As Russian troops entered Ukraine, the government in Kiev ordered the“emergency destruction” of pathogens including plague and anthrax at US-funded laboratories near the Russian border, the Ministry of Defense in Moscow claimed on Sunday. Earlier rumors that the Russian military was targeting US-run biolabs were written off as conspiracy theories, but the ministry has promised to back up its claims with documents.
“We have received documentation from employees of Ukrainian biolaboratories on the emergency destruction on February 24 of especially dangerous pathogens of plague, anthrax, tularemia, cholera and other deadly diseases,” read a statement from the ministry.
The statement accused the “Kiev regime” of conducting an “emergency cleansing” to hide evidence of the supposed biological weapons program, which the ministry claimed was funded by the US, and involved the production of “biological weapons components” at at least two laboratories in the cities of Poltava and Kharkov, both of which have seen intense fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces in recent days.
The documents published by the ministry purportedly include an order from the Ukrainian Ministry of Health to destroy the pathogens, and lists of the germs in question.
RT can not independently verify the authenticity of these documents. Russia’s Defense Ministry said that they are currently being analyzed by radiation, chemical and biological protection specialists.
“In the near future we will present the results of the analysis,” the ministry said, adding that it believes the documents will prove that Ukraine and the US were violating Article 1 of the UN Biological Weapons Convention. The US, Ukraine and Russia are among more than 180 parties to this treaty, and under Article 1 of the agreement, all parties agree “never under any circumstances to develop, produce, stockpile, acquire, or retain” biological weapons.
As of the moment of this article’s publication, Washington has not commented on the ministry’s claims, and neither has Kiev.
In the initial days of Russia’s military offensive last month, claims circulated online that Russia was targeting western-funded biolabs with missile strikes. These allegations were never verified and were derided by western sources as conspiracy theories, although the Pentagon has publicly stated that it works with the Ukrainian government to “consolidate and secure pathogens and toxins of security concern in Ukrainian government facilities,” for “peaceful research and vaccine development,” according to the US embassy in Kiev.
In April 2013, Dzhokkar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev were framed as patsies for what was called the Boston Marathon bombing.
Local police lethally shot brother Tamerlan near Watertown, MA.
Dzhokhar was arrested, falsely charged, convicted and sentenced to death.
Neither brother was involved with the incident, a state-sponsored false flag.
Like many times before in the US, innocent patsies were wrongfully punished, innocence not enough to save them.
At the time, Dzhokhar’s father, Anzor, said his sons had nothing to do with the bombings.
US “special services went after them because my sons are Muslims, and don’t have anyone in America to protect them.”
“I’m sure about my children, in their purity. I don’t know what happened or who did this… I fear for my son, for his life.”
Neither son was trained or had knowledge of explosives or firearms.
Their mother, Zubeidat, said both sons were set up.
FBI operatives followed them for years.
Her eldest son Tamerlan “was controlled by the FBI, like for three, five years,” she said.
“They knew what (he) was doing.”
“They knew what actions were and what sites on the Internet he was (accessing).”
“They used to come (to our) home.”
“They used to talk to me.”
‘They were telling me that (Tamerlan) was really an extremist leader and that they were afraid of him.”
“They told me whatever information he is getting, he gets from these extremist sites.”
“They were controlling him.”
“They were controlling his every step (and) now they say that this is a terrorist act.”
“Never ever is this true. My sons are innocent.”
Asked if they had secret aspirations and dark secrets, she said:
“That’s impossible. My sons would never keep a secret.”
In July 2020, US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit panel unanimously overturned Dzhokhar’s death sentence, saying:
The trial judge failed to adequately question jurors about their exposure to pretrial publicity about the incident.
Weeks later, Trump regime AG William Barr vowed to “do whatever’s necessary” to appeal the decision and “pursue the death penalty” against Dzhokhar.
In October 2020, the (In)justice Department filed a petition for writ of certiorari, seeking Supreme Court intervention in the case.
On Friday, the Supremes reinstated the death penalty against wrongfully convicted Dzhokhar by a 6 – 3 majority ruling.
He had nothing to do with placing one of two so-called “pressure cooker” bombs near the April 2013 Boston Marathon’s finish line — killing three, injuring around 260 others.
Writing for the Court’s majority, Clarence Thomas falsely said the following:
“The Sixth Amendment nonetheless guaranteed him a fair trial before an impartial jury (sic).”
“He received one (sic).”
“The judgment of the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit is reversed.”
Justices Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett allied with Thomas to reverse the First Circuit’s ruling.
Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor dissented.
Dzhokhar is serving a life sentence at Colorado’s ADX Florence prison — the sole federal supermax facility.
According to the DOJ’s National Institute of Corrections, supermax confinement is in “special housing unit(s), maxi-maxi, maximum control facilit(ies), secured housing unit(s), intensive management unit(s), and administrative maximum penitentiar(ies.).”
They’re “highly restrictive, high-custody housing units within a secure facility.”
They “isolate inmates from the general prison population and from each other due to grievous crimes, repetitive assaultive or violent institutional behavior, the threat of escape or actual escape from high-custody facility(s), or inciting or threatening to incite disturbances in a correctional institution.”
In a 1999 report titled, “Supermax Prisons: Overview and General Considerations,” the DOJ said the following:
“Although “concentration, dispersal, and isolation are not new, the development of ‘supermax’ prisons is a relatively recent trend.”
“Prisons always had “prisons within the prison” for their worst inmates (usually called administrative segregation), and most states operate one or more facilities for their most threatening inmates.”
They’re for society’s “worst of the worst.”
Alcatraz was the prototype until closed in 1963.
Prison wardens aware of cruel and unusual punishment in supermax confinement call it a fate “worse than death.”
Prisoners are confined to windowless single cells about 7 by 12 feet for up to 23 hours a day, with a shower and concrete bed.
Inmates have few if any programs.
Little constructive activity is offered.
Few visits are allowed, almost no direct contact ones.
There’s very little human contact overall.
Most inmates are incarcerated for life. For others, sentences are determinate.
Imagine being isolated in less than 100 square feet of windowless space with nearly no human contact for the rest of your life — especially if young, like Dzhokhar, when confined.
A fate worse than death indeed.
A Final Comment
Longterm isolated confinement crushes the mind and spirit, along with taking a horrendous physical toll — over time causing:
severe anxiety
panic attacks
lethargy
insomnia
nightmares
dizziness
irrational anger, at times uncontrollable
confusion
social withdrawal
memory loss
appetite loss
delusions and hallucinations
mutilations
profound despair and hopelessness
suicidal thoughts;
paranoia
For many, a totally dysfunctional state and inability ever to live normally outside of confinement.
Prisoner anecdotes describe the experience:
“People come in with a few problems and leave as sociopaths.
You’re like a “caged animal. I’ve seen people just crack and either scream for hours on end or cry.”
Isolation “creates monsters (who) want revenge on society.”
We “have a sense of hopelessness. Plus my anger (is) a silent rage…I am beginning to really hate people.”
“They…try to break a person down mentally (and) mental abuse leaves no evidence behind (like) physical abuse.”
Others say isolation is like being buried alive in a tomb.
When longterm, it often causes irreversible psychological trauma and harm, a condition no society should inflict on anyone, nor should lawmakers allow it.
Yet thousands in the US are irreversibly harmed this way, including wrongfully convicted victims of injustice like Dzhokkar.
Joe Biden’s current crop of senior policy aides, led by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, have helped create one of the most significant foreign policy crises in modern history. It’s time for a new slate of advisers.
Despite having served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for decades, US President Joe Biden is not an expert on Russia. His Senate experience, which includes providing critical support for NATO expansion, when combined with the leading role he played in managing Ukraine policy under the administration of President Barack Obama, have slanted Biden’s world view of Russia, married as it is to the very policies that Moscow is currently challenging. Biden shared a worldview with fellow Senate hawk John McCain, who once quipped that “Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country,” clearly not understanding just how important a gas station is to economies dependent upon fossil fuels for their very survival. Biden has called Putin a “killer,” showing little regard for either fact or diplomatic norms.
But perhaps the most egregious display of the lack of fundamental appreciation Biden has regarding Russia and its role in global geopolitics is comments made by the US president to the press following his June 17, 2021 meeting with Putin in Geneva. He was asked if he had taken away anything from his talks with the Russian president that indicated, as the reporter put it, “that Mr. Putin has decided to move away from his fundamental role as a disrupter, particularly a disrupter of NATO and the United States?” Biden responded with an answer that underscores just how little he understands of Russia, Russian policy, and the geopolitical realities of the present day.
“I think that the last thing he [Putin] wants now is a Cold War. Without quoting him – which I don’t think is appropriate – let me ask a rhetorical question: You got a multi-thousand-mile border with China. China is moving ahead, hellbent on election, as they say, seeking to be the most powerful economy in the world and the largest and the most powerful military in the world. You’re in a situation where your economy is struggling, you need to move it in a more aggressive way, in terms of growing it. And you – I don’t think he’s looking for a Cold War with the United States,” Biden said.
Less than eight months later, it is the United States that stands accused of pursuing a “Cold War” agenda, one that has brought Beijing and Moscow together in unprecedented fashion, united by the perceived threat posed by the US and its allies. In a comprehensive joint statement issued following the meeting between Putin and Xi Jinping in Beijing on Friday, Russia and China called on all states “to protect the United Nations-driven international architecture and the international law-based world order” as opposed to the “rules-based international order” being promulgated by the Biden administration. This is a shot across the bow of the US and its allies, informing them that their continued efforts to breathe relevance into archaic structures imposed on the world in the aftermath of the Second World War will not go unchallenged.
President Biden is facing a new policy debacle, one that has massive geopolitical consequences. The US cannot afford to emerge from the current situation having had its bluff called by both Russia and China; nor can it prevail by going all in, initiating a conflict where neither it nor its allies are positioned to prevail. As the principal architects of the “rules-based international order” posture that dominates US foreign policy today, neither Biden nor his two principle foreign policy advisers, Blinken and Sullivan, are either ideologically or intellectually capable of changing course, preferring to run the ship of state aground in defense of their so-called “principles.”
All three individuals have had their global vision vis-a-vis the US and Russia shaped by a collective of ersatz Russian experts, led by the likes of Michael McFaul, Anne Applebaum, Susan Glasser, Masha Gessen, Steven Hall, John Sipher, and their ilk – people whose ignorance of the reality of Russia is only surpassed by their singular focus on the person of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, as the personification of evil. Any influence such individuals – former diplomats, academics, intellectuals, and spies – have on current policy formulation and implementation, however, is indirect; none of them have a seat in the rarified air of policy formulation and implementation as directed from within the White House.
If the US is to have any hope of being able to emerge from its current policy journey with an outcome that differs from the fate enjoyed by the Titanic, it will need a cohort of genuine Russian experts who have the access necessary to advise the president at a time and place that makes such advice a part of the deliberations that occur before policy is acted on. Any such counsel, if previously offered, was disregarded in favor of the “rules-based international order” focus being marketed by Biden, Blinken, and Sullivan. At some point, however, Joe Biden as the chief executive must realize he is promulgating failed concepts. While it might be too much of an ask to have him cashier the architects of this policy debacle, the president would do well to raise the stature, so to speak, of the few voices of reason that are part of his inner circle.
For anyone hoping that the US military establishment would rise to the occasion, guess again. There was a time when US general officers were schooled in the art of combined arms warfare as practiced in Europe against a Soviet-style enemy; those days are gone. The current crop of generals, led by Mark Milley, have made a career out of fighting (and losing) low-intensity conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and, in the process, overseeing the transformation of the US military from a world-class fighting force to a bloated edifice unable to meaningfully project power into anything other than permissive counterinsurgency conflicts. Milley’s “feel” for large-scale conventional conflict is purely theoretical, as reflected in his recent briefing to Congress about his assessment of alleged Russian invasion plans regarding Ukraine.
