Un) to have a missile that could hit America.”
“If there’s going to be a war to stop him, it will be over there,” Graham added. “If thousands die, they’re going to die over there. They’re not going to die over here — and he’s told me that to my face.”
When asked for confirmation, White House officials said “all options remain on the table” — but efforts were to continue “maximum diplomatic and economic pressure to convince North Korea to change course.”
Analysts at the time suggested Graham was projecting, and who would be surprised. It is after all, Lindsey Graham, who said this March during the 20th anniversary of the war in Iraq that the decade of bloodshed and continuing costs to Americans and the world was “worth it.”
“Here’s what I would ask people to focus on,” Graham said at the time. “Is the world better off without Saddam Hussein, and are we better off with a democracy replacing him? I’d say yes.”
Graham was booed off a stage this weekend. We’d like to think it was for his warmongering. Likely not. But it is a pleasant thought.
Heavy Lies the Crown: POTUS Biden Totally Loses the Plot As NATO’s Narrative Implodes

By Declan Hayes | Strategic Culture Foundation | July 3, 2023
First off, hats off to young Hafez Bashar Assad, who recently aced a Master’s degree in Pure Mathematics from Russia’s prestigious Moscow State University which has, in the course of its long and glorious history, produced several Fields Medals winners. May young Hafez go on to similarly great things.
Hafez was, some years back, the subject of oceans of ire when he represented Syria in the Math Olympics, a competition I have some familiarity with, as friends of mine represented Ireland in years gone by. And though those young Irishmen went on to be awarded PhDs from the world’s most prestigious universities and land jobs with mouth-watering salaries from the world’s most prestigious companies, like young Hafez, they got nowhere at the Math Olympics because they lacked the in-depth 24/7 tutoring the United States’ Ivy League Professors give the young (generally Chinese) charges, who compete under the Yankee flag.
So well done, young Hafez and congratulations, too, to your beautiful, urbane, cosmopolitan, multi-lingual, great and gracious mother, Asma Assad, proudly hugging you after you were awarded your degree. I know of no current or former First Lady, who is in her league in terms of elegance, grace, brains or sheer good manners and your father, Syrian President Bashar Assad, certainly hit the jackpot when he landed that Damask Rose. He is a lucky and blessed man.
Moving from Moscow to Kiev, we see that former Irish President and serial grifter Mary Robinson and Swedish propagandist Greta Thunberg are on a jolly there to advise Clown Prince Zelensky on matters concerning the environment. As 20 year old Greta has only recently graduated High School, at an age when most others would be whistling through their undergraduate degrees, one wonders if this slow learner will stay as silent on NATO’s use of depleted uranium as she has been on the Nordstream terrorist attack, the greatest ecological crime of our era.
Not that I care as Greta, and Mary Robinson are, like Clown Prince Zelensky himself, media creations, all tinsel and no substance. NATO’s Zelensky regime must be really scraping the barrel if that is the best they can do.
But the bottom of the barrel is all NATO seems to have left. French dictator Macron spends his time attending Elton John 1970s’ retro concerts as France burns down around him. The best that Britain can do is to ban Nigel Farage from having a bank account and keep POW Julian Assange on ice for their American masters.
Stella Moris, Julian’s wife, was recently in Rome where, appropriately dressed, she met Pope Francis, who has also recently honoured British film-maker Ken Loach, who was recently expelled from the British Labour Party. Say what you like about Julian Assange and, irrespective as to whether the British will murder him or hand him over to the Yanks for further torture sessions, he is blessed to have such a woman standing foursquare beside him.
Although all of these singularities would have been noted in Washington, it is doubtful if they registered with Creepy Joe Biden, the Don Vittorio of the NATO organised crime gang. Don Vittorio, you may recall, is the senile Italian Mafia godfather, who appeared in The Sopranos a few seasons before fellow mafia mobster Junior also succumbed to dementia.
Although, as Biden claims Putin, in some parallel world, may be losing the war in Iraq, in this world Creepy Joe is most definitely losing the 2024 Presidential war to Donald Trump and Bobby Kennedy. Although Oddslotter still has him favourite to be re-elected, Biden’s place is in the dock as a war criminal and then off to an old folks’ home to be heard from no more.
The threats that Trump and Kennedy pose are not so much personal threats to Creepy Joe as they are to the gangster system he presides over. Trump is a threat because he says what others will not say: that the United States is a predatory state that robs and loots at will. And Kennedy is a threat because he points out the threats Big Pharma’s greed pose to all Americans and Big Pharma’s spokespersons like notorious narcissist Dr. Peter Hotez, won’t even debate him on Joe Rogan’s show for over $1 million in cash.
Although neither of these challengers criticise Israel, such criticisms are inconceivable because of the nature of NATO’s gangsterism. Palestinians are little more than plastic ducks at a shooting arcade and heaven help any “anti-Semite” who might argue otherwise.
But even argument itself is now haram in NATOstan. Donald Trump, remember, was banned from social media when he was POTUS, supposedly the world’s most powerful position. Germany’s Greens, perhaps trying to reconnect to their Nazis past, have persecuted their own citizens for not being sufficiently Russophobic and Australia, Canada and Vichy Ireland are, as part of NATO’s plans of world conquest, introducing the most draconian hate speech laws that have drawn the ire of Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk.
And there is the rub. Rogan, Carlson and Musk are forming the backbone of an opposition that believe in such things as free speech and free, open and honest debate and such things present an existential threat to Biden and his fellow-fraudsters.
