Where Can We Go for The Truth Anymore?
By Sandra Friedemann | American Thinker | November 29, 2021
In this messed-up mixed-up world the formerly respected Fourth Estate has devolved into a collection of flat-out liars, brain-dead ideologues and unmitigated ignoramuses. Turn on any of the mainstream media channels or go to any one of hundreds of online outlets and you’ll be swamped in effluent.
The horrific murderous tragedy in Waukesha, Wisconsin in which a man deliberately and determinedly drove his SUV at a high rate of speed through a parade last week is being called a “parade crash” by the most liberal media outlets.
According to 95% of the media talking heads and their cohort, Kyle Rittenhouse is a ‘murdering white supremacist.’ Laughably, Snopes calls the three convicted felons who attacked Rittenhouse — one a domestic abuser and rapist, another a pedophile, and the third a burglar — ‘victims.’ Snopes goes further saying those three felons were there to ‘peacefully protest.’ Never mind the fires, the looting and property destruction. None of which was discussed in the vast majority of the media during Rittenhouse’s trial or after his acquittal.
Now we have a new variant of COVID-19 which the physician who first encountered and reported it says is “mild.” In a report in the Telegraph, Dr. Angelique Coetzee, a GP for thirty-three years who also chairs the South African Medical Association says, “Their symptoms were so different and so mild from those I had treated before.”
Mild illness. Zero hospitalizations. No deaths. Yet with this report, we have yet another round of wholesale fear mongering from the press and governments.
“Biden to restrict travel from South Africa and 7 other countries starting Monday” (Remember the cries and howls from the Left when Trump shut down travel when COVID first appeared? Xenophobe!)
“Boris Johnson announces ‘tighter rules’ in response to Omicron variant”
“Israel to ban entry of foreigners from all countries over Omicron”
Across the ether alleged “news” outlets are spouting nonsense about this variant that the WHO and CDC say appears to be mild and, thus far, not deadly.
MSNBC proclaims, “Omicron variant renews calls for more robust vaccination…” Why when the vaccines we currently have a) do not work against the pre-existing COVID variants and b) aren’t designed for this variant? (MSNBC’s institutional ignorance was run up the flagpole for fullest display with this story.)
“Omicron variant puts world in a ‘race against time’, says EU Commission President” is the headline quote from CNN.
MSNBC proclaims, “New covid variant: Omicron is a pandemic gut check.” They hype the “growing concern” and breathlessly report that “Omicron variant represents a ‘significant potential risk’ to its (Moderna’s) Covid-19 vaccine.” Well, DUH! Previous vaccines that didn’t work against alpha, beta or delta sure aren’t going to work against a new strain. The biggest risk is that if this is as mild or non-threatening as it seems to be thus far (zero deaths, zero hospitalizations, remember) is that the market for COVID vaccines may have just dried up.
As soon as news of this variant came out and was blasted around the world, financial and commodity markets tanked, prompting Goldman Sachs to announce, “This mutation is unlikely to be more malicious and that the existing vaccines will most likely continue to be effective in preventing hospitalizations and deaths. We do not think that the new variant is sufficient reason to make major portfolio changes.”
According to Paul Elias Alexander, PhD at the Brownstone Institute, it might be that COVID has now transformed so much that new variants might be more infectious but less deadly.
This is a brain twister of an article if you’re not accustomed to reading technical papers, but Alexander makes several key points (emphasis added):
“The virus is behaving just like how viruses behave. They are mutable and mutate and via Muller’s ratchet, we expect this to be milder and milder mutations and not more lethal ones given the pathogen seeks to infect the host and not arrive at an evolutionary dead-end.”
“For example, the (Pfizer) vaccine has failed to stop infection and spread against Delta… fully vaccinated individuals with breakthrough infections have peak viral load similar to unvaccinated cases.”
What’s most fascinating in this paper is a reference to a Swedish study of records of the nation’s entire population. The study’s findings are that efficacy of Pfizer’s BioNtech vaccine “waned progressively from 92% (effectiveness) at day 15-30 to 47% at day 121-180, and from day 211 and onwards no effectiveness could be detected.
AstraZenica’s mRNA vaccine fared even worse: “effectiveness of ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 was generally lower and waned faster, with no effectiveness detected from day 121 and onwards.”
This Swedish study is news given that governments are forcing vaccines into our bodies. Shouldn’t this be reported? Shouldn’t it be headlines? Yet nowhere is this information readily available outside the medical community. WHO isn’t reporting it; CDC and FDA aren’t reporting on it in the US, and nowhere in Europe is it being reported.
The only reason Dr. Alexander’s paper and the Swedish study are presented here is because of diligent research through many sites and noting a single reference embedded in a longer article.
The fact is, all of this COVID hysteria is being driven by the lobbyists for the pharmaceutical companies and fomented by “news” organizations and governments for power and control over us, our livelihoods and our lives.
Isn’t it about time this nonsense ends?
Graphic credit: U3161929 CC BY-SA 4.0 license
Fauci and the Great AIDS Swindle
A Partial Review of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., THE REAL ANTHONY FAUCI
BY LAURENT GUYÉNOT • UNZ REVIEW • NOVEMBER 27, 2021
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s new book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health is not the book of a politician seeking attention. It is the book of a man determined to stake his own life in the resistance against the unfolding bio-terrorist assault on humankind by governments captive of the pharmaceutical industry. He is calling for mass insurrection, and his last word is: “I’ll see you on the barricades.” The book begins like this:
I wrote this book to help Americans—and citizens across the globe—understand the historical underpinnings of the bewildering cataclysm that began in 2020. In that single annus horribilis, liberal democracy effectively collapsed worldwide. The very governmental health regulators, social media eminences, and media companies that idealistic populations relied upon as champions of freedom, health, democracy, civil rights, and evidence-based public policy seemed to collectively pivot in a lockstep assault against free speech and personal freedoms. Suddenly, those trusted institutions seemed to be acting in concert to generate fear, promote obedience, discourage critical thinking, and herd seven billion people to march to a single tune, culminating in mass public health experiments with a novel, shoddily tested and improperly licensed technology so risky that manufacturers refused to produce it unless every government on Earth shielded them from liability. … Conscientious objectors who resisted these unwanted, experimental, zero-liability medical interventions faced orchestrated gaslighting, marginalization, and scapegoating. American lives and livelihoods were shattered by a bewildering array of draconian diktats imposed without legislative approval or judicial review, risk assessment, or scientific citation. So-called Emergency Orders closed our businesses, schools and churches, made unprecedented intrusions into privacy, and disrupted our most treasured social and family relationships.
Kennedy is not a newcomer to this frightening dystopia. “My 40-year career as an environmental and public health advocate,” he writes, “gave me a unique understanding of the corrupting mechanisms of ‘regulatory capture,’ the process by which the regulator becomes beholden to the industry it’s meant to regulate.” From the time he entered the vaccine debate in 2005, he realized that “the pervasive web of deep financial entanglements between Pharma and the government health agencies had put regulatory capture on steroids.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), for example, owns 57 vaccine patents and spent $4.9 billion in 2019 buying and distributing vaccines. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) receives 45 percent of its budget from the pharmaceutical industry. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), with its $42 billion budget, owns hundreds of vaccine patents and often profits from the sale of products it supposedly regulates. High-level officials receive yearly emoluments of up to $150,000 in royalty payments on products that they help develop and then usher through the approval process.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, “America’s reigning health commissar,” stands at the summit of that Leviathan. From 1968, he occupied various posts at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a sub-agency of NIH, of which he became director in 1984. With a $417,608 annual salary, he is the highest paid of all federal employees, including the President. “His experiences surviving 50 years as the panjandrum of a key federal bureaucracy, having advised six Presidents, the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, foreign governments, and the WHO, seasoned him exquisitely for a crisis that would allow him to wield power enjoyed by few rulers and no doctor in history.” He has nurtured a complex web of financial entanglements that has transformed the NIH into a subsidiary of Big Pharma. Reaching into the deep pockets of the Clinton and Gates Foundations, he has used his $6 billion annual budget to achieve dominance and control over many agencies, including the World Health Organization (WHO). He can make and break careers, enrich or punish university research centers, and dictate the outcome of scientific research across the globe, consistently prioritizing pharmaceutical industry profits over public health.
Kennedy’s book documents Fauci’s “two-decade strategy of promoting false pandemics as a scheme for promoting novel vaccines,” as well as “his actions to conceal widespread contamination in blood and vaccines, his destructive vendettas against scientists who challenge the Pharma paradigm, [and] his deliberate sabotaging of patent-expired remedies against infectious diseases.”
But of course, Kennedy’s book is not about a man: it is about an irremediably corrupt and predatory system created in the U.S. and exported worldwide. Ultimately, however, the system is built and run by humans, and focusing on its most emblematic representative shows its very soul.
Kennedy’s book puts the current crisis in historical perspective. But it doesn’t tell the story chronologically. It starts with a very long first chapter on the current Covid crisis—a book by itself—, then goes back, from chapter 3, to the 1980s and the search for the AIDS vaccine, the template for today’s pharmaceutical coup. In this review, I will focus on the AIDS episode, because it is the least familiar part of a history covering fifty years, and it helps make sense of what is happening today. It is an incredible story, that I would have had difficulty believing just three years ago, but that our current enslavement now makes utterly credible.
The thirty-year decampment of journalistic scrutiny means that there is still no coherent public narrative chronicling Dr. Fauci’s futile quest for his “inevitable” AIDS vaccine, much less accountability. Industry and government scientists have instead shrouded the scandalous saga in secrecy, subterfuge, and prevarication, obscuring a thousand calamities and a sea of tears deserving its own book. Every meager effort to research the debacle—on Google, PubMed, news sites, and published clinical trial data—yields only shocking new atrocities—a grim, repetitive parade of horribles: heartbreaking tragedies, entrenched institutional arrogance and racism, broken promises, vast expenditures of squandered treasure, and the recurring chicanery of Anthony Fauci, Bob Gallo, and Bill Gates.
Kennedy deserves praise and gratitude for his courage to bring this controversy out into the open, in a clear and well-documented exposé. His book is destined to become a landmark in the struggle for Life and Truth—and in the Kennedy heroic saga. This article reflects only a fraction of what can be learned from its 480 pages packed with data and references. Since page numbers in the kindle edition (recommended for its thousand hyperlinks) differ from those in the printing book, I have dispensed with them.