There was a time when the US military produced the finest Russian Foreign Area Officers (FAOs) imaginable, experts on Russian language and culture who were able to provide sound advice to senior policy makers, military and civilian alike. These officers were well-grounded in the realities of what war with Russia (back then, the Soviet Union) could entail, having served several tours in combat and combat support units that were focused on just that task. The training was more than just academic – these officers went on to serve in utilization tours that put them on the frontline of the Cold War, either at the US Military Liaison Mission in Potsdam, East Germany, where they kept close tabs of the Soviet Group of Forces, Germany, or as military attaches in Moscow or other Warsaw Pact capital cities. The pinnacle of the FAO experience was to be assigned as the defense attache in Moscow. Here, one oversaw intelligence collection in support of national security objectives and provided direct advice to the US ambassador, the joint chiefs of staff, and the White House.
Today, the Russian-Eurasian Foreign Area Officer program is but a shadow of its former self, producing officers who are more political than military. Alexander Vindman, an Army Eurasian FAO who testified during the first impeachment hearings against then-President Donald Trump, is an example. So, too, is Brittany Stewart, the military attache to the US Embassy in Kiev who, during a tour of the Donbass region, was photographed wearing a patch bearing the “Ukraine or Death” skull insignia of a Ukrainian brigade. So shallow is the field of available expertise that the current defense attache to Moscow, Rear Admiral Philip Yu, is a China FAO with virtually no experience in US-Russian military affairs.
Contrast this with the defense attache assigned to Moscow during the August 1991 coup, Army Brigadier General Gregory Govan. He had served two tours of duty in Potsdam, and three total tours of duty in Moscow as an attache. When either the US ambassador or senior policy makers in Washington, DC had questions about the Soviet military, they picked up the phone and called a genuine expert. Moreover, Govan was no ideologue – his article on the “Spirit of Torgau” captured his deep appreciation of history and culture which made his advice more powerful.
Defense attaches are but one part of a larger diplomatic presence run out of the US Embassy in Moscow that is overseen by the ambassador. During Govan’s tenure, the US ambassador was Jack Matlock, a career diplomat and one of the most experienced and knowledgeable Russian experts in the State Department.
Admiral Yu, by contrast, reports to John Sullivan, a political appointee under Donald Trump with significant government experience, primarily as a lawyer, but no real expertise on Russia. In short, at one of the critical moments in US-Russian history, Washington has a politically appointed lawyer as ambassador, advised by a naval officer whose specialty is China. Recognizing the political role played by ambassadors, the State Department backstops them with career foreign service officers who serve as the Deputy Chief of Mission (DCM). Jack Matlock’s DCM was James Collins, like Matlock a top-level Russian expert. Sullivan’s DCM is Bartle Gorman, whose background is diplomatic security.
With the US Embassy in Moscow unable to provide anything more substantive than a current events update, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, secretary of state, and national security adviser trapped in their own ideological prison, the burden of providing genuine expertise on matters pertaining to Russia falls on the shoulders of three individuals – Victoria Nuland, the undersecretary for political affairs; Eric Green, the special assistant to the president and senior director for Russia and Central Asia on the National Security Council; and William Burns, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
While Nuland’s credentials are not to be scoffed at – she has served as a diplomat for more than three decades, during which she acquired solid expertise in European, NATO, and Russian affairs – her role in the 2014 Maidan revolution has limited her utility as someone able to interface with her Russian counterparts effectively and, as such, diminishes her functionality as an adviser. Moreover, Nuland is cut from the same ideological cloth as Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan. Her utility in terms of being able to guide Joe Biden away from a potential conflict with Russia is, at best, indirect – because she so closely mimics the policy positions of Blinken and Sullivan, her advice is muted.
One source of potential policy dissent is Eric Green, a career foreign service officer possessing considerable experience in Russian affairs, including as the State Department’s director, Office of Russian Affairs, Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, and the minister-counselor for political affairs at the US Embassy in Moscow. Green already has the ear of the president, having sat in on every phone call between Biden and Putin, as well as being present during the June 2021 Geneva Summit. Ostensibly Jake Sullivan’s subordinate, Green’s ability to provide advice about potential diplomatic off-ramps regarding the current crisis is real, as is the balance he can provide given the non-political nature of his service history.
The person with the greatest potential to alter the course of the Biden administration’s suicidal Russia policy is, titularly speaking, the least qualified: William Burns, the director of the CIA. However, Burns possesses a resume that is more conducive to back-channel diplomacy than covert operations. Indeed, the title of his 2019 memoir as a diplomat, ‘The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal’, is self-explanatory in this regard. Biden has already made use of Burns’ service, dispatching the CIA director to Moscow in November 2021 to help dampen down tension between the two nations.
Confronted with a looming policy disaster which threatens to undermine US relations with NATO, Europe, and the world at a time when his administration seeks to assert the perception, if not reality, of leadership, it is likely that President Biden will be turning more and more to William Burns to fix the problems created by the incompetence of his secretary of state and national security adviser. Burns may very well find that he is ably backstopped at the National Security Council by Eric Green, whose expertise should supplant the ideological approach taken to date by Jake Sullivan.
Whether Joe Biden will avail himself of the expertise of Burns and Green is yet to be seen. One thing is certain – the journey on which the US is being taken on the advice of Blinken and Sullivan can only lead to embarrassment and ruin. Hopefully President Biden is wise enough to recognize this and bring in those who can help find a diplomatic path towards peace.
Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘SCORPION KING: America’s Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, served in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991 to 1998 served as a chief weapons inspector with the UN in Iraq. Mr Ritter currently writes on issues pertaining to international security, military affairs, Russia, and the Middle East, as well as arms control and nonproliferation.
Public health policies over the past two years have failed to curb covid at all but wrought unmitigated societal devastation. What exactly have they done right?
One of the most intractable impediments to convincing people of straightforward facts relating to the covid vaccines is their instinctive and unshakeable trust of the mainstream medical community, and especially their personal doctor/s.
To that end, here a series of arguments or reasons why it is not just imprudent but irrational to have faith in the mainstream medical community and everyone who relies on them as a primary source of covid vaccine information.
Another objective is to empower people to articulate their clear and reliable intuition that the medical community lacks institutional credibility and objectivity rather than doubt their own intellectual ability.
It is necessary to preface that when I refer to the medical community or establishment, I am not referring to any of the heroic doctors and other professionals who do think and act independently of the mainstream medical community. In fact, you can pretty much apply to them the inverse of all the arguments enumerated below.
Another critical point to keep in mind is that even though most of the arguments below only directly apply to part – or even a select few individuals – of the mainstream medical community, they are nevertheless an indictment of the entire medical community. It is a tightly interwoven, interconnected and insular group that shares information widely through a variety of channels and feedback mechanisms. Information deriving from a corrupted source anywhere in the medical community thus infects the entire medical community. Its insular nature regarding what they consider to be acceptable sources for scientific or medical information means that they largely lack a mechanism for allowing correction of faulty information from an external source.
For the most part, I restricted the arguments presented to those that can be made from premises that are objectively true regardless of where one falls regarding the covid vaccines.
One final point is that the contention that it is irrational to trust the medical community regarding the vaccines is derived from the totality of the evidence. In other words, when there are a dozen major red flags, it is prudent to assume that there is something systematically rotten about the whole system; in this case it that means it would be irrational to regard them as a reliable source of information for anything to do with the covid vaccines.
For the following reasons, the medical establishment is unequivocally untrustworthy regarding the vaccines:
The mother of all biases: The medical community bet every ounce of credibility and authority they had on the vaccines being safe and effective, so they cannot afford to ever admit they were wrong should the vaccines ultimately turn out to have real safety issues
The politicization of the medical community
The insistence on a “One Size Fits All” contrary to fundamental medical practice
The lack of consistent evidentiary standards
Few medical professionals including those involved in making policy or opining on the vaccines have any idea how the vaccines work
They got pretty much everything about covid wrong before the vaccines
The failure to treat covid
The lack of critical or independent thinking by anyone in the mainstream medical community
The medical community failed to convey basic risk stratification
Public health officials used wrong information and spurious data to construct pandemic policies
The medical community never admitted that they made serious mistakes
The denial of natural immunity
Censorship and Fraud
They don’t denounce useless and harmful practices derived from their policies and statements
The medical establishment is riddled with massive financial conflicts of interest
Every specific claim made regarding the vaccines so far has ultimately proven to be false
A significant % of the medical community are genuinely evil people
1. The mother of all biases: The medical community bet every ounce of credibility and authority they had on the vaccines being safe and effective, so they cannot afford to ever admit they were wrong should the vaccines ultimately turn out to have real safety issues
Never in recent memory has there been such a powerful bias afflicting the medical community or public health officials. They have loudly and daily proclaimed in the most definitive ways imaginable that the covid vaccines are absolutely safe and effective, to the point of advocating that people be compelled by various means to get vaccinated. Billions of people followed their advice, and billions more succumbed to their pressure.
If the truth is that these vaccines are not quite as safe as they say, that would mean that potentially millions people died, and perhaps tens or evenhundreds of millions suffered all sorts of horrible injuries because of them, or contracted covid despite vaccination because they were lulled into a false sense of security that the vaccines are essentially impervious and subsequently contracted severe covid disease or even died.
Their credibility would be absolutely blown to pieces. After all, they were as definitive as possible. And they attacked with unrestrained zealotry anyone who dared to even voice a little skepticism. They have publicly humiliated, attacked, defamed, castigated, chastised, mocked and scorned those who refused to accept their proclamations of functionally impervious vaccine safety.
The inherent human impulse to preserve one’s sense of integrity, morality, and righteousness is severely threatened by the prospect of conning the world into a hastily rushed intervention that proved to be the deadliest therapeutic ever released and foisted upon the public.
Another powerful innate human impulse is to preserve oneself from facing accountability for enormously consequential rank negligence – if the vaccines are anywhere near as dangerous and lethal as a growing mountain of data and studies now indicate, “rank negligence” doesn’t even begin to describe the depth of culpability here.
And let’s not forget that not only is their expertise is on the line, but so is the essence of their professional identity. If the medical community got this wrong and people figure it out, the medical community will become a pejorative to many if not most people, an institution completely denuded of credibility and thought of as a modern cult.
This is true as much for the small community doctors as it is for Fauci, for they too are complicit in convincing people that the vaccines were “safe and effective”, albeit on a smaller scale.
In Short: It is not rational to expect that the medical community can be remotely objective about the issues pertaining to the covid vaccines, let alone be willing to admit that the vaccines are not safe, when they are so heavily and intractably invested in the vaccines being as safe as they promised they would be. This is especially true now that they took a significant hit on the efficacy claims as Omicron publicly humiliated them when it shredded any notion that the vaccines could stop transmission, a critical and prominent early claim of vaccine proponents.
2. Politicization of the Medical Community
The medical community has become extremely politicized. Consider the following:
JAMA sacked their President because he had the temerity to defend doctors as not intrinsically racist
the AMA declared that racism is a not only a public health crisis, but is the #1 PH crisis (!)
the inclusion of race in itself as a “risk factor” used for triaging scarce covid treatments
the sudden and radical switch from “a 10-person outdoor funeral was too unsafe to allow” to “27 million people mass protesting George Floyd was somehow not only safe but necessary to address the aforementioned “public health crisis” of systemic racism”
The CDC’s prior advocacy for gun control, calling gun ownership a public health crisis
These are but a few of the numerous and ubiquitous instances of clear political entanglement with what are supposed to be non-partisan medical institutions, showing that political considerations clearly supersede scientific considerations in the most high-profile and impactful sorts of decisions and policies.