In my earlier paeon to Asma Assad, I used an abundance of adjectives to try to give Syria’s First Lady her well-earned due. However, at days’ end, she is a wife, a mother and a woman, a wonderful adult female in other words and not a cisgender or a transgender, phrases that Biden’s handlers have shanghaied from the British and Roman Empires where Transjordan and Cisjordan were, still are and will always be divided by the Jordan River and Gaul and Cisgaul were, still are and will always be divided by the mighty Alps. You do not need Hafez Assad’s Master’s Degree in Pure Mathematics to know no such demarcations apply to sovereign womanhood and nor do you even need Greta Thunberg’s hard-earned High School diploma. What you need is a degree of honesty and common sense and, because they are attributes Creepy Joe and his whore-bonking son Hunter cashed in years ago, all of Creepy Joe’s dodgy deals are now coming home to roost.

And, just as the Alps and the Jordan divide for all time the Cis from the rest, so also in our own time do the mountains and rivers of honesty and truth divide the Creepy Joe Bidens and Mary Robinsons from the great and the good, from Stella Moris, Gonzalo Lira, Hafez and Asma Assad, all of whom affirm the words of Irish martyr Terence MacSwiney that “it is not those who can inflict the most, but those who can endure the most, who will prevail”.
And, it is because of good, great and immortal people like Asma Assad that Damascus itself has prevailed against Biden’s Beast of the Apocalypse. Let us, as we conclude, recall Mark Twain’s recollections of that eternal city: “We shall remember… Damascus, the Pearl of the East, the pride of Syria, the fabled garden of Eden, the home of princes and genii of the Arabian Nights, the oldest metropolis on Earth, the one city in all the world that has kept its name and held its place and looked serenely on while the Kingdoms and Empires of four thousand years have risen to life, enjoyed their little season of pride and pomp, and then vanished and been forgotten.”
And, as Eternal Damascus and her eternally gallant allies prepare to consign Biden, NATOstan’s faux Little Caesar, to the trash bin of history, let us salute not only Hafez and Asma Assad on their recent fortune but all of the great and good people of Syria, Palestine, Serbia, China and Russia who, at great cost, defied NATO and carried the banners of humanity not only for the Assange and Lira families but for all of us in the face of the butchers Biden, Macron and Zelensky sent against them. May God bless them and their protectors, the heroic men and women of the Syrian Arab Army, now and forever.
Spiraling West Bank violence could spell political doom for both Israeli and Palestinian leadership
By Robert Inlakesh | RT | July 3, 2023
The latest upsurge in violence throughout the occupied West Bank signals the failure of US-led efforts to create calm. Both the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Israeli government were faced with domestic pressure to take escalatory measures against the opposing side, resulting in an Israeli military operation against Palestinian armed groups in Jenin.
Beginning with an Israeli raid on the city of Jenin, a string of violent events again ignited tensions between Palestinians and Israelis inside the occupied West Bank. In mid-June, a number of Israeli armored vehicles stormed Jenin to arrest members of the armed group known as the Jenin Brigades, when they were ambushed by local Palestinian fighters. Seven Israeli soldiers were injured by improvised explosive devices that were detonated underneath their military vehicles. This led to the deployment of Apache helicopters and a large number of Israeli ground forces, who ended up killing seven Palestinians and injuring 91.
Just one day later, two Palestinian gunmen carried out an attack near the entrance to the West Bank settlement of Eli, killing four Israeli settlers and injuring four others. The two shooters were identified as having an affiliation with the armed wing of Hamas, the Qassam Brigades. Both were shot and killed by Israeli forces that same day.
The increase in violence followed the decision of the Israeli government to allow its far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, to assume special powers to develop settlement expansion plans, even without the approval of the Knesset. The move sparked only light condemnation from the US government, which said that it “opposes such unilateral actions that make a two-state solution more difficult to achieve and are an obstacle to peace.”
The following night, radical Israeli settlers decided to attack Palestinian villages, in what they called “revenge” for the shooting attack against settlers earlier that day. In the Palestinian village of Turmasaya alone, around 400 armed settlers torched 30 homes and 60 cars. The attack also resulted in over 100 injuries and 1 death. Israeli settler attacks like these target any Palestinian community that they are able to penetrate, almost always with the protection of the Israeli army. One such attack, earlier this year in the village of Huwara, was even described as a “pogrom” by Israeli general Yehuda Fuchs.
The Israeli government, headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was put in an embarrassing position following the events in both Jenin and the settlement of Eli. Both these situations represented a clear development in the sophistication of the West Bank armed groups, proving them capable of inflicting casualties on both Israeli soldiers and settlers in just over a 24 hour window. Already there had been calls from Israeli settler communities, in the northern West Bank, to launch an all-out military operation in order to crush the armed groups, with the above mentioned incidents only leading to further pressure being placed on the government to act.
In an Israeli security session, held to assess the situation inside the West Bank following the Eli shooting attack, it was reported that both Netanyahu and his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, opposed the option of launching a military operation inside the occupied territory at the time. The expectation was raised on the government, at that point, to react disproportionately to such attacks, given that the Israeli coalition is held together by a number of hardliners who seek a complete annexation of the West Bank and currently live inside illegal settlements themselves.
Earlier this year, the Biden administration set up two security summits, aimed at improving cooperation between the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Israel. The conferences were held in Jordan’s Aqaba and the Egyptian city of Sharm El Sheikh. The goal was to have the PA’s security forces and the Israeli military work together in order to prevent further deterioration in the security situation. One of the components to creating a more stable environment was a plan to utilize a specially trained PA force that would directly confront the West Bank armed groups that have emerged over the past two years. The plan, drawn up by US security coordinator Michael Fenzel, represented political suicide for a PA that is already facing a massive backlash from Palestinians.