In the Beginning
In the first lines of his 2014 book Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak (documenting an astonishing 1,135 percent higher rate of autism among children who took hepatitis B vaccines), Kennedy prudently claimed to be “pro-vaccine” and to “believe that vaccines have saves the lives of hundreds of millions of humans over the past century.” Kennedy makes no such disclaimer in his new book. Rather, he sides with the critics of the popular dogma that vaccines played the key role in abolishing mortal contagious illnesses in North America and Europe, citing a 2000 study by CDC and Johns Hopkins scientists that concluded: “nearly 90 percent of the decline in infectious disease mortality among US children occurred before 1940, when few antibiotics or vaccines were available.” The main causes of the dramatic 74 percent decline in infectious disease mortality in the first half of the twentieth century were improved nutrition and sanitation.
From Kennedy, The Real Anthony Fauci, 2021
This revisionist but objective perspective explains why Fauci and Gates’s obsession with vaccine-preventable diseases has caused negative overall impacts on public health in Africa and Asia, by proportionally reducing assistance streams for nutrition, clean water, transportation, hygiene, and economic development. Gates and Fauci have actually hijacked WHO’s public health agenda away from the projects that are proven to curb infectious diseases, and diverted international aid to wedge open emerging markets for their multinational partners.
To understand their craze for vaccines, Kennedy reminds us of the pioneering influence of the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1911, after the Supreme Court ruled that Standard Oil constituted an “unreasonable monopoly” and splintered it into thirty-four companies, John D. Rockefeller inaugurated what Bill Gates would later call “philanthrocapitalism.” He provided large grants to scientists for synthesizing and patenting chemical versions of the molecules identified in traditional medicine. The Foundation provided almost half of the initial budget for the League of Nations’ Health Organization (LNHO) in 1922, and populated its ranks with its veterans and favorites. It imbued the League with its technocratic philosophy of health, inherited by its successor body, the WHO, in 1948.
The Rockefeller Foundation launched a “public-private partnership” with pharmaceutical companies called the International Health Commission, which first set about inoculating the hapless populations of the colonized tropics with a yellow fever jab. By the time John D. Rockefeller, Jr. disbanded it in 1951, the International Health Commission had spent billions of dollars on tropical disease campaigns in almost 100 countries and colonies. These projects had a hidden agenda, according to a 2017 report, U.S. Philanthrocapitalism and the Global Health Agenda: they allowed the Rockefeller family to open developing world markets for oil, mining, banking and other profitable trades, including pharmaceutical profits that grew tremendously when, in the 1970s:
a wave of new technologies, including PCR and super powerful electron microscopes, had opened windows on teeming new worlds containing millions of species of previously unknown viruses to scientists. … The lure of fame and fortune ignited a chaotic revolution in virology as ambitious young PhDs scrambled to inculpate newly discovered microbes as the cause of old malignancies. … Under this new rubric, every theoretical breakthrough, every find, became potentially the basis for a new generation of drugs.
By the mid-1970s, the CDC was seeking to justify its existence by tracking small outbreaks of rabies. “Drumming up public fear of periodic pandemics was a natural way for NIAID and CDC bureaucrats to keep their agencies relevant. Dr. Fauci’s immediate boss and predecessor as NIAID Director, Richard M. Krause, helped pioneer this new strategy in 1976.” That year the fake swine flu epidemic was concocted. The experimental vaccine was so fraught with problems that the Health and Human Services (HHS) discontinued the jab after vaccinating 49 million Americans. According to news accounts, the incidence of flu was seven times greater among the vaccinated than the unvaccinated. Furthermore, the vaccine caused some 500 cases of the degenerative nerve disease Guillain-Barré Syndrome, 32 deaths, more than 400 paralyzations, and as many as 4,000 other injuries. Injured plaintiffs filed 1,604 lawsuits. By April 1985, the government had paid out $83,233,714 and spent tens of millions of dollars adjudicating and processing those claims.
Another scandal broke in 1983, when a NIH-funded UCLA study found that the DTP vaccine developed by Wyeth—now Pfizer—was killing or causing severe brain injury, including seizures and death, in one in every 300 vaccinated children. While protecting children against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis, the DTP vaccine had ruined their immune systems, making them vulnerable to a wide range of other deadly infections.
The resultant lawsuits caused the collapse of insurance markets for vaccines and threatened to bankrupt the industry. Wyeth claimed to be losing $20 in downstream liability for every dollar it earned on vaccine sales, and induced Congress to pass in 1986 the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which shielded vaccine makers from liability. (This incentive for unrestricted greed was strengthened in 2005 when George W. Bush signed into law the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act).
AIDS and AZT
In 1984, when Fauci became director of NIAID, the AIDS crisis was spiraling out of control. That proved “a redemptive juncture for NIAID and the launch pad for Dr. Fauci’s stellar rise.” In an April 1984 press conference, NIH scientist Robert Gallo linked AIDS to the virus that was soon to be named HIV. Dr. Fauci then moved aggressively to claim jurisdiction for his agency over the National Cancer Institute (NCI), another sub-agency of NIH. “As the nation’s newly appointed AIDS czar, Dr. Fauci was now a gatekeeper for almost all AIDS research … parroting NCI’s vows to cure cancer, Dr. Fauci promised Congress that he would quickly produce drugs and vaccines to banish AIDS.”
At the same time, he was deliberately spreading contagion terror, warning in a 1983 fear-mongering article that “the scope of the syndrome may be enormous”, since “routine close contact, as within a family household, can spread the disease”—despite the fact that AIDS was almost exclusive to intravenous drug users and male homosexuals. A year later, Fauci was forced to concede that health officials had never detected a case of the disease spread through “casual contact.” Nevertheless, Dr. Fauci’s systematic response was “to amplify the widespread panic of dreaded pestilence that would naturally magnify his power, elevate his profile, and expand his influence. Amplifying terror of infectious disease was already an ingrained knee-jerk institutional response at NIAID.”
Having seized control over AIDS research, Fauci captured the new flood of congressional AIDS appropriations flowing to NIH through the lobbying of a newly organized gay community. By 1990, NIAID’s annual AIDS budget reached $3 billion. In the ensuing decades, the federal government spent over half a trillion dollars in the quest for an elusive vaccine that never materialized. Dr. Fauci pumped up taxpayers’ money into nearly 100 vaccine candidates, with no other result than “massive transfers of public lucre to Dr. Fauci’s Pharma partners,” and a sea of tears for millions of unfortunate human guinea pigs.
NIAID’s lack of in-house drug development capacity meant that Fauci had to farm out drug research to a network of so-called “principal investigators” (PIs), academic physicians and researchers controlled by pharmaceutical companies and acting as liaisons, recruiters and spokespersons.
PIs are pharmaceutical industry surrogates who play key roles promoting the pharmaceutical paradigm and functioning as high priests of all its orthodoxies, which they proselytize with missionary zeal. They use their seats on medical boards and chairmanships of university departments to propagate dogma and root out heresy. … They are the credentialed and trusted medical experts who prognosticate on television networks—now helplessly reliant on pharmaceutical ad revenue—to push out Pharma content.
Dr. Fauci’s choice to transfer virtually all of NIAID’s budget to pharmaceutical PIs for drug development was an abdication of the agency’s duty to find the source and eliminate the explosive epidemics of allergic and autoimmune disease that began under his watch around 1989. … NIAID money effectively became a giant subsidy to the blossoming pharmaceutical industry to incubate a pipeline of profitable new drugs targeted to treat the symptoms of those very diseases.
In the late 80s and early 90s, PIs received every year between 4 and 5 billions of dollars from NIH’s budget. But “legalized bribes” from drug companies and royalty payments from drug products often dwarfed their government funding. Celia Farber’s 2006 Harper’s article, “Out of Control: AIDS and the Destruction of Medical Science,” laid bare the culture of squalor, corruption, and vendetta at Fauci’s AIDS Branch, the Division of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (DAIDS).
Despite his miserable track record at reducing illness over the previous decade, Fauci persuaded President Bill Clinton, in May 1997, to set a new national goal for science. In a speech delivered at Morgan State University, Clinton—perhaps not without cryptic irony— imitated Kennedy’s May 25, 1961 moonshot promise, saying, “Today let us commit ourselves to developing an AIDS vaccine within the next decade.”
A year later, Bill Gates, who had just founded his International Aids Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), sealed a deal with Fauci. “Over the next two decades, that partnership would metastasize to include pharmaceutical companies, military and intelligence planners, and international health agencies all collaborating to promote weaponized pandemics and vaccines and a new brand of corporate imperialism rooted in the ideology of biosecurity.” The story of Gates’ involvement in the vaccine business, of his murderous experiments in Africa and India, and of his rise as the unofficial top sponsor of the WHO (ordering in 2011: “All 193 member states, you must make vaccines a central focus of your health systems”), is told in chapters 9 and 10 of Kennedy’s book.
When Dr. Fauci became head of NIAID, azidothymidine, known as AZT, was the only candidate as an AIDS remedy. AZT is a “DNA chain terminator,” randomly destroying DNA synthesis in reproducing cells. It had been developed in 1964 for cancer, but abandoned as too toxic even for short-term therapy. It was deemed so worthless that it was not even patented. In 1985, Samuel Broder, head of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), claimed having found that AZT killed HIV in test tubes. The British company Burroughs Wellcome then patented it as an AIDS remedy. “Recognizing financial opportunity in the desperate terror of young AIDS patients facing certain death, the drug company set the price at up to $10,000/year per patient—making AZT one of the most expensive drugs in pharmaceutical history. Since Burroughs Wellcome could manufacture AZT for pennies per dose, the company anticipated a bonanza.”
Fauci gave Burroughs Wellcome a monopoly control over the government’s HIV response. But all did not go smoothly. “AZT’s horrendous toxicity hobbled researchers struggling to design study protocols that would make it appear either safe or effective.” Another problem is that community-based doctors were achieving promising results with cheap, off-label therapeutic drugs. Dr. Fauci refused to test any of those repurposed drugs that had no Pharma patrons. When he did put on trial AL721, an antiviral that was far less toxic than AZT, he rigged the studies to fail, and abruptly cancelled Phase 2.
Meanwhile, he accelerated testing of AZT, skipping animal testing and allowing Burroughs Wellcome to proceed directly to human trials. In March 1987, Fauci’s team declared the human trials a success after only four months, and Fauci congratulated himself in front of the press. However, when in July 1987, the official report of Burroughs Wellcome’s Phase 2 trial was published, European scientists complained that raw data showed no benefit in reducing symptoms. FDA conducted its own investigation eighteen months later, but kept its results secret, until investigative journalist John Lauritsen obtained some of them by using the Freedom of Information Act; the documents showed that the Fauci/Burroughs Wellcome research teams had engaged in widespread data tampering. More than half of the AZT patients suffered adverse reactions so deadly that they needed multiple blood transfusions just to keep them alive. Nevertheless, Fauci kept on lying himself to the top of the world, with little scrutiny from mainstream media.
