Ukraine War reveals ugly face of Western Europe’s anti-Russian racism
By Paul Antonopoulos | March 4, 2022
No matter one’s opinion of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine, it appears that the famous “tolerant liberal West” are using the war to express their most disgusting Russophobic racism and dehumanization of the Russian people. With Russian troops pouring into Ukraine, Western liberals excitedly used this as an opportunity to cancel Russian art, history and cultural contributions to humanity. This is occurring at humiliating proportions and has a more dangerous dimension as even simple Russian shop owners in Western Europe are being targeted in racist attacks.
Russia has already been stripped from hosting the Champions League football final and Formula One’s Russian Grand Prix – with much hypocrisy. The Grand Prix did not condemn Russia but cited the “impossibility” of holding the race under the current circumstances. It now appears the event will be hosted in Turkey, where there is no “impossibility” for race organizers despite the country’s illegal occupation of Cyprus, Syria and Iraq.
This was followed by Russian and Belarussian athletes being banned from competing in the 2022 Beijing Winter Paralympics. Although the International Paralympic Committee [IPC] announced that competitors from both countries would be permitted to take part, albeit under a neutral banner, this was not satisfactory for Ukrainian athletes who issued a joint statement accusing Paralympic bosses of “choosing bloodshed over principle.” Apparently for the Ukrainian athletes, even just the very presence of a Russian or Belarussian – no matter their political positioning or opinion of the Ukraine War, is enough to warrant complaints in evident racism. None-the-less, the IPC succumbed to the pressure and even flagless Russians cannot compete now.
However, it is not only in the sporting arena where Russians are being embargoed, targeted and restricted.
The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) said Russia would no longer be allowed to participate in this year’s Eurovision song contest; Britain’s Royal Opera House cancelled a planned residency by Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet, one of the oldest and most prestigious ballet companies in the world; and the Ukrainian Film Academy has called for an international boycott of Russian cinema, including a ban on Russian films at international festivals.
Although banning Russians from participating in sports competitions and cancelling current events is an immediate response to the War in Ukraine, there are much darker undertones that aim to even smear and cancel “dead Russians.” What is meant by this?
On March 2, Italian journalist Alessandra Bocchi tweeted: “Italy’s main University in Milan just banned teaching Fyodor Dostoevsky because he’s a Russian writer. Dostoevsky was sent to a Siberian labour camp for reading banned books in Tsarist Russia. We are reaching levels of hatred and stupidity that I thought were never possible.” At time of publication, nearly 35,000 people had retweeted her, easily one of the most viral social media posts of the day.
The University of Milano-Bicocca informed the Italian writer Paolo Nori on Tuesday night that his course on the author of Crime and Punishment had been cancelled “to avoid any controversy, in a moment of high tension.” Nori on an Instagram live video read the email and slammed the university’s decision as “ridiculous”, saying “even dead Russians” are now the target of censorship in Italy. After the justified backlash, the course on Dostoevsky was approved to go ahead as originally planned and the rector of the university said he would be meeting Nori next week “for a moment of reflection.”
However, it is not only sports stars, entertainers, artists and dead authors who are being targeted, but even Russian students in France, Belgium, Czechia and other European Union countries where they have been expelled. The irony is that many of these Russian students are liberal and anti-Putin but are now being driven away by Western liberals from the liberal West.
This demonstrates that the so-called tolerant liberal West does not only have a hatred for Putin, but also for all Russian people, culture and art. After many years of normalizing the demonization of Russians in the media, the Ukraine War has provided the perfect opportunity for Russophobes to openly express their racism knowing that they will face little recourse.
None-the-less, no matter one’s opinion of Putin and the Ukraine War, this crisis has exposed the ugly head of Russophobic racism, something that has culminated for years in Western media and its political landscape, particularly during and after the so-called “Russiagate” incident.
Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.
On Ukraine, Biden’s State of the Union address was just ‘good vs. evil’
By Scott Ritter | RT | March 3, 2022
Biden’s simplistic “good versus evil” pronouncements on the Russian-Ukraine conflict did little to prepare America for the consequences of declaring economic warfare against the Russian state.
It wasn’t surprising that Russia’s ongoing military incursion into Ukraine topped the list of issues addressed by US President Joe Biden in his first State of the Union (SOTU) address, delivered on March 1, 2022, to a joint session of Congress.
Biden pitched the Ukraine crisis as a defining moment in modern history, a problem that could only be resolved with American leadership, both at home and abroad. His job during his address was to convince both domestic and foreign viewers alike that he was the man for the job.
He repeated the time-tested mantra that held that Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, constituted a threat to democratic principles at home and abroad. This was especially true, he said, when it came to Ukraine.
There was nothing new in what Biden told his audience – the same words and themes had been deployed many times over in the past week. He pushed the same buttons – Putin as the personification of “autocratic oppression,” leading a Russia addicted to power, hell-bent on forcefully absorbing the nation of Ukraine into the Russian orbit.
He likewise pulled at the heartstrings of America, talking about Ukraine’s embattled leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, and the heroic resistance of his people in the face of overwhelming Russian power. The United States stood fully behind them, Biden said. This sentiment was shared by many in the audience as the president spoke. They held small Ukrainian flags or wore the nation’s blue-and-yellow colors. But this support, he said, had its limits – the US, he declared, would not send a single soldier to Ukraine to fight for its cause.