According to a recent poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, roughly 80% of Palestinians want the current PA President Mahmoud Abbas to resign. During the latest string of Israeli settler attacks against defenseless Palestinian villages, locals have also gone viral calling on the PA to deploy its roughly 70,000-strong security force to protect against settler attacks. The PA only has limited areas of jurisdiction inside the West Bank and uses its forces to handle domestic Palestinian crime, in addition to protecting Israeli security interests. Under the current circumstances, a direct confrontation between PA forces and Palestinian armed groups could lead to a revolt against its rule inside the territory.
Mahmoud Abbas is currently 87 years old and there is a fear that when he passes away, there will be a power vacuum, which could result in the PA’s collapse or even a revolutionary anti-Israeli group taking over. Although the PA is currently attempting to sit on the fence, knowing that no conflict resolution dialogue has even been entertained with the Israeli side since 2014. It attempts to pretend as if there aren’t thousands of armed Palestinian fighters who are currently operating outside of the administration’s control and that it cannot do anything about Israel’s actions either. This attitude is mostly born out of a desire to remain in the good graces of their top donors, the United States and European Union. While the PA does not want to assume the role of an active protector against Israeli military and settler attacks, which the Palestinian people call on it to be, neither does it want to commit to being a direct aggressor against the armed militant groups.
Unlike the PA, the Israeli government was in the position to launch a military operation against the West Bank armed groups, so it waited and decided to carry out its attack on Sunday night. In 2002, Israel launched Operation Defensive Shield, during which they killed around 500 Palestinians and effectively eliminated many of the strongholds for the armed groups that were operating at the time. Israel’s army would seek to replicate the 2002 model in any large-scale operation, however, it has instead chosen to isolate Jenin in order to set back the groups, instead of attempting all out elimination. If it is to launch an all encompassing campaign, it is also likely that it will lose many soldiers and that there will be attacks from other territories, such as Gaza, Syria and Lebanon. Therefore, there will be a political price to pay for launching such an operation, which is something that Netanyahu knows and is perhaps why he ordered a more limited attack.
Instead of declaring war inside the entire West Bank, it seems that the Israeli army has decided to increase the heat on the armed groups, using tactics like drone strikes to assassinate fighters, while this current escalation is an attempt to show strength and cut back the abilities of the groups. The day after the settlers’ “revenge” attack, Israeli forces announced that they had carried out a missile strike on a car, near a checkpoint that is located in Jenin, killing three Palestinian fighters. This airstrike was significant because it was the first assassination by missile strike in the West Bank since 2005. Now, the current invasion of Jenin is the largest since 2002.
If the Palestinian armed groups are allowed to grow stronger and their influence spreads to other cities, it may be politically impossible in the future for the Israeli government not to launch a large-scale military campaign, which is likely why it has opted for the current approach. However, one interesting element to the recent military operation in Jenin, is the lack of care from Palestinians in Ramallah and other cities, only Palestinians from the refugee camps came out in large demonstrations. This reflects a massive victory of Israeli policy over the Palestinians of the West Bank, they have successfully disconnected them from the suffering of their fellow people and it seems as if life can go on as normal for people living in cities like Ramallah.
Due to the US refusal to present any pathways forward, the West Bank is heading towards even greater violence. Its roadmap for the PA is not reasonable, given that it essentially asks the Palestinian Authority to commit suicide, but on the other hand, it won’t actually punish Israel for violating its own red-lines. Washington is frequently expressing its concern over the Israeli government’s constant approval of settlement expansion plans, yet it is unwilling to take a single step toward doing anything about it and supports Israel’s military solution to a problem that Washington failed to solve. The Biden administration has the power to pressure both the PA and Israel to sit down together today, yet it refuses, offering nothing more than platitudes about peace negotiations that have essentially been dead since the late 1990s. Without any viable options for a solution on the table, there will only be more violence, even if tensions calm temporarily.
Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker currently based in London, UK. He has reported from and lived in the Palestinian territories and currently works with Quds News. Director of ‘Steal of the Century: Trump’s Palestine-Israel Catastrophe’.
The character assassination of Robert F Kennedy Jr
By Niall McCrae | TCW Defending Freedom | July 3, 2023
Will there be another dead Kennedy? I hope not to tempt fate, but as a Democrat nomination candidate for the US presidential election next year, Robert F Kennedy Jr is making himself a target. He rejects the official narrative on Covid-19 and Ukraine, and he rails against Big Pharma, corrupt federal authorities and militaristic foreign policy. The Democratic Party wants to keep the octogenarian and cognitively suspect incumbent Joe Biden, whom many people see as a puppet of the Deep State, struggling to read from an autocue.
Already being RFK is being attacked, albeit by the pen rather than the sword. Liberal-progressive media are troubled by his rise in the polls. First they ignored him; then they ridiculed him; now they are desperately denouncing him as a harmful interference in ‘democracy’ (a term that means something different to the elite than to you and me). Among the latest hit jobs, the Washington Post argued that RFK should be running as a Republican, as that’s where the anti-vaccine constituency lies. A Daily Mail column described him as a serial misogynist (journalists are less concerned with the sitting president’s proclivity for fondling little girls and sniffing their hair).