A key and enduring legacy of the AZT battle was Dr. Fauci’s emergence as the alpha wolf of HHS [Health and Human Services]. His enormous budget, and multiplying contacts on Capitol Hill, the White House, and the medical industry, thereafter allowed him to influence or ignore a succession of politically appointed HHS directors and to bully, manipulate, and dominate HHS’s other sister agencies, most notably FDA.
AZT was not the only subject of interest to Fauci. By June 2003, NIH was running 10,906 clinical trials on new antiviral concoctions in some four hundred clinical trials in ninety countries. Some of those trials seemed pulled out of Dickens’ worst nightmares. The Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP), a medical industry watchdog organization, has documented that between 1985 and 2005, NIAID conscripted at least 532 infants and children from foster care in New York City as subjects of clinical trials testing experimental AIDS drugs and vaccines. AHRP’s investigation revealed that many of those children were perfectly healthy and may not even have been HIV-infected. Yet 80 of them died. In 2004, journalist Liam Scheff chronicled Dr. Fauci’s secretive experiments on foster children at Incarnation Children’s Center (ICC) in New York City and numerous sister facilities between 1988 and 2002. These disclosures, comments Kennedy, beg many questions:
From what moral wilderness did the monsters who devised and condoned these experiments descend upon our idealistic country? How have they lately come to exercise such tyrannical power over our citizens? What sort of nation are we if we allow them to continue? Most trenchantly, does it not make sense that the malevolent minds, the elastic ethics, the appalling judgment, the arrogance, and savagery that sanctioned the barbaric brutalization of children at the Incarceration Convent House, and the torture of animals for industry profit, could also concoct a moral justification for suppressing lifesaving remedies and prolonging a deadly epidemic? Could these same dark alchemists justify a strategy of prioritizing their $48 billion vaccine project ahead of public health and human life? Did similar hubris—that deadly human impulse to play God—pave the lethal path to Wuhan and fuel the reckless decision to hack the codes of Creation and fabricate diabolical new forms of life—pandemic superbugs—in a ramshackle laboratory with scientists linked to the Chinese military?
Indeed, Kennedy shows in his final chapter, “Germ Games,” that Fauci’s investments in so-called “gain of function” experiments to engineer pandemic superbugs raise “the ironic possibility that Dr. Fauci may have played a role in triggering the global contagion that two US presidents entrusted him to manage.”
Africa is “the venue of choice for companies seeking cooperative government officials, compliant populations, the lowest per-patient enrollment costs, and lax oversight by media and regulatory officials.” In the early 1990s, African dictators rolled out the red carpet for Pharma, cashing in on the lucrative business of farming out their citizens for the booming clinical trial business. And on January 29, 2003, President George W. Bush announced at his State of the Union speech his Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), Fauci’s new swindle:
On the continent of Africa, nearly 30 million people have the AIDS virus. … Yet across that continent, only 50,000 AIDS victims—only 50,000—are receiving the medicine they need. … I ask the Congress to commit $15 billion over the next five years, including nearly $10 billion in new money, to turn the tide against AIDS in the most afflicted nations of Africa and the Caribbean.
Does HIV Cause AIDS?
Kennedy’s chapter 5, “The HIV Heresies,” opens up with the following note:
I hesitated to include this chapter because any questioning of the orthodoxy that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS remains an unforgivable—even dangerous—heresy among our reigning medical cartel and its media allies. But one cannot write a complete book about Tony Fauci without touching on the abiding—and fascinating—scientific controversy over what he characterizes as his “greatest accomplishment” and his “life’s work.”
The controversy illustrates how pharmaceutical industries and health agencies, acting in concert, engineer consensus on incomplete or fraudulent theories, and ruthlessly suppress dissent from even the most gifted recognized scientists. “From the outset,” Kennedy insists, “I want to make clear that I take no position on the relationship between HIV and AIDS.” However, there seems little doubt that his basic point is correct:
During the thirty-six years since Dr. Fauci and his colleague, Dr. Robert Gallo, first claimed that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS, no one has been able to point to a study that demonstrates their hypothesis using accepted scientific proofs. … Even today, incoherence, knowledge gaps, contradictions, and inconsistencies continue to bedevil the official dogma.
The success story of the HIV-AIDS dogma shows “many of the tactics Dr. Fauci has pioneered to dodge debate—bedazzling and bamboozling the press into ignoring legitimate inquiry of the credo, and undermining, gaslighting, punishing, bullying, intimidating, marginalizing, vilifying, and muzzling critics.” One of Fauci’s victims was Dr. Peter Duesberg, who in 1987 was still recognized as the world’s most accomplished retrovirologist. Duesberg argues that HIV does not cause AIDS but is essentially a “free rider” common to high-risk populations who suffer immune suppression due to environmental exposures. HIV, he says, is a harmless passenger virus that has almost certainly coexisted in humans for thousands of generations without causing diseases. While HIV may be sexually transmittable, Duesberg claims, AIDS is not.
Duesberg published his views in a groundbreaking 1987 article, then in a 724-page book, Inventing the AIDS Virus. Kennedy finds that “Duesberg’s rationales appear so clean, so elegantly crafted, and so compelling that, in reading them, it seems impossible that the entire [orthodox] hypothesis did not instantly collapse under the smothering weight of relentless logic.” But Fauci and Gallo never attempted to reply to Duesberg. Blaming AIDS on a virus was the gambit that had allowed NIAID to claim the jurisdiction—and cash flow—away from NCI, and Duesberg was severely punished for endangering this.
Dr. Fauci summoned the entire upper clergy of his HIV orthodoxy—and all of its lower acolytes and altar boys—to unleash a storm of fierce retribution on the Berkeley virologist and his followers. … the AIDS establishment, down to its lowliest doctor, publicly reviled Duesberg, NIH defunded him, and academia ostracized and exiled the brilliant Berkeley professor. The scientific press all but banished him. He became radioactive.
Surprisingly, however, Dr. Luc Montagnier, whose discovery of HIV Gallo had in fact stolen—as he admitted in 1991 after years of litigation—, became Duesberg’s most embarrassing convert, declaring at the San Francisco International AIDS Conference in June 1990, that “the HIV virus is harmless and passive, a benign virus.” He added that, according to his findings, HIV becomes dangerous only in the presence of a second organism, a bacteria-like bug called a mycoplasma. Montagnier, in fact, had never claimed that HIV was the only factor in AIDS, and grew increasingly skeptical of that theory. His repeated questioning of the establishment paradigm signaled the beginning of his vilification, for which his Nobel Prize hardly protected him.
Gallo’s “proof” that the cause of AIDS was a virus—as opposed to toxic exposures— provided the critical foundation stone of Dr. Fauci’s career. It allowed Fauci to capture the AIDS program and launch NIAID as the leading federal partner of the drug-production industry. This explains why Fauci never funded any study to explore whether HIV actually caused AIDS, and took vigorous preemptive action against any such study.
Kennedy cites other dissenting voices on AIDS epidemiology. Dr. Shyh-Ching Lo, the Chief Researcher in charge of AIDS programs for the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, was shocked by Anthony Fauci’s unconventional claim that antibodies, normally the sign of a robust immune response, should, with HIV, be the signal for impending death. Since “HIV tests” do not in reality detect the elusive virus but only antibodies, there seems to be an Orwellian inversion at work. Kennedy also quotes Dr. David Rasnick, a PhD biochemist who has worked for thirty years in the pharmaceutical biotech field:
Fauci’s fundamental conundrum is that he has told everybody to diagnose AIDS based on the presence of HIV antibodies. With every other disease, the presence of antibodies is the signal that the patient has vanquished the disease. With AIDS, Fauci and Gallo, and now Gates, claim it’s a sign you’re about to die. Think about it; if the objective of an AIDS vaccine is to stimulate antibody production, then success would mean that every vaccinated person would also have an AIDS diagnosis. I mean, this is fodder for a comedy bit. It’s like someone gave the Three Stooges an annual billion-dollar budget!
The nature of AIDS—a syndrome, not a disease—is itself subject to questions, since it was made to encompass a galaxy of some thirty separate well-known diseases, all of which occur in individuals who have no HIV infection. “In the hands of Dr. Fauci’s opportunistic PIs, AIDS became an amorphous malady subject to ever-changing definitions, encompassing a multitude of old diseases in hosts who test positive for HIV.” Nobel Laureate Kary Mullis, the inventor of the PCR tests, pointed out that the PCR was capable of finding HIV signals in large segments of the population who suffered no AIDS symptoms. On the other hand, AIDS commonly occurs in people who test HIV negative, as Geoffrey Cowley documented in a 1992 Newsweek article, followed by Steve Heimoff in the Los Angeles Times.
These very inconsistencies were not a problem for Fauci and his standing army of pharmaceutical mercenaries. Quite the opposite: they opened up Africa’s AIDS bonanza. Researchers funded by Fauci, using PCR tests and murky statistical models, declared that up to 30 million Africans were suffering from AIDS, nearly half the adult population in some nations. While in Western nations, AIDS continued to be a disease of drug addicts and homosexual “poppers” (consumers of the amyl nitrite vasodilator providing relaxation of the anal musculature, packaged into the “popper” container patented by Burroughs Wellcome and advertised in the gay press throughout the AIDS epidemic), mysteriously, in Africa, 59 percent of AIDS cases were women, and 85 percent were heterosexuals.
But in the early 1990s, the character of AIDS changed dramatically with the proliferation of AZT. As they started to give AZT to people who were in fact not even sick but simply positive on the HIV test, AIDS started to look increasingly like AZT poisoning. And the death rate climbed precipitously. According to the Duesbergians, the vast majority of “AIDS deaths” after 1987 were actually caused by AZT. The medication that Dr. Fauci was prescribing to treat AIDS patients actually did what the virus could not: it caused AIDS itself. In 1988, the average survival time for patients taking AZT was four months. In 1997, recognizing the lethal effect of AZT, health officials lowered the dose; the average lifespan of AZT patients then rose to twenty-four months. According to Dr. Claus Köhnlein, a German oncologist, “We virtually killed a whole generation of AIDS patients without even noticing it because the symptoms of the AZT intoxication were almost indistinguishable from AIDS.”