Just what the devil are “human-ice interactions”?? This sounds more like pseudo-religious mysticism than anything remotely scientific.
And their conclusion opens with the following declaration:
“Ice is not just ice. The dominant way Western societies understand it through the science of glaciology is not a neutral representation of nature.”
Scientifically, ice is indeed just ice. Apparently, however, scientists understanding a topic solely via the scientific method is “not a neutral representation of nature”.
This used to be my cardinal example of politics conquering the scientific journals, but that was before I came across the study On Having Whiteness:
Ask yourself: just how rotten does the culture in academia have to be for an actual journal to publish the rabid deranged rantings of an unhinged lunatic? (Just imagine if someone tried to publish this sort of vile screed about “Jewishness” or “Blackness”…)
And lest you think that this paper is somehow a one-off exception, here are many more.
In Short: The medical establishment is openly and blatantly political, and has a history of acting against science for political reasons; this means that they are willing to put politics over science.
3. The insistence on a “One Size Fits All” contrary to fundamental medical practice that patients are unique individuals with unique health profiles
One of the cardinal rules of medicine is that every patient is a unique individual with unique medical characteristics that therefore requires individualized treatment. There is certainly no such thing as a treatment that is magically the optimal choice for every one of the hundreds of millions of people in the country.
As the few intrepid inquisitive people who bother to actually read granular scientific literature about the vaccines know, there is considerable variation between types of individuals regarding the vaccine and how best to administer it.
It is axiomatic that different people have different risks from different medical interventions. Or at least it used to be. The myopically focused hyper-aggressive campaign that quite literally every adult and child, man and woman, get vaccinated is contraindicated by all of medical history, and suggests that the medical community literally sees the vaccine as some sort of magical unicorn, something that would be seen in a cult but out of place in the practice of medicine.
The manic obsession to vaccinate even those with so-called “natural immunity” – ie immunity from having been infected with the covid virus – stands as ironclad proof of the morally unhinged and the firmly anti-science character of the medical community’s agenda to vaccinate every living human on the planet.
In Short: The aggressive, unrelenting insistence on the biggest one-size-fits-all in history that everyone get vaccinated is contrary to all prior medical standards and practice; this means that they are at minimum acting and thinking more like cult members than doctors. This also means that they are not treating patients as unique individuals in the same way they used to.
4. The lack of consistent evidentiary standards
It goes without saying that objective, unchanging standards for evaluating evidence is the very definition of scientific research and inquiry.
The utter lack of any standards used for anything Covid related stands as a starkly visible sign of the decidedly unscientific character of the medical community throughout Covid.
Lockdowns were implemented on the basis of a fringe lunatic’s crackpot model. I say “fringe lunatic” because he has a long history of delusional epidemiological predictions of viruses becoming mass-casualty pandemics where the magnitude that he was off by was itself considerably larger than the total actual deaths from the prognosticated pandemic super-killer:
[Imperial College epidemiologist Neil] Ferguson was behind the disputed research that sparked the mass culling of eleven million sheep and cattle during the 2001 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. (Sheep genocide!!) He also predicted that up to 150,000 people could die. There were fewer than 200 deaths.
In 2002, Ferguson predicted that up to 50,000 people would likely die from exposure to BSE (mad cow disease) in beef. In the U.K., there were only 177 deaths from BSE.
In 2005, Ferguson predicted that up to 150 million people could be killed from bird flu. (And then he said maybe 200,000,000!) In the end, only 282 people died worldwide from the disease between 2003 and 2009.
In 2009, a government estimate, based on Ferguson’s advice, said a “reasonable worst-case scenario” was that the swine flu would lead to 65,000 British deaths. In the end, swine flu killed 457 people in the U.K.
And Ferguson is still going strong:
Mask usage and mandates were adopted suddenly and unexpectedly without any sort of scientific rationale whatsoever, at least that was documented in any scientific literature.
Remdesivir was given its EUA on the basis of one trial conducted by its manufacturer, and whose primary endpoint was changed midway (which is something that typically constitutes scientific fraud) when the preselected primary endpoint failed to show that Remdesivir had any efficacy, namely that there was no reduction in mortality or hospitalization. The same story repeated itself for every pharma drug granted approval for a covid indication.
On the other hand, HCQ was demonized despite having hundreds of trials showing very convincingly that it was effective as a prophylaxis and early treatment.
Ivermectin was similarly demonized despite having dozens of RCT’s showing a clear and consistent benefit in all stages of covid.
The same goes for most of the other drugs/treatments used by thousands of doctors worldwide, such as those found in the FLCCC’s protocols – numerous studies showing a clear and consistent significant benefit, and all ignored by the medical establishment and government agencies.
The vaccine trials that provided the “robust” data for the FDA’s approval were a colossal joke. This article is long enough so I’ll avoid going through the details here, but suffice it to say that the Pfizer kids trial simply lied about paralyzing one of the kids in the trial – Maddie de Garay (along with an inhuman ordeal of excruciating agony and mental/emotional trauma). All of the treatment options on the FLCCC protocols have far more robust evidence than any of the vaccines hurriedly rushed out on the skimpiest data imaginable.
In Short: The medical establishment simply cast aside all evidentiary standards (in favor of a particular political agenda); this means that the medical establishment’s culture is against objectivity in science, and lacks the necessary mechanisms or guardrails critical to conducting objective scientific inquiry.
5. Few medical professionals including those involved in making policy or opining on the vaccines have any idea how the vaccines work
Doctors, surgeons, GP’s, infectious disease specialists, OBGYN’s, etc, etc, etc haven’t the foggiest idea of how the covid vaccines work. If you don’t believe me, go ahead and ask your local [fill in the blank] specialist/doctor to explain codon optimization, the proline swaps in the vaccine’s spike protein, self-assembling lipids, the chemical alterations to switch the positive charge of cationic lipids to neutral in a neutral PH, spike biodistribution, lipid biodistribution, and so on.
And it’s not only the vaccines themselves that are ridiculously intricate and complicated. The immune system itself is massive, twisted maze of different types of cells, molecules, pathways, and chemistry that involves the entire human anatomy. Even an experienced immunologist could not possibly predict in advance how the different and truly novel vaccine products would interact with the various human anatomical biomes.
Expert opinion is considered the lowest form of “evidence,” because when it comes to predictions, experts are almost always wrong. Were scientists’ inability to conceive of a plausible mechanism for speculative harms a viable standard to adjudicate safety concerns, the FDA could be largely retired, what with little need for the robust testing regiment all novel therapies and biological agents are subjected to in the face of staunch expert claims of lack of plausibility for unexpected adverse effects to occur. Regrettably, experts seldom recognize the limits of their expertise, and vis-à-vis covid seem unaware that any exist altogether.
In Short: The bottom line is that none of the “experts” and none of the ‘local doctors’ who are telling people the vaccines are safe and effective have any idea of the actual technical underlying science. This means that they cannot possibly provide any scientific insight, credibility, or authority regarding the vaccines.
6. They got pretty much everything about covid wrong before the vaccines
If a particular methodology consistently yields wrong answers, than it can be reasonably assumed that it will continue to do so. It is irrational to trust the same people who got masks, lockdowns, distancing, asymptomatic spread, risk stratification, seasonality, children’s risks from and spreading covid, testing, case data, hospitalization data, mortality rate, etc., etc., etc. dead wrong to suddenly know what they’re talking about when it comes to the vaccines.
And as we will get to later, pretty much every specific statement made about the vaccine that we can test against real-world results has been proven to be dead wrong.
In Short: They were wrong about everything else before the vaccines, and there is no compelling reason to think that they will do better regarding the vaccines.
7. The failure to treat covid
The failure to treat what was allegedly the worst plague in modern times is possibly the greatest medical failure of modern times. This is without considering the war they waged on effective cheap repurposed FDA-approved drugs – simply their failure to ever really treat covid is itself astounding. Quite literally the whole point of doctors is to treat medical maladies and diseases. Never in human history have doctors systematically decided not to even try and treat something, never mind the most pressing existential medical crisis in a century.
Contrast the failure of the medical establishment to treat covid with the amazing success of the thousands of heroic doctors and nurses around the world in treating covid. All that this small minority of doctors did was to simply practice the art of medicine using the tools available to them. In the words of Dr. Brian Tyson, one of the most prolific doctors who treats covid:
If you see inflammation, use anti-inflammatories
If you see blood clots, treat blood clots
If you see pneumonia, treat pneumonia
If you see hypoxemia, treat hypoxemia
If you know it’s viral, use antivirals
If you do nothing, quit practicing!!!
This isn’t complicated. The failure to treat covid is a failure to treat covid.
In Short: The medical community has failed – by choice – to treat covid, allegedly the worst plague in a hundred years; this means that something has replaced their Hippocratic culture and healer mindset as their guiding principle/s.
8. The lack of critical or independent thinking by anyone in the mainstream medical community
Consulting an expert is only meaningful if the expert will apply his or her expertise and judgement to analyze the issue presented. On the flip side, experts who uncritically go along with whatever those atop the medical community’s hierarchy promulgate not only cannot be considered as “expert opinion”, but also indicate that the free-flowing debate that is the lifeblood of scientific inquiry has clotted as though it was invaded by hordes of marauding spike proteins.
One of the more glaringly obvious characteristics of the pandemic is the shocking, Borg-like unanimity among the medical establishment. Pretty much every mainstream doctor on the establishment side is in 100% agreement with 100% of what the establishment says or does 100% of the time.
Exhibit A: Covid treatment. After two years of covid, how many prestigious hospital systems or universities have developed their own covid treatment protocol? Outpatient treatment? Prophylaxis regiment? The answer – again quite shockingly – is ZERO. Every major hospital and academic center has simply just went along with the NIH panel’s recommendations.
And no, that isn’t because they tried and just couldn’t come up with anything. How many medical conferences have been held where frontline doctors got together to share notes and compare clinical experiences, or where the world’s preeminent researchers and protocol designers swapped theoretical possibilities to study? Zero. Is there even an official online platform or portal in either the government or in academia where doctors and clinicians can network in the aforementioned manner? Nope.
So they never bothered to even take the most basic and rudimentary steps to try and develop any treatment protocols for covid.
We’ll get to the censorship and crusading against any dissenters later, but let’s state for now that the medical community literally censoring dissent within their own ranks is also indicative of a lack of independent or critical thinking by the establishment medical community.
In Short: The medical establishment’s members do not think critically or independently of the medical organizations and government agencies; this means that firstly the doctors/medical professionals not in positions of significant authority are not exercising any personal judgement, and second, that the few people in charge of the medical community are not engaging in the sort of rigorous debate that is the basic diligence for scientific analysis as they simply never face any dissenting views when making decisions.
9. The medical community failed to convey basic risk stratification
One of the most basic if not the most foundational axioms in Public Health is to figure out who, and to what degree, is at risk.
So first off, the med community failed to notice the severe age and comorbidity stratification of covid risk. This was obvious immediately as covid set in from the earliest analysis of covid deaths in Italy and from the Diamond Princess cruise ship, to pick 2 prominent examples.
They subsequently compounded this indefensible negligence by failing to communicate this to the public when the medical literature, and more importantly worldwide clinical experience, decisively proved this to be the case.