A recent diatribe in the Los Angeles Times by Michael Hiltzik is so bad that it’s good. RFK had appeared on a 90-minute ‘town hall’ programme on the cable channel News Nation on June 27. Hiltzik wondered why. A similar format featuring Donald Trump on CNN was supposed to be taken by broadcasters as a clear message that nothing can be gained from giving a platform to bombasts and conspiracy theorists. Trump had played to the gallery and taken control of the debate, interrupting and haranguing the weak presenter. Fact-checking ‘quackery’ on a live show is futile.
Although RFK is up to around 20 per cent in polling as a challenger to Biden, Hiltzik belittled him as ‘a fringe candidate for the Democratic Party nomination’. He suggested ulterior motives: ‘perhaps News Nation is trying to assume the mantle of Fox News as a dispenser of right-wing twaddle, or (to be more charitable) of CNN as a sober neutral voice’. To regard (actually, to disregard) CNN as a fair, unbiased medium shows how once-trusted organs such as the Los Angeles Times have become polarised.
RFK performed in a controlled setting, before a small audience in Chicago, but Hiltzik complained that moderator Elizabeth Vargas was ‘ill-equipped to counter Kennedy’s elaborate web of misinformation about vaccines’. Actually, Vargas did not raise the topic of vaccines until near the end of the debate. This should have come first, Hiltzik averred, ‘because Kennedy’s anti-vaccination stance is a major element of his presidential campaign . . . that’s what makes him a public health hazard’.
As a business editor, Hiltzik is unlikely to have a fraction of the knowledge gained by RFK on vaccines over decades of research. But he felt qualified to rebut the claims of the Democrat pretender. After denying that he is ‘anti-vaccine’, Kennedy asserted that vaccines should be tested like other medicines, but ‘of 72 vaccine doses mandated for American children, not one has ever been subjected to a prelicensing placebo-controlled trial’. ‘Yes, they have,’ Vargas responded. But Hiltzik was exasperated by the host’s failure to ‘catch Kennedy’s deceptive sleight of hand’. RFK is wrong, according to Hiltzik, as a placebo such as an inert saline injection would be unethical; instead, a new product needs only to perform better than an existing vaccine, not by depriving study participants of potentially life-saving immunisation. Naïve to this Big Pharma stitch-up, Hiltzik believes the propaganda that vaccines have ‘all gone through phased trials mandated by the Food and Drug Administration to determine their safety and gauge their efficacy.’
Quite reasonably, RFK told the New Nation audience that vaccines should be properly tested for long-term risks. Hiltzik scoffed: ‘Does he mean one year? Five years? Thirty years? Some diseases take that long after exposure to manifest themselves. Is 30 years an appropriate period to wait?’
Kennedy focused on two specific vaccines. There is considerable evidence of the chickenpox vaccine, mandated for children in every state of the US, causing outbreaks of shingles in adulthood. Googling it, Hiltzik found the predictable array of pro-vaccine medical authorities denying any link between the vaccine and this painful rash.
The second vaccine of concern was for hepatitis B, a disease transmitted through sexual contact or bodily fluids. RFK asked why this is mandated for young children, but Hiltzik glibly explained that a mother of unknown infection could pass the virus to her newborn. There will always be a reason to jab kids against every known pathogen.
As Hiltzik explained, ‘while speaking deceptively, he [Kennedy] comes off as earnest — a skill that Donald Trump hasn’t mastered’. The lesson that the media must learn is that ‘there’s no way that even a determined interviewer can fight back against deception and deceit when it’s dispensed by the torrent’. Doing their duty for the establishment, influential broadcasters and newspapers are demanding censorship of presidential candidates: in a functioning democracy this would be so intolerable as to justify removal of their licences. When the establishment threw everything but the kitchen sink at Trump, this proved to his supporters that the system is rigged.
Although best known for his views on vaccines, RFK is causing most trouble through his opposition to the military-industrial complex, a term coined by Dwight Eisenhower in a warning to the American people three days before leaving the White House in 1961. His successor John F Kennedy (RFK’s uncle) delivered his ‘Peace Speech’ in June 1963, conveying his intent to end the arms race and build peaceful stability with Russia. Such outspoken resistance to the generals and CIA may have been the final straw that led to his assassination five months later in Dallas. The US and Nato empire have been waging wars ever since.
Hiltzik had little to say about Kennedy’s contrary views on Ukraine. It is hard to discredit pacifism as ‘disinformation’, never mind ‘dangerous’. But as shown by the ferocity of establishment attacks on Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump, the one topic that is definitely out of bounds is military interventionism. RFK is an imperfect but compassionate and conscientious man. It is grossly insensitive for journalists to describe the son of a murdered father and nephew of a murdered uncle as a mortal hazard.
Laid Low by the COVID Vaccine, Now They’ve Got a Bad Case of Federal Unresponsiveness
By Christian Britschgi | RealClear Investigations | June 28, 2023
In April 2021, Adele Fox received a single shot of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine. Within a few hours, the 60-year-old resident of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, started feeling shooting pains in her legs, arms, and neck. The pain didn’t abate over the next few days. Instead, it got worse and was accompanied by nausea and debilitating fatigue.
Within a few weeks, neurologists affiliated with Massachusetts General Hospital diagnosed her with several serious conditions they say were a result of her COVID-19 vaccine, including small-fiber neuropathy (which causes a painful tingling in the extremities) and Sjögren’s Syndrome (which leaves patients pained and fatigued, and in extreme cases, can damage internal organs).
This shot, which was supposed to get Fox back to normal, instead left her with diminished ability to work and enjoy life. Persistent physical therapy and experimental treatments she’s taken since have done little to alleviate her symptoms.