Conclusion
In July 2019, Dr. Fauci made a surprise announcement: he finally had a working HIV vaccine, the potential “nail in the coffin” for the epidemic. He conceded that his new vaccine didn’t prevent transmission of AIDS, but predicted that those who took the jab would find that when they did get AIDS, the symptoms would be much reduced. Kennedy comments:
So confident was Dr. Fauci of the media’s slavish credulity that he assumed, correctly, that he’d never need to answer the many questions raised by this feverish gibberish. That entire odd proposition received zero critical press commentary. His success at slapping lipstick on this donkey and selling it to the world as a Thoroughbred may have emboldened his ruse—a year later—of placing similar cosmetics on the COVID vaccines that, likewise, neither prevent disease nor preclude transmission.
By 2019, the AIDS rope started to wear out. Who still cared about AIDS anyway? The “Covid-19 Pandemic” came as the perfect opportunity for a reset and an update in the pharmaceutical racket. As Winston Churchill reportedly said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste”. With complicit corporate media blacking out the scandalous track record of his white-coat mafia, Fauci emerged, again, as the good doctor, the savior.
“Is it fair to blame Dr. Fauci for a crisis that, of course, has many authors?” asks Kennedy. To some extent, it is.
Under Dr. Fauci’s leadership, the allergic, autoimmune, and chronic illnesses which Congress specifically charged NIAID to investigate and prevent, have mushroomed to afflict 54 percent of children, up from 12.8 percent when he took over NIAID in 1984. Dr. Fauci has offered no explanation as to why allergic diseases like asthma, eczema, food allergies, allergic rhinitis, and anaphylaxis suddenly exploded beginning in 1989, five years after he came to power. On its website, NIAID boasts that autoimmune disease is one of the agency’s top priorities. Some 80 autoimmune diseases, including juvenile diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis, Graves’ disease, and Crohn’s disease, which were practically unknown prior to 1984, suddenly became epidemic under his watch. Autism, which many scientists now consider an autoimmune disease, exploded from between 2/10,000 and 4/10,000 Americans when Tony Fauci joined NIAID, to one in thirty-four today. Neurological diseases like ADD/ADHD, speech and sleep disorders, narcolepsy, facial tics, and Tourette’s syndrome have become commonplace in American children. The human, health, and economic costs of chronic disease dwarf the costs of all infectious diseases in the United States. By this decade’s end, obesity, diabetes, and pre-diabetes are on track to debilitate 85 percent of America’s citizens. America is among the ten most over-weight countries on Earth. The health impacts of these epidemics—which fall mainly on the young—eclipse even the most exaggerated health impacts of COVID-19.
Dr. Fauci has done nothing to advance NIAID’s core obligation of researching the causes of chronic allergic and autoimmune diseases that have mushroomed under his tenure. Instead, Fauci has “reshaped NIAID into the leading incubator for new pharmaceutical products, many of which, ironically, profit from the cascading chronic disease pandemic.” Instead of researching the causes of Americans’ failing health, Dr. Fauci funnels the bulk of his $6 billion budget to the research and development of new drugs and vaccines that are largely responsible for weakening our natural immunity. “Of late, he has played a central role in undermining public health and subverting democracy and constitutional governance around the globe and in transitioning our civil governance toward medical totalitarianism.”
I was reminded of Dr. Knock, the central character of Jules Romains’s famous novel Knock or the Triumph of Medicine, written in 1923. Dr. Knock is a shady medical doctor of dubious competence who professes that “health” is an obsolete and unscientific concept, and that all men are sick and need to be informed about it by their doctor. To advance his plan of converting a whole town into permanent patients, he enlists the help of the school teacher and of the pharmacist, who suddenly sees his clientele booming (watch unforgettable moments of Guy Lefranc’s 1951 film adaptation with Louis Jouvet here and here).
Louis Jouvet as Dr. Knock in 1951
To some extent, however, Fauci is himself the product of a civilizational orientation that could only, in the long run, lead to the tyrannical medical technocracy that is now trying to enslave us. Rather than a new Dr. Frankenstein, Fauci is our own monster coming back after us. Kennedy hints at this vast aspect of the question, pointing to the need for deep questioning. The way Americans and Westerners in general have come to view health care has been shaped by the philosophy of the Rockefeller Foundation: “a pill for an ill.” In the debate between the “miasma theory”—that emphasizes preventing disease by fortifying the immune system through nutrition and by reducing exposures to environmental toxins and stresses—versus the “germ theory”—which blames disease on microscopic pathogens—we have unambiguously opted for the latter. We have signed up for an approach to disease that requires to identify the culpable germ and tailor a poison to kill it. The choice was not forced upon us. We have surrendered responsibility for our health to medical experts and insurance brokers.
As Dr. Claus Köhnlein and Torsten Engelbrecht observe in their book Virus Mania (2007) quoted by Kennedy: “The idea that certain microbes—above all fungi, bacteria, and viruses—are our great opponents in battle, causing certain diseases that must be fought with special chemical bombs, has buried itself deep into the collective conscience.” It is a warlike paradigm, perfectly suited for manufacturing consent on the way to dictatorship. As Kennedy wrote in his preface to Dr. Joseph Mercola and Ronni Cummins, The Truth About Covid-19 (2021), “demagogues must weaponize fear to justify their demands for blind obedience.”
Government technocrats, billionaire oligarchs, Big Pharma, Big Data, Big Media, the high-finance robber barons, and the military industrial intelligence apparatus love pandemics for the same reasons they love wars and terrorist attacks. Catastrophic crises create opportunities of convenience to increase both power and wealth.
Laurent Guyénot, PhD, is the author of The Unspoken Kennedy Truth and of a film on the same subject.
With Democrat Back in White House, MSNBC Returns to Ignoring U.S.-Backed War in Yemen
By Adam Johnson | The Column | November 24, 2021
A review of MSNBC’s coverage from Nov. 3, 2020 to Nov. 22, 2021 shows MSNBC hasn’t run a single segment on the U.S.-backed war still raging in Yemen.
To the extent MSNBC did cover Yemen’s “civil war” during this time frame it was exclusively to pass along, without skepticism, claims last spring from Democrats that President Biden had “ended U.S. support for the war”—which turned out to not be true in any meaningful sense, a fact evident at the time but not met with any questioning from MSNBC reporters or pundits.
Since then, it’s become increasingly clear little has changed in the status quo. While the U.S. has halted some forms of assistance, like mid-air refueling of aircraft, other forms of vital participation remain, including: green-lighting of weapons transfers, maintaining spare parts for Saudi war planes, sharing some forms of intelligence, and training the Royal Saudi Navy, which is enforcing a catastrophic blockade on Yemen.
And then there is the political cover that the Biden administration is giving the Saudi-led coalition, a vital form of support that noted in September by Annelle R. Sheline and Bruce Riedel at The Brookings Institute—hardly a far-left bastion of anti-imperial polemic:
Biden’s broken promise on Yemen
… Unfortunately, Biden’s approach is fatally flawed. The president stated that he would “end U.S. support for offensive operations in Yemen.” Yet the Saudi-led war on Yemen by definition, is an offensive operation. Saudi Arabia is bombing and blockading another country: Between March 2015 and July 2021, the Saudis conducted a minimum of 23,251 air raids, which killed or injured 18,616 civilians. The Houthis, known formally as Ansarallah, launch missiles in retaliation but if Saudi airstrikes ceased, the Houthis would have little reason to provoke their powerful neighbor. As long as the U.S. materially and rhetorically backs the Saudis’ war of choice, Biden’s assertion that the U.S. would end support for offensive operations is a lie.
The second crucial flaw in Biden’s approach is that he did not call for an immediate end to the Saudi blockade of Yemen. The blockade primarily blocks fuel from entering the Houthi-controlled Hodeida port; the Saudis also prevent the use of Sanaa International Airport. Blockades cannot be defensive: they are offensive operations, and therefore U.S. involvement should have ended following Biden’s declaration in February. The U.S. tacitly cooperated with the blockade by not challenging it, and the U.S. Navy occasionally announces it has intercepted smuggled weapons from Iran, suggesting a more active role than the administration admits. Congress should investigate.
Just this week, the Biden White House and State Department announced the US will be selling another $650 million in weapons to Saudi Arabia, hiding behind the nonsensical talking point that the weapons are “purely defensive.”
There was a time when MSNBC media personalities did act like they cared about what the UN calls the “world’s worst humanitarian disaster,” which has killed almost a quarter of a million people.
MSNBC ignored the war almost completely during the Obama years and early Trump years. But after the Saudi coalition bombed a school bus in August 2018, and Saudi dictator Mohammad bin Salman ordered the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in October 2018, they—like much of the U.S. media—finally began reporting on the regime’s human rights abuses. For a while.
MSNBC ran multiple segments on the war in the second half of 2018 when it was considered very much Trump’s war.
- Aug 9 2018 – All in with Chris Hayes: Dozens of children killed in school bus bombing in Yemen
- Aug 10 2018 – Velshi & Ruhle: An airstrike in Yemen struck a school bus, killing children
- Oct 21 2018 – All in with Chris Hayes: 14 Million People On Brink Of Starvation In Yemen
- Nov 15 2018 All in with Chris Hayes: Trump boosts authoritarians, as war rages in Yemen
- Sept 2018 – All in with Chris Hayes: WSJ: Pompeo backed continuing US role in war in Yemen
- Nov 28 2018 – All in with Chris Hayes: Senate advances bill to end support for war in Yemen
- Dec 12 2018: All in with Chris Hayes: Rep. Chris Murphy on what’s at stake with vote on Yemen
- Dec 12 2018 – All in with Chris Hayes: Paul Ryan’s Cowardly Act On Yemen
- Dec 13 2018 – Andrea Mitchell Reports: Bernie Sanders: Congress must determine U.S. involvement in Yemen crisis
- Dec 13 2018 – Ali Velshi: Senate votes to end U.S. support for Saudi-led war in Yemen
After this spasm of concern in late 2018, the coverage largely died out. As I noted in FAIR at the time, when activist pressure to pass a resolution compelling an end to U.S. support for the war was at its most urgent in March 2019, MSNBC ignored the effort altogether. There was a brief aside about Trump’s veto of said Yemen war powers act by Rachel Maddow on April 16, 2019, but it amounted to little more than a passing mention.
The next—and it turns out last—time an actual segment aired on the Yemen war was on Morning Joe in July 2020. This report, by NBC News’ Keir Simmons, did mention the war and the U.S.’s role in it, with a focus on how Covid was killing Yemenis. But since the July 2020 Morning Joe report, there have been no segments aired on MSNBC about the U.S.-backed Saudi bombing of Yemen.
In over 18 months, our nominally progressive cable network has not dedicated a single news report, roundtable debate, or segment to the world’s worst humanitarian disaster, which continues to be aided and armed by the U.S. government. When it was Trump’s war—and the Saudi regime fell out of favor with U.S. elites—their hearts bled. Now that we’re back to business as usual and the war is being armed and supported by a Democratic White House, it’s simply a non-issue.