The fact was, Biden was abandoning it to its fate. While praising the courage and leadership of the Ukrainian president, he said, “Let me be clear, our forces are not engaged and will not engage in conflict with Russian forces in Ukraine. Our forces are not going to Europe to fight in Ukraine, but to defend our NATO allies in the event that Putin decides to keep moving west.”
There is no evidence that Russia intends to “keep moving west.” And while Biden spoke of the important leadership role played by the US in Europe, the fact remains that Europe is a veritable prisoner to the whims of any US president, whose pronouncements take on the weight of law whenever they are uttered.
Neither Europe nor the United States, it seemed, would be intervening on behalf of Ukraine against Russia. Zelensky and Ukraine were on their own, their only choice for national relevance being to commit suicide on the international stage while the West, from the safety of their homes and offices, cheered them on like bloodthirsty Romans watching gladiators do battle in the Colosseum.
The major takeaway from Biden’s SOTU address? Ukraine will lose this war, and the West will do nothing to stop that fact.
While Biden lionized Ukraine and its beleaguered president, he failed to explain to the American people why there was a war, beyond the sophomoric argument that “Putin did it.” No talk of America’s role in the Maidan back in 2014, no discussion of the role played by Ukrainian right-wing ultra-nationalists in oppressing the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine, no mention of the shelling of the breakaway Donbass region, no discussion of the role that NATO expansion played in creating an untenable security situation for the Russian state.
Simplistic jingoism plays well in atmospheres such as televised political addresses, where a captive audience is compelled to rise and applaud made-for-TV pronouncements lest they be singled out for public criticism by a fawning, vindictive corporate media. The cheer-fest the SOTU has become would give any Brezhnev-era meeting of the Presidium a run for its money when it comes to mindless standing ovations.
But it was here, in the orgy of self-congratulation that is the interplay between president and Congress where America’s weakness in its conflict with Russia was exposed. As united as everyone seemed to be about sacrificing Ukraine on the altar of Russia-bashing, it was clear Congress was deeply divided from Joe Biden on issues of domestic policy, especially when it came to the economy of the US. While the US president may not want to engage Russia in a shooting war in Europe, he has embarked on a great global crusade to destroy it economically. And the tepid response the political opposition gave to his pronouncements underscores the reality that the US is not prepared for the consequences of his declaration of open economic war with Russia.
Let there be no doubt: Russia will win the shooting war in Ukraine. This outcome is inevitable, given the reality that Ukraine has been abandoned by its erstwhile partners in the West. Yet the conflict between Russia and the West won’t end when the last bomb explodes on Ukrainian soil, but when, in the mindset of the US and its European partners, the Russian economy is destroyed and Putin is humiliated and diminished as a political force, domestically, regionally, and globally.
Here, the US president did the American people a great disservice, selling them a feel-good struggle in which Ukraine is promoted as the glorified martyr and Russia demoted as the evil oppressor. A bloodless conflict – from the US perspective, at least – that will be won simply by shutting down the Russian economy by remote control. It won’t be that simple.
Russia has yet to respond to the US-led economic war being waged against it. When it does, rest assured that these sanctions Congress so enthusiastically applauded will prove to be a double-edged sword – one that will cut into a US economy still reeling from the consequences of the Covid pandemic. When that time comes, President Biden could find that many of those politicians who rose to their feet to cheer on the sacrifice of Ukraine will turn on him.
War, it is said, is but an extension of politics by other means. Given the deep partisan political divide that exists in the US when it comes to the economy, it is clear neither Biden nor the American public is ready for what is about to happen when the consequences of their anti-Russian hysteria finally comes home to roost.
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, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector.
Military lab changed mission statement after report questioned value of its work
A BSL-4 lab at Fort Detrick is shown. (Courtesy of: the Office of the Maryland Governor)
By Emily Kopp | US Right To Know | March 1, 2022
The Army’s premier biolab changed its mission statement after a 2014 report by high-ranking officials concluded its work has become less useful since its Cold War heyday and no longer delivers medical products for service members.
The report, which had not been previously released, was obtained through a state public records request by U.S. Right to Know.
The challenges at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, or USAMRIID, come to light at a time of fierce debate about the degree to which research on novel pathogens contributes tangible benefits. Scientists with different theories about the COVID-19 pandemic’s origins have been tangled in arguments over whether certain work on dangerous pathogens can help predict pandemics or poses unacceptable risks.
Located 50 miles outside of Washington at Fort Detrick, USAMRIID was once charged with responding to the Soviet Union’s biological weapons program, but stopped developing bioweapons in 1969. It now conducts research on biological threats including Ebola, Zika, anthrax and plague, and conducts research for universities and private companies. It employs about 900 military, civilian and contract researchers.
The global biological threat landscape has changed due to gain-of-function technology, the limited capacity of the intelligence community to identify biological threats, and the proliferation of “dual use” research programs that generate pathogens that could be harmful in the wrong hands, the report states.