“I used to do so much, and now it’s a struggle,” she says. “Sometimes you just get down.”
With her medical bills mounting and her condition not improving, Fox sought compensation for her damaged health. Federal liability protections prevent the vaccine-injured from directly suing vaccine manufacturers like Johnson & Johnson. Instead, claimants have to go to the federal government for compensation.
But as Fox would soon learn, the government has two starkly different injury programs for vaccines. One operates like a civil court with a neutral judge, lawyers on both sides, and a guaranteed right of appeal. In recent decades, it has approved about 75% of claims and pays out hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
The other, which handles COVID-19 vaccines, has rejected almost every claim brought to it, awarding less than $10,000 since the pandemic. And in a nation nearly numb to the pandemic’s toll and its scandals, the program is adding seething frustration atop lasting injury to Fox and people like her in a little reported aftermath to the government’s much criticized performance on vaccines – ranging from erratic booster advice to broad-brush vaccine mandates that cost people their jobs.
Fox filed her claim two years ago, submitting hundreds of pages of medical documents about her condition and diagnoses. She’s nevertheless one of the 10,887 people still waiting on a decision. “You’re not even hearing anything from the organization that’s supposed be helping you,” she says. “The phone keeps ringing, no one is emailing, nobody is doing anything.”
The federal agency overseeing the program, the Health Resources and Services Administration, said in a statement to RealClearInvestigations that the current number of claims “significantly exceeds the previous volume in the program” and that the program has “hired additional staff to address this growth in claims, and the President’s budget requests additional funding to support the additional staffing needed to process claims.”
Tale of Two Compensation Programs
The government’s two contrasting vaccine compensation programs are similarly named and thus easily confused. The first, Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) was created in the 1980s and covers most routine vaccines. The second, the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP), is a result of war-on-terror legislation in 2005 and now covers COVID-19 vaccines. Their bureaucratic differences help explain why a nation that has spent trillions of dollars on COVID relief programs has provided almost no assistance to people harmed by the vaccines that the government encouraged, and sometimes required, them to take.
The earlier program was supposed to shore up pharmaceutical companies’ willingness to make childhood vaccines in the face of persistent vaccine injury lawsuits, while also giving the vaccine-injured a fair and expedited process for compensation.
The vaccine-injured would not sue pharmaceutical companies. Instead, they’d petition the government in Federal Claims Court, where special masters (judges) would decide cases. Compensation came from a government-administered trust fund paid for by excise taxes levied on vaccine manufacturers.
Between 2006 and 2021, this court adjudicated cases from 10,602 petitioners and issued compensation to 7,618 of them. The compensation trust fund sits at $4 billion and pays out about $200 million in compensation and attorneys’ fees each year.
This earlier program bears little resemblance to the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program, where the COVID-vaccine cases of Fox and many others are languishing.
It was meant to incentivize pharmaceutical companies to be part of the federal response to one-off, one-in-a-million events like a bioweapon attack or an outbreak of a deadly pandemic. Although almost one billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered in the United States, and health authorities say boosters could become as common as the annual flu shot, it remains the only way people harmed by the shot can receive compensation.
It’s far from guaranteed they’ll get it.
Before the pandemic, this program received a little over 500 claims and had paid out compensation to only 30 people – mostly for H1N1 (swine flu) vaccine injuries. In just the past two years, it has been asked to make decisions on over 10,000 injury claims related to COVID countermeasures.
As of June, it made decisions on just 919 of these COVID-related claims and rejected 894 of them. It has so far paid out only $8,593 in compensation to just four people who were injured by a COVID vaccine. The program has deemed another 20 people eligible for compensation, but has yet to pay them.
It’s not a judicial process either. Rather, it’s an administrative process overseen by Health Resources and Services Administration, which is housed within Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). People file a claim and government medical reviewers decide whether to pay out or not. That’s an awkward arrangement, given that HHS is deciding whether to pay for damages caused by products it approved and in some cases mandated.
Because it’s an administrative process, there’s no right to counsel and no neutral arbitrator. A denied claimant can file for reconsideration with HRSA, but otherwise has no right to appeal.
Unlike the earlier program, the CICP offers no compensation for pain and suffering and doesn’t pay attorneys’ fees. Most successful claimants have received compensation totaling a few hundred dollars or a few thousand dollars. The highest award for a COVID-19 vaccine injury sufferer was $3,957.66 to a person who got myocarditis (a heart condition) from a vaccine.
It also has shorter filing deadlines. People have to file a claim within one year of vaccination, a much shorter window than the earlier program’s standard of three years from the onset of symptoms. Of the 894 claims that CICP has rejected, 444 of them were for missing the filing deadline.
CICP also only awards compensation in cases where there’s “compelling, reliable, valid, medical, and scientific evidence” that someone’s injury is linked to a covered countermeasure. HRSA describes this as “a high evidentiary standard.” Renée Gentry, a practicing vaccine injury lawyer who directs the Vaccine Injury Litigation Clinic at George Washington University, says it’s a much higher bar than what the earlier vaccine injury compensation program requires, which contributes to a much lower rate of successful claims.
The Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program’s nature as a small emergency program has seen its capacity strained by a flood of COVID-related injury claims. Of the 11,806 COVID-related claims filed, 10,887 are still pending. Those four cases where COVID compensation was paid out didn’t come until after April 2023, over two years since the first vaccines were administered.
Pain and Suffering
The shortcomings of CICP are all too apparent for the people who are forced to wade through it. Even folks who seem to have done everything right are left waiting or disappointed by the program.