In February 2021, President Joe Biden announced the U.S. was ending its support for “offensive” operations in Yemen, a deliberately vague and ultimately meaningless distinction that appears to have been designed to confuse progressives into declaring victory and moving on. Much to the White House’s liking, one can assume, the gambit seems to have worked, with MSNBC shelving the issue altogether and treating the U.S.-funded and backed war crime like it was wrapped up and out of our hands.
But it’s far from it. At any time, the Biden administration could cancel a U.S. program that provides maintenance for Saudi warplanes, the same warplanes that are still dropping bombs on civilians, including the recent bombing of a plastics factory in Sana’a. The Biden administration could reject the sale of U.S. air-to-air missiles, which can be used to shoot down airplanes and are one more tool the Saudi-led coalition can use to menace humanitarian workers who want to deliver supplies, or people trying to get their ill loved ones out of the country for treatment. And, it is an extremely low bar, but, at any point, Biden could clarify what is meant by support for “defensive” operations, and disclose the full extent of U.S. participation in the blockade, something he has repeatedly declined to do, even after 16 senators requested more transparency and robust action. These are all things the Biden administration is declining to do, thereby providing material and political support that is contributing to Saudi Arabia’s ability to continue the war.
After his six-month period in 2018 of breathlessly and repeatedly pronouncing the urgency of the issue, Chris Hayes’ show ‘All In’ has not run a segment on Yemen at all since December 2018.
Hayes hasn’t even mentioned the topic on Twitter since Biden took office Jan 20, 2021.
Mehdi Hasan, a consistent, long-time critic of Saudi Arabia and the war prior to joining MSNBC Feb 28 2021, did a segment on his online-only Peacock show after the election on Dec. 3 featuring prominent Yemen war critics Prof. Shireen Al-Adeimi and journalist Spencer Ackerman. In this segment, Hasan suggests in his opening that a Biden presidency would turn a page on the U.S.-Saudi relationship and end the war, neither of which happened (though both of his guests expressed profound skepticism). Also on his Peacock online-only show, he asked questions about continued U.S. support for Saudi Arabia, some quite skeptical, to guests Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) in April 2021 and Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wisc.) in May 2021. But none of this was on his main cable show on MSNBC.
Hasan has not done a single segment on the Yemen war for his MSNBC show since his show first aired Feb 28 2021. On March 14 2021, he did ask White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain about the White House going soft on Saudi Arabia in general and in a one “minute rant” from May 2021, Hasan did take about 6 seconds to mention the U.S. selling arms to Saudi Arabia that are used in Yemen.
But this is the full extent of Hasan’s—and thus MSNBC’s—Yemen coverage. It goes without saying that multimillionaire MSNBC personalities Lawrence O’Donnell and Rachel Maddow haven’t done any segments on the war since Biden took office because, in the more than six years since it’s been raging, they haven’t mentioned it at all. To their credit, at least their indifference to the world’s largest humanitarian crisis isn’t motivated by partisan gotchas—they just don’t care in general.
In November 2020, Hasan insisted “we” needed to hold Biden to his promises that he would end US support for the war in Yemen.
Now that it’s been over a year since Biden’s election, and the U.S. is openly backing the Saudi blockade starving Yemenis, selling $650 million weapons to Saudi Arabia just this week, and continues to back SaudiArabia at the UN, perhaps media personalities with large platforms at nominally progressive cable networks should do just that.
The Cynical and Dangerous Weaponization of the “White Supremacist” Label
By Glenn Greenwald | November 27, 2021
Within hours of the August 25, 2020, shootings in Kenosha, Wisconsin — not days, but hours — it was decreed as unquestioned fact in mainstream political and media circles that the shooter, Kyle Rittenhouse, was a “white supremacist.” Over the next fifteen months, up to and including his acquittal by a jury of his peers on all charges, this label was applied to him more times than one can count by corporate media outlets as though it were proven fact. Indeed, that Rittenhouse was a “white supremacist” was deemed so unquestionably true that questioning it was cast as evidence of one’s own racist inclinations (defending a white supremacist).
Yet all along, there was never any substantial evidence, let alone convincing proof, that it was true. This fact is, or at least should be, an extraordinary, even scandalous, event: a 17-year-old was widely vilified as being a white supremacist by a union of national media and major politicians despite there being no evidence to support the accusation. Yet it took his acquittal by a jury who heard all the evidence and testimony for parts of the corporate press to finally summon the courage to point out that what had been Gospel about Rittenhouse for the last fifteen months was, in fact, utterly baseless.
A Washington Post news article was published late last week that was designed to chide “both sides” for exploiting the Rittenhouse case for their own purposes while failing to adhere carefully to actual facts. Ever since the shootings in Kenosha, they lamented, “Kyle Rittenhouse has been a human canvas onto which the nation’s political divisions were mapped.” In attempting to set the record straight, the Post article contained this amazing admission:
As conservatives coalesced around the idea of Rittenhouse as a blameless defender of law and order, many on the left just as quickly cast him as the embodiment of the far-right threat. Despite a lack of evidence, hundreds of social media posts immediately pinned Rittenhouse with extremist labels: white supremacist, self-styled militia member, a “boogaloo boy” seeking violent revolution, or part of the misogynistic “incel” movement.
“On the left he’s become a symbol of white supremacy that isn’t being held accountable in the United States today,” said Becca Lewis, a researcher of far-right movements and a doctoral candidate at Stanford University. “You see him getting conflated with a lot of the police officers who’ve shot unarmed Black men and with Trump himself and all these other things. On both sides, he’s become a symbol much bigger than himself.”
Soon after the shootings, then-candidate Joe Biden told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that Rittenhouse was allegedly part of a militia group in Illinois. In the next sentence, Biden segued to criticism of Trump and hate groups: “Have you ever heard this president say one negative thing about white supremacists?
Valuable though this rather belated admission is, there were two grand ironies about this passage. The first is that The Post itself was one of the newspapers which published multiple articles and columns applying this evidence-free “white supremacist” label to Rittenhouse. Indeed, four days after this admission by The Post‘s newsroom, their opinion editors published an op-ed by Robert Jones that flatly asserted the very same accusation which The Post itself says is bereft of evidence: “Despite his boyish white frat boy appearance, there was plenty of evidence of Rittenhouse’s deeper white supremacist orientation.” In other words, Post editors approved publication of grave accusations which, just four days earlier, their own newsroom explicitly stated lacked evidence.
The second irony is that while the Post article lamented everyone else’s carelessness with the facts of this case, the publication itself — while purporting to fact-check the rest of the world — affirmed one of the most common falsehoods: namely, that Rittenhouse carried a gun across state lines. The article thus now carries this correction at the top: “An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Kyle Rittenhouse brought his AR-15 across state lines. He has testified that he picked up the weapon from a friend’s house in Wisconsin. This article has been corrected.”
It continues to be staggering how media outlets which purport to explain the Rittenhouse case get caught over and over spreading utter falsehoods about the most basic facts of the case, proving they did not watch the trial or learn much about what happened beyond what they heard in passing from like-minded liberals on Twitter. There is simply no way to have paid close attention to this case, let alone have watched the trial, and believe that he carried a gun across state lines, yet this false assertion made it past numerous Post reporters, editors and fact-checkers purporting to “correct the record” about this case. Yet again, we find that the same news outlets which love to accuse others of “disinformation” — and want the internet censored in the name of stopping it — frequently pontificate on topics about which they know nothing, without the slightest concern for whether or not it is true.
Those who continue to condemn Rittenhouse as a white supremacist — including the author of The Post op-ed published four days after the paper concluded the accusation was baseless — typically point to his appearance at a bar in January, 2021, for a photo alongside members of the Proud Boys in which he was photographed making the “okay” sign. That once-common gesture, according to USA Today, “has become a symbol used by white supremacists.” Rittenhouse insists that the appearance was arranged by his right-wing attorneys Lin Wood and John Pierce — whom he quickly fired and accused of exploiting him for fund-raising purposes — and that he had no idea that the people with whom he was posing for a photo were Proud Boys members (“I thought they were just a bunch of, like, construction dudes based on how they looked”), nor had he ever heard that the “OK” sign was a symbol of “white power.”
Rittenhouse’s denial about this once-benign gesture seems shocking to people who spend all their days drowning in highly politicized Twitter discourse — where such a claim is treated as common knowledge — but is completely believable for the vast majority of Americans who do not. In fact, the whole point of the adolescent 4chan hoax was to convert one of the most common and benign gestures into a symbol of white power so that anyone making it would be suspect. As The New York Times recounted, the gesture has long been “used for several purposes in sign languages, and in yoga as a symbol to demonstrate inner perfection. It figures in an innocuous made-you-look game. Most of all, it has been commonly used for generations to signal ‘O.K.,’ or all is well.”
But whatever one chooses to believe about that episode is irrelevant to whether these immediate declarations of Rittenhouse’s “white supremacy” were valid. That bar appearance took place in January, 2021 — five months after the Kenosha shootings. Yet Rittenhouse was instantly declared to be a “white supremacist” — and by “instantly,” I mean: within hours of the shooting. “A 17 year old white supremacist domestic terrorist drove across state lines, armed with an AR 15,” was how Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) described Rittenhouse the next day in a mega-viral tweet; her tweet consecrated not only this “white supremacist” accusation which persisted for months, but also affirmed the falsehood that he crossed state lines with an AR-15. It does not require an advanced degree in physics to understand that his posing for a photo in that bar with Proud Boys members, flashing the OK sign, five months later in January, 2021, could not serve as a rational evidentiary basis for Rep. Pressley’s accusation the day after the shootings that he was a “white supremacist,” nor could it serve as the justification for five consecutive months of national media outlets accusing him of the same. Unless his accusers had the power to see into the future, they branded him a white supremacist with no basis whatsoever — or, as The Post put it this week, “despite a lack of evidence.”
The only other “evidence” ever cited to support the rather grave accusation that this 17-year-old is a “white supremacist” were social media postings of his in which he expressed positive sentiments toward the police and then-President Trump, including with the phrase “Blue Lives Matter.” That was all that existed — the entirety of the case — that led the most powerful media outlets and politicians to stamp on this adolescent’s forehead the gravest accusation one can face in American culture. This is really the heart of the matter: this episode vividly demonstrates how cheapened and emptied and cynically wielded this “white supremacist” slogan has become. The oft-implicit but sometimes-explicit premise in liberal discourse is that everyone who deviates in any way from liberal dogma is a white supremacist by definition.