In order for an individual to make personal health decisions regarding covid, they obviously need to know what the risks and benefits are for them specifically from covid. The failure of the medical community to communicate the most basic risk breakdowns is flat-out dishonest manipulation with the aim to deceive the people into believing that they were at substantially higher risk than they actually were (and they largely succeeded too, as polling showed that in the US for instance on average respondents thought that already midway through 2020 9% of the US population had died from covid, and younger people perceived their personal risk from covid as 1000x (or more) than what it was in reality). That their intent was (allegedly) to prevent covid transmission is not a justification whatsoever; indeed, such arguments are ubiquitous amongst aspiring dictators looking for a superficial façade to grant themselves unlimited emergency powers.
The medical community has even admitted outright to lying to the public. The media (eventually) asked Fauci to explain his original stance advising against public masking in light of his current position that facemasks were the single most important and impactful public health measure in reducing covid transmission. That the media even asked such a question is a testament to the profoundly troubling and seemingly impossible contradiction between his flip-flopping from an unequivocal no on masks to masks being the most powerful policytool in the arsenal. Completely nonplussed by what should have been a humbling recognition of the very real limits of human expertise, Fauci comfortably explained that he had lied in order to protect what were at that time scarce supplies of PPE for healthcare workers.
Fauci would subsequently go on to admit to moving the goalposts on what percentage of the population needed to be vaccinated in order to reach the critical threshold that would end the pandemic spread of covid based on his sense of the mood and sensibilities of the public.
The failure of the medical community to communicate even elementary risk stratification is also at its core base authoritarian paternalism, devoid of compassion or regard for people as individuals.
In Short: Public health officials and doctors are supposed to keep people apprised of the reality of what is going on so that they can make informed and rational personal health decisions, and also to prevent masses of people from seeking medical information from crackpots which inevitably occurs when the medical establishment is clearly not acting in good faith or honestly. That they deliberately failed to do so means that the medical establishment routinely lies to the public, and that it also has an unmistakably elitist & paternalistic culture that looks down derisively upon the ‘peasants’.
10. Public health officials used wrong information and spurious data to construct pandemic policies
The medical community literally used the wrong metrics, information, and data. Imagine if Fauci said that we’re locking down because of the astrological alignment of the North Star relative to the position of Saturn – the position of the North Star in the sky relative to Saturn has nothing whatsoever to do with the pandemic. Same idea here – the medical establishment relied on similarly irrelevant data or information to decide pandemic policy.
And the examples are legion. From models to death data, it was all garbage. Models, especially models written by known fraudulent quacks like Mr. Ferguson, do not provide any sort of reliable information; what they do provide is many ways to imagine a worst-case scenario playing out without a shred of evidence to back it up.
Then there are the various covid metrics. From cases to deaths and everything inbetween, all the metrics were defined so ineptly (and corruptly) that they were rendered meaningless (and numerous radical and novel assumptions were made without any evidence and contrary to all previous conventional medical wisdom and data). Covid deaths due to gunshots and alcohol poisoning. Covid hospitalizations from physical trauma. Covid cases of bits of viral debris or bits of random nucleotide junk amplified by asinine PCR parameters. Test positivity %’s that didn’t account for covid-recovering individual testing multiple times to test out of quarantine. Case counts that didn’t account for increased testing. And so on.
The flip side of this coin is the failure of any government or academic agency/institution – especially the CDC, whose primary raison d’etre is to conduct research on contagious diseases – to even attempt to curate high-quality and granular data on covid.
For instance, the CDC has still two years into the pandemic failed to conduct even once a random antibody seroprevalence sampling for the US. How can you hope to deal with a pandemic virus if you don’t know how many people were infected is a mystery to everyone (at least those of us who aren’t not in public health). This suggests that the CDC and the public health establishment have ulterior motives leading them to prefer ignorance over rigorous data (that might prove highly embarrassing to the medical community…).
(The CDC has also failed to perform even a single autopsy for any reported deaths tied to the vaccines, which suggests that the CDC similarly thinks that ignorance is indeed bliss regarding vaccine injuries and deaths.)
The failure to curate rigorously defined proper metrics was the wholesale rejection of science. Scientific inquiry and analysis requires accuracy and precision. The blasé nonchalant dismissal of proper metrics is a searing indictment that the medical establishment does not practice science as defined by the scientific method.
In Short: The medical community knowingly curated and used corrupted and irrelevant metrics and data to characterize the epidemiology of covid; this means that they ignored the scientific method.
11. The medical community never admitted that they made serious mistakes
The medical establishment, despite their innumerable ‘errors’ that were incredibly destructive to literally hundreds of millions of people across the world, has never admitted that they were wrong to have done what they did about anything. The only exception to this is that once their mistakes and missteps started becoming so obvious that it was impossible to deny them anymore, the medical establishments go-to explanation has been that “science is always evolving and we did the best we could do with the limited data we had”.
The notion that the medical community couldn’t or shouldn’t have done better than they did is sheer lunacy. And their failure to be able to admit that they have even the slightest degree of culpability in the societal devastation wreaked by their policies (more on that later) is, frankly, despicable.
In Short: The medical community refuses to admit that they made any substantial mistakes at any point; this means that they are at minimum detached from reality and unable to learn from past mistakes, ie that they will continue to make the same “mistakes” going forward, including regarding the vaccines. This also is indicative of a powerful “us-vs-them” mentality of the medical community, where they emotionally cannot tolerate the cognitive dissonance of admitting that they (“us”) were wrong and the ‘conspiracy theorists’ (“them”) were right.
12. The denial of natural immunity
The denial that natural immunity provides robust protection against not just reinfection but even from severe disease stands as one of the most blatant and illiterate contentions of the entire pandemic. Immunity following recovery from an infection or disease is as basic and standard Bio101 as it gets. It’s called the immune system.
Now, it is possible to have exceptions. But it is completely illogical and unprecedented to just assert the most radical hypothesis and adopt it as the default without any evidence whatsoever. Furthermore, as the pandemic wore on, the glaring lack of documented reinfection phenomena – anywhere in the world – surely proved the inadequacy of this nonsensical theory. If natural immunity didn’t work, then where were the second waves in nursing homes? They are the most vulnerable to covid, and have the weakest immune systems generally, so surely at least some nursing homes should have experienced subsequent outbreaks of reinfected residents?
Even more indicting, there was clinical evidence that immune specific cells were still circulating in individuals from the 1918 Spanish Flu. And there was also documented clinical evidence of robust SARS-CoV-1 immunity documented 17 years later. So why should SARS-CoV-2 be different with >80% shared genome with SARS1? What exactly was so “novel” about SARS-CoV-2 that the immune system was suddenly and obviously inadequate??
Furthermore, there were a number of studies that documented this thing called “cross-reactive immunity”, whereby immune specific cells acquired from infections mostly with other coronaviruses (that are responsible now for common colds) were able to help out with SARS-CoV-2. So let’s try a basic syllogism:
Immunity from other coronaviruses demonstrated significant neutralizing activity against the other coronaviruses and even against covid.
The immune system produces immune-specific cells against infection by SARS-CoV-2.
The logical conclusion: Immune specific cells generated against covid are effective at neutralizing covid, consistent with historical observation and the fundamental tenets of immunology.
The conclusion of the medical community: Immune specific cells generated against covid don’t work because they are inferior than less-specific immunity from other somewhat related coronaviruses.
I have no idea how the logic works according to the esteemed experts over at the CDC and NIH. I’m pretty sure that they don’t either.
At any rate, this anti-science flat-Earth “immunity-denier” stance by the medical community became even more egregious when the vaccines were rolled out. Now, they had to get us to believe that vaccines would induce reliable and robust immunity after they had spent months explaining how actually getting infected with covid did not.
So let’s go back to our syllogism test:
Immune system exposure to the pathogen that causes covid does not result in the immune system developing strong and effective immune cells against the virus.
Vaccines – which by design are mimicking infection so as to provoke the immune system to respond in a similar manner – will provoke an immune response as if an infection was happening.
The logical conclusion: Assuming premise #1 is true, then the vaccines would be expected to not elicit robust or reliable immunity.
The conclusion of the medical community: The immune response to the vaccine will be robust and reliable, even though the immune response to infection with the real thing is not, and even though there has never been a vaccine that elicited superior immunity to a pathogen than infection.
The only consistency in the logic of the medical community regarding immunity is that if we don’t make it, it’s bad, but if we make it, it’s amazing.
They had no way of knowing that vaccines would produce superior immunity, and certainly had no indication from prior science or from real clinical evidence (and in fact all of the available evidence had and has soundly and unambiguously contradicted them). All they had was this bizarre theory that we’re just going to assume that the immune response to the natural pathogen was of course going to be inadequate, and our designer vaccines will be better because they are producing antibodies to the spike protein which is of course superior, although we have no actual evidence for such a proposition.
There is actually much, much more to say regarding how insane and anti-science the natural immunity denialism by the medical establishment was (and still is), but this should suffice to illustrate the delusional quackery of this position.
In Short: The medical community denied the obvious reality of natural immunity from the beginning without any basis despite this being one of the most radical and wacky theories ever conjured up in the history of the scientific method; and then they did a partial about-face when it came to the vaccines, despite the inescapable contradiction between the two positions; this means that the medical community has been so conditioned to follow anything that is said by the medical “authorities” that they resemble a religious cult more than scientists. It also means that there is no limit to what they will be willing to cast aside of science that was previously held as a foundational truth.
13. Censorship and Fraud
Censorship is a weapon employed by authoritarians to hold onto their power – a mafioso intellectual thuggery that remains the last refuge of charlatans cornered by the truth.
I’m putting censorship and fraud together because censorship in science is by definition fraud — the process of scientific inquiry is to debate different hypotheses and test various options; if some are censored, then the scientific inquiry is being conducted fraudulently.
So… who remembers the original letter to Nature that became the justification to portray the “lab leak hypothesis” as a lunatic conspiracy theory? And let’s not forget the Great HCQ Fraud Paper (What is… Surgisphere?) that got published in The Lancet, which was the catalyst for government agencies and medical organizations around the world to suspend HCQ even from ongoing active trials. The paper whose data was entirely fabricated out of thin air. And it was far from the only corrupt fraudulent paper published.
Then there is the newest fad in academic medicine: Retractions. Papers threatening the establishment narrative or “facts” that somehow elide the censors and pass peer review are suddenly without any warning yanked by journals, something that is unprecedented in modern academia. Daniel Horowitz wrote a great article documenting this phenomenon: Retraction serves as the new academic censorship.
And lets not forget the now-infamous Ouchy-Fauci emails that were openly plotting in plain English to “takedown” the Great Barrington Declaration & the universally acclaimed preeminent epidemiologists who authored it. If trying to depict world-renowned expert epidemiologists as fringe in order to disabuse the public of their considered expert opinion isn’t censorship, I don’t know what is.
And then there is the entire regime of threatening to yank the license, and even possibly investigate criminally, any medical professional who is judged to be guilty of spreading “covid disinformation”. Literally straight out of the Soviet playbook.
So although Big Tech seems to get all the attention as censors, the medical community seem to be far better at it in some respects. After all, if the big medical journals keep out “unapproved” opinions, how will the majority of the medical community – the front-line doctors, nurses, etc who don’t do their own research but rely on their weekly emails from various medical societies or journals of that week’s “notable” developments – be able to stay abreast of actual developments and research? It is no wonder that the vast, vast majority of doctors are so illiterate and ignorant.
In Short: The medical community has engaged in a wholesale, all-out censorship regime in order to eliminate any dissenting facts, data, and expert opinions that challenge their preferred narrative; censorship always and everywhere is the attempt to hide the truth from public view.