Fox filed her claim in May 2021, which was relatively early in the immunization campaign. She also had clear diagnoses from well-credentialed doctors linking her conditions to her COVID-19 vaccination. Fox says she provided the program with no shortage of documentation as well.
After filing all that paperwork, she hasn’t been idle either. After months of not hearing anything back from CICP, Fox started to reach out repeatedly to anyone she thought might be able to move the needle. She spoke repeatedly with representatives from Sen. Jeanne Shaheen’s and Rep. Chris Pappas’ offices. She also kept calling program administrators, trying to figure out what was taking so long.
“I’m sure they saw my number, and said ‘Ah, Fox, oh no, not her [again]’,” she jokes.
Her congressional representatives did reach out to CICP on her behalf. That was at least effective at getting program administrators to call Fox personally twice, once in July 2022 and again in June 2023. But each time, they could only offer her reassurance that her paperwork had been received. On both calls, Fox says she was told that the program was vastly overburdened by the flood of COVID-19 claims it had received. She, like thousands of others, would have to wait.
The few decisions on COVID-19 claims that have trickled out haven’t offered much relief to the people who’ve received them. That includes Cody Flint, one of the 894 people who’ve had their COVID-related claims rejected.
Flint was vaccinated in February 2021, when he received a single Pfizer dose. He says that he started to feel headaches and had affected vision within 30 minutes of the shot. He was still experiencing symptoms two days later when he headed to his job as a crop-dusting pilot.
While flying that day, he started to experience extreme tunnel vision, followed by a sensation he describes as “a bomb [going] off in my head.” He barely managed to get his plane back to his runway, where his coworkers found him slumped over his controls and shaking.
He was diagnosed with perilymphatic fistula (or tear of the inner ear) caused by elevated intracranial pressure – which could only be relieved through repeated draining of his spinal fluid. Given the timing of his symptoms and the fact that he’d passed a flight physical just a couple weeks prior, his doctors said his condition was almost certainly caused by the vaccine. His injury prevented him from returning to work as a pilot, and his mounting medical bills saw him draw down all of his savings.
In April 2021, Flint filed a claim. In May 2022 – just a few weeks after Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith asked HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra about his case specifically in a committee hearing – Flint’s claim was rejected. The program’s medical reviewers told Flint that it was more likely his injuries were caused by barotrauma from flying a plane.
He petitioned for a reconsideration of his case. His doctors argued that there was no way he’d have experienced barotrauma from flying just a few hundred feet off the ground. Commercial airliners, they noted, are pressurized at 6,000 to 8,000 feet of elevation. Flint’s lawyers also submitted recent studies linking the symptoms he’d experienced to COVID-19 vaccinations.
Nevertheless, a separate medical reviewer at HRSA upheld the CICP’s initial denial in January 2023. That letter succinctly stated that HHS has “no appeals process beyond this reconsideration” and “there is no judicial review of a final action concerning CICP eligibility.”
Efforts at Reform
The federal government’s liability protections for COVID-19 vaccines aren’t scheduled to expire until the end of 2024. Once they do, those claiming a vaccine injury will be able to pursue claims against vaccine manufacturers in state courts.
While liability protections remain in effect, the federal program is injured claimants’ only potential source of compensation.
Whether or not the HRSA succeeds in boosting staffing in line with its statement to RCI, those seeking compensation have started to get organized. They’ve formed the group React19, which is dedicated to advocating for additional research into the side effects of COVID-19 vaccines. It’s grown into a network of tens of thousands of people who say they suffered adverse injuries from the shot. Flint, the pilot, is on its board of directors.
“It’s a very pro-vaccine community,” says Christopher Dreisbach, the group’s legal affairs director. “You say anything about vaccine injuries, you’re branded as anti-vaxxers. We are pro-science, we are not political. We’re just dealing with a very politicized issue.”
He says the politicization of vaccines has made their efforts at compensation reform a challenge.
When the CICP, and the 2005 Pandemic Response and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act that created it, were first being debated, Republican lawmakers were its main advocates, while its main critics were Democrats. The partisan politics of the program and liability protections for pharmaceutical companies has done a 180 since COVID.
In 2005, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee argued during the House floor debate on the PREP Act that the law’s liability shield would leave injured healthcare workers with little protection or chance of compensation. Come 2023, she would return to the floor of the House to argue in favor of mandating those same healthcare workers receive a vaccine covered by the PREP Act’s liability shield.
The PREP Act’s harshest critics during COVID, meanwhile, have mostly been Republicans.
“I call the PREP Act medical malpractice martial law,” says Rep. Thomas Massie, who complains that its liability shield is both incredibly broad and improperly preempts state law. “I think it’s sort of anathema to the way our government is set up. I found it hard to believe that Congress would pass something, much less that a Republican president would invoke it.”
In March 2022, Sen. Mike Lee introduced a bill that would have amended CICP to give claimants the same framework for pursuing compensation as the VICP. They could file in Federal Claims Court and receive an expedited, judicial adjudication of their injury claim.
Gentry argues that it would be far simpler to just move the COVID-19 vaccines into the VICP program, which already has a successful track record of adjudicating injury claims. In order for that to happen under the law that created the VICP, the CDC needs to recommend the vaccines for routine administration to children (which has already happened) and vaccine manufacturers would have to start paying excise taxes. That latter condition will require action from Congress.
VICP needs a number of updates as well, says Gentry, including expanding the number of special masters to handle the backlog of cases and increasing the available levels of compensation (which haven’t been updated since the 1980s).