Within this rubric, perhaps the most decisive “evidence” that one is a white supremacist is that one supports the Republican Party and former President Trump — i.e., that half of the voting electorate in the U.S. at least are white supremacists. A subsidiary assumption is that anyone who views the police as a necessary, positive force in U.S. society is inherently guilty of racism (it is fine to revere federal policing agencies such as the FBI and other federal security forces such as the CIA, as most Democrats do; the hallmark of a white supremacist is someone who believes that the local police — the ones who show up when citizens call 911 — is a generally positive rather than negative force in society).
An illustration of how casually and recklessly this accusation is tossed around occurred last year, shortly after the George Floyd killing, when my long-time friend and colleague, Intercept journalist Lee Fang, was widely vilified as a racist and white supremacist, first by his own Intercept colleague, journalist Akela Lacy, and then — in one of the most stunningly mindless acts of herd behavior — by literally hundreds if not thousands of members of the national press, including many who barely knew who Lee was but nonetheless were content to echo the accusation (that Lee is himself not white is, of course, not an impediment, not even a speed bump, on the road to castigating him as a modern-day KKK adherent). As Matt Taibbi wrote in disgust about this shameful media episode:
[Lacy’s accustory] tweet received tens of thousands of likes and responses along the lines of, “Lee Fang has been like this for years, but the current moment only makes his anti-Blackness more glaring,” and “Lee Fang spouting racist bullshit it must be a day ending in day.” A significant number of Fang’s co-workers, nearly all white, as well as reporters from other major news organizations like the New York Times and MSNBC and political activists (one former Elizabeth Warren staffer tweeted, “Get him!”), issued likes and messages of support for the notion that Fang was a racist.
Writing in New York Magazine, Jonathan Chait documented that “Lacy called him racist in a pair of tweets, the first of which alone received more than 30,000 likes and 5,000 retweets.”
What was the evidence justifying Lee Fang’s conviction by mob justice of these charges? He (like Rittenhouse) has expressed the view that police, despite needing reforms, are largely a positive presence in protecting innocent people from violent crime; he suggested that resorting to violence harms rather than helps social justice causes; and he published a video interview he conducted with a young BLM supporter, who complained that many liberals only care when white police officers kill black people but not when black people in his neighborhood are killed by anyone who is not white.
Now-deleted tweets from Intercept reporter Akela Lacy, accusing her Intercept colleague Lee Fang of being a racist, June 3, 2020.
That such banal and commonly held views are woefully insufficient to justify the reputation-destroying accusation that someone is a white supremacist should be too self-evident to require any explanation. But in case such an explanation is required, consider that polls continually and reliably show that the pro-police sentiments of the type that caused Rittenhouse, Fang, and so many others to be vilified by liberal elites as “white supremacists” are held not only by a majority of Americans, but by a majority of black and brown Americans, the very people on whose behalf these elite accusers purport to speak.
For years, polling data has shown that the communities which want at least the same level of policing if not more are communities composed primarily of Black, Brown and poor people. It is not hard to understand why. If the police are defunded or radically reduced, rich people will simply hire private security (even more than they already employ for their homes, neighborhoods and persons), and any resulting crime increases will fall most heavily on poorer communities. Thus, polling data reliably shows that it is these communities that want either the same level of policing or more — the exact view which, if you express, will result in guardians of elite liberal discourse declaring you to be a “white supremacist.” Indeed — according to one Gallup poll taken in the wake of the George Floyd killing, when anti-police sentiment was at its peak — the groups that most want a greater police presence in their communities are Black and Latino citizens:
In the wake of anger over the Floyd and Jacob Blake cases, several large liberal cities succeeded in placing referendums on the ballot for this year that proposed major defunding or restructuring of local police. They failed in almost all cases, including ones with large Black populations such as Minneapolis, where Floyd died, precisely because non-white voters rejected it. In other words, expressing the same views about policing that large numbers of Black residents hold somehow subjects one to accusations of “white supremacy” in the dominant elite liberal discourse.
What all of this demonstrates is that insult terms like “white supremacist” and “racist” and “white nationalist” have lost any fixed meaning. They are instead being trivialized and degraded into little more than discourse toys to be tossed around for fun and reputation-destruction by liberals, who believe they have ascended to a place of such elevated racial enlightenment that they are now the sole and exclusive owners of these terms and thus free to hurl them in whatever manner they please. It is not an overstatement to observe that in elite liberal discourse, there are literally no evidentiary requirements that must be fulfilled before one is free to malign political adversaries with those accusatory terms. That is why editors at The Washington Post published an op-ed proclaiming Rittenhouse was plagued by “deeper white supremacist orientation” just four days after its news division explicitly concluded that such an accusation “lacks evidence” — because it it permissible to accuse people of racism and white supremacy without any evidence needed.
It is inherently disturbing and destructive any time a person is publicly branded as something for which there is no evidence. That is intrinsically something we should collectively abhor. But this growing trend in liberal discourse is not just ethically repellent but dangerous. By so flagrantly cheapening and exploiting the “white supremacist” accusation from what it should be (a potent weapon deployed to stigmatize and ostracize actual racists) into something far more tawdry (a plaything used by Democrats to demean and destroy their enemies whenever the mood strikes), its cynical abusers are draining the term of all of its vibrancy, potency and force, so that when it is needed, for actual racists, people will have tuned it out, knowing that is used deceitfully, recklessly and for cheap entertainment.
A similar dynamic emerged with accusations of anti-semitism and the weaponization of it to demonize criticisms of Israel. It is, of course, true that some criticisms of the Israeli government are partially grounded or even largely motivated by anti-semitism — just as it is true that some championing of the local police or support for Trump grows out of racist sentiments. But the converse is just as true: one can vehemently criticize the actions of the Israeli government the same as any other government without being driven by an iota of anti-semitism (indeed, many of the most vocal critics of Israel are proudly Jewish), in exactly the same way as one can be highly supportive of the local police or Donald Trump without an iota of racism (a proposition that should need no proof, but is nonetheless highlighted by the uncomfortable fact that growing numbers of non-whites support both Trump and the police). But the cynical, manipulative weaponization of anti-semitism accusations to smear all critics of Israel has rendered the accusation far weaker and more easily dismissible than it once was — exactly as is now happening to the accusatory terms “white supremacist” and “white nationalist” and “racist,” which are being increasingly understood, validly so, not as a grave and sincere condemnation but a cheap tactic to be applied recklessly, for the tawdry entertainment one derives from public rituals of reputation-destruction.
BBC, Nov. 22, 2020
Ever since his acquittal, Rittenhouse has made a series of public statements directly at odds with the dark, hateful image constructed of him by the national press over the last sixteen months, while he was forced to remain silent due to the charges he faced. He has professed support for the Black Lives Matter movement, argued that the U.S. is plagued by structural racism, and suggested that he would have suffered a worse fate if he had been Black. The same people who are smugly certain that his entire character and soul was permanently captured by that fleeting moment in a bar when he was seventeen and flashed an “okay” symbol — and who are certain that his denials that he knew what it meant or with whom he was posing are false — have, of course, scoffed at these recent statements of his as self-serving and insincere, even though they offer far greater insight into Rittenhouse’s actual views on questions of race than anything thus far presented.
But that is the point. The political and media faction that casually and recklessly brands people as “white supremacists” the way normal people utter “excuse me” while navigating a large crowd have no interest at all in whether the accusation is true. They are devoted to reducing everyone whose political ideology diverges from their own to their worst possible moment — no matter how long ago it happened or how unrepresentative of their lives it is — in order to derive the most ungenerous and destructive meaning from it. It is a movement that is at once driven by rigorous rules resulting in righteous decrees of sin and sweeping denunciations, yet completely bereft of the possibility of grace or redemption.
And its most cherished weapon is accusing anyone who they decide is an enemy or even just an adversary of being a white supremacist, a white nationalist, a racist — to the point where these terms now sound more like reflexively recited daily prayer slogans than anything one needs to take seriously or which has the possibility to engage on the merits. For fifteen months, it was gospel in political and media circles that Kyle Rittenhouse was a “white supremacist terrorist” only for The Washington Post to suddenly announce that this claim persisted “despite a lack of evidence.”
But that lack of evidence really does not matter, which is why that announcement by The Post received so little notice. Under the rules of this rotted discourse, evidence is not a requirement to affirm this accusation. All that is needed is an intuition, a tingly sensation, and — above all else — the realization that hurling the accusation will yield some personal or political advantage. Like all cynical weapons, it worked for awhile, but is rapidly running out of efficacy as its manipulative usage becomes more and more visible. The term is still needed as a tool to fight actual racism, but those who most vocally and flamboyantly proclaim themselves solemnly devoted to that cause have rendered that tool virtually useless, thanks to their self-interested misuse and abuse of it.
Are We Overreacting to Omicron?
BY PAUL ELIAS ALEXANDER | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | NOVEMBER 26, 2021
With natural exposure immunity and early outpatient treatment and when combined with no reports of increased lethality, the WHO’s reaction of generating panic toward “Omicron” is causing needless fear and panic. So too with the Biden administration’s newly imposed travel restrictions, which will achieve nothing and will once again disrupt trade and violate human rights.
The WHO has said that the Omicron variant can spread more quickly than other variants. Likely true. The virus is behaving just like how viruses behave. They are mutable and mutate and via Muller’s ratchet, we expect this to be milder and milder mutations and not more lethal ones given the pathogen seeks to infect the host and not arrive at an evolutionary dead-end.
The virus will mutate downward so that it can use the host (us) to propagate itself via our cellular metabolic machinery. The Delta has shown us this: it is very infectious and mostly non-lethal. Especially for children and healthy people. So is the WHO panicking the globe needlessly? Is this Covid-19 February 2020 once again?
The problem with South Africa as is with Australia and New Zealand and even island nations like Trinidad is that it has low natural immunity to SAR-Cov-2. This is because, as we witnessed over the last year and more, if you lock down your society too long and too hard, you deny the nation and population from inching closer to population-level herd immunity. And you have no economy or society from which to reemerge. You devastate your society for a pathogen that is largely harmless to the vast majority of people especially children.
Moreover, governments asked us for two weeks to flatten the curve to help prepare hospitals so that they can tend to surges and other non-Covid illnesses. We as societies gave our governments 2 weeks, not 21 months. They failed to tend to the non-Covid illnesses and we locked down the healthy and well (children and young and middle aged healthy persons) while failing to properly protect the vulnerable and high-risk persons such as the elderly. We failed and it was like killing fields in our nursing homes.