14. They didn’t denounce useless and harmful practices derived from their policies and statements
If someone distorts your opinion egregiously in a way that makes it look insane, you would protest, especially regarding a national policy that affects >330 million people. In addition to making you look like a fool, such distortions will deter people from accepting your policies.
Yet, we were treated to all manner of theater of the absurd, such as wearing masks when alone in your car or outside, and even when taking a shower. My parents were recently on a packed flight whereupon the plane landing, the stewardess kindly reminded the passengers to please be mindful to socially distance while getting off the plane. Umm, what now??? Good luck with that.
Then there were the insane policies, like Governor Whitmer in Michigan banning people already in a store from purchasing “non-essential” items. She irrationally banned gardening at one point of Michigan’s lockdown, the scientific justification of which still remains unclear.
In some states, even driving by yourself was prohibited. So people who were literally going mad cooped up all day in their house who desperately needed to get out for a bit so they didn’t become one of the >25% of people who considered suicide by June 2020 were forbidden to do so. What could possibly justify such a draconian nonsense measure? This list is endless. (If you really want to get a sense of how crazy this all was, just look at the evolution of headlines over at The Babylon Bee from the lockdown months.)
Special emphasis is reserved for restaurant policies: wear your mask into the restaurant but take it off when you sit down only to put it back on when you walk to the bathroom??
To be fair, often enough, it wasn’t the people misinterpreting the scientific catechisms of the elite public health demigods — their policies or statements were frequently objectively incoherent.
Warning: you are entering the Twilight Zone
The initial “15 days to flatten the curve” underwent numerous evolutions to finally reach the status of indefinite emergency without any defined objective or stopping conditions; it has given rise to a host of devastating memes capturing the sheer lunacy, mendacity, hypocrisy and tyranny of the rapidly changing policies.
Masks were initially (and accurately) explained to be not only useless for reducing the community transmission of covid, but likely to be counterproductive as well in the hands of untrained laypeople who would handle them very unsanitarily. But the science made a radical turnabout after a few months, when we were then informed that masks were the single most critical measure in reducing covid transmission. This kabuki theater reached a climax with then-CDC director Robert Redfield picking up his mask, putting it down, holding it up, and then declaring that it provides more protection than a vaccine would (!?!) – all of this during a nationally televised hearing in front of a senate committee. This stood as the most illiterate statement of any prominent public health official over the course of the pandemic until the covid vaccine rollout. Mask mandates were reimposed in numerous jurisdictions following the obvious failure of the vaccines to mitigate covid transmission from the vaccinated. So in hindsight, Dr. Redfield was not really that off base.
The IHME models routinely failed to accurately predict the covid metrics for the day the model was released. These divorced-from-reality IHME models also predicted the imminent overwhelming of hospital capacity in numerous states, which was the catalyst that convinced governors in a few states to infamously compel nursing homes to accept positive covid patients back from hospitals – in order to clear space for the expected tsunami of critically ill covid patients. Besides the obvious stupidity of starting cascades of nursing home outbreaks that would produce many extra and unnecessary severe covid cases that would require hospitalization, why would anyone listen to the doomsday predictions of an algorithm so inept that it couldn’t even accurately capture the metrics that already existed, let alone predict future numbers? This is the equivalent of watching the local weather forecaster saying that there is a thunder storm right now and tomorrow there will be a hurricane as you’re relaxing on the beach under an umbrella to protect you from the sun.
Where did 6 feet come from? Nobody knows really, but the one place it definitely didn’t come from was a scientific publication or study. What difference does it make if we’re standing 6 feet apart or 1 foot apart in an indoor room, and the aerosols carrying the live covid virions could hang in the air for literally days and sometimes weeks? Also unclear, but distancing definitely made people feel better.
What was the minimum age that wearing a mask is safe? That depended on which agency you consulted. The CDC was by far the most optimistic, declaring that masking 2-year-old kids was perfectly ok. The WHO took a far more cautious approach, asserting that masks should categorically not be worn by anyone under the age of 5, and that children under the age of 12 should only wear masks if absolutely necessary and under the supervision of a competent adult. Various European countries fell all over the map in between, in a haphazard manner that resembled a Wonder-8 ball more than science. Although science itself had by then become virtually indistinguishable from shaking a Wonder-8 ball.
Speaking of competent adults, I am fairly confident that no one except perhaps for the teachers union representatives would consider the average public school teacher in Chicago or NYC to be “competent” in the way the WHO’s guidance had in mind.
And for anyone who was wondering what the actual efficacy of masks was, that mostly depended on who was interviewing Fauci that day. To be honest though, Fauci had a tendency not to provide numbers all that much, which left a confused and vexed population to parse the adjectives Fauci used to try and decipher the degree of efficacy of mask wearing for any particular day. For instance, “confers a high degree of protection” meant more efficacy than “it’s better than nothing”. Precisely where “it is undeniable that wearing a mask helps” fell on this scale was left to the individual cable news viewers to figure out for themselves.
Some policies even confounded justices on the Supreme Court, some of whom struggled to grasp for instance why casinos were not a significant covid risk operating at 50% capacity but churches were virtually guaranteed super-spreaders even at a mere 10%.
And who can forget the profound mysteries of viral kinetics that confounded the best and brightest scientists, who were never quite able to explain the precise scientific rationale by which 10-person outdoor funerals were unacceptably risky but 27 million screaming protesters were perfectly safe.
Did anyone once ever hear Fauci call out these excesses? And not just Fauci, but anyone and everyone who was prominent or influential. It’s almost as though they wanted the most draconian, incoherent measures. As every good tyrant and cult leader knows, forced irrationality conditions people to blind, unquestioning obedience.
In Short: The medical community never called out any of the innumerable excesses that were the result of authorities and individuals misinterpreting their policies and statements. This means that they were not perturbed by the obvious unwarranted and false conclusions being assumed by many local policymakers or regular people evident from their own policies, statements or actions.
15. The medical establishment is riddled with massive financial conflicts of interest
The financial conflicts are everywhere. The vast majority of the establishment gets significant money from either the government, a hospital institution, a billionaire-funded non-profit, or Pharma – all of whom will stop the flow of finance the instant the recipient steps out of line. There is an incestuous merry-go-round of high-profile FDA regulators joining Pharma board members. Etc.
In Short: There is an otherworldly degree of financial inducements and pressures on the vast majority of medical professionals and anyone else caught up in the orbit of the mainstream medical institutions to toe the official narrative, or else; this means that they are compromised – and certainly not trustworthy – to think independently, much less to openly defy the establishment.
16. Every specific claim made regarding the vaccines so far has ultimately proven to be false
Here are just a few of the many specific claims made about the vaccines by the medical community that have since been resoundingly debunked:
The injected serum of the vaccine will stay in the area of the injection site
The spike proteins will remain tethered to the cell membrane and won’t escape into circulation
The spike protein is not biologically active
The spike protein has no significant toxicities
No corners were cut in the development or trials of the vaccines
There were no life-altering SAE’s in the Pfizer kids trial
The lipid nanoparticles are safe and won’t circulate all over the anatomy
The vaccines confer superior immunity to natural infection
The vaccines prevent infection & transmission
There are no serious side effects associated with the vaccines
there is no plausible mechanism or basis by which the vaccines can affect fertility
reports of menstrual irregularities are exaggerated and fake
VAERS reports are mostly submitted by random people who are simply assuming without any basis that a random adverse event that happened after vaccination is related to the vaccine
The CDC investigated all of the VAERS reports of death and determined that none were attributable to the vaccine
There is no need for long term observation to determine that there are no serious long term effects
99% of the hospitalizations for covid are unvaccinated patients
There is no basis for a causal link between myocarditis and the vaccines
Myocarditis is an exceedingly rare complication from the vaccines, and everyone is more likely to get myocarditis from covid than from the vaccines
In Short: Every specific thing they said about the vaccines that can be adjudicated so far has turned out to be demonstrably false. Why would anyone trust someone on a topic where everything they say is wrong?
17. A significant % of the medical community are genuinely evil people
In numerous cases around the country, hospitals have refused giving deathly ill covid patients Ivermectin, preferring to see them die rather than recover.
A very simple question: What possible reason could hospitals have to go to court to fight patients they themselves had already given up on, and for whom they had no more treatment options, in order to prevent even outside doctors from prescribing a medication that is safer than Tylenol? And even if you can somehow come up with some sort of justification for the first time, once there were a few of these cases on record, surely there is no rational moral basis for not trying Ivermectin on every patient, let alone fighting in court to ensure that the precious few patients whose families have the temerity to demand Ivermectin should be denied lifesaving treatment??
Whistleblowers have revealed cruel treatment of patients in Covid wards – negligent treatment, letting patients starve to death, putting patients on ventilators unnecessarily and without critical safeguards in place resulting in numerous “covid” deaths, denying patients their vitamins and doctor prescribed medicines, etc.
Society trusted medical professionals due to its ethos of prizing saving life above all else. This is most certainly no longer the case regarding the medical community writ large. At a minimum, a medical community whose culture breeds such contempt for the value of a patient’s life that hospitals will fight in court to deny potentially lifesaving treatment that is essentially cost-free and without any legal liability is a medical profession that has lost all credibility that their overriding concern is saving lives and the welfare of their patients.
Within this context, let us turn to the war on covid treatments more generally.
As practically anyone reading this is undoubtedly aware, at the height of the HCQ political controversy, The Lancet – arguably the world’s top medical journal – published what was initially presented as the coup de grâce to kill HCQ’s viability: the aforementioned Surgisphere study. This study purported to have data from more than 90,000 patients from hospitals on all six inhabited continents showing not only that HCQ had no efficacy against covid, but additionally was toxic and raised the mortality of hospitalized covid patients.
To make a long story short, the entire study was quickly debunked as a massive fraud – literally the entire dataset they had was fabricated out of thin air. And it was obvious to anyone who was even a little bit familiar with the details of how such studies are conducted.
Which all begs the question: Why would the editors and scientists at The Lancet be willing to publish a colossal fraud??
The only rational conclusion from this affair is that they had an overwhelming desire to kill HCQ and debunk it, that was powerful enough to get the editors at the world’s most prestigious medical journal to forever tarnish their reputation by publishing an obvious and wholesale fraud on the most controversial political issue at the time — there wasn’t even a snowball’s chance in a volcano that the fraud wouldn’t be easily spotted and debunked.
Why would they oppose a cheap, safe and widely available drug that could significantly mitigate covid disease??
Why would they quash a potentially effective drug that might save millions of lives if deployed widely, but might result in millions of deaths if denied??
And the medical community has continued to prosecute an organized and systematic war on every cheap and effective covid treatment that is being successfully used by thousands of heroic doctors around the US and around the world.
The FDA even went so far as to publicly tweet out that Ivermectin – pound for pound the most effective covid treatment widely available – was a “horse-dewormer” and potentially very dangerous. This was despite the fact that the discovery of Ivermectin won a Nobel prize in 2015 and is one of the safest drugs ever made, having been dispensed over 4 Billion times over the past few decades without any known toxicities.
There’s one more dimension to point out regarding the genuine evil within a large segment of the medical community: the absolute devastation caused by the covid policies.
Rational Ground has a partial list of lockdown harms (with supporting documentation) that is simply way too long to reproduce here, but it conveys a sense of the scope and destruction inflicted by public health officials worldwide.
Very disturbingly, children bore the brunt of the societally calamitous covid policies. Perhaps the most enduring symbol of the pandemic will ultimately be the useless and abusive masking of children. The institutionalization of child abuse through forced masking in schools, lockdowns, quarantines, the inhuman deprivation of sociality — these are unforgivable sins. And these are all policies that were suggested and implemented by the medical community, who were the driving force behind this unequivocal abomination.