USAMRIID has in recent years suffered many troubles, including biosafety breaches, a shut down of its high security work, and accusations from Department of Defense leadership of wasting taxpayer funds.
The report by government experts, including former USAMRIID Commander David Franz, describes an agency adrift as America’s first biodefense research facility struggled to deliver on the promises in its mission statement.
The report concludes that the lab’s work may not always generate medical advances, and should not be expected to in the eyes of its funders in Washington.
“The emphasis on products to the warfighter has become less relevant,” the report reads. “Because prophylaxis for ‘biological agents’ (traditional vaccines) requires great specificity and a period of at least weeks before protection is achieved, the era of vaccines for the force, one of USARMIID’s greatest historic strengths, is essentially over.”
The experts behind the report recommended changing the mission of the military lab away from generating vaccines and drugs.
It appears USAMRIID’s leaders listened.
By Jan. 2015 – several months after study’s authors had convened in June 2014 – the vision of the lab had changed on its website from “right product, right time for the Warfighter” to a more general statement about leadership in medical biological defense, according to changes accessed via the WayBack Machine.
“To be the leader in the advancement of medical biological defense with world renowned experts dedicated to protecting our military forces and the nation,” USAMRIID’s vision statement now reads.
In the years since USAMRIID’s 2014 consultants fought to prove its importance to the Pentagon, the lab has faced allegations of “financial mismanagement,” according to a Defense Department letter reported by CQ Roll Call.
Other problems
USAMRIID is one of two facilities at Fort Detrick with laboratories designed to handle the most dangerous pathogens in the world, so-called BSL-4 labs. There are 14 BSL-4 labs in North America.
These labs have come under greater scrutiny amid concerns by Republicans and some independent biosecurity experts that the COVID-19 pandemic may have arisen from a lab accident in China.
USAMRIID has not developed a COVID-19 vaccine candidate, though the lab has tested COVID-19 vaccines in the pre-clinical trial stage, according to Caree Vander Linden, public affairs officer at USAMRIID.
Vander Linden also provided U.S. Right to Know with a spreadsheet of 43 scientific papers produced by the lab about COVID-19. For example, the lab recently announced engineering hamsters to increase their expression of the human ACE2 receptor — a key protein used by SARS-CoV-2 to enter airway cells — to enable the study of more severe disease. Remdesivir, the first therapeutic with approval from the Food and Drug Administration to treat COVID-19, was also developed with the help of USAMRIID.
Vander Linden did not respond to questions about the report and the change of the USAMRIID mission statement. Franz did not respond to requests for comment.
Morale has plummeted since the deadly release of anthrax from the lab in 2001, the 2014 report suggests. That has been worsened by the expansion of work on biorisks at other labs. Now USAMRIID struggles to retain talent. Much of the work at USAMRIID is that of a contract research organization performing tasks for the private sector.
“The concept that USAMRIID is more of an ‘insurance policy’ to deal with the unknown and unexpected than a ‘factory’ to produce medical ‘things’ for the soldier should be understood by all,” it states.
The report criticizes the biosafety regulations at the Fort Detrick lab, saying the routine presence of inspectors is a distraction.
“The heavy regulatory burden … and oversight following the 9-11 attacks and the anthrax letters has diverted both funding and human resources from the research mission,” the report states.
Yet in the years since, serious safety breaches have occurred at USAMRIID. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention flagged failures to “implement and maintain containment procedures sufficient to contain select agents or toxins” in biosafety level 3 and 4 laboratories, the Frederick News-Post reported, culminating in a shutdown of USAMRIID’s two top security labs and a suspension of its registration with the Federal Select Agent Program.
Though work resumed in November 2019, the lab’s Defense Department funding remained frozen until April 2020.
Both the Biden and Trump administrations have sought cuts to USAMRIID. But members of the Maryland congressional delegation have fought to maintain funding levels.
Congress appropriated $130 million for the expansion of USAMRIID in fiscal 2021.
Unpredictable threats
While USAMRIID once focused on responding to the Soviet Union, new biological threats are more diverse and harder to nail down, according to the report.
“The intelligence community is limited in its ability to identify specific threats,” the report states.
This unpredictability is due in part to so-called “gain-of-function” research, a term used to describe research that can make pathogens more virulent or transmissible.
“Threat agents … might include traditional ones to those that blur the line between chemistry and biology or even those modified through ‘gain of function’ techniques,” the report reads.
Potentially dangerous biological research is now characterized by “small footprint, dual-use offensive capabilities that might be found in a few large and medium nation states,” according to the report.
Two of the 2014 report’s authors – Franz and former director of the National Science Foundation Rita Colwell – have connections to EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit under investigation for its gain-of-function work on coronaviruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Colwell is on the board of directors, while Franz was a booster of the organization, according to a 2019 social media post.
Other consultants who coauthored the report include former secretary of the Navy Richard Danzig; former deputy commander-in-chief of United States Strategic Command Robert Hinson; former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority Carol Linden; and former chief of staff of the U.S. Army Dennis J. Reimer; executive director of the Maryland Biotechnology Center Judy Britz; distinguished research fellow at National Defense University Seth Carus; Harvard professor of biologically inspired engineering David Walt; and NIH researcher Richard Whitley.