Increasing the number of special masters is particularly important if the VICP program is going to be expected to process tens of thousands of COVID claims, she says. But she argues it’s the best way of getting the vaccine injured out of CICP and into a program that will work for them. “If you’re taking away someone’s constitutional right to sue, you really have to give them a reasonable and meaningful alternative and that’s what this program is, for all of its faults,” says Gentry.
While efforts at reform in Washington lumber on, React19 has started a privately funded compensation program that’s thus far paid out $552,000.
“Is that making a meaningful difference to all the vaccine injured everywhere? No, that’s not enough,” says Dreisbach, but he notes that it’s far more than what CICP has paid out. “That should be pretty embarrassing to the federal government.”
Government Contracts With COVID Vaccine Makers Let Federal Agencies Bypass Normal Regulatory Process: FOIA Docs
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | June 30, 2023
A little-known federal agency called BARDA dedicated to countering “health security threats” was responsible for conducting the quality review of every COVID-19 vaccine dose administered in the U.S., Sasha Latypova reported on her Substack.
But BARDA, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, which has a “militarized” purpose according to Latypova, is not subject to the same regulations as typical pharmaceutical manufacturers, distributors or regulatory agencies.
Distribution through BARDA was part of the “bait and switch” the federal government subjected the American people to with the COVID-19 vaccines, Latypova — a former pharmaceutical industry executive who now exposes fraud in COVID-19 countermeasures — told The Defender in an interview.
“The public was told these vaccines are made by Pfizer and Moderna and rigorously approved by the FDA.” That, she said, would mean that the “consumer protections we expect from pharmaceutical products, medical devices and even food — which are huge and extensive — we expect them to be in place.”
But in fact, countermeasures contracts made available through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by various parties and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission disclosures show the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) and BARDA contracts with the pharmaceutical companies were structured such that these protections weren’t required, according to Latypova.
The contracts also specified that manufacturers and federal agencies were protected by the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act, which shields “covered persons” — such as pharmaceutical companies, or the DOD/BARDA — from liability for injuries sustained from “countermeasures,” such as vaccines and medications administered during a public health emergency.
Latypova posted a video of a November 2022 presentation during which BARDA’s then-director of Regulatory and Quality Affairs (RQA) Tremel Faison bragged that before the U.S. government could purchase and release any COVID-19 product, the RQA team had to perform a review and acceptance.
“I thought it was very strange, given that this is technically the FDA’s [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] job,” Latypova wrote, so she investigated BARDA.
BARDA is housed within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, but its purpose is “to develop medical countermeasures that address the public health and medical consequences of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) accidents, incidents and attacks, pandemic influenza, and emerging infectious diseases.”
BARDA now functions as part of the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Pandemic Preparedness and Response, elevated by the Biden administration in 2022 to coordinate the nation’s response to health emergencies.
BARDA reports that it has 77 products on the market.
This is concerning, Latypova said, because typically pharmaceutical products are subject to regulations that govern the clinical trial and manufacturing process and then the licensed pharmacy distribution system monitors for consumer safety.
They are subject to “cGxP” regulations, a suite of “current good practice” processes and procedures with the “x” standing in for a variety of life sciences areas, including manufacturing, laboratory, clinical and distribution.
Those regulations create tight control over pharmaceutical products ensuring, for example, that labeling is accurate, dosage is accurate, there are no impurities, and the active ingredients are active and present in the proper amounts.
The regulations also establish supply chain regulations so the products are tracked during transportation and distribution and are traceable, and they protect consumers from drugs being counterfeit, stolen, contaminated or otherwise harmful.
According to Latypova, the fact that BARDA receives and quality checks the vaccines means the vaccines and COVID-19 countermeasures are subject to different protocols than typical FDA-approved or FDA-authorized products.
According to BARDA’s Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) documents outlining its procedures for receiving and inspecting medical countermeasure products, which Children’s Health Defense obtained through a FOIA request, materials ordered by BARDA have their own process of approval.
Products are shipped from the manufacturer to BARDA. Prior to delivery, BARDA receives the lot number and a certification from the producer that says the product meets its established specifications and contains other technical information such as lot number, etc.
BARDA’s RQA team then receives sealed trucks, makes sure documentation is in order and temperature control is maintained, watches the unloading, and “conducts a cursory examination of obvious physical damage.”
BARDA does not test or verify the contents of the vials it receives. It simply accepts the claims in the manufacturers’ paperwork.
And the products from BARDA, according to the SOP, go into storage at a Strategic National Stockpile site, which, unlike typical pharmaceutical storage sites, is also not subject to regulations.
Pharmacy distribution is licensed on a state-by-state basis. Those regulations are typically extensive as seen, for example, in the Pharmacy Lawbook for the state of California that Latypova posted.
It was previously known that the FDA exempted COVID-19 countermeasures from many of these requirements, justifying that exemption based on the public health emergency.
In May, the FDA extended that exemption beyond the May 11 end of the COVID-19 public health emergency.
But the BARDA documents reveal how limited the oversight provided for the receipt and inspection of countermeasures is in practice.
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Tulsi Gabbard warns Biden pushing world toward nuclear war
Press TV – July 2, 2023
Former US presidential contender and ex-lawmaker Tulsi Gabbard has slammed US President Joe Biden over his war-mongering, accusing the octogenarian leader of pushing the world towards a nuclear war over Ukraine.
Speaking on Saturday at a meeting in a university in Centennial in the US state of Colorado, Gabbard said the Biden administration’s war-mongering policy was shoving the world on the brink of nuclear disaster.