Realize that prior to covid, if a teacher would have disciplined an impossibly unruly and disruptive student by forcing the student to wear a surgical facemask, the teacher would quickly find him/herself under criminal indictment for child abuse. Somehow, though, masking children as young as two (!?!) has become the norm.
For some perspective: Sweden never closed their schools, had no mask policies, and didn’t have a test-and-quarantine regiment. Not one child died from covid and teachers in Sweden tested positive for covid at a slightly lower rate than the occupational average for jobs with a similar covid risk profile.
In Short: A significant portion of the medical community are genuinely evil people responsible for the deaths and suffering of hundreds of millions. The culture of the medical community is sufficiently rotten to the core to not only allow for the ascendance of such evil people to positions of influence and authority, but also celebrate them. Such evil should not be tolerated, nor regarded as an authoritative source for any matter.
Conclusion
There is so much more to say on every issue raised here, but the need for brevity restrains how much can be included.
In summation, with the advent of the covid vaccines we were assured – promised, really – that the mRNA vaccines were truly a once-in-a-generation medical miracle akin to the discovery of penicillin or hand hygiene by physicians.
We were promised. But that’s all we ever had: the guarantee of the medical community. They still won’t let us have meaningful access to the real data or science behind the vaccines. We still don’t have:
the raw data from any of the vaccine trials
any reports from government agencies tasked with vaccine safety monitoring providing details of how they have so far adjudicated the existing pharmacovigilance data such as VAERS
any reports from government agencies tasked with vaccine safety monitoring providing details of the manufacturing and production infrastructure and how it has fared so far
the methodology by which the CDC/FDA/NIH (allegedly) adjudicates potential causality of reported vaccine injuries
access to internal FDA communications regarding their adjudication of the trial data for any of the approved vaccines
access to the military data – probably the dataset that most readily can establish causality per the Bradford-Hill criteria and per common sense – but we have a few whistleblowers alleging that the data has been corruptly altered to expunge reports of vaccine injuries
access to the internal developmental animal studies/experiments conducted by the vaccine companies that are not subject to disclosure requirements by the FDA, but that are typically used by the Pharma manufacturers to characterize their own products for themselves so that they understand exactly how they work and what might happen in real life so that they can figure out in advance how to design trials, depict the product/drug in media, and so on.
access to any reports regarding the manufacturing processes used to create billions of vaccine doses, especially in so short a window – manufacturing capacity was scaled up from zero to billions practically overnight by industry standards, without the typical extensive development of manufacturing capacity that includes myriad levels of reviews and testing to ensure that the manufacturing process is consistent and free of any impurities
access to the copious data filed with the FDA by the vaccine manufacturers that the FDA used to adjudicate awarding the EUA’s, and which the FDA is now lying – yes, openly lying – in court to avoid surrendering the data to a FOIA request. This after the FDA’s initial request for a release timeline that would require 75 years for the full release of the requested documents was rebuffed by the judge in a glimmer of judicial sanity.
All we have to rely on is their word.
After all that has transpired, can it be at all rational to trust them?
On December 16, 2021, ICAN, through its attorneys, issued a Freedom of Information Act request to the CDC seeking any documents reflecting why a certain VAERS report was no longer available in the VAERS database. The report described an extremely disturbing incident wherein a two-year-old boy “began bleeding out of the mouth, eyes, nose and ears within six hours” of his first dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine on November 18, 2021, and died later that night. On February 14, 2022, the CDC finally responded to ICAN’s request, stating: “A search of our records failed to reveal any documents pertaining to your request.”
Significantly, the CDC has made repeatedassurances that “COVID-19 vaccines are being administered under the most intensive vaccine safety monitoring effort in the United States’ history.” The CDC’s VAERS Standard Operating Procedures for COVID-19 even states that the “CDC will perform clinical reviews” for certain “Adverse Events of Special Interest,” which include death, “especially in children (<18 years of age) and recipients of newly licensed vaccines).”
But despite all of these claims of about the unprecedented level of “intensive” safety monitoring of these vaccines, the CDC claims to have no records that would explain why a VAERS report describing the horrific death of a toddler suddenly disappeared from the primary government-funded system for reporting adverse vaccines reactions in the United States, VAERS—a system of which the CDC is a co-sponsor.
ICAN intends to get to the bottom of the disappearance of this deeply disturbing report and will persist in holding the CDC accountable for its purported claims of intensive vaccine safety monitoring.
Two news stories this week reveal how the federal government plans to treat COVID “misinformation” as a crime, and what role tech companies will play in rounding up the “criminal.”
This is truly frightening.
Two U.S. Senators this week introduced a bill to provide tech companies cover via legislation that could make it possible for Congress to “legalize” censorship and criminalize First Amendment rights to freedom of speech.
“U.S. Senators Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), both members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, on Wednesday introduced legislation to counter the threat that misinformation and disinformation pose to public health as evidenced by the widespread false narratives throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The Promoting Public Health Information Act would support efforts across the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and with outside stakeholders to communicate effectively during a public health emergency and address health misinformation.”
Here is what Murphy had to say about the bill:
“Throughout this pandemic, the impact of misinformation has been devastating. Rumors and conspiracy theories about the efficacy of masking or the safety of vaccines still run rampant on social media and have caused thousands of deaths that could have been prevented.
“This legislation will help us get smart about how to tackle misinformation and effectively promote science-based health information, especially as we continue fighting COVID-19 and prepare for future public health emergencies.”
In other words, the feds are asking detailed information about the demographics “exposed to misinformation,” allowing them to determine who’s reading what, and to obtain their names.
Next, in the last paragraph of this New York Timesarticle, “The surgeon general calls on Big Tech to turn over Covid-19 misinformation data,” we learn that the federal government wants citizens to start “sharing” information on “misinformation:”
“‘We’re asking anyone with relevant insights — from original research and data sets to personal stories that speak to the role of misinformation in public health — to share them with us,’ Dr. [Vivek] Murthy said.”
Isn’t that sweet?
This is how they dress up the Stasi in 21st-century euphemism to encourage ratting out your friends and neighbors: “Please share with the feds. They care what you think.”
Sure they do.
According to the Times :
“President Biden’s surgeon general on Thursday formally requested major tech platforms submit information about the scale of COVID-19 misinformation on social networks, search engines, crowdsourced platforms, e-commerce platforms and instant messaging systems.
“The request for information from the surgeon general’s office demanded tech platforms send data and analysis on the prevalence of COVID-19 misinformation on their sites, starting with common examples of vaccine misinformation documented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“The notice asks the companies to submit ‘exactly how many users saw or may have been exposed to instances of COVID-19 misinformation,’ as well as aggregate data on demographics that may have been disproportionately exposed to, or affected by, the misinformation.
“The surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, also demanded information from the platforms about the major sources of Covid-19 misinformation, including those that engaged in the sale of unproven Covid-19 products, services and treatments.
“‘Technology companies now have the opportunity to be open and transparent with the American people about the misinformation on their platforms,’” Murthy said in an emailed statement. He added: “‘This is about protecting the nation’s health.’”
“Companies have until May 2 to submit the data. Denying requests for information does not carry a penalty, but the notice is the first formal request from the Biden administration of the tech companies to submit COVID-19 misinformation data, according to the surgeon general’s office.
“Six months ago, Murthy used his first formal advisory to the U.S. to deliver a broadside against tech and social media companies, which he accused of not doing enough to stop the spread of dangerous health misinformation — especially about COVID-19. He called the misinformation “an urgent threat to public health.”
“The request for information is part of President Biden’s National COVID-19 Preparedness Plan, which the White House detailed on Wednesday and which is a road map for a new stage of the pandemic where COVID-19 causes ‘minimal disruption,’ according to the White House.
“Biden first revealed details of the plan during his State of the Union address Tuesday night.
“In addition to demanding misinformation data from the tech platforms, the surgeon general called on healthcare providers and the public to submit information about how COVID-19 misinformation has negatively influenced patients and communities.
“‘We’re asking anyone with relevant insights — from original research and data sets to personal stories that speak to the role of misinformation in public health — to share them with us,’” Murthy said.”
Meryl Nass, M.D., ABIM, is an internist with special interests in vaccine-induced illnesses, chronic fatigue syndrome, Gulf War illness, fibromyalgia and toxicology.
President Biden during Tuesday’s State of the Union address falsely claimed the billion-dollar gun manufacturing industry is the only industry in the U.S. that can’t be sued — when in fact, vaccine makers in the U.S. have total liability protection for injuries or deaths caused by COVID vaccines.
“Repeal the liability shield that makes gun manufacturers the only industry in America that can’t be sued,” Biden said. “These laws don’t infringe on the Second Amendment. They save lives.”
CNN fact-checked Biden’s claim and said it was “false.”
“Gun manufacturers are not entirely exempt from being sued, nor are they the only industry with some liability protections,” CNN said. “Under the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, gun manufacturers cannot be held liable for the use of their products in a crime.”
But gun makers can be held liable for “negligence, breach of contract regarding the purchase of a gun or certain damages from defects in the design of a gun.”
According to CNN:
“Other industries also have some exemptions in liability. For example, vaccine manufacturers cannot be held liable in a civil suit for damages from a vaccine-related injury or death. And for the next four years, pharmaceutical companies developing the Covid-19 vaccines will have immunity from liability under the 2005 Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act.
“Those who claim to have been harmed by vaccines may receive money from the government, not the pharmaceutical company, via the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.”
Although CNN was correct that vaccine manufacturers cannot be held liable for harm caused by vaccines, those injured by COVID vaccines cannot seek compensation under the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP).
Instead, claims must be submitted through an obscure government program called the “Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP).” The CICP, which almost never awards money, is the only program that accepts claims related to COVID vaccines and other COVID countermeasures.
There are important differences between the two programs that make it more difficult to get compensation through CICP, which is run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Vaccine makers are exempt from liability, the injured have no recourse
The NVICP, a special, no-fault tribunal housed within the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, handles injury claims for 16 common vaccines. To date, it has awarded more than $4 billion to thousands of people for vaccine injuries.
It is difficult to obtain compensation within the NVICP. Payouts, including attorneys’ fees, are funded by a 75-cent tax per vaccine. There is a $250,000 cap on pain and suffering. The proceedings are often turned into drawn-out, contentious expert battles and the backlog of cases is substantial.
The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 established the NVICP, and U.S. Supreme Court Decision, Russell Bruesewitz et al v. Wyeth et al, guaranteed vaccine manufacturers, doctors and other vaccine administrators almost always have no legal accountability or financial liability in civil court when a government-recommended or mandated vaccine(s) causes permanent injury or death.
As for the CICP, only about 8% of the people who have applied for compensation for vaccine injuries have ever received payouts. The statute of limitations for the CICP is one year from the time of injury and the program does not cover attorney fees.
The agency’s website outlines the parameters of the program, which is authorized by the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (or PREP) Act.
In March 2020, HHS issued a PREP Act Declaration covering “COVID tests, drugs and vaccines,” providing liability protections to manufacturers, distributors, states, localities, licensed healthcare professionals and qualified persons who administer COVID countermeasures.
A PREP Act declaration is specifically for the purpose of providing immunity from liability, which is why people who are injured by COVID vaccines can’t seek redress via the NVICP.
To be compensated by the CICP for a COVID vaccine injury, it must be established, based on “compelling, reliable, valid, medical and scientific evidence,” that the injury or death was directly caused by the vaccine.