Most Kids Are Already Naturally Immune to COVID. So Why Are We Vaccinating Them?
The Defender | March 1, 2022
The “majority” of children in the U.S. have already been infected with COVID-19, The Washington Post today reported, after reviewing data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The Post’s report begs the question: If so many kids have natural immunity to the virus, and, as reported Monday, the vaccines aren’t very effective in children 5 to 11 years old, why are public health officials, schools, businesses and others pushing to vaccinate kids?
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
During a security conference in Munich on Feb. 18, Bill Gates said:
“Sadly, the virus itself, particularly the variant called Omicron, is [a] type of vaccine — that is, it creates both B cell and T cell immunity — and it’s done a better job of getting out to the world population than we have with vaccines.”
Did Gates actually admit natural immunity to Omicron is succeeding where vaccines have failed — and that he’s “sad” about that?
Gates isn’t the only one talking about natural immunity these days.
Eric Topol, executive vice president of Scripps Research last month argued for including an option of natural immunity in the definition of “fully vaccinated.”
Even vaccine advocate Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and member of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory committee, is going to bat for recognizing natural immunity to COVID.
During a Jan. 25 interview, Offit described a meeting with Dr. Francis Collins, then-director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy where Offit was asked, along with three others, whether he thought natural immunity should count as a vaccine.
Offit and one other person said yes, natural immunity should count. But they were out-voted, leading U.S. health officials to decide natural immunity should not be recognized in the U.S, as an alternative to a vaccine mandate.
To this day, the CDC maintains this position in its official guidance for the public — despite the agency’s own studies showing natural immunity against COVID is superior to the immunity provided by COVID vaccines.
Some U.S. lawmakers think the CDC is wrong, as evidenced by the introduction of two the Natural Immunity Is Real Act in the Senate (S.2846) and the House (H.R. 5590).
The bills would require “all federal agencies to acknowledge and consider natural immunity to COVID-19 when promulgating any regulation related to the COVID-19 public health emergency.
But for now, in the U.S. at least, those states, businesses and schools requiring “proof of COVID vaccination” make no exceptions for people — including kids — who recovered from COVID, and therefore have natural immunity.
UK data show most unvaccinated kids already have natural immunity
Unfortunately, the CDC doesn’t provide up-to-date seroprevalence data for children in the U.S., but UK data may shed light on children and natural immunity.
The UK Office of National Statistics (ONS) early last month reported these data based on population sampling:
“In the week beginning 10 January 2022, the percentage who would have tested positive for antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 ranged from 90.2% to 93.3% for children aged 12 to 15 years and from 63.3% to 72.7% for those aged 8 to 11 years across the UK. Estimates show the percentage of children testing positive for antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 at or above 42 ng/ml.”
In the UK, vaccines have not yet been made available for the under 12 age group (except those who are at very high risk). The 63.3 to 72.7% is thus overwhelmingly due to natural immunity and not vaccination.
Also, as noted by the ONS, individuals testing below the threshold level may also have natural immunity, presumably in the form of T cells and B cells, where the antibodies have waned. Thus these data may be underestimates of the true population-level immunity.
The UK government had previously reported:
“It is estimated that over 85% of all children aged 5 to 11 will have had prior SARS-CoV-2 infection by the end of January 2022 with roughly half of these infections due to the Omicron variant. Natural immunity arising from prior infection will contribute towards protection against future infection and severe disease.”
The UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) on Dec. 22, 2021, authorized the vaccine only for high-risk children ages 5 to 11.
Yet despite the encouraging data on natural immunity in this age group, the JCVI on Feb. 16, in updated guidance, expanded its recommendations to include a “non-urgent offer” of the vaccine to children who are not in a clinical risk group.
To be clear, the UK government authorized an mRNA vaccine for the original SARS-CoV-2 strain, to be made available in April, to a group of 5 million young healthy children — 85% or more of whom are expected to have natural immunity.
As John Campbell, Ph.D., said, if and when a future COVID wave ever comes, any possible beneficial effect from these shots will likely have waned.
Studies may explain why children are protected from SARS-COV2
A study in 2020 reported that cross cellular immunity and immunomodulation from previous existing childhood vaccines may provide protection against COVID infections.
A more recent study of children as young as 3 years old measured spike-specific T cell responses and found they were twice as high as those in adults. The authors suggested this is in part due to pre-existing cross-reactive responses to seasonal coronaviruses.
A January 2022 study demonstrated a protective effect from high levels of pre-existing immune cells generated by other coronaviruses like the common cold, which attack the proteins within the virus (nucleocapsid), rather than the spike protein on the virus.
According to the senior author of the study:
“The spike protein is under intense immune pressure from vaccine-induced antibodies which drives evolution of vaccine escape mutants. In contrast, the internal proteins targeted by the protective T cells we identified mutate much less.
“Consequently, they are highly conserved between the various SARS-CoV-2 variants, including omicron. This suggests that the existing cross-reactive T cells may provide better protection than an mRNA vaccine that focuses only on the original variant spike protein.”