This failure rests on public health messaging and government. Additionally, what did our governments in the US, Canada, UK, Australia etc. do with the tax money for the hospitals and PPE etc.? Hospitals must be prepared by now. Governments have failed! Not the people. The Task Forces have failed, not the people.
These nations thought that they could stay locked down and wait for a vaccine. This is a reasonable view though I was against lockdowns as they would and did cause crushing harms on especially poor persons and children. The problem is there was an opportunity cost because the vaccine we were waiting on was suboptimally developed without the proper safety testing or assessment of effectiveness.
We have data that the Pfizer vaccine loses 40% of antibodies per month, meaning in 3 months post-shot, you have low effective vaccinal immunity. We see it clearly playing out now whereby you got to tamp down spread with the draconian lockdowns, but you did it at the cost of natural immunity. That is the opportunity cost. So we spent on getting the vaccine and it cost us natural immunity and thus herd immunity.
For example, the vaccine has failed to stop infection and spread against Delta. We have research findings by Singanayagam et al. (fully vaccinated individuals with breakthrough infections have peak viral load similar to unvaccinated cases and can efficiently transmit infection in household settings, including to fully vaccinated contacts), by Chau et al. (viral loads of breakthrough Delta variant infection cases in vaccinated nurses were 251 times higher than those of cases infected with prior strains early 2020), and by Riemersma et al. (no difference in viral loads when comparing unvaccinated individuals to those who have vaccine “breakthrough” infections and if vaccinated individuals become infected with the delta variant, they may be sources of SARS-CoV-2 transmission to others) that reveal the vaccines have very suboptimal efficacy.
This situation of the vaccinated being infectious and transmitting the virus has also emerged in seminal nosocomial outbreak papers by Chau et al. (HCWs in Vietnam), the Finland hospital outbreak (spread among HCWs and patients), and the Israel hospital outbreak (spread among HCWs and patients). These studies have also revealed that the PPE and masking were essentially ineffective within the healthcare setting. All of the HCWs were double-vaccinated yet there was extensive spread to themselves and their patients.
In addition, Nordström et al. (vaccine effectiveness of Pfizer against infection waned progressively from 92% day 15-30 to 47% day 121-180, and from day 211 and onwards no effectiveness), Suthar et al. (a substantial waning of antibody responses and T cell immunity to SARS-CoV-2 and its variants, at 6 months following the second immunization), Yahi et al. (with Delta variant, neutralizing antibodies have a decreased affinity for the spike protein, whereas facilitating antibodies display a strikingly increased affinity), Juthani et al. (higher numbers of patients with severe or critical illness in those who received the Pfizer vaccine), Gazit et al. (SARS-CoV-2-naïve vaccinees had a 13-fold increased risk for breakthrough infection with the Delta variant, and substantially elevated risk of symptomatic Covid and hospitalization), and Acharya et al. (no significant difference in cycle threshold values between vaccinated and unvaccinated, asymptomatic and symptomatic groups infected with Delta) collectively reveal the poor efficacy and even negative efficacy of the Covid vaccines. Levine-Tiefenbrun et al. reports that the viral load reduction effectiveness declines with time after vaccination, “significantly decreasing at 3 months after vaccination and effectively vanishing after about 6 months.”
As an example, the Swedish study (retrospective with 842,974 pairs (N=1,684,958) is particularly alarming for it shows that while the vaccine provides temporary protection against infection, the efficacy declines below zero and then to negative efficacy territory at approximately 7 months, underscoring that the vaccinated are highly susceptible to infection and eventually become highly infected (more so than the unvaccinated). A further example emerges from Ireland whereby reporting suggests that the Waterford city district has the State’s highest rate of Covid-19 infections, while the county also boasts the highest rate of vaccination in the Republic (99.7% vaccinated). Reports are that the U.S. Covid-19 deaths for 2021 surpassed the deaths from 2020, leading some to state that “more people have died from COVID-19 in 2021, with most adults vaccinated and nearly all seniors), than in 2020 when nobody was vaccinated.”
Thus these nations that locked down and stayed that way are in a quandary for they do not know what to do now. If you open you will get surges in infection. Where is the money that was to go to hospital preparation? Did governments embezzle and steal and misappropriate the money for the hospitals remain still not prepared?
We have a lot of natural immunity in the US, e.g. near 65-70% of the population. The open states (those that did not lock down too long and too hard and opened quickly) will likely do very well with this Omicron or any new variant. This also is the power of natural immunity.
And we need not forget the potency of the overlooked ‘innate’ immunity with the innate antibodies and innate natural killer cellular compartment. This innate response is particularly potent in children (our first line of defense against pathogens) and is what has spared children from Covid and how children typically stave off pathogens, especially young children still laying down immunological memory.
Moreover, there is no reporting of increased virulence/lethality of this new Omicron variant. As yet this will remain the case based on Delta and prior variants. There are no guarantees but we operate based on risk and all things point to the same for this new variant.
Just because there is a wave in SA does not mean that there will be waves in the US or Israel or other places with greater natural immunity. This was the prize of letting people enjoy day-to-day living. The nations that have ended lockdowns are likely to move past this new variant scare, and be fine. This is more of an overreaction by the WHO and governments and much ado about nothing.
Dr Alexander holds a PhD. He has experience in epidemiology and in the teaching clinical epidemiology, evidence-based medicine, and research methodology. Dr Alexander is a former Assistant Professor at McMaster University in evidence-based medicine and research methods; former COVID Pandemic evidence-synthesis consultant advisor to WHO-PAHO Washington, DC (2020) and former senior advisor to COVID Pandemic policy in Health and Human Services (HHS) Washington, DC (A Secretary), US government; worked/appointed in 2008 at WHO as a regional specialist/epidemiologist in Europe’s Regional office Denmark, worked for the government of Canada as an epidemiologist for 12 years, appointed as the Canadian in-field epidemiologist (2002-2004) as part of an international CIDA funded, Health Canada executed project on TB/HIV co-infection and MDR-TB control (involving India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Afghanistan, posted to Kathmandu); employed from 2017 to 2019 at Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) Virginia USA as the evidence synthesis meta-analysis systematic review guideline development trainer; currently a COVID-19 consultant researcher in the US-C19 research group
Vaccinated “No Less Infectious” Than Unvaccinated, CDC Study Finds
By Will Jones • The Daily Sceptic • November 24, 2021
A pre-print study out this week from the U.S. Government’s Covid Response Team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has found vaccinated people to be “no less infectious” than unvaccinated people.
The study tested inmates in a federal prison with high vaccination rates daily during a SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant outbreak.
The study was very thorough. Inmates who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 were, where willing, PCR-tested for 10 consecutive days and reported symptoms via a questionnaire. The researchers performed whole genome sequencing and viral culture analysis on a high proportion of the 978 specimens collected, allowing them to assess the duration of PCR positivity and viral culture positivity.
There were 95 participants in total, of whom 78 (82%) were double vaccinated and 17 (18%) were not double vaccinated (two having received one dose and 15 having received none). No significant differences were found between double vaccinated and not double vaccinated either in duration of PCR positivity (13 days each) or in duration of culture positivity (five days each).
The authors conclude that “clinicians and public health practitioners should consider vaccinated persons who become infected with SARS-CoV-2 to be no less infectious than unvaccinated persons”.
This is in line with the findings of Public Health England and others.
While this sounds like more good news for countering vaccine passports, vaccine mandates and all other vaccine-based coercion and discrimination, it may be less good news for ending general restrictions and interventions. The authors state: “These findings are critically important, especially in congregate settings where viral transmission can lead to large outbreaks.” Which suggests they think the lack of efficacy against transmission is a reason to intervene more generally to prevent “large outbreaks” in “congregate settings”. It could be a long winter.
Biden Mulls Sending Extra Weapons & Trainers To Ukraine Amid Dubious Reports Of “Russian Invasion”
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | November 24, 2021
Here we go again: the ratcheting tit-for-tat threats currently being unleashed between Moscow and Washington arguably hasn’t been this intense since the height of the Donbass conflict of years ago, and the Crimea crisis. It’s leading to the Biden administration mulling ramping up arms transfers to Kiev.
CNN on Tuesday is citing multiple defense sources to report “The Biden administration is weighing sending military advisers and new equipment including weaponry to Ukraine as Russia builds up forces near the border and US officials prepare allies for the possibility of another Russian invasion.
And yet as we’ve reviewed, there’s still as yet little to nothing in the way of hard evidence that Russia is setting in motion any kind of plans to “invade Ukraine” – as Bloomberg last week first reported based on anonymous US sources. Much of the speculation appears based on satellite images of Russian troop movements taking place significantly far from Ukraine’s border, with Moscow’s constant refrain to the West being that it can move its own troops within Russia’s sovereign borders wherever it wants to.
But this new US plan to not just send more military hardware – but also US military advisers – would mark a serious escalation, as the Kremlin has recently warned it would see any kind of NATO forces buildup inside Ukraine as violating its “red lines” which would require taking action.
According to the fresh CNN report, the proposed lethal aid package now under consideration by the White House could include stinger missiles – which Moscow would without doubt consider a severe escalation:
The discussions about the proposed lethal aid package are happening as Ukraine has begun to warn publicly that an invasion could happen as soon as January. The package could include new Javelin anti-tank and anti-armor missiles as well as mortars, the sources said.
Air defense systems, such as stinger missiles, are also under consideration, and the Defense Department has been pressing for some equipment that would have gone to Afghanistan — like Mi-17 helicopters — to instead be sent to Ukraine. The Mi-17 is a Russian helicopter that the US originally purchased to give to the Afghans. The Pentagon is now weighing what to do with them after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in August.
And in particular the Javelins are seen as deadly and effective against Russia’s T-80 tanks. Recently, Moscow has accused pro-Ukrainian forces of heightened attacks on pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine’s east over the past months, which has included multiple deaths from sporadic mortar fire.
The past year has seen NATO military exercises utilize closer Ukrainian army and naval participation…
Already in response to the rumors and reports of more US weapons and trainers sent to Ukraine, Russia is responding with threats of its own to send its weapons into eastern Ukraine.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, “we shouldn’t rule out the possibility of sending military advisers and weapons to Ukraine, because this is already taking place. Military advisers are arriving there, weapons are supplied there — not only from the United States, but also from other NATO countries. And all this, of course, leads to a further aggravation of the situation on the border line.”
Previously on Monday the Kremlin vehemently denied the Western reports of any planned-for “invasion”, with government spokesman Peskov explaining that currently the Russian military is merely engaged in the “usual background level” of military maneuvers – similar to the training drills that ended up generating false reports last April and May of a “planned Ukraine invasion”. That prior situation, like the current one, involved Russian troops and weaponry being observed at least 60km from the actual Ukrainian border, and not along it.