The program provides compensation only for medical expenses, lost employment income and survivor death benefits as “the payer of last resort,” covering only what remains unpaid or unpayable by other third parties such as health insurance.
A detailed chart of alleged injury claims filed with the CICP includes anaphylactic shock, myocarditis and blood-clotting disorders. Other conditions listed involve claims affecting virtually all major health systems including appendicitis, hearing loss, kidney injury, arthritis and depression.
As of Feb. 1, the CICP had approved only one COVID vaccine-related claim, but that claim has not been paid out.
Since the program’s inception in 2010, 7,033 claims have been filed, but only 29 claims were compensated, with an average payout of around $200,000. The other 452 claims (91.4%) were denied. Ten claims won approval but were deemed ineligible for compensation.
According to the most recent data from the Vaccine Adverse Reporting System, the primary government-funded system for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S., there have been 24,827 deaths related to COVID vaccines reported as of Feb. 25. Of those deaths, 11,312 cases occurred within the U.S. and 22% occurred within 48 hours of vaccination.
The low number of applicants to the CICP fund for injuries or death from the COVID vaccine suggests people don’t know the program exists.
Families could wait ‘many many years’ for compensation if injury claim approved
According to Sean Greenwood, a vaccine injury attorney in Texas, even if the family does get an approved claim through CICP, they could wait “many many years” to receive compensation.
As The Defender reported Feb. 25, a family whose 21-year-old son developed a life-threatening reaction to Pfizer’s COVID vaccine has been waiting six months to learn if the U.S. government’s CICP will help cover their son’s medical bills.
The family of Kartik Bhakta in August 2021 submitted a claim on behalf of their son. So far, the claim has been ignored. Bhakta’s parents quit their jobs to take care of Bhakta — who is unable to return to medical school — and do not know how they will continue to pay for their son’s medical expenses.
Asked what the family would do if denied assistance, Bhakta’s father replied, “I don’t know. Then why is the government forcing us to take a vaccine if they’re not taking responsibility?”
Kendra Lippy was a healthy 38-year old woman — until she got the Johnson & Johnson (J&J) shot.
Lippy was diagnosed with severe blood clots that subsequently sent most of her organs into failure. She also was left without most of her small intestine and more than $1 million in medical bills that she said the federal government should compensate her for.
Lippy’s case was one of the six that led federal agencies to temporarily pause the J&J shot in mid-April. Her blood clots developed in March. She was hospitalized for 33 days, including 22 days of intensive care.
Lippy wants to see a federal compensation system that is fair to her and others who are harmed by COVID vaccines.
Because the government shielded vaccine makers from liability, she can’t sue J&J. She also doesn’t have a legitimate legal route to sue the government.
Biden extends national emergency to protect COVID vaccine manufacturers
As countries around the world drop COVID restrictions and downgrade the virus to “flu-like status,” Biden on Feb. 18 announced the U.S. national emergency declared in March 2020 for COVID will be extended beyond March 1.
Citing the ongoing risk to “public health and safety” posed by the virus, Biden told House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) — in a letter released by the White House — there “remains a need to continue this national emergency.”
Biden wrote:
“The COVID-19 pandemic continues to cause significant risk to the public health and safety of the Nation. More than 900,000 people in this Nation have perished from the disease, and it is essential to continue to combat and respond to COVID-19 with the full capacity and capability of the Federal Government. Therefore, in accordance with section 202(d) of the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1622(d)), I am continuing the national emergency declared in Proclamation 9994 concerning the COVID-19 pandemic.”
“For this reason, the national emergency declared on March 13, 2020, and beginning March 1, 2020, must continue in effect beyond March 1, 2022,” Biden wrote in a second statement released by the White House for publication in the Federal Register.
The emergency would have been automatically terminated unless, within 90 days prior to the anniversary date of its declaration, Biden notified Congress of his intent to continue it.
Extending the “national emergency” keeps COVID vaccines covered under the PREP act, which allows manufacturers to escape liability for the harms caused by their products.
According to Greenwood, once the government approves the COVID vaccine for children under 5 years old and pregnant women, compensation requests will move over to the NVICP.
It is unknown whether CICP claimants will also be able to file in the NVICP if the COVID vaccine is added to the program.
Megan Redshaw is a freelance reporter for The Defender. She has a background in political science, a law degree and extensive training in natural health.
An innocuous tweet from Russia’s Permanent Representative to International Organisations in Vienna Mikhail Ulyanov earlier today in the afternoon said that he met with the EU Coordinator at the Vienna talks on Iran nuclear issue Enrique Mora and “raised a number of questions which need to be duly addressed now in order to ensure smooth civil nuclear cooperation with Iran.”
A couple of hours later, he again tweeted, “The #ViennaTalks continue. I had today a useful meeting with Deputy Foreign Minister of Iran for Economic Diplomacy Mr. Mehdi Safari.”
Other reports suggest that Russia has put forth a new demand at Vienna that its trade, investment and military cooperation with Iran would not be hindered by US sanctions. Russia seeks written guarantees in this regard at the highest level from the Biden administration. Apparently, Russia put forth this demand a couple of days back.
A few hours ago in the evening, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov confirmed this development. Disclosing this at a press conference in Moscow, Lavrov explained that against the backdrop of the latest western sanctions, Russia wants to have a “very clear answer” from the US in the context of bilateral Moscow-Tehran relations and the Iranian nuclear deal.
In Lavrov’s words, “We need guarantees these sanctions will in no way affect the trading, economic and investment relations contained in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action for the Iranian nuclear program. We have asked the American counterparts, who rule the roost here, to provide us with guarantees at least at the level of the secretary of state [that] the current process launched by the United States will by no means affect our right to free and full-fledged trading, economic, investment, military and technical cooperation with Iran.” [Emphasis added.]
Furthermore, Lavrov also openly backed Iran’s remaining demands, saying that Tehran’s expectations are “quite fair.” Whether Lavrov spoke in consultation with Tehran, we don’t know.
The development comes as the 8th round of negotiations on the restoration of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and the United States’ return to the fold of that multilateral agreement is nearing completion. The negotiators are working on a draft final document. Iran and the IAEA also agreed today on a roadmap with the UN nuclear watchdog to resolve all outstanding questions about the country’s nuclear program by late June, which removes one big stumbling block.
Lavrov calmly pointed out that the sanctions on Russia create a “problem” from Moscow’s perspective. He noted sarcastically, “It would have all been fine, but that avalanche of aggressive sanctions that have erupted from the West — and which I understand has not yet stopped — demand additional understanding by lawyers, above all.”
So, Lavrov insisted: “We want an answer — a very clear answer — we need a guarantee that these [US] sanctions will not in any way touch the regime of trade-economic and investment relations which is laid down in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.”
On Iran’s part, Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian had told EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell only yesterday, “I am ready to fly to Vienna when the Western sides accept our remaining red lines… We are ready to finalise a good and immediate agreement. Most of Iran’s requests have been considered.”
But today, the most anxious person to clinch the deal at Vienna is none other than President Joe Biden himself. After derailing the Russia-Europe energy relationship, Biden is witnessing that the prices for gas are skyrocketing in Europe, and Washington has no solutions to the grave situation that is developing. The spot market price for gas has zoomed to 8 times the price at which Russia had been supplying Germany. (Russia has announced that w.e.f Thursday, it has shut down the Yamal-Europe gas pipeline which is the trunk route transporting gas to German market.)
On the whole, the situation in the energy market is becoming very complicated, as western oil companies which had invested in Russia are forced to quit due to the sanctions. These include big players such as BP which has a 20-percent stake in Russian giant Rosneft, Shell with 27.5 percent stake in the Sakhalin-II LNG facility and a 50 percent stake in the Salym Petroleum Development, ExxonMobil (Sakhalin-1) and so on.
Apart from the impairment these companies will suffer running into tens of billions of dollars, their exit will also strain Russia’s ability to maintain such high production levels and continue to meet its commitments under the OPEC+ agreement. Now, the already-tight global market for crude – which saw Brent crude top $115 per barrel in early Thursday trading – can ill-afford these downstream hits from the sanctions against Russia. Evidently, crude prices still have nowhere to go but up from here. Expert opinion is that if oil price touches $125 per barrel, US economy slides into recession.
Russia has not so far made any direct indications that it will restrict energy exports, though the rhetoric is heating up. Deputy Prime Minister Andrey Belousov warned on Friday that western companies, including energy firms, that are ditching Russia will be considered pushing their Russian subsidiaries to “deliberate bankruptcy,” which under Russian law draws criminal prosecution.
To solve Europe’s problem of high prices, Biden recently swallowed pride and mentioned buying cheap Iranian oil as a response. Western analysts opine that Biden is in a mood to appease the “Iranian hawks” at Vienna. That is to say, US desperately needs both a lucrative energy deal and Iranian cooperation in Vienna. Israeli observers are apprehensive that the Biden administration might go ahead with easing or lifting restrictions on Iranian oil exports even without signing the Vienna agreements!
One big reason behind this panic is that the Biden administration is profoundly concerned about the strong growth of motor fuel prices in the US lately. But on the other hand, any visible US appeasement of Iran at this critical stage will be a sign of weakness, and, surely, Biden will come up for trenchant criticism in the domestic opinion.
Indeed, Lavrov has factored in all these developments while demanding that “at least” Antony Blinken should give a written guarantee. Moscow is paying back for Blinken’s boorishness. Of course, it will be a devastating loss of face for Biden to cave in publicly. Of course, the most awful thing will be that it is not only precedent setting but makes a complete mockery of America’s weaponisation of the dollar!
Europeans too must be wondering what is going on. They have passively sacrificed self-interests vis-a-vis Russia on the basis of Biden’s demands! Nord Stream 2 stands abandoned!
This is going to be a catch-22 situation. For, Russia’s green signal is an imperative for the JCPOA deal to be approved within the framework the joint commission of Iran and the international quintet (Russia, Britain, Germany, China and France.) Besides, Iran will surely expect a formal approval for any deal from the UN Security Council.
On the other hand, if the negotiations at Vienna get prolonged, Iran’s enrichment activities at the accelerated pace will continue and a point of no return may be reached very soon, in a matter of weeks at the most, which will put the Biden administration in an even bigger bind, as the spectre of a nuclear Iran haunts West Asia and Europe.
To be sure, the blowback to the US sanctions has begun. This is of course only the beginning. Trust Russia to go further and further up on the escalation ladder. Russia would have no conceivable reason to cooperate with the US from now onward. (See my blog Ukraine sparks EU, US rush to Iran deal, March 1, 2022)
However, if the chronicle of Russian-American relations is anything to go by, trust Biden to start making entreaties using back channels to Moscow.
Actually, in response to a question at a press briefing in Moscow today evening about the current state of Russia-US relations in view of the developments in Ukraine and the pressure of sanctions, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov remarked cryptically that “We are maintaining certain channels of a dialogue with the United States.” He didn’t elaborate.
As longtime readers of my blog know, I have long maintained that it is the national-security branch of the federal government that runs the government, especially when it comes to foreign affairs. The other three branches, while being permitted to have the veneer of running the government, actually operate in support of the national-security branch.
This is also the thesis set forth in a book that I have long recommended, entitled National Security and Double Government by Michael J. Glennon, professor of law at Tufts University.
Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in a case involving the CIA provides a perfect example of this phenomenon.
The case involved a man named Abu Zubaydah, who the CIA accused of being a terrorist as part of its much-vaunted worldwide “war on terrorism.” After taking Zubaydah captive some 20 years ago, the CIA subjected him to brutal torture, including 80 hours of waterboarding, hundreds of hours of live burial, and “rectal rehydration.” It should be pointed out that U.S. officials have never convicted Zubaydah of a crime.