Despite these studies, the latest data on how many children likely have immunity because they’ve recovered from COVID and the well-established scientific theory that natural immunity to a pathogen is superior to vaccine-induced immunity, places like New York City continue to demand proof of vaccination for all children age 5 and over in order for them to participate in extracurricular school activities, visit museums, zoos, theaters, gyms, and restaurants.
For the most comprehensive list of 150 research articles on natural immunity visit the Brownstone Institute.
© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.
Russia’s space agency hits back at US
RT | March 3, 2022
In a tit-for-tat move against restrictions slapped on it by the international community due to the Russian-Ukrainian war, Russia’s space agency announced on Thursday that it would be imposing counter-sanctions.
According to the agency’s director, Dmitry Rogozin, Roscosmos will halt shipping RD-181 rocket engines to the US and maintaining the 24 engines that are currently owned by the country.
“In this situation, we can no longer provide the US with the best rocket engines in the world. Let them fly on something else – their brooms,” he stated live on Russian television.
Rogozin also announced that he had written to Anke Kaysser-Pyzalla, the head of the German Aerospace Center (DLR), announcing that Russia would cease conducting joint scientific experiments on the International Space Station.
What he described as the hostile and destructive actions of the DLR had curtailed crucial joint space projects, Rogozin said. He pointed to the shutdown of the German eROSITA wide-field telescope aboard the Russian observatory, which had led to the collapse of a unique scientific project to create a map of the entire sky in the Röntgen (X-ray) spectrum.
“German colleagues who took such steps to politicize our relations will end up with nothing,” he opined.
Russia launched a military invasion of Ukraine last week, claiming it was forced to do so to stop Kiev’s armed forces from attacking the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Lugansk, and in order to “demilitarize” and “denazify” the country.
The West has almost universally condemned Russia for what it called its unprovoked aggression. The sanctions that have since been imposed on Moscow in retaliation target a lengthy list of Russian authorities and are intended to seriously impact the Russian economy. The UN has adopted a resolution condemning Russian actions in Ukraine and demanding Russia immediately withdraw its troops.
Russia Prevents Washington from Unleashing Biological Warfare
By Vladimir Platov – New Eastern Outlook – 03.03.2022
In view of the unrest that US intelligence services have been actively initiating lately, whether in Central Asia, Transcaucasia or other areas bordering Russia and China, the risk of a biological disaster from multiple secret military biological laboratories deployed by the US in potentially politically and socially unstable regions is objectively increasing. In this regard, the issue of the US preparing a biological time bomb in Kazakhstan has been raised many times before. The growing risk of the Pentagon initiating biological warfare using over 400 US biological laboratories located overseas around the world and the need for a clear response to the risk of worldwide biological disaster from such secret US overseas facilities has been repeatedly pointed out. After all, these biological laboratories employ some 13,000 “employees” who are busy creating strains of killer pathogens (microbes and viruses) that are resistant to vaccines.
It is no secret nowadays that the US has set up such biological laboratories in 25 countries around the world: in the Middle East, Africa, South-East Asia. Only within the former Soviet Union there are US military biological laboratories in Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova and Uzbekistan.
The Americans try to deny the military nature of the studies conducted in such laboratories. However, the secrecy that surrounds them is only comparable to that of the most important military facilities. There is no accountability to the local and global public about the “work” being done there. Moreover, no scientific “achievements” have been publicly demonstrated by American biologists over the many years of the existence of such foreign secret laboratories, and the results of their research are not published anywhere in the public domain.
Meanwhile, laboratories are actively collecting information on the gene pool of the populations of countries where such laboratories operate. All this indicates that the Pentagon is undoubtedly preparing to wage a biological war using biological weapons, which the US is building in such biological laboratories. It is well known that the US has already spent over $100bn in recent years developing biological warfare weapons. The US is the only country that still blocks the establishment of a verification mechanism under the 1972 Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction.
However, like Russia’s demands to the West for a clear agreement on universal security measures and on the non-proliferation of NATO to the east, warnings about US readiness to unleash a global biological war have never been heeded in Washington and Western capitals.
With this in mind, one can hardly deny that Russia, like any other country, does not wish to have such weapons near its borders, thus jeopardizing the security of all.
Therefore, in Moscow’s military operation to denazify and demilitarize Ukraine in recent days, getting rid of the numerous US military biological laboratories on the territory of that country is an important point.
On February 24, the British conservative publication THE EXPOSÉ published an article entitled “Is there more to the Ukraine/Russia conflict than meets the eye?” It recognizes that Russia should have conducted the current military operation on the basis of its security interests and confirms that there has long been a very serious threat to the lives and health of the Russian Federation population from the territory of Ukraine. It refers to at least 16 US military biological laboratories located in Odessa, Vinnitsa, Uzhgorod, Lviv (three), Kharkiv, Kiev (also three), Kherson, Ternopil, Dnepropetrovsk, as well as near Luhansk and the border with Crimea. Such “cooperation” between the Pentagon and the Ukrainian Ministry of Health dates back to 2005. Opposition parties managed to push through the Verkhovna Rada in 2013 to end this “cooperation”, but the US-led coup d’état in Kiev in February 2014 prevented the implementation of this decision, resulting in this “cooperation” not only continuing but also actively developing at the initiative of Washington.