“We are faced with the reality. Now, President Biden’s actions and policies have pushed us to the brink of nuclear war,” she said.
The former Democratic lawmaker from Hawaii warned that the US-led proxy war against Russia posed an “existential crisis”, threatening the very existence of humanity.
“This is an existential crisis, not only for us here but the world. This proxy war against Russia using the Ukrainian people’s lives continues to escalate,” Gabbard said in her speech which was broadcast on her social media.
She insisted that it was time for a reality check to see if Biden and his lackeys had any awareness of the risk and dangers of delivering more and deadlier weapons to Ukraine, saying it would “only increase the likelihood” of a possible direct confrontation between the US-led NATO forces and Russia.
“Now if you hear President Biden and his administration … talk about this, they talk about World War III and nuclear war as though it is just another war, just another conflict … it is so far removed from the reality … they are not being honest with the American people what the cost and consequences of these wars would look like,” Gabbard added.
Study Finds Xanax, Valium Associated With Brain Injury, Suicide
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | July 1, 2023
About 30 million Americans are taking benzodiazepines like Xanax, Valium, and Klonopin- about 12.5% of the adult population. Doctors and psychiatrists have prescribed these drugs for decades to treat anxiety. But a new study reveals “benzodiazepine usage and discontinuing usage” can create “nervous system injury and negative life effects.”
Researchers from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus said as patients enter the discontinuation phase of Xanax, Valium, and Klonopin, they face significant withdrawal symptoms.
“Despite the fact that benzodiazepines have been widely prescribed for decades, this survey presents significant new evidence that a subset of patients experiences long-term neurological complications,” said Alexis Ritvo, M.D, M.P.H., an assistant professor in psychiatry at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and medical director of the nonprofit Alliance for Benzodiazepine Best Practices. She said the medical community must reevaluate how it prescribes benzodiazepines.
The study was a collaborative effort between CU Anschutz, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and several drug advocacy that specializes in raising awareness of benzodiazepine harms.
“Patients have been reporting long-term effects from benzodiazepines for over 60 years. I am one of those patients. Even though I took my medication as prescribed, I still experience symptoms on a daily basis at four years off benzodiazepines. Our survey and the new term BIND (benzodiazepine-induced neurological dysfunction) give a voice to the patient experience and point to the need for further investigations,” said Christy Huff, MD, one of the paper’s coauthors and a cardiologist and director of Benzodiazepine Information Coalition.
About 76.6% of the respondents had long-lasting symptoms after discounting the use of benzodiazepines. Almost half of the respondents had these ten symptoms for more than a year:
- low energy
- difficulty focusing
- memory loss
- anxiety
- insomnia
- sensitivity to light and sounds
- digestive problems
- symptoms triggered by food and drink
- muscle weakness
- body pain
The most alarming part of the study was the symptoms listed above were new and distinct and weren’t experienced before respondents used Xanax, Valium, and Klonopin. Many respondents reported damaged relationships, job loss, and increased medical costs. Also, 54.4% of the respondents reported suicidal thoughts or attempted suicide.
But don’t worry because doctors and the government tell us benzodiazepines are safe, just like they said OxyContin wasn’t addictive in the 1990s.
Israel backs down on threats to bomb Iranian nuclear sites
The Cradle | July 1, 2023
Israel is not planning to attack Iran’s nuclear sites, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s national security adviser said on 30 June, as indirect talks between Tehran and Washington regarding the nuclear issue have continued in recent weeks.
Asked whether an Israeli decision on a preemptive strike against Iran was any closer, Tzachi Hanegbi said:
“We are not getting closer because the Iranians have stopped, for a while now, they are not enriching uranium to the level that, in our view, is the red line.”
Hanegbi added: “But it can happen. So we are preparing for the moment.”
For several decades, Israel and the US have accused Iran of being “weeks away” from building a nuclear weapon. However, Iran says its nuclear industry is for peaceful purposes, including energy, and has stressed that Islam forbids pursuing weapons of mass destruction.
Hanegbi said it was still unclear what would come of the US-Iran talks. Still, he insisted that if an agreement is signed between Israel’s primary sponsor and main enemy during the indirect talks that began in Oman, this will not obligate Israel to abide by it.
Last week, Netanyahu said at a cabinet meeting that Israel opposes any interim agreement between the US and Iran regarding the latter’s nuclear program.
Israel opposed the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and celebrated when Donald Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018.
The deal limited Iranian uranium enrichment to 3.67 percent. After the US withdrew from the agreement, Iran began enriching to 60 percent, which is still far from the 90 percent needed for use in a nuclear weapon.
“We also tell [the US] that even… ‘mini agreements,’ in our opinion, do not serve our goals, and we oppose those as well,” Netanyahu recently stated.
At the same time, US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan reportedly accused Israeli officials of leaking information about the indirect US-Iran talks while complaining that the leaked information was inaccurate.
This included claims that the Biden administration seeks to reach an informal deal with Iran limiting its nuclear enrichment to bypass getting approval from Congress.
According to the New York Times, the US seeks an agreement that would include a pledge by Tehran not to enrich uranium beyond 60 percent purity, to better cooperate with UN nuclear inspectors, to stop attacks on US forces in Iraq and Syria, to avoid providing Russia with ballistic missiles, and to release three American-Iranians held in the Islamic Republic.
In exchange, the US would release billions in seized Iranian funds, commit not to impose additional sanctions, and not take action against Iran in international forums such as the UN and IAEA.