Zubaydah was tortured at CIA “black sites,” such as one that the CIA operated in Poland, one of the former Warsaw Pact countries that was absorbed by NATO. Later, he was transferred to the Pentagon’s and the CIA’s torture and prison center at Guantanamo Bay.
The reason that Zubaydah was tortured was that CIA and Pentagon officials were convinced that he was a high-ranking figure in al Qaeda, which the CIA later concluded was a mistake. Nonetheless, Zubaydah remains incarcerated at Gitmo, where for 20 years the CIA and the Pentagon steadfastly failed to grant him a speedy trial, a right guaranteed in the Bill of Rights.
Zubaydah filed a legal action seeking to take depositions of two private-sector individuals who served as torturers for the CIA. He wanted them to testify under oath as to everything they did to him.
The CIA objected, arguing that Zubadah’s legal action should be dismissed on two grounds: (1) The depositions of the two torturers would inevitably reveal the fact that the CIA maintained a black site in Poland, which, the CIA maintains, falls within the state-secrets doctrine that the Supreme Court, in another act of extreme deference, awarded the CIA decades ago; and (2) It would breach a promise that the CIA entered into with Poland to keep their joint dark-side activities secret.
Not surprisingly, the Supreme Court, in a 7-2 decision, deferred to the CIA and dismissed Zubaydah’s lawsuit. The Court held that “national security” dictated that the CIA would be permitted to keep secret the location of its black sites and the details of its dark-side activities, including torture. It’s just tough luck for victims of CIA and Pentagon torture, kidnapping, rendition, indefinite detention, assassination, and other totalitarian-like dark-side activity.
Needless to say, if a similar legal action were to be brought in Russia, China, or North Korea — all of which also have national-security state forms of government — the judicial ruling would be the same. In every national-security state, most everyone within the government pays extreme deference to the military-intelligence part of the government and gives them free rein to do whatever they want to people.
A long-range precision strike on a military depot in the Ukrainian city of Zhytomyr has destroyed a warehouse storing West-supplied weapons, the Russian Defense Ministry claimed in its latest update on Saturday.
The warehouse was located on a military base in the northwest of Ukraine, the spokesman for the ministry, Major General Igor Konashenkov, said. The site had been used to store the American and Anglo-Swedish Javelin and NLAW man-portable anti-tank systems shipped to Ukraine in the run-up to the ongoing crisis.
Konashenkov claimed the number of Ukrainian military infrastructure targets destroyed during the operation had now surpassed 2,000. Russian troops and the allied forces of the Lugansk and Donetsk People’s Republics, Ukraine’s breakaway provinces, which Russia recently recognized as independent states, have also made progress since the start of the conflict, he said.
The major general announced a temporary ceasefire for the cities of Mariupol and Volnovakha in the east, which will be in operation from 10am to 4pm local time. He said Russian and Ukrainian forces had agreed on establishing humanitarian corridors to allow civilians to evacuate from the two cities.
Russia invaded Ukraine nine days ago, citing the growing threat posed by NATO’s creeping expansion, and what it claimed was continued Ukrainian violence against the breakaway regions to justify its offensive. Western nations have condemned it as an unprovoked act of aggression and imposed harsh sanctions intended to cripple the Russian economy.
As the Russian invasion of Ukraine goes on, the world wonders what the reason was behind such a precipitous act. The pro-Ukraine crowd has put forth a narrative constructed around the self-supporting themes of irrationality on the part of a Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and his post-Cold War fantasies of resurrecting the former Soviet Union.
This narrative ignores that, far from acting on a whim, the Russian president is working from a playbook that he initiated as far back as 2007, when he addressed the Munich Security Conference and warned the assembled leadership of Europe of the need for a new security framework to replace existing unitary system currently in place, built as it was around a trans-Atlantic alliance (NATO) led by the United States.
Moreover, far from seeking the reconstitution of the former Soviet Union, Putin is simply pursuing a post-Cold War system which protects the interests and security of the Russian people, including those who, through no fault of their own, found themselves residing outside the borders of Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In this age of politicized narrative shaping, which conforms to the demands of domestic political imperatives as opposed to geopolitical reality, fact-based logic is not in vogue. For decades now, the Russian leadership has been confronting a difficult phenomenon where Western democracies, struggling to deal with serious fractures derived from their own internal weakness, produce political leadership lacking in continuity of focus and purpose in foreign and national security relations.
Consistent Leadership
Whereas Russia has had the luxury of having consistent leadership for the past two decades, and can look to another decade or more of the same, Western leadership is transient in nature. One need only reflect on the fact that Putin has, in his time in office, dealt with five U.S. presidents who, because of the alternating nature of the political parties occupying the White House, have produced policies of an inconsistent and contradictory nature.
The White House is held hostage to the political constraints imposed by the reality of domestic partisan politics. “It’s the economy, stupid” resonates far more than any fact-based discussion about the relevance of post-Cold War NATO. What passes for a national discussion on the important issues of foreign and national security are, more often than not, reduced to pithy phrases. The complexities of a balanced dialogue are replaced by a good-versus-evil simplicity more readily digested by an electorate where potholes and tax rates matter more than geopolitics.
Rather than try to explain to the American people the historical roots of Putin’s concerns with an expanding NATO membership, or the impracticalities associated with any theoretical reconstitution of the former Soviet Union, the U.S. political elite instead define Putin as an autocratic dictator (he is not) possessing grandiose dreams of a Russian-led global empire (no such dreams exist).
It is impossible to reason with a political counterpart whose policy formulations need to conform with ignorance-based narratives. Russia, confronted with the reality that neither the U.S. nor NATO were willing to engage in a responsible discussion about the need for a European security framework which transcended the inherent instability of an expansive NATO seeking to encroach directly on Russia’s borders, took measures to change the framework in which such discussions would take place.
Russia had been seeking to create a neutral buffer between it and NATO through agreements which would preclude NATO membership for Ukraine and distance NATO combat power from its borders by insisting the alliance’s military-technical capabilities be withdrawn behind NATO’s boundaries as they existed in 1997. The U.S. and NATO rejected the very premise of such a dialogue.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine must be evaluated within this context. By invading Ukraine, Russia is creating a new geopolitical reality which revolves around the creation of a buffer of allied Slavic states (Belarus and Ukraine) that abuts NATO in a manner like the Cold War-era frontier represented by the border separating East and West Germany.
Russia has, by redeploying the 1st Guards Tank Army onto the territory of Belarus, militarized this buffer, creating the conditions for the kind of standoff that existed during the Cold War. The U.S. and NATO will have to adjust to this new reality, spending billions to resurrect a military capability that has atrophied since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Here’s the punchline — the likelihood that Europe balks at a resumption of the Cold War is high. And when it does, Russia will be able to exchange the withdrawal of its forces from Belarus and Ukraine in return for its demands regarding NATO’s return to the 1997 boundaries.
Vladimir Putin may, in fact, be crazy — crazy like a fox.
Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD.
Amid the abusive wave of sanctions against Russia due to the special operation in Ukraine, some specific rumors have caught the attention of experts, suggesting that there are plans on the part of the Western states to simply pressure to remove Russia’s permanent seat on the UN Security Council (UNSC). This kind of illegal maneuver is a real coup attempt and could lead to the end of the UN.
Apparently, an effort is under way to diplomatically isolate Moscow and even challenge Russia’s right to a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, alleging that Russia took the seat of the former Soviet Union in 1991 without proper authorization – which in fact is nothing more than a public “justification” to promote such an illegal maneuver.
Currently, there are reports circulating on several websites alleging that Western diplomats, mainly American and British, are starting a research work to investigate whether there is a legal possibility of removing Russia from its position on the UNSC within the current international documents. Obviously, this type of “research” is useless and there is no possibility of carrying out such a maneuver within the limits of public international law. In practice, when reporting that diplomats are investigating this kind of maneuver, it is only possible to conclude that they are somehow conspiring to carry out a coup against Moscow at the United Nations.
This absolutely absurd idea has become a common discourse in the Western media recently. This is due to the fact that the West has become furious with the Russian veto on the American resolution against the operation in Ukraine, voted on at the UNSC last week. Western political analysts began to say that “administrative reform” was needed at the UN to prevent “aggressor nations” from vetoing sanctions against themselves. Shortly thereafter, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelesnky, during one of his online speeches, claimed that Kiev “demands” Russian removal from the Council, strengthening Western discourse.
Quite unexpectedly, diplomats seem to have paid attention to this utterly unrealistic idea suggested by Zelensky and some ideologically fanatical analysts, initiating the current plan, in which Western officials plan to form a legal argument about the “illegitimacy” of the Russian presence on the Council. It is expected that some document will soon emerge containing various distortions and arbitrary interpretations of the norms of international law, just in order to justify the idea of removing Russia.
It is questionable whether the analysts and diplomats involved in this type of maneuver are taking into account all the consequences of this attitude. This irresponsible, illegal, rude and anti-diplomatic act could simply generate the biggest crisis in international relations since the Second World War, directly threatening the stability of global peace.
The very existence of the UN will lose its meaning without the Russian presence in its Security Council, considering the country’s military and nuclear importance. If that happens, the Russian attitude may simply be to abandon the UN, as it will have become a mere pro-Western international organization. China would certainly take the Russian side in this dispute as it would also have its interests affected by the coup in the Security Council. Russia and China would perhaps form a new organization together. And that would be the end of the UN as the regulator of world peace. The UN would have the same end of its predecessor league and this is something that everyone wants to avoid – except the Western officials who are planning the coup against Russia.
Obviously, administrative reform is needed at the UN and until a few days ago there was a consensus on the need to expand the Security Council’s permanent seats, including new emerging states of geopolitical relevance, such as India, Pakistan, Brazil, among others. Trying to reduce the Council is absurd considering that the world is increasingly multipolar. This would be a mere attempt on the part of NATO to carry out a global coup d’état, but instead of controlling the world, it would only bring about the end of the UN.
It is necessary that good sense prevails in the UN, in order for such an illogical project to be promptly rejected, so that the organization survives. The attempt to “cancel” Russia cannot go beyond the limits of international law. It is essential that the main world powers are on the Security Council and that the most important of them have veto power to prevent the interests of one side from prevailing over those of the other. It is this structure that guarantees world peace. It is necessary to increase the permanent seats, giving this right to new world powers, adapting the UN’s structure to the multipolar world. Any attempt to the contrary threatens the very existence of the organization.
Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.
Dr. Anthony Fauci’s private diary reveals a “mind-numbing” contradiction between what the former top U.S. infectious disease official knew about COVID-19 and what he told the public, senior White House adviser Peter Navarro, Ph.D., said last week on “American Thought Leaders.”
“I show, actually, how a prosecution can and should happen … at the state level, most likely,” Navarro said. “He should wind up in prison, and we’ve got the receipts in this book to put him there.”
Navarro said Fauci repeatedly acknowledged important facts in private, then publicly pursued policies that contradicted those facts — with devastating consequences.
“What he says many times privately in his diary is so at odds with both his public behavior and public statements that it’s mind-numbing,” Navarro said.
Navarro examines the lasting damage caused by lockdowns and other pandemic policies, and the ongoing toll of long COVID.
His book also addresses questions about vaccine safety, including why healthy young people faced COVID-19 vaccination mandates despite concerns about myocarditis, and why women were not warned about miscarriage risks linked to the shots. … continue
This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.
This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.
Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.
Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.
The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
Fair Use
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
DMCA Contact
This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.
If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.
We will respond and take necessary action immediately.
If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.
All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.