Many of the Pentagon’s and White House’s official secrets about US clandestine biological laboratories overseas have been revealed by Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois at Champaign (USA) and author of the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 (BWATA). As this American scientist points out, “We now have an Offensive Biological Weapons industry in this country that violates the Biological Weapons Convention and my Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989”. According to Boyle, “American universities have a long history of willingly permitting their research agenda …. to be co-opted, corrupted, and perverted by the the Pentagon and the C.I.A. into death science”. He cites as an example the group of Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin, which managed to increase the toxicity of the flu virus by a factor of 200. According to Boyle, the Pentagon and the CIA are “ready, willing and able to launch biowarfare when it suits their interests… They have a stockpile of that super-weapons-grade anthrax that they already used against us in October 2001”.
The threat to people living even at a distance from such laboratories is evidenced by an investigation conducted by USA Today newspaper, which showed that from 2006 to 2013 alone, more than 1,500 accidents and safety violations occurred in 200 military biological laboratories on the territory of the US. So what about possible similar incidents in biological laboratories in Ukraine or other former Soviet republics?
In the summer of 2019, “America’s main biological warfare lab has been ordered to stop all research into the deadliest viruses and pathogens over fears contaminated waste could leak out of the facility,” reported Britain’s The Independent. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the public health authority in the US, has revoked the military bioresearch center at Fort Detrick’s license to handle Ebola, smallpox and anthrax after CDC inspectors found “problems with the procedures used to decontaminate wastewater” at Fort Detrick. In this regard, it is notable that the possibility of “deadly viruses and pathogens” leaking into Fort Detrick’s wastewater was detected shortly before the COVID-19 outbreak, which the Americans were quick to blame on China. It is also noteworthy that the Pentagon has significantly stepped up the activities of its overseas biological laboratories since 2019, clearly shifting the “work” on particularly dangerous strains and biological weapons development there.
In these circumstances, the task of terminating the activities of the US secret biological laboratories as part of the demilitarization of that country is justified in the program of Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine.
Against this background, it is noteworthy that the US embassy in Ukraine removed all documents about the biological laboratories in Kiev and Odessa from its official website after Moscow launched its military operation. This further confirms that in addition to the nuclear threat from Zelensky, Russia was also being prepared for bio-extinction behind the ocean. Under these circumstances, the announcement by the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) on the US government procurement website last October of an addendum on “combating highly dangerous pathogens” is understandable. This document concerned the $3.6mln finishing work to launch two biological laboratories in Ukraine – in Kiev and Odessa, where machinery, equipment and personnel were already being prepared for the United States to unleash a biological war under the cover of Ukraine.
Public Health Erred on the Side of Catastrophe
In a coercive mass experiment, governments opened a Pandora’s box of harms
By Brian McGlinchey | February 21, 2022
Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, proponents of lockdowns, shelter-in-place orders, mask mandates and other coercive government interventions have characterized these measures as benevolently “erring on the side of caution.”
Now, as the grim toll of those public health measures comes into ever-sharper focus, it’s increasingly clear those characterizations were terribly wrong.
What’s less readily apparent, however, is how the very use of the “erring on the side of caution” framing was injurious in itself—by thwarting reasoned debate of public health policies, diverting attention from unintended consequences, and buffering the Covid regime’s architects from accountability.
To understand how the misuse of “erring on the side of caution” performed a sort of mass hypnosis that coaxed populations into two years of submission to disastrous, overreaching policies, consider how the expression is typically used.
In everyday life, one might err on the side of caution by:
- Leaving for the airport an extra 30 minutes early
- Carrying an umbrella when there’s a 25% chance of rain
- Opting for a less-challenging ski slope
- Going back into the house to make sure the iron is unplugged
- Getting a second medical opinion
Generally speaking, “erring on the side of caution” in everyday life means lowering risk with a precaution that has a negligible cost.
When mandate proponents portrayed their edicts as “erring on the side of caution,” it had the effect of tacitly assuring the public—and themselves—that there’d be little or no harm associated with extreme measures like:
- Shutting down businesses for months at a time
- Knowingly forcing millions of people into unemployment
- Halting in-person attendance at schools and colleges
- Ordering people of all ages and risk profiles to wear masks
- Denying people opportunities to socialize, recreate and enjoy living
That implicit low-downside assurance not only fostered unthinking support for draconian measures among citizens and experts alike, it also cultivated an atmosphere of intolerance toward those who questioned the wisdom of these interventions and predicted the great many harms that have resulted.
“Overconfident, unnuanced messaging conditioned us to assume that all dissenting opinions are misinformation rather than reflections of good faith disagreement or differing priorities,” write Rutgers professors Jacob Hale Russell and Dennis Patterson in their essay, The Mask Debacle. “In doing so, elites drove out scientific research that might have separated valuable interventions from the less valuable.”
Of course, in addition to its implicit assurance that a risk-reduction measure comes at little cost, “erring on the side of caution” conveys an assumption that the precaution will actually be effective.
That hasn’t been the case with Covid mandates. Though many continue embracing the illusion of government control over Covid, the contrary studies and real-world observations are stacking far too high to be denied any longer by the intellectually honest among us.