During the statement, Peskov actually turned the charges back on NATO, saying, that in Ukraine “The number of provocations has increased significantly and these provocations are conducted using weapons delivered by NATO.” He blamed Kiev and its backers for the soaring tensions, calling its own military build-up “alarming” – thus each side appears to be ramping up troop readiness based on accusing the other of a “build-up” of forces.
The Magical Thinking and Dangers of Masks
By Dr. Joseph Mercola | November 24, 2021
Are you prepared to wear masks forever? Some are, but their positive attitude toward masks is a likely result of deceptive and misleading information. The resulting magical thinking relating to masks has created one of the most polarized debates in U.S. history and led to anti-maskers being labeled as “grandma killers.”1
To be clear, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has blatantly lied about masks’ effectiveness. November 5, 2021, CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky tweeted, “Masks can help reduce your chance of #COVID19 infection by more than 80%.”2
But as Dr. Vinay Rasad, MPH, a hematologist-oncologist and associate professor in the department of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California San Francisco, put it in the Brownstone Institute, “I don’t know how to put this politely, but it is a lie, and a truly unbelievable one at that … The idea that masks could reduce the chance of infection by 80% is simply untrue, implausible and cannot be supported by any reliable data.”3
Masks Have Meager Effectiveness, if Any
Walensky didn’t give a reference for her claim that masks reduce COVID-19 infection by 80%, but a large study4 from researchers at Yale, Stanford and the University of California Berkeley found much less impressive results from masks.
The trial involved 342,183 people from 600 villages in rural Bangladesh from November 2020 to April 2021. In villages that received masks, the number of symptomatic COVID-19 infections were 9.3% lower compared to villages without masks, or 11% lower in villages that received surgical masks instead of cloth masks.5
Why, then, hasn’t Walensky’s tweet been flagged for misinformation and targeted by “fact checkers” calling out the blatant lie? Rasad featured a tweet6 by Carnegie Mellon University mathematician Wesley Pegden, who said:7
“The head of the agency responsible for providing Americans with accurate and trustworthy information about interventions (like vaccines) that we actually know are really effective should not also be making fabricated quantitative statements in support of poorly evidenced ones.”
Antibiotic-Resistant Pathogens Live on Face Masks
While face masks continue to be recommended or mandated, little has been said about the risks inherent to covering your mouth and nose with fabric or other materials. Both cotton and surgical masks collect pathogens that may increase your risk of infectious illness — a factor that’s rarely taken into account when discussing their merits.
When researchers from the University of Antwerp, Belgium, analyzed the microbial community on surgical and cotton face masks from 13 healthy volunteers after being worn for four hours, bacteria including Bacillus, Staphylococcus and Acinetobacter were found — 43% of which were antibiotic-resistant.8
In order to best clean masks to remove the bacteria, the study found boiling at 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees F), washing at 60 degrees Celsius (140 degrees F) with detergent or ironing with a steam iron worked best, but only 21% of survey respondents said they cleaned their cotton face masks daily.9 According to the researchers:
“Taken together, this study suggests that a considerable number of bacteria, including pathobionts and antibiotic resistant bacteria, accumulate on surgical and even more on cotton face masks after use. Based on our results, face masks should be properly disposed of or sterilized after intensive use. Clear guidelines for the general population are crucial to reduce the bacteria-related biosafety risk of face masks …”
Researchers from Germany similarly questioned whether a mask that covers your nose and mouth is “free from undesirable side effects” and potential hazards in everyday use.10 It turned out they were not and instead posed significant adverse effects and pathophysiological changes, including the following, which often occur in combination:11
- Increase in dead space volume
- Increase in breathing resistance
- Increase in blood carbon dioxide
- Decrease in blood oxygen saturation
- Increase in heart rate
- Decrease in cardiopulmonary capacity
- Feeling of exhaustion
- Increase in respiratory rate
- Difficulty breathing and shortness of breath
- Headache
- Dizziness
- Feeling of dampness and heat
- Drowsiness
- Decrease in empathy perception
- Impaired skin barrier function with acne, itching and skin lesions
Mask-Induced Exhaustion Syndrome Is Prevalent
The study referred to this cluster of symptoms as mask-induced exhaustion syndrome (MIES) and warned that children, pregnant women and those who are sick or suffering from certain chronic conditions may be particularly at risk from extended masking. While short-term effects include microbiological contamination, headaches, exhaustion, carbon dioxide retention and skin irritation, the long-term effects may lead to chronic issues:12
“Extended mask-wearing would have the potential, according to the facts and correlations we have found, to cause a chronic sympathetic stress response induced by blood gas modifications and controlled by brain centers. This in turn induces and triggers immune suppression and metabolic syndrome with cardiovascular and neurological diseases.”
Further, “it can be assumed,” they wrote, “that the potential adverse mask effects described for adults are all the more valid for children: … physiological internal, neurological, psychological, psychiatric, dermatological, ENT, dental, sociological, occupational and social medical, microbiological and epidemiological impairments …
The masks currently used for children are exclusively adult masks manufactured in smaller geometric dimensions and had neither been specially tested nor approved for this purpose.”13
Again, in taking on these unknown risks — both short- and long-term — to wear masks, the benefits are highly questionable and intended to thwart a pathogen with a low death rate for most populations:14
“[R]ecent studies on SARS-CoV-2 show both a significantly lower infectivity and a significantly lower case mortality than previously assumed, as it could be calculated that the median corrected infection fatality rate (IFR) was 0.10% in locations with a lower than average global COVID-19 population mortality rate.
In early October 2020, the WHO also publicly announced that projections show COVID-19 to be fatal for approximately 0.14% of those who become ill — compared to 0.10% for endemic influenza — again a figure far lower than expected. On the other hand, the side effects of masks are clinically relevant.”
‘The Mask of Your Enslavement’
It’s clear that the evidence in support of masks for physical protection against disease is lacking, while their potential for psychological harm is immense. Brownstone Institute highlighted the story of folk saint Escrava Anastácia, a slave of African descent who lived in Brazil during the 19th century.15
She was forced to wear a metal, muzzle-like mask during her lifetime in order to silence her from speaking out about the oppression and injustice she was facing. As written by Roberto Strongman, associate professor in the department of black studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara:16
“The apparition of Anastásia at anti-lockdown rallies represents an opportunity to understand the current medical tyranny as a form of enslavement and to forge links of solidarity between communities whose freedom is threatened across all racial groups. The claim of cooptation deserves to be unpacked for a valid claim of cultural usurpation could easily work towards severing important alliances in a divide-and-conquer model.
While there are clear specificities between the suffering of Africans under the system of chattel slavery and the deprivation of civil liberties endured by most citizens around the world during the current pandemic panic, Anastásia reminds us of certain transhistorical constants in the process of dehumanization and subjugation of populations through the gagging and muzzling of their bodies to quell their protestations.”
Strongman pointed out several undeniable reasons why face mask mandates “fashion the citizenry as slaves” and act as symbols of enslavement. Among them, they:17
- Lead to oxygen deprivation, promoting a state of physical and mental weakness
- Are symbols of submission and used as part of master-slave dynamics
- Enforce the creation of a carceral culture
- Erase personhood and homogenize the masses — “The collectivized wearing of masks results in an enforced uniformity in which the individual cedes way to the nameless collectivity as the neo-meta citizen.”18
- Are theatrical and act to conceal identities, rendering us alien to others and ourselves
- Delete facial expressions and inhibit nonverbal communication, including that necessary for social organization that can lead to revolution
- Reduce verbal output
- Are visible displays of allegiance to the “system of medicalizing technocratic control”
- Are part of preparing individuals for new societal roles — “However transitory the current regime of face masking might be, the population must face that we are beingforced to undergo a rite of passage, a process of resocialization into the new normal.”
- Promote a culture of fear
- Act as deterrents of solidarity by making your neighbor into a “nameless pathogenic vector instead of your ally”
Magical Thinking on Masks
In addition to flat-out lies, the CDC also makes nonsensical statements, like this: “Cloth masks will not protect you from wildfire smoke … They might not catch small, harmful particles in smoke that can harm your health.”19
But we are to believe that they will protect us from an aerosolized virus? “The virus is 25X smaller than a smoke particle,” wrote Steve Kirsch, executive director of the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation. “So it’s like trying to stop a mosquito with a chain link fence.”20
Yet magical thinking — the belief that you can influence outcomes by doing something that has no causal connection to them — persists. Robert Dingwall, a consulting sociologist, questioned why the U.K.’s Health Security Agency expert panel used only a second-class evidence base that failed to demonstrate clear benefits on which to base their conclusion that face masks in the community help reduce transmission. He wrote:21
“The state of the face mask debate is rather as if Galileo had published his account of the heliocentric universe and then included a paragraph at the end telling the reader to ignore all the evidence because the Church had declared that everything revolved around the Earth.
In the absence of better-quality work — and we must ask why that research has not been done — some of the claims for face masks look much more like magical thinking than anything that demonstrates the sort of casual connection that might be recognizable as science.”
As the pandemic stretches on, science continues to be ignored and recommendations are primarily pushed based on emotional justifications and triggers. If science were actually followed, universal mask wearing by healthy people would not — indeed could not — be recommended.
In the beginning, health officials did, in fact, advise against masks for healthy people,22 but somewhere along the way — early on — they flip-flopped. Why? According to Strongman:23
“Just as masks function as liminal artifacts in rites of passage and as part of animal training, these covid mask are harbingers of further intrusions to our integrity.
Wearing the masks is just one step away from receiving the shots, then accepting the vaccine passports and the implantable neural links until one’s original persona is buried by a cyborg. The masks function as an empirical compliance test for the projected acceptability of future corporeal technologies of control. Where will you draw the line?”
Sources and References
- 1, 20 Steve Kirsch Newsletter November 7, 2021
- 2 Twitter, Rochelle Walensky November 5, 2021
- 3, 6 Brownstone Institute November 7, 2021
- 4 The Impact of Community Masking on COVID-19: A Cluster-Randomized Trial in Bangladesh November 8, 2021
- 5 ABC Action News September 1, 2021
- 7 Twitter, Wes Pegden November 5, 2021
- 8, 9 Frontiers in Medicine September 3, 2021
- 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2021 Apr; 18(8): 4344
- 15 History Collection December 13, 2018
- 16, 17, 18, 23 Brownstone Institute November 4, 2021
- 19 U.S. CDC, Wildfire Smoke and COVID-19
- 21 Social Science Space October 25, 2021
- 22 Life Site News July 31, 2020
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