Charts via Ian Miller at Unmasked
Public Health Threw Out the Playbook and Threw Pandora’s Box Wide Open
The masses who’ve chanted “I trust science,” as they praise each government intervention and idolize those who impose them, are likely unaware that, before Covid-19, the well-considered scientific consensus was against lockdowns, broad quarantines and masking outside of hospital settings—particularly for a virus like Covid-19 that has a 99% survival rate for most age groups.
For example, a 2006 paper published by the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center—focusing on mitigation measures against another contagious respiratory illness, pandemic influenza—reads like a warning label against many of the policies inflicted on humanity in the face of Covid-19:
- “There is no basis for recommending quarantine either of groups or individuals. The problems in implementing such measures are formidable, and secondary effects of absenteeism and community disruption as well as possible adverse consequences… are likely to be considerable.”
- “Widespread closures [of schools, restaurants, churches, recreations centers, etc] would almost certainly have serious adverse social and economic effects.”
- “The ordinary surgical mask does little to prevent inhalation of small droplets bearing influenza virus… There are few data available to support the efficacy of N95 or surgical masks outside a healthcare setting. N95 masks need to be fit-tested to be efficacious.”
The point of that and other pre-2020 research into pandemic mitigation was to be prepared, in times of crisis, with policies that reflected a well-reasoned and dispassionate weighing of costs and benefits.
However, when the pandemic arrived, panicking public health officials and academics threw out the playbook and took their policy inspiration from the government that was first to confront the virus. Sadly for the world, that was communist China.
The breadth of the resulting harms from the ensuing plunge into public health authoritarianism is staggering. Far from erring on the side of caution…
Public health erred on the side of a mental health crisis. Anxiety and depression have surged, particularly among adolescents and young adults, where symptoms have doubled during the pandemic.
“I have never been as busy in my life and I’ve never seen my colleagues as busy,” New York psychiatrist Valentine Raiteri told CNBC. “I can’t refer people to other people because everybody is full.”
Public health erred on the side of juvenile suicide attempts. In the summer of 2020, emergency room visits for potential suicides by children leapt over 22% compared to the summer of 2019.
Public health erred on the side of drug overdoses. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, overdose deaths surged 30% in 2020 to a record-high of more than 93,000. Among the factors cited: social isolation, people using drugs alone, and decreased access to treatment.
Public health erred on the side of auto fatalities. Traffic deaths had been on a general downtrend since the 60s, reaching a near-record low in 2019. However, even with shutdown-lightened traffic, deaths jumped 17.5% in the summer of 2020 compared to 2019, and kept rising into 2021.
Blame increased drug and alcohol use, along with psychological fallout from people being denied life’s fundamental pleasures. University of Texas cognitive scientist Art Markman told The New York Times that anger and aggression behind the wheel in part reflects “two years of having to stop ourselves from doing things that we’d like to do.”
Public health erred on the side of domestic violence. A review of 32 studies found an increase in domestic violence around the world, with the increases most intense during the first week of lockdowns. “The home confinement led to constant contact between perpetrators and victims, resulting in increased violence and decreased reports,” the researchers found.
Public health erred on the side of riots, arson and looting. It’s my own conviction that 2020’s eruption of summer violence following a Minneapolis police officer’s callous homicide of George Floyd was greatly magnified by the period of forced mass confinement that preceded it.
Floyd’s death was a match dropped into a tinderbox of humanity confined to veritable house arrest. People blocked from restaurants and bars were suddenly granted a societal waiver to venture out into enormous crowds, where they found excitement, socialization and, far too often, a senselessly destructive means of venting months of pent-up energy, anxiety and frustration. It stands as the costliest civil unrest episode in American history.
Public health erred on the side of confining people where the virus is transmitted most. Lockdowns ordered people away from workplaces, schools, restaurants and bars and into their homes, where New York contract tracers found 74% of Covid spread was happening, compared to just 1.4% in bars and restaurants and even less in schools and workplaces.
Public health erred on the side of obesity. According to the CDC, “the risk of severe COVID-19 illness increases sharply with higher BMI [Body Mass Index].” So what happens when public health “experts” shut down schools, workplaces and recreation options and told people to stay home to stay “safe”?
The CDC found that, in 2020, the rate by which BMI increased among 2- to 19-year olds doubled. Another study found that 48% of adults gained weight during the pandemic, with those who were already overweight most likely to add even more. Among other factors, the study pointed to psychological distress and having schoolchildren at home.
Public health erred against fresh air, exercise and Vitamin D. Governments raced to shut down playgrounds, basketball courts and other outdoor recreation facilities. In a move that’s profoundly emblematic of heavy-handed, counterproductive authoritarianism in the age of Covid, the city of San Clemente, California filled a skate park with 37 tons of sand.
Public health erred on the side of impaired child development. “We find that children born during the pandemic have significantly reduced verbal, motor, and overall cognitive performance compared to children born pre-pandemic,” say the authors of a study from Paediatric Emergency Research in the UK and Ireland (PERUKI).
“Results highlight that even in the absence of direct SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 illness, the environmental changes associated [with the] COVID-19 pandemic [are] significantly and negatively affecting infant and child development.”
Public health erred on the side of learning loss. Children are less vulnerable to Covid-19 than they are to the flu, and rarely transmit it to teachers. Unfortunately, American public health officials and teacher unions prevailed in halting in-person instruction (and socialization) in favor of “remote learning.”
It was a poor substitute that fell hardest on the youngest learners. For example, according to curriculum and assessment provider Amplify, the percentage of first-graders scoring at or above the goals for their grade in mid-school-year dropped from 58% before the pandemic to just 44% this year.
Public health erred on the side of pointlessly masking schoolchildren. When schools did open, mask mandates abounded—despite children’s relative invulnerability to the virus and the documented rarity of in-school transmission. A Spanish study showed no discernible difference in transmission among 5-year-olds—who aren’t required to mask—and 6 year olds, who are.
“Masking is a psychological stressor for children and disrupts learning. Covering the lower half of the face of both teacher and pupil reduces the ability to communicate,” wrote Neeraj Sood, director of the Covid Initiative at USC, and Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford. “Positive emotions such as laughing and smiling become less recognizable, and negative emotions get amplified. Bonding between teachers and students takes a hit.”
“Most of the masks worn by most kids for most of the pandemic have likely done nothing to change the velocity or trajectory of the virus,” writes University of California associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics Vinay Prasad. “The loss to children remains difficult to capture in hard data, but will likely become clear in the years to come.”
Public health erred on the side of giving masked people a false sense of security. As I wrote in August, “Covid-19 particles are astoundingly small. Hard as it is to imagine, the imperceptible gaps in surgical masks can be 1,000 times the size of a viral particle. Gaps in cloth masks are well larger.” That’s to say nothing of the respirated air that simply goes around the mask’s edges.
Earlier in the pandemic, questioning cloth masks triggered outrage and swift social media censorship. Now, even mandate-happy CNN medical analyst Leanna Wen has declared they’re “little more than facial decorations.” Mask skepticism is sprouting elsewhere in mainstream media; the Washington Post and Bloomberg even published an essay titled “Mask Mandates Didn’t Make Much of a Difference Anyway.”
Chart via Ian Miller at Unmasked
When public health officials exaggerated the power of masks, they did more than promote pointless discomfort and a dystopian way of life. “Naively fooled to think that masks would protect them, some older high-risk people did not socially distance properly, and some died from Covid-19 because of it,” said epidemiologist, biostatistician and former Harvard Medical School professor Martin Kulldorff.
Public health erred on the side of killing small businesses. Thanks in large part to government’s targeting of so-called “non-essential businesses,” the first year of the pandemic brought an additional 200,000 business closures over prior levels.
Public health erred on the side of harming women’s careers. Women comprise a greater proportion of the sectors hid hardest by lockdowns, and the closing of schools and child care centers prompted many more women than men to put their careers on hold.
Public health erred on the side of inflation. To offset the massive economic destruction inflicted by public health shutdowns, the federal government plunged into an astounding spending spree, handing out cash to individuals, businesses and city and state governments.
It was money the government didn’t have, so the Federal Reserve essentially created it out of thin air. Pushing all that new fiat money into circulation debases the currency, fueling today’s surging price inflation—which is a stealth tax with no maximum rate, which hits poor people hardest.
Note: Lockdowns and other mandates weren’t the exclusive driver of many of the various harms I’ve described; general fear of the virus also contributed to some of them. However, it should also be noted that public health officials—and media that overwhelmingly emphasized negative stories—whipped up a level of fear that led people to overstate the level of danger actually posed by the virus.
There’s one more way in which characterizing lockdowns and other mandates as “erring on the side of caution” plays a psychological trick: Since the phrase is embedded with the notion of good intentions, it conditions citizens to be forgiving of the bureaucrats and politicians who imposed them.
Note, however, that in most everyday usage of “erring on the side of caution,” the choice to “err” is made voluntarily by individuals who bear the consequences of their own decisions—or by others, like an airplane pilot or a surgeon, to whom we’ve voluntarily and unmistakably granted control of our well-being.
The grim impacts of lockdowns and other mandates, however, were coercively imposed on society, to say nothing of the fact that so many of the edicts represented gross usurpations of power and violations of human rights.
On top of all that, the edicts were reinforced by Orwellian censorship and ostracism leveled at those who dared raise questions that have now proven valid.
So make no mistake: Overreaching public health officials and politicians—and the journalists-in-name-only who served as their mindless, unquestioning megaphones—have fully earned our withering condemnation. Indeed, holding them accountable is essential to sparing ourselves and future generations from repeating this dystopian chapter of human history.
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Book Review
‘Why Fauci Must Rot in Prison’: A Tale of Two Diaries
By Jill Erzen | The Defender | October 13, 2026
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.”
In his new book, “Why Fauci Must Rot in Prison,” due out Oct. 20, Navarro compares Fauci’s private entries to his own pandemic-era diary, and uses what he calls “a tale of two diaries” to argue that Fauci should face criminal prosecution.
“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
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- Green Energy Debacle: German Expert Professor Fritz Vahrenholt Warns Of Severe Economic And Social Consequences
- Two More Paleo Reconstructions Affirm Meters-Higher Sea Levels Across Ireland, Brazil 7000-6000 Years Ago
